Best Adobe Workfront Alternative: Top 9 Competitors for Agencies

Interested in finding the top Workfront alternative? Read our list of top project management platforms with benefits, downsides, and user reviews.

Adobe Workfront is a team collaboration and work management tool for creative teams. It can be a good option for your agency, but what if you’ve outgrown it, or you’re simply looking for something different? To help you find the next best thing, we’ve compiled a detailed list of software alternatives with their key features.

Keep reading to find out more or skip directly to our list.

Adobe Workfront is a project management software and collaboration tool for project teams. Essential features include workflow management and automation, goal alignment, budget planning, and online proofing and approval.

Adobe Workfront has positive and negative reviews, with a 4.5-star rating on Capterra and a 4.1-star rating on G2. Users underline the following downsides of the tool:

As for the benefits of Adobe Workfront, users from creative agencies and digital marketing agencies specifically mentioned that it supports their workflows with features such as proofing and file sharing. Additionally, it can be a good addition for those who are using the Adobe Inc. product suite.

Productive is an all-in-one work management tool for agencies of all shapes and sizes. Compared to Adobe Workfront, Productive can be considered a more complete solution, as its extensive features include project planning, financial management, and capacity planning. Some additional features are integrated sales, time tracking, purchase orders, and billing.

Productive has a 4.5-star rating across G2 and Capterra, and users usually highlight its comprehensiveness and user-friendliness as key selling points:

As a tool for advanced project management, Productive can be your ideal alternative to Workfront. Let’s explore some of Productive’s key features for professional services teams in more detail.

Productive offers extensive support to project managers with its Project Management and Time Tracking capabilities.

Some essential features for project management include:

Productive’s integrated time tracking supports timesheet creation with a timer, manual entry, or automatic sync with resource bookings. Team leaders can mark time as billable or non-billable and easily request changes or additional information on each entry.

See more: 13 Best Agency Time Tracking Software in 2023

With Budgeting, Productive enables extensive project budget management support. You can build budgets of all types — including fixed-price, hourly-priced, retainer, and hybrid — and manage your cost rates to track salaries and expenses. Other essential features include customizable warnings depending on the percentage of billable hours delivered, profitability and revenue forecasting through resource bookings, and integrated client invoicing with Billing.

Read the full story: Clear Launch Has More Predictability and Consistency With Productive

Productive’s Resource Planning helps you balance your team’s workloads and allocate resources across projects. To simplify your resource oversight, you can use custom fields to split resources up by team, skill, or seniority, and filter views by project and client.

While a G2 review reports that Workfront is “dependent upon users to properly input data,” Productive aims to automate this process as much as possible to enable proactive and data-driven decisions.

For example, based on allocated hours, Productive can forecast your revenue and profit margins up until your project deadlines. Any changes in your bookings are immediately reflected in your key performance indicators. Productive also enables billable utilization insights and forecasting.

Additional capabilities are:

See more: Capacity Planning: A Comprehensive Guide for Agencies and Professional Service Firms

According to research by Wellingtone, 54% of agencies do not have access to real-time KPIs, and as many as 30% spend one or more days manually creating reports.

Productive’s Reporting feature streamlines analytics by extracting data from various platform activities, including budgeting, resource management, service rates, and billable hours tracking.

Key features include more than 50 templates for agency operations, custom fields to add extra parameters, diverse visualizations such as Column, Line, Area, Bar, Donut, and Metric, and personalized dashboards for team collaboration.

Productive’s Docs supports team collaboration and document management on a single platform. Create documents and collaborate in real-time, use version history to ensure nothing is lost, and ask AI to create summaries or improve your texts in a flash.

The best part of Productive’s Docs is that they integrate seamlessly with your other platform activities so that you can mention tasks and tag team members directly from your pages.

Additional features: Sales, Automations, Purchase Orders.

Integrations include: Xero, QuickBooks, HubSpot, Breathe, Zapier, Slack, Jira, and more.

Productive offers a 14-day free trial, so you can decide if it’s the right Workfront alternative for your agency.

Wrike is a tool that provides essential features for project management, including customizable templates, task lists, and budget tracking.

Key features:

Wrike offers project-level and business processes support for your agency. This can make it a good alternative if you’re looking for a software solution that is more extensive than Workfront. However, consider that Wrike’s financial management is not included in the essential plan, while comparable tools such as Productive integrate it as a core feature.

Related: Wrike vs ClickUp vs Productive: An In-Depth Comparison

Smartsheet is a cloud-based project management tool with an interface similar to spreadsheet apps.

Key features:

Those who are used to working in Excel might find Smartsheet a good alternative, as it can be easier to grasp for first-time users of project management software solutions. However, for a modern solution with an intuitive user interface, considering another option might be better. Users frequently underline that the tool feels outdated compared to other software on the market.

Asana is a user-friendly software solution for team collaboration and simple project management.

Key features:

Asana can be a good Workfront alternative for agencies that are looking for affordable pricing, as it offers a free forever plan with essential features. However, even though it features unlimited tasks, the free version is limited to 10 users per month. If you’re running a mid-sized to larger agency and want to invest more resources into financial management, consider another alternative from this list.

Related: Wrike vs Asana vs Productive: An In-Depth Overview of Popular Project Management Solutions

Microsoft Project, soon to be known as Microsoft Planner, is a tool from the Microsoft Suite that supports simple and complex workflows.

Key features:

Microsoft Project offers both a cloud-based and on-premise installation, which can make it a good alternative for agencies that need an extra layer of security. However, some frequently outlined downsides of the tool are the steep learning curve and the pricing, so keep this in mind if you want to get the most out of your technology.

Clarizen, now known as Planview AdaptiveWork, is a project portfolio management software that supports service delivery teams of all sizes.

Key features:

While Planview has certain strengths, such as its rich customization that helps project teams plan projects and build tailored workflows, users point out some notable downsides. For example, recent reviews on G2 state that many steps need to be done externally and then imported into the platform, which makes it less efficient in comparison to other project management software. Others mention numerous growing pains ever since Clarizen became Planview.

Zoho Projects is a cloud-based project management tool with a user-friendly interface for team communication.

Key features:

Zoho Projects can be an affordable alternative to Workfront, as it offers essential features for project and progress tracking. However, some reviewers mention that Zoho Projects lacks support for more extensive features, such as advanced reporting or agile processes. Overall, Zoho Projects can be a good fit for smaller to mid-sized agencies on a budget, but there are more comprehensive options available.

Kantata, previously Mavenlink, is one of the top management platforms for portfolio management and project planning.

Key features:

When it comes to the cons of Kantata, users report some minor user experience issues with certain features, as well as the fact that the onboarding phase can be lengthy due to the complexity of the tool. Some reviewers also mentioned that customer service could be better to streamline this process. Otherwise, it can be a good option for essential to advanced project management, though it might lack some capabilities for robust agency project management.

Related: Top 25 Mavenlink Alternatives for Agencies

Basecamp is a simplified project management tool that provides teams with an intuitive overview of project status and task dependencies.

Key features:

Thought it might lack advanced features for complex projects, Basecamp can be a good project management solution for agencies looking for simple collaboration features. This includes capabilities such as managing task dependencies or simple project reporting. Users usually underline Basecamp’s simplicity and streamlined user experience as its best features.