Must-Have Software for Consultants: 10+ Tools Reviewed (2025)

We’ll explore eight essential categories of consulting tools with a brief overview. For each category, we’ll list examples, features, user reviews, and more:

According to Source Global Research, the main skills that clients are looking for in consulting firms are the ability to make things happen quickly (43%), flexibility (37%), ease of getting support organised (25%), and good stakeholder management skills (23%).

The best way to achieve all of this is to turn to software, which can help you:

We can say that a consultant’s working day is separated into three core activities: creating reports, doing research, and meeting with various project stakeholders.

Here are key features you need to support daily and strategic business operations:

Operations management software for consultants are comprehensive solutions for supporting daily business processes. Some of the perks of  all-in-one vs specialized options are:

Productive’s end-to-end consulting software helps consulting businesses address their most critical challenges: declining billable utilization, project budget overruns, and lack of financial visibility.

By linking project, resource, and financial management in one platform, Productive eliminates the need to juggle multiple fragmented systems.

Despite its wide range of features, Productive doesn’t compromise on its implementation process. The experience is streamlined and you won’t need a team of consultants to get started.

Finally, the integrated sales pipeline helps you manage potential clients and plan head for upcoming work—all within the same platform your team already uses daily.

Each hour you track can be compared against your project budgets. With Productive, you’ll get a full understanding of where your time is going, and how it affects key metrics like budget burn, revenue, and business profit margins.

Performance can also be compared across multiple clients, so you can find out which ones bring you the most (or the least) profit. This can be especially useful if you’re working on the retainer pricing model and you need to update rates.

Speaking of retainers, Productive automatically generates new budget periods at specified intervals, freeing you from tedious manual entry.

You can even invite your clients onto your project workspace and share budget or timesheets access with them, so they stay up to date with your progress.

Productive’s Resource Planning directly tackles consulting firm resource allocation headaches. Project managers gain real-time visibility into consultant availability, instantly identifying gaps and preventing the costly mistake of overscheduling (or underscheduling) your talent.

Cross-project visibility ensures you’ll never again discover too late that a key consultant is overallocated across multiple engagements, while the integrated time off management eliminates the administrative burden of handling vacation and leave in separate systems.

Additionally, utilization forecasting addresses one of consulting’s most critical metrics directly. Identify underutilization trends before they impact your bottom line, and spot capacity issues weeks in advance—giving you time to adjust staffing or business development activities accordingly.

Productive makes the time tracking process as efficient and painless as possible for consultants. You can track time directly from tasks, or use the desktop timer so you don’t have to switch through tabs.

If you’re often multitasking smaller tasks, use manual tracking. There’s also automatic tracking, which creates entries from your resource scheduling.

Project managers can differentiate between billable vs non-billable hours for easier client invoicing. Invoices can be generated and customized through the platform, so you won’t need an additional tool for this.

But, if you’re already using software such as Xero or QuickBooks, you can integrate it with Productive.

Finally, Productive facilitates the creation of reports with over 50+ templates that can be customized with business-specific data.

These reports are useful both to business owners and project managers, as they include high-level insights such as profitability across client projects and billable utilization, but also task and timeline progress.

Additionally, you can create custom dashboards with specific insights and share them with various teammates. You can schedule them to be sent to Slack or any external email addresses.

This is a great way to keep all relevant team members up-to-date, while saving precious time spent on creating and updating reports.

Check out Productive with a 14-day free trial before deciding on your desired pricing plan.

These software systems help consultants execute their projects and daily tasks more easily. This usually includes various planning, organization, and collaborative capabilities that support end to end program management.

Key features to consider:

Productive integrates project management with general agency management, so you can benefit from getting both a granular and big-picture overview of your projects. For simpler task and project management solutions, check out two popular alternatives to Productive below.

Asana is a platform for collaboration and project management that caters to diverse professional services business teams, including IT, consulting, marketing, and operations. Some key features of Asana are customizable project views, personalized task dashboards, reporting dashboards, time tracking and tasks.

Consider if: Your biggest challenge is managing tasks across teammates and ensuring efficient collaboration. Asana is a streamlined solution, which makes it a suitable pick for smaller businesses, or teams that aren’t very experienced in similar systems. However, Asana lacks some advanced features, such as reporting or financial management, so look for a different solution (for example, Asana vs Productive) if this is one of your main considerations.

Trello is a simplified app for managing projects with an intuitive and streamlined user interface that is well-suited for smaller teams. Trello’s Kanban-like boards can be customized with official or community-created project templates to suit various workflows. Trello also offers essential project-related insights, as well as numerous integrations.

Consider if: You need to structure your consultancy’s workflows in the simplest possible way. Compared to Asana, Trello takes an even more visual approach that makes onboarding your teams easy. Due to its numerous templates, Trello is also fairly customizable and can provide support for a variety of processes, for example, the entry and calculation of data.

You can also check out a Wrike vs Trello comparison to learn more.

Time tracking systems are designed to support consultancies in accurately managing their billable hours and timesheets. These types of solutions often offer various types of automation features that aim to reduce the number of hours necessary to carry out administrative and financial tasks.

Key features to consider:

Productive offers fully-fledged time tracking, budgeting, and billing support, with advanced financial forecasting capabilities that help you stay one step ahead of your projects. If you’re interested in more specialized tools, check out our top picks below.

Harvest is a time-tracking and billing software that provides integrations with various productivity tools to help consultancies and other businesses streamline their workflows. Some key features of the tool include time tracking across various devices with reminders, invoicing with integrated online payments, and essential budgeting and reporting support.

You can also check out some other time tracking tools for consultants.

Consider if: You’re looking for an affordable, specialized solution for time tracking and invoicing. Users of Harvest frequently mention that it’s a user-friendly solution that helps them bill and manage finances for multiple projects efficiently. As a downside, some reviewers mentioned having issues with how retainers are managed on the platform, so consider this when implementing the tool. Learn more in our article on the top Harvest competitors.

FreshBooks is a billing and time tracking software for businesses of all sizes, as well as self-employed professionals and freelancers. FreshBooks offers billing and time tracking features, as well as support for accounting and taxes, file sharing, client communication and feedback, and business profitability.

Consider if: Your consultancy needs more advanced support for invoicing and time tracking that includes additional features for client work and reporting. It can be a good all-around software solution for various budgeting and accounting needs. Something to keep in mind is that reviewers frequently report issues with customer support, specifically that response times can get lengthy.

We also explored how FreshBooks fares as a Hello Bonsai alternative.

Consulting CRM software & tools are designed to enhance client experience and drive business growth by increasing the likelihood of winning projects and maintaining stable relationships.

Key features to consider:

Productive is a sales and project management platform that provides essential CRM features. This includes an integrated sales pipeline, analyzing reasons for lost deals, sending quotes from the platform, forecasting sales revenue and performance, and more.

For more robust CRM functionalities, check out the solutions described below.

Salesforce Sales Cloud provides support to help sales teams in companies of all sizes and from all industries drive their growth and realize value faster. Key features include client engagement, email automation, sales analytics and forecasting, revenue intelligence, and sales performance support.

Consider if: You’re looking for an advanced option to support prospecting, client communications, streamlining time-consuming activities, and analyzing sales and marketing data. As reviewers have mentioned the pricing tiers are complex and the user interface can be confusing, Salesforce might not be the best option for smaller consultancies or inexperienced teams.

Pipedrive is a sales-focused CRM solution for teams of all sizes that is designed to optimize sales processes, enhance customer experience, and generate new business opportunities. Key features include an integrated sales pipeline, content management, email and communications, and analytics.

Consider if: You’re running a smaller consultancy and need a solution with essential customer and sales support features. Some reviews have mentioned that users who are used to more advanced software, such as Salesforce, might notice certain integrations are missing or that API support is less developed. Overall, users believe that Pipedrive has a good cost-to-value ratio.

Consultant project financial software and accounting tools provide consultants with more advanced expense and cashflow management features, along with essential features such as time tracking and billing. These tools often feature connected bank feeds, online payments, tax support, purchase orders, and more. Popular examples of these types of software include QuickBooks and Xero.

QuickBooks supports consultancies and various other types of businesses in tracking their expenses, customizing invoices, and creating financial reports. Users often highlight that QuickBooks is an easy-to-learn solution, but that it might be easy to outgrow.

Xero is designed small businesses, accountants, and bookkeepers, with features such as connected bank feeds, real-time collaboration, pay runs and payroll reports, payment acceptance, and more. Users praise Xero for its range of features and user-friendly interface but often comment that it can be somewhat buggy and customer support slow to respond.

Document and file management tools provide a centralized place for organizing and managing documentation within an organization. They often include features such as version control, which helps maintain a clear history of changes and restore documentation in case of errors, as well as real-time collaboration. Other commonly included features are data security measures, search capabilities, and easy sharing. Common examples of these types of software are Google Drive and Dropbox.

Some project or agency management software might include integrated documentation management features, such as Productive’s Docs. With Productive, you can benefit by storing all of your project information in the same place where you manage tasks, schedule resources, and generate financial reports. With streamlined document handling comes improved productivity and data organization.

Communication software enables all project stakeholders to work together efficiently. Key features of this type of tool usually include real-time messaging, file sharing, the creation and management of groups, and audio and video conferencing. The most famous examples of such tools are Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Chat.

Communication software can be especially handy when it integrates with your other tools. For example, Productive’s Slack integration lets you link up your messages with your project boards, so you can efficiently turn discussions into tasks. You can also receive notifications from the platform, as well as sync up your statuses.

All of this can streamline your daily obligations and give you more time and head space to focus on more important tasks.

Consider the following in regards to your consultancy, clients, and teams:

The latest consulting software trends include:

The Business Innovation Consulting Group (BICG), with offices across Europe and Mexico, specializes in designing work solutions to improve internal processes for global clients.

With 70 employees, BICG struggled with scattered tools, inefficient time tracking, and fragmented project scheduling. Managing operations through Excel, PowerPoint, and Word made resource planning and billing cumbersome.

By switching to Productive’s business consultant software, BICG streamlined its project management, centralized time tracking, and gained real-time insights into resource allocation and profitability. The firm reports a 15–20% reduction in administrative hours and now benefits from a 360-degree view of operations, helping teams make faster, more informed decisions.

Check out BICG’s full consultancy software implementation story:

In this guide to software for consultants, we’ve explored some of the basics you need to consider when investing in a new software solution.

There is no true one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to supporting your processes, as there are many big or small differences depending on your industry, your client requirements, your internal expertise, and many other considerations.

However, a good step towards this goal are all-in-one software solutions. By making this switch, your consulting firm can get consolidated information and standardized processes, as well as reduce IT overhead.

Consider booking a demo with Productive to find out more about how you can optimize your processes with all-in-one software.

There are a couple of essential steps to go through when implementing new software in your consultancy. First, identify your agency’s main challenges or pain points that you want your tool to address. Keep this in mind while you’re informing yourself about various vendors and their solutions.

During the selection phase, keep four main criteria in mind: scalability, user-friendliness, ability to integrate with other tools, and security and compliance. Once you’ve picked the right tool, you need to customize and configure your account to match your business processes, as well as train team members with the help of educational materials from your vendor. During all of this, consider picking a software champion to spearhead communication and onboarding – this can significantly speed up the process.

After a successful implementation, make sure to review what the software has to offer and consider changes or updates that need to be made.

First, you need to make sure that you’ve picked the best option for your business by conducting an internal needs analysis and software market research. Make sure you create tangible objectives for your implementation period, such as deadlines, to avoid the process stretching out longer than needed.

Then, promote user adoption by providing your team with the necessary training to start using the software in their daily workflows. Encourage team feedback and get in touch with the vendor in case of necessary changes, bugs, or anything that you require assistance with.

Finally, make sure you’re staying informed on software updates by following your vendor’s page and learning about the latest capabilities. Always consider how you can tweak your existing processes in order to streamline and optimize them further.

Some common risks might come from a lack of planning, such as setbacks and challenges during the implementation phase, often accompanied by cost overruns. Others might be tied to the software itself, for example, security issues, limitations in customization, or bugs. Although it can be hard to ensure that none of these issues will occur, you can minimize the possibility with proper planning and informing yourself in detail about the software you are implementing.