Top Project Management Software for Professional Services

Productive is an all-in-one project management software designed to cater to the workflows of professional service providers. This includes marketing, design, web development, consulting agencies, or any other kind of specialized projects.

Productive’s most significant benefit is its unified platform with the core features necessary for successful project and business management. This reduces the time and cost needed to manage your processes across multiple fragmented tools and spreadsheets.

Find out how Clear Launch gained more predictability and consistency with Productive.

Some of Productive’s core features for professional services businesses include integrated time tracking, project and time management, budgeting, billing, and reporting.

Let’s explore these features in more detail.

Productive Project Management provides a high-level overview of your project planning, as well as granular task management.

First, users can get a comprehensive overview of their progress through seven customizable views. These include Gantt charts, Kanban boards, Lists, Calendar, Workload, and others.

While some of these layouts provide a more visual perspective on tasks, others, like the Workload view, enhance functionality by including capacity indicators and employee availability, helping you better manage workloads across your team.

With task management features, you can track time on tasks, create subtasks and to-dos, add dependencies, and update their status.

You can also customize when and where you receive notifications and even create automatic workflows with Productive’s no-code Automations.

Productive’s Time Tracking helps employees create time entries as efficiently as possible, and lets project managers approve and reject them individually or in bulk.

Productive includes an integrated timer with a desktop widget, so you can control the timer without switching through tabs.

There’s also an integration with Google Calendar, so you can turn your activities into time entries and associate them with services.

With Productive’s Budgeting, you can set and manage your company rate cards, build proposals/quotes for potential clients, and then set up your budgets for won deals.

Productive supports hourly, T&M, and retainer billing; you can also split budgets into separate phases to manage complex projects.

Monitor your budgeting in real time to ensure you’re on track. You can then switch to the Profitability view to check the relationship between your budget spend and profit margins.

By scheduling your resources, you can view this data ahead of time with Forecasting.

With Budgeting and time tracking information, you can also generate invoices and control unpaid vs paid amounts in Productive.

Besides enabling financial forecasting, Productive’s Resource Planning helps ensure that employees are scheduled optimally across tasks.

When you have visualized employee utilization across a timeline (with capacity indicators), you can easily ensure that no one is overworked or left on the bench.

This also includes holidays and time off since Productive includes assigning, requesting, and approving time off.

With Productive, you can also visualize and forecast your employee utilization across different metrics, which provides insights into how productive your entire team is.

Forecasting billable utilization helps you make better HRP decisions, such as hiring for overutilized roles or upskilling/reskilling underutilized team members.

Productive’s Reporting collects data from various sources in Productive, including your time tracking, budgeting, employee scheduling, invoicing, and more.

You can use one of the 50+ templates from Productive’s library or create your report entirely from scratch.

Group data by different categories, pivot it by specific columns, visualize it as a Column, Line, Area, Bar, Donut, or Metric chart, and use custom fields to add specific data.

Users can also create custom dashboards, add different elements (including reports) with widgets, as well as share reports with automated sequences with Productive’s Pulse.

Additional features include:

Productive offers various integrations with HR, accounting, and collaboration tools.

This includes Slack, Google Calendar, and Outlook for scheduling and updates; Xero and QuickBooks for accounting; BambooHR and Breathe for HRM; Jira and Memtime for time tracking, and more.

You can also try a 14-day free trial before committing to a paid plan.

Wrike is a software solution that offers a variety of project management features for professional services management:

Key feautures:

While Wrike is a solid all-around choice, a notable downside is that budgeting is currently only available in the most advanced plan. In comparison, Productive offers a basic version of its budgeting, starting with the most affordable plan.

Additionally, some reviews state that the reporting features could be more advanced.

Source: Capterra

To find out more details on how Wrike compares to other competitors, check out our Wrike vs Airtable article.

Jira is a project management and issue-tracking tool for agile, DevOps, and product teams.

Key features:

Jira is a popular software solution for web development and agile project management. While it can be suitable for other types of projects, many of Jira’s features are oriented towards development, so you might not be able to get the most out of it if you’re working in a marketing or consulting firm.

Check out our Asana vs Jira vs Trello article for more information.

Source: Reddit

ClickUp is a workload management software for enterprises, startups, non-profits, education companies, and agencies.

Key features:

ClickUp has good customization and flexibility, and is also suitable for development companies with its sprint management and GitHub integration.

However, you might want to consider Jira as  a specialized ClickUp alternative for web development or Productive for all-in-one project management. Additionally, ClickUp has some performance and usability issues.

Source: G2

Notion is a knowledge management and documentation system with advanced features for handling data.

key features:

Notion can be a great tool for managing your information and processing complex data, but it isn’t suitable for comprehensive client management. There are some task management and collaboration features, but you won’t find resource allocation, time tracking, or budgeting here.

Source: Reddit

For more information on knowledge management systems, check out our comparison between Obsidian and Notion.

Trello is a user-friendly software known for its Kanban and card-based task management system.

Key features:

Trello can be a great starter tool for smaller agencies. However, most businesses will need to transition to more complex solutions as they grow. Integrated time tracking, budgeting, and billing are some key features that you’ll be missing out on.

Accelo is an enterprise project management software solution for managing client projects and promoting team alignment.

Key features:

Accelo is a solid tool with many useful features, but users mention that getting used to Accelo can be daunting due to its complexity and unintuitive technology. Some users also believe that the user interface could be easier to use.

Source: G2

Check out some more modern Accelo alternatives here.

Asana is a streamlined professional services automation software solution.

Key features:

Asana is a middle-of-the-road option; it’s not as simple to use as Trello,and it lacks the comprehensiveness of solutions such as Productive (advanced reporting and financing).

It’s a solid choice, but you’ll need to consider some more robust Asana alternatives at one point.

Basecamp is a simple project management app for small teams.

Key features:

Basecamp is similar to Trello, and to an extent Asana, as it’s a simple project management tool. It doesn’t get into company finances, but it can be a good starting point for inexperienced teams.

Keep in mind that unlike Trello or Asana, Basecamp doesn’t offer a free version of its software.

Toggl Track is a timekeeping software for creative agencies, consultants, law firms, and more.

Key features:

Toggl Track is a streamlined and easy-to-use time-tracking software. The more advanced plans also provide project cost management features, and there’s a QuickBooks integration for invoicing.

While Toggl Track can be a great option, especially if you’re using the free version, there are tools that will offer more features at a comparable price.

Microsoft Project is a project management software solution in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Key features:

Users often report that they enjoy using Microsoft Project for construction projects and that it has solid features that support more complex projects. However, it also feels dated compared to other solutions, and there are some issues with exporting and sharing your workspace with other users.

You can also check out our list of the best ERP for service companies.

The five types of project management software for professional services teams are: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Professional Services Automation (PSA), Time Tracking and Billing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and reporting tools.

These tools are made to cover various key aspects of business management:

ERP software for professional services offers an integrated approach to managing an organization’s resources, including finances, human resources, and customer satisfaction.

These solutions help professional service providers make informed decisions based on consolidated data. Some top ERP features include resource allocation, financial oversight and forecasting, and project budgeting. To learn more, check out the best examples of ERP systems.

Like ERP solutions, PSA software integrates multiple capabilities into a single platform, including professional services project management, resourcing, time tracking, and invoicing, but the biggest difference is their industry focus. PSA focuses specifically on professional services workflows, while ERP supports industries such as retail, construction, healthcare, etc.

Time tracking and billing software is more narrowly focused on managing billable hours and ensuring a stable cash flow. Some common features of professional services time tracking software include timers, online timesheet creation and approval, invoice generation, and payment monitoring.

These features are crucial to ensuring that projects are delivered within time and budget.

Customer relationship management is another crucial part of an company’s workflow. This includes managing prospective customers, winning deals, and sales team collaboration. While there are specialized CRM systems such as HubSpot, some software solutions offer embedded CRM capabilities for agencies.

For example, Productive’s Sales CRM allows you to set up your sales pipeline, track communication, and analyze sales performance.

Reporting tools provide actionable insights into project performance, resource utilization, and financial health. Like CRM software, there are specialized solutions to get advanced data; however, reporting is usually embedded in project management tools (though it ranges from simple insights into time and task progress to more complex forecasting).

Essential features include creating custom reports, visualizing your data, and sharing it among stakeholders.

The key features of project management tools are resource management, project planning and workflow management, collaboration tools, automation capabilities, budgeting and invoicing and real-time reporting.

These features ensure that your overall agency operations and workflows get the digital support they need for increased efficiency and higher productivity.

You’ll also collect data that will help you make the smartest decisions about future projects or current business operations (e.g., what can be done better and how to increase profit margins by XY%)

To summarize, these key features are:

In case you’d like a more comprehensive overview, here’s a neat key feature table.

Using a project management tool helps you estimate timelines accurately, allocate resources efficiently, improve team communication, forecast budgets precisely, and generate reliable metrics for informed decision-making. Your team members also get more work done.

Capterra’s PMS Market Research Report shows similar findings. According to them the benefits of using project management software in your professional services organization include:

This data highlights why project management software is essential to ensuring that a professional services firm can stay competitive and successful.

Investing in the right tool can help your business become more cost efficient, increase employee engagement and satisfaction, and foster long-term relationships with clients.

So, if you want to take your agency project management to the next level, you’ll need to do the same.

The best way to choose a project management tool for your professional services company is to match its core features to your team’s real-world workflows and then validate that fit through a brief pilot with your own projects.

The key takeaway here is that you should define and prioritize your must-have requirements, then see how well the tool fits your team. Below, we’ll break up the selection process into practical steps.

Step 1: Define Your Core Requirements

Sit down with your project leads and list out exactly how you deliver work—your planning rhythms, approval gates, billing models, reporting cadences, and collaboration habits.

Step 2: Prioritize Must-Have Features

From that list, pull out your non-negotiables:

Step 3: Build a shortlist

Research three to five tools that tick all your feature boxes. Look for peer reviews (on software review sites, youtube, or lists like this) and tool comparison tables.

Include at least one all-in-one platform (e.g., Productive) and one specialist tool if you have narrow needs.

Step 4: Run a two-week pilot run

Pick two live projects and run them in each candidate system. Have your team track time, assign tasks, update budgets, and pull reports.

The goal of this hands-on test is to reveal real adoption barriers.

Step 5: Evaluate how easy it is to use the software

Collect feedback on ease of setup, speed of daily tasks, and overall satisfaction. A tool only adds value if your team actually uses it.

Keep in mind that a messy implementation or patching up different tools for different operations can only make room for errors.

Step 6: Check the platform’s integrations and automation capabilities

Ensure your finalist connects seamlessly to your existing stack (accounting software, CRM, calendars, Slack, google drive, etc.).

The tool should also be able to automate routine workflows like reminder emails, invoice generation or budget-overrun alerts.

Step 7: Take into account scalability and growth support

Confirm the vendor’s road map matches your growth plans (adding new user seats, handling more complex project hierarchies or workflows, or expanding into new service lines).

Their support team should always stay responsive, and be here to help, especially during the rollout period.

Step 8: Compare total cost of ownership

Look beyond the the monthly price. You need to consider the setup fees, training time, add-ons, and potential savings from improved efficiency and fewer tool-hops. Again, using an all-in-one project management software will save you time and reduce costly errors.

As a nice bonus, you’re team will communicate better and deliver more.

Step 9: Make Your Decision

Assess pilot results, team feedback, integration fit, and ROI. Then roll out your chosen tool with a clear onboarding plan and a short training program to get everyone productive on day one.

Choosing a vendor with great learning resources and amazing support will make onboarding and user adoption much more smoother, so you should definitely keep that in mind.

We’ve reviewed various types of project management software. To find your best option, consider features, pricing, and additional criteria such as usability, scalability, and customer support

To summarize: Trello or Basecamp can be a good streamlined option, and Jira and Notion are more specialized solutions for specific needs. Toggl Track is great for timekeeping.

However, for comprehensive project and company management, Productive is your best choice. It supports your business with financial management, resource planning and robust analytics dashboards and forecasting.

Book a demo with Productive today to learn how it can support your company’s growth.