Top Project Management Software for Professional Services (2024)

Project management software for professional services can make or break your projects.

According to research by PwC, 77% of companies use project management software. Why? Because it’s linked to high-performing projects. So, if you want to take your agency project management to the next level, you’ll need to do the same.

But choosing the best option among the dozens of software solutions available (Capterra lists 339 under the PSA software category only!) can be tricky.

That’s why we’ve compiled this list of the best software for professional service teams.

Here are five categories of software that cover various 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 agencies make informed decisions based on consolidated data. Some top ERP features include resource allocation, financial 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 projects are delivered within time and budget.

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 projects are delivered within time and budget.

Customer relationship management is another crucial part of an agency’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.

Your ideal software should have a mix of features described above. This ensures that your overall agency operations and workflows are supported for increased efficiency and productivity.

To summarize, these key features are:

Now, let’s head into a more in-depth comparison of the best project management tools for agencies:

Productive is an all-in-one agency management software designed to cater to the workflows of professional service providers. This includes marketing, design, web development, and consulting agencies.

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 tools and spreadsheets.

Let’s explore Productive’s 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, Kanban, List, 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 agency 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. By helping you visualize how utilized an employee is across a timeline (with capacity indicators), managers can more 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 agency-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 agency 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 agency 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.

According to research by Capterra, 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.

We’ve reviewed a range of solutions for project management. 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 agency management, Productive is your best choice. It supports your business with financial and resource planning and robust analytics and forecasting.

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