Teamwork has built a strong reputation among digital agencies. It came up specifically because it targets agencies — not just generic project management, but a platform that claims to understand retainers, client billing, and delivery. If you’re evaluating alternatives, that positioning makes it a natural comparison point. So let’s be honest about where it excels, where it falls short, and why pricing alone might be reason enough to look elsewhere.
This isn’t a takedown. Teamwork is a competent product. But “competent at project management” is not the same as “built to run your whole agency.” Once you map Teamwork’s actual feature coverage against the full stack a modern digital agency needs — CRM, billing, support, site health, client portal, Shopify — the gaps become significant, and the per-user pricing model makes those gaps increasingly expensive to patch with additional tools.
What Teamwork Does Well
Start here, because it matters. Teamwork’s core project management is genuinely strong. Task lists, subtasks, dependencies, Gantt charts, milestones, and resource management are all solid. If your primary pain is project delivery — tracking work across a team, managing timelines, preventing tasks from falling through the cracks — Teamwork is a credible answer. It’s been purpose-built for that workflow and it shows in the UI.
Time tracking is built in and reasonably flexible. You can log time against tasks, set budgets per project, and get a clear view of where hours are going. That’s more than many generic project tools offer natively, and it’s directly relevant to agencies billing on time or managing utilisation. The reporting layer on top of this — hours logged, budget consumed, profitability by project — is a genuine strength and better than what you’d get from, say, ClickUp or Monday.com in this area.
Teamwork also has a client-facing portal feature, which lets you share project updates, files, and messages with clients without giving them full system access. It’s a meaningful differentiator versus pure project tools, and agencies running transparency-led client relationships will appreciate having something built in rather than bolted on. The intake forms feature — letting clients request work through a structured form — is similarly thoughtful.
Where Teamwork Falls Short for Agencies
The core issue is scope. Teamwork is a project management tool with billing features added — not an agency management platform that happens to do project management. That distinction plays out across several critical gaps.
There is no CRM. Teamwork does not manage your client pipeline, track opportunities, score client health, or give you a 360-degree view of a client relationship. When someone fills in an enquiry form on your website, there’s nowhere in Teamwork for that lead to live, progress through stages, and convert into a project. You need a separate CRM — HubSpot, Pipedrive, or similar — which means data living in two places and manual handoffs between sales and delivery. For a 10-person agency, that friction is genuinely costly.
Support and ticketing are absent. If a client emails in with a bug report, a hosting query, or a question about their invoice, Teamwork has no structured way to handle it. There’s no support inbox, no ticket queue, no SLA management, and no way to route inbound requests to the right team member with visibility across the team. Agencies maintaining sites for clients — which is most of them — end up using a separate helpdesk tool. That’s another subscription, another login, and another place where client history sits in isolation.
Site monitoring does not exist. Teamwork has no capability to monitor uptime, SSL certificates, or WordPress plugin versions for the sites your agency manages. If a client’s site goes down at 2am, you find out when the client calls the next morning. For agencies providing managed hosting, maintenance retainers, or any kind of SLA-backed care plan, this is a significant gap. You’ll need Uptime Robot, ManageWP, or similar running alongside Teamwork — more tools, more cost, more manual reconciliation.
No Shopify integration. E-commerce agencies managing Shopify stores on behalf of clients have no native connection from Teamwork into store data, orders, or performance metrics. This isn’t a niche requirement — a significant proportion of UK digital agencies now count Shopify clients among their retainer base.
Invoicing is limited. Teamwork’s billing features cover basic invoicing from time logs, but they don’t extend to recurring invoices, retainer management, expense tracking, quotes, or contract e-signing. If you want to run your financial workflow from within the platform — rather than exporting time data into Xero or FreeAgent and managing billing there — Teamwork isn’t enough. The result is another tool, another reconciliation process.
The Pricing Problem
This deserves its own section because it’s where the comparison gets pointed. Teamwork charges per user. As of 2024, the Deliver plan (which includes the features most relevant to agencies — resource scheduling, budgeting, billing, the client portal) starts at around $13.99 per user per month, billed annually. Grow plan is around $17.99/user/month. Scale comes in higher still.
For a 10-person agency on the Deliver plan, that’s roughly £110–120 per month just for Teamwork. Then add the tools Teamwork doesn’t cover: a CRM (even a basic one runs £40–80/month), a helpdesk (Zendesk Starter is around £40/agent/month; Freshdesk cheapest paid plans are similar), site monitoring (ManageWP is circa £60–90/month for agency scale), and contract/e-sign capability. You’re now looking at £350–500/month or more, spread across four or five tools that don’t talk to each other cleanly.
Marque CRM’s Agency plan is £149/month flat for up to 15 users, unlimited clients, and all 38 modules — including CRM, project management, time tracking, invoicing, retainers, contracts with e-sign, client portal, support tickets with SLA, site monitoring (uptime, SSL, WordPress plugins), Shopify sync, and AI triage. That’s the total cost. There are no per-user overages, no add-on modules, and no separate tool subscriptions to manage alongside it.
For a 10-person agency, the monthly saving of switching from a Teamwork-anchored stack to Marque is typically £200–350 per month — £2,400–4,200 per year — while simultaneously collapsing five or six separate logins into one.
Feature Comparison: Marque vs Teamwork
The table below covers the features that matter most to a digital agency running retainers, ongoing delivery, and client management.
Client Portal: The White-Label Difference
Both products offer a client-facing portal, but they’re meaningfully different in positioning. Teamwork’s client view is functional — clients can see tasks assigned to them, access files, and communicate on projects. But it’s clearly Teamwork. The branding is Teamwork’s, and clients know they’re looking at your project management tool.
Marque’s client portal is fully white-labelled on the Agency plan. Your logo, your domain, your colours. Clients visit something like clients.youragency.co.uk and see a polished, branded experience that includes project progress, invoice history, support ticket submission, and file access. From the client’s perspective, this is your agency’s platform — not a third-party tool you’ve granted them access to. That presentation difference is real when you’re trying to justify premium fees or position your agency as a serious operator.
White-labelling also matters for client retention. Agencies that invest in a branded portal create a switching cost — clients are accustomed to the workflow, the portal becomes part of your service, and moving away from your agency means losing access to it. That’s a meaningful commercial advantage, and it’s built into Marque’s Agency plan at no additional charge. Teamwork doesn’t offer white-label at any price point.
Site Monitoring: The Capability Teamwork Can’t Match
For agencies providing managed hosting, care plans, or any form of ongoing maintenance retainer, site monitoring is operational infrastructure — not a nice-to-have. When a client’s SSL certificate expires two days before their biggest sales period, or their site goes down overnight because a WordPress update broke something, you need to know before they do.
Teamwork has no answer to this. You’ll need ManageWP, Uptime Robot, Better Uptime, or similar running as a completely separate system. That means separate logins, separate alerting, and no connection between the monitoring data and the client record, project, or support ticket where the issue gets resolved.
Marque’s site monitoring is built directly into the client record. Add a client’s domain, and Marque starts checking uptime, SSL expiry, and WordPress plugin versions automatically. When something needs attention, it surfaces in the client health score — and if it’s urgent, it can trigger an alert or automatically create a support ticket. The entire workflow from “site went down” to “ticket created and assigned to the right person” can happen without human intervention. For agencies running 30, 50, or 100 client sites, that automation is the difference between a proactive maintenance operation and a reactive firefighting exercise. There’s more detail on this in our guide to uptime monitoring for agencies.
Who Should Choose Teamwork
Honest comparison requires acknowledging where Teamwork genuinely wins. If your agency’s primary operational pain is project delivery complexity — large teams, many concurrent projects, sophisticated resource scheduling, granular task dependencies — Teamwork’s project management depth is real. It’s been refined specifically for that use case and it’s better at it than most alternatives.
If your agency already has a CRM you love and isn’t ready to migrate client data, a standalone project management tool might be preferable to a platform switch. Teamwork integrates with HubSpot, and if that combination works for your workflow, there’s a coherent argument for staying with it — provided you’re conscious of the total cost and the gaps you’re accepting.
Teamwork also suits agencies that have no intention of handling support, billing, or site management through their project tool — where a deliberate separation of systems is a preference rather than a compromise. Some operations directors prefer to maintain strict separation between project delivery, finance, and support. If that’s your architecture, Teamwork’s depth in project management may be worth more than Marque’s breadth.
Who Should Choose Marque
If you’re running a 5–15 person agency and your real problem is tool sprawl — too many subscriptions, too many logins, too much data living in systems that don’t talk — Marque is built for exactly that situation. The premise is straightforward: every operational function an agency needs, in a single platform, at a price point that’s cheaper than the tool stack it replaces.
That value is sharpest for agencies providing managed services — sites on retainer, monthly care plans, hosting and maintenance — because Marque covers the full workflow: client is onboarded, site monitoring is activated, retainer invoice is set up to recur, support tickets come in through the portal, and the client health score reflects all of it. That entire loop runs in one tab.
Agencies with Shopify clients will find meaningful operational value in the Shopify sync — keeping store data visible alongside client records and projects without needing a separate e-commerce reporting tool. If even two or three of your retainer clients are Shopify merchants, that integration alone pays for part of the platform.
For an honest look at what the real cost of running multiple tools looks like in practice, and a framework for thinking about client health scoring as a churn-prevention mechanism, both are worth reading before you make your decision. See also our full features overview and pricing page for the complete picture.
Bottom line: Teamwork is a strong project management tool that agencies have legitimately built workflows around. But it is not a full agency management platform — it has no CRM, no support ticketing, no site monitoring, and limited billing depth. If you’re currently paying for Teamwork plus a CRM plus a helpdesk plus a monitoring tool, the combined spend almost certainly exceeds Marque’s Agency plan at £149/month. And you’ll be running four logins instead of one.