Teamwork was built for agencies. That’s the pitch, and for a certain type of project-focused team it has delivered. But if you’ve found yourself looking at your annual renewal and doing the mental arithmetic — £24 per user per month, 12 users, that’s £3,456 a year just for project management — and simultaneously noticing you still have separate tools for CRM, invoicing, client support, and site monitoring, then the question is fair: what are you actually getting for this?
This post is a direct answer to that question. We’ll cover when Teamwork makes sense, when it doesn’t, and the best alternatives for UK digital agencies at each stage of growth — including the pricing reality, the feature gaps, and the specific scenarios where each option wins.
Why Agencies Outgrow Teamwork
Teamwork is a competent project management platform. Tasks, milestones, Gantt charts, time tracking, workload management — it handles the delivery side of agency operations reasonably well. The problem is that project management is only one slice of running an agency, and Teamwork stops sharply at the edge of that slice.
There’s no CRM. There’s no pipeline for new business opportunities. There’s no built-in invoicing, so the time you log in Teamwork doesn’t connect directly to a bill you can send. The client portal exists but it’s branded as Teamwork — you can’t white-label it on the lower plans. There’s no support ticketing, no site monitoring, no client health scoring. For a 5-person agency handling 15 clients, you can live with these gaps by stitching Teamwork to HubSpot, Xero, and Zendesk. At 12 people and 60 clients, those stitches start tearing.
The per-user pricing model accelerates the pressure. Teamwork’s Deliver plan sits at around £23–26 per user per month depending on billing cycle. When you grow from 6 to 12 people, your Teamwork bill doubles — but your workload management needs haven’t doubled in sophistication, and you’re still running three other tools alongside it. The value-per-pound comparison gets harder to justify the larger you grow.
A secondary frustration that comes up repeatedly: Teamwork’s UI has accrued significant complexity over the years. New staff members need meaningful onboarding time before they can work efficiently in it. The settings are nested deep, template management is fiddly, and the reporting — while powerful — requires configuration time that smaller agency teams rarely have.
The real question isn’t “is Teamwork bad?” — it isn’t. The question is whether paying £24/user/month for project management alone, while still running a separate CRM, invoicing tool, and support system, makes sense at your current size. For most agencies past the 8-person mark, the answer starts being no.
The Best Teamwork Alternatives for Agencies
There’s no single correct replacement — it depends on what you need Teamwork to become. Are you looking for a direct project management swap at lower cost? A broader platform that handles billing and CRM too? Or a ground-up rethink of how your agency runs its operations? Each of the options below addresses a different version of that question.
1. Marque CRM — Best for agencies wanting to consolidate tools
If the reason you’re leaving Teamwork is that it’s one more specialist tool in a growing stack, Marque CRM is the logical destination. It was built specifically for UK digital agencies and covers the full operational surface that Teamwork doesn’t: CRM and pipeline, projects and Kanban, time tracking, invoicing and recurring retainers, contracts with e-sign, a white-label client portal, support ticketing with SLA management, site monitoring (uptime, SSL, WordPress plugin alerts), Shopify sync, and client health scores.
The pricing comparison is stark. Teamwork’s Deliver plan at 10 users costs around £230/month. Marque CRM’s Agency plan — which covers 15 users, unlimited clients, and all 38 modules including site monitoring and white-label — is £149/month. You’re paying less and eliminating the need for a separate CRM, invoicing tool, and support system. For agencies that are currently paying for Teamwork plus HubSpot Starter plus FreeAgent plus Zendesk, the consolidated monthly cost typically drops by 40–60%.
The site monitoring module deserves particular mention. If your agency builds and maintains WordPress sites for clients, having uptime monitoring, SSL expiry alerts, and WordPress plugin vulnerability checks built into the same tool where you manage the client relationship changes how quickly you respond to issues. When a client site goes down, the alert fires in the same system where you’d log the support ticket, which already has the client’s contact history and SLA terms attached. That’s a qualitatively different response workflow to receiving an email from an external monitoring tool and then logging into Teamwork to figure out who manages that client.
What Marque CRM doesn’t try to be is a generic project management tool for non-agency teams. If you’re a software development shop with highly technical sprint-based workflows, or a large consultancy needing enterprise resource planning, it’s not the right fit. But for a 6–15 person UK digital agency running client retainers, one-off projects, and managed services, it’s built precisely for you. See the full feature list here.
2. ClickUp — Best for teams prioritising flexibility and low per-user cost
ClickUp is the most feature-dense project management tool available at any price point. The free plan is genuinely usable, and the Unlimited plan at around £7/user/month undercuts Teamwork significantly. If pure project and task management is the core of what you need — without billing, CRM, or client portal requirements — ClickUp delivers more customisability than Teamwork at less cost.
The catch is the learning curve. ClickUp’s flexibility is also its complexity. Getting a 10-person team to use it consistently requires meaningful process documentation and ongoing enforcement. The 15+ view types (list, board, Gantt, timeline, table, calendar, Workload, Mind Map, etc.) that make it powerful also make it easy for each team member to end up working in a different configuration, which defeats the purpose. Agencies that have successfully adopted ClickUp tend to have a dedicated operations person who built the workspace deliberately and keeps it maintained.
ClickUp also doesn’t have agency-specific features. There’s no CRM built in (the “CRM template” is a workaround, not a real CRM), no invoicing, no client portal, no support ticketing with SLA, and no site monitoring. You’ll still need those tools alongside it. For a pure Teamwork replacement where the only goal is cheaper and more flexible task management, ClickUp wins. For a Teamwork replacement that also addresses the wider tool stack problem, it doesn’t.
3. Monday.com — Best for agencies prioritising visual workflow management
Monday.com occupies similar territory to ClickUp: high visual appeal, extensive customisation, no agency-specific depth. The Standard plan is around £10/user/month, which is cheaper than Teamwork but not dramatically so. Where it genuinely excels is in its board-based views and automation builder — if you run a lot of repetitive campaign workflows (onboarding sequences, content production pipelines, social media scheduling), Monday’s automations are well-designed and don’t require technical setup.
The limitations are the same as ClickUp: Monday.com is a project management and work OS tool, not an agency management platform. There’s no CRM, no invoicing, no client health monitoring. The client portal feature requires the Enterprise plan. For a UK agency paying £10/user/month for Monday plus a CRM plus an invoicing tool plus a monitoring solution, total software spend quickly exceeds what they’d pay for a purpose-built platform.
4. Productive.io — Best for larger agencies focused on utilisation and profitability
Productive.io is the most direct competitor to Teamwork in terms of market positioning — it’s explicitly built for agencies and includes project management, time tracking, resource planning, budgeting, and basic invoicing in a single package. The reporting on utilisation and project profitability is particularly strong; if you’re managing 20+ active projects across a team of 20+, the financial visibility it provides is valuable.
The downside is pricing. Productive.io’s Essential plan starts at around £13/user/month, which seems reasonable, but the features you actually need as a growing agency — resource management, advanced reporting, custom fields — are locked behind the higher plans at £22–28/user/month. At those prices you’re back in Teamwork territory, and Productive.io still doesn’t have a CRM or site monitoring. It’s a strong choice for an agency that is genuinely sophisticated about project financial management and has 20+ people, but it’s overkill — and overpriced — for a 10-person agency that mainly wants less complexity.
5. Bonsai — Best for freelancers or small teams transitioning to an agency
Bonsai is a solid all-in-one tool for independent freelancers or very small agencies (2–4 people). It covers proposals, contracts, invoicing, time tracking, and basic project management in one place, and the pricing — around £17/month for a single user — is reasonable. The client portal is a genuine feature, not a workaround.
The ceiling is low, though. Bonsai starts to strain under the weight of 20+ clients and a team of 5+. Multi-user pricing is expensive relative to what you get, there’s no serious retainer management, and the project management features are too lightweight for complex delivery work. If you’re currently on Teamwork, you’ve already outgrown Bonsai’s target audience. It’s only relevant here if you’re downsizing or restructuring rather than upgrading.
Feature Comparison: Teamwork vs the Alternatives
The table below compares the core agency management features across each platform. All pricing is approximate based on publicly available rates and mid-tier plans as of mid-2024.
The pricing column tells only part of the story. ClickUp at £70/month for 10 users looks compelling — until you factor in the CRM, invoicing tool, support system, and monitoring solution you’ll still need alongside it. When you add those up honestly, the consolidated cost of Marque CRM at £149/month frequently wins on total software spend.
When Teamwork Still Makes Sense
It’s worth being clear about the scenarios where staying on Teamwork is the right call, because switching tools has real migration costs in time and disruption.
Teamwork remains a good choice if your agency is primarily project-delivery focused with a small number of large clients — say, 3–4 enterprise clients with complex, long-running projects where the depth of Gantt and milestone management is actively used by multiple stakeholders every day. In that scenario, project management is genuinely the core of your operation, and Teamwork’s depth in that area is worth the price premium over lighter tools.
It also makes sense if you have clients who specifically log in to the Teamwork client portal to review project status — particularly if they’re enterprise buyers who find the interface professional. Ripping that out mid-engagement introduces client-facing friction that’s hard to justify for a cost saving.
And if you’ve genuinely got the rest of your stack sorted — a CRM you love, an invoicing tool that integrates cleanly, a support system that’s embedded in your team’s workflow — then the argument for switching is weaker. The strongest case for leaving Teamwork is when it’s prompting you to build a wider constellation of tools around it rather than reducing the number of tools you operate.
What Migration Actually Looks Like
The practicalities of switching are what most comparison articles skip. Here’s a realistic picture.
Your active project data — tasks, milestones, time logs — is the most time-consuming part to migrate. Teamwork exports data via CSV, which means you’ll be doing some manual work to import it into whatever replaces it. Budget half a day for a thorough migration of a mid-sized project history; more if you have years of archive data you want to carry across. Most agencies find it’s cleaner to archive completed projects and only migrate active work.
Client contacts and company records migrate more easily, since most tools accept CSV imports for contacts. The messier part is recreating recurring invoices, retainer schedules, and contract templates — those need to be rebuilt, not migrated. Plan for a 1–2 week parallel-running period where both systems are live for billing purposes.
The actual switch for the team typically takes two to four weeks of adjustment time, not months. The agencies that migrate smoothest are those that pick a clean handover date (usually aligned with the start of a billing month), do a structured team walkthrough of the new tool’s core workflows, and nominate one person to own the migration rather than running it by committee.
If you’re switching to Marque CRM, the white-label client portal means your clients see your branding from day one — there’s no awkward transition period where clients are suddenly seeing a different vendor’s interface. The client onboarding process remains consistent even when your internal tools change underneath it.
The Total Cost Calculation Most Agencies Miss
The comparison most agencies make when evaluating a Teamwork alternative is direct and logical: compare the monthly price of Teamwork against the monthly price of the alternative. That comparison is incomplete.
The real number is total software spend across the entire tool stack serving the same operational surface. A 10-person agency on Teamwork Deliver (£230/mo) plus HubSpot Starter CRM (£14/mo per user × 5 sales seats = £70/mo) plus FreeAgent (£33/mo) plus Pingdom or UptimeRobot Pro (£40/mo) is spending around £373/month. Move to Marque CRM Agency at £149/month and eliminate three of those four tools, and the saving is over £2,700 per year — without any loss in capability. In most cases you gain capability, because the integration between modules in a purpose-built platform is meaningfully better than the integration between four separately procured tools.
There’s also a hidden cost that never appears in these calculations: staff time spent switching between tools and reconciling data across systems. If your project managers spend 30 minutes per week moving information between Teamwork and your CRM, and you have four project managers, that’s two hours per week — over 100 hours per year — of work that serves the tools rather than the clients. That work disappears when the tools are consolidated. See our guide on agency operations systems that actually scale for a fuller treatment of this calculation.
Making the Right Call
The decision to leave Teamwork is rarely about Teamwork being bad. It’s about recognising that your agency has grown to a point where a specialist project management tool — however good — is the wrong shape for your operations. You need something that joins up the full client relationship: from first contact through to project delivery, monthly billing, ongoing support, and the early signals that a client relationship is at risk.
If your primary goal is simply to reduce per-user project management costs, ClickUp or Monday.com will do that. If your goal is to consolidate your tool stack, reduce admin overhead, and get a single view of every client relationship, Marque CRM is the more complete answer. The 14-day free trial requires no credit card, so the cost of finding out is zero.