Best Project Management Software For Scaling Agencies

Best Project Management Software For Scaling Agencies

1. PM Software for Agencies with 1-2 Employees

While operations and building robust systems are important, when you’re a 1 or 2 person agency, less is more.

Notion

Best for: Database management, SOPs and training materials

Notion is an excellent starting point if your main goal is to stay organized and document your core SOPs for future hires.

It is user-friendly, and you can set up everything you need in just a couple of hours.

However, Notion has lots of limitations as it’s not a dedicated project management platform and I wouldn’t recommend it to teams that has aspirations to scale further.

Trello

Best for: Managing personal tasks and workflow

Trello is another great tool for one-person agencies, as it is incredibly easy to use and straightforward to set up.

I’d only recommend it if you’re a one or two-person business, as it becomes increasingly difficult to manage teams and access important data when scaling your agency.

2. PM Software for Agencies with 3-20 Employees

ClickUp

As your agency grows beyond a couple of team members, you'll need more robust project management capabilities to keep everything running smoothly.

Best for: Strong project management with CRM capabilities and multiple view options

ClickUp strikes the perfect balance between powerful features and user-friendly interface, making it ideal for growing agencies with 3-20 team members.

It offers versatile views (Gantt charts, Trello-style boards, grid views) that allow different team members to work in the way that suits them best, while maintaining a single source of truth for all your projects.

You can create and save templates for recurring projects, set up automations to reduce manual work, and build basic CRM functionality to manage your client relationships—all within one platform.

However, it should be said that its learning curve is going to be steeper than Notion or Trello, but the scalability makes it absolutely worth the effort for agencies looking to grow.

After trying out dozens of different software, this is the software we’ve been using ourselves and implementing for other agencies for years.

3. PM Software for Agencies with 20+ Employees

ClickUp

Yes, ClickUp will still be one of your top choices when trying to manage 20+ employees, especially considering it’s an out-of-the-box solution.

The pricing is pretty smart and affordable, even for bigger teams, and 90% of the features would be more than enough for even enterprise teams (with proper structuring).

However, some features such as limited reporting, will make you implement third party reporting applications via Make or Zapier, which in some cases can be tricky, and not so straightforward.

Bubble

Bubble is like a Lego set. You create your own reality, and it often comes with a cost.

Bubble is a custom software development platform where you can build completely custom and tailored solutions for your unique needs in your agency.

Because you're going to building the software around what you absolutely need and nothing else, the custom built system will be incredibly efficient to use.

However, you could be looking at about $30,000-$40,000 in development costs + a monthly retainer to upkeep the system just to start out.

I’d still recommend it to mega enterprise agencies, looking for outside-of-the-box solutions to their PM systems.

How Can I Help

If you’d like to hear about how I could help you and your agency scale efficiently without additional headcount by implementing our Agency Operations System™, you can book a call with me here.

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-Egemen