The short version. Productive is the agency operating system if you have ten people, which is not optional because ten seats is the minimum. Teamwork does most of the same job with no minimum, and its AI is free for now but will be metered from September 2026. Harvest is $9 a seat if all you need is time and margin. Metricool produces the client report at a price that does not scale with your client count. Fathom records the client calls for nothing.
Every price here came off the vendor’s own pricing page on 15 August 2026, except Metricool’s, which is quoted in euros because that is how its page lists it.
Looking at the commercial side rather than the tooling? Our directory keeps shortlists for agency owners, including client profitability and retainer management.
How we ranked this, and why it is mostly about pricing
Agencies do not usually have a tooling problem. They have a margin problem that tooling is supposed to reveal, and the tools that reveal it are priced in ways that punish exactly the agencies who need them most.
Two things shaped this list more than features. Seat minimums, which turn a reasonable per-user price into an unreasonable bill for a team of six. And AI that is included now and will not be later, which several vendors have already announced.
Beyond that we looked for:
- Does it work without timesheets? Agency timesheets are filled in on Friday from memory. Anything depending on them is measuring a story.
- Does the price scale with clients or with staff? For reporting tools this decides whether growth is affordable.
- Does it tell you something you would act on? Utilisation charts are interesting. Margin per client changes who you fire.
1. Productive: the agency operating system, if you are big enough
Essential $10/user/month billed monthly, or $12/user/month annually. Professional $25/user/month monthly, or $24 annually. Ultimate is custom. All plans carry a 10-seat minimum. Verified 15 August 2026.
Productive is built for agencies specifically rather than adapted to them, and it shows in what it puts on the front page: budgets, profitability per project, resourcing and forecasting rather than tasks. If you have ever tried to run agency finances out of a general project tool and a spreadsheet, the difference is obvious within a week.
The reason it ranks first is that it answers the question agencies get wrong most often, which is which work is actually profitable once you count the people who touched it. Getting that answer from one system rather than reconciling three is worth real money.
The ten-seat minimum is the catch and it is a hard one. A six-person studio pays for ten seats, so Essential is $120 a month rather than $72, and Professional is $240 rather than $150. That is not a rounding error at that size. Note also that annual billing is more per user than monthly on Essential, which is unusual and worth reading twice.
Who it is wrong for: agencies under about eight people. You are paying for seats you do not have, and Teamwork does most of this without the floor.
2. Teamwork: the same job without the floor, for now
Free tier. Basics $9.99/user/month billed annually with no user minimum. Accelerate $24.99/user/month annually. Optimize and Enterprise are custom. Verified 15 August 2026.
Teamwork has been aimed at client work for years, and the practical difference from Productive is that you can start with three people. For a small agency that is the entire decision, because the alternative is paying a ten-seat tax to find out whether the category helps at all.
The AI is spread across the tiers rather than sold separately: summaries and assistants on Basics, deeper operations and utilisation insights on Accelerate, resourcing and profitability forecasting further up. For an agency wanting to know where the hours went without asking anyone to log them differently, Accelerate is the interesting tier.
One thing to plan for. Teamwork’s own page says AI is included in all paid plans for an introductory period, and that usage-based AI credits launch in September 2026. So the AI you evaluate this month is not necessarily priced the way it will be next month. Budget for a change rather than assuming the current bundle holds.
Who it is wrong for: agencies whose main problem is financial rather than operational. If you need budgets, forecasting and profitability as the primary view, Productive is built around that and this is not.
3. Harvest: if you do not need a platform at all
Free forever for 1 seat. Teams $9 per seat per month, or $108 per seat per year. Enterprise $14 per seat per month, or $168 per year. Enterprise Plus is custom. Verified 15 August 2026.
Plenty of small agencies do not have a platform problem. Work happens in Slack, files live in Drive, and the only genuinely missing number is how many hours went into each client against what that client pays.
Harvest answers exactly that and nothing else, at $9 a seat with no minimum. For a five-person studio that is $45 a month against $120 for the cheapest Productive configuration, and it will tell you the same uncomfortable thing about your worst client.
The trade is that it depends on people tracking time, which is the weakness this whole category is trying to design around. Harvest is about as painless as time tracking gets, and it is still a habit somebody has to keep.
Who it is wrong for: teams who have already tried and failed to make time tracking stick. If your timesheets are fiction, buying better timesheet software does not fix the fiction, and you want something that reads the systems people actually work in.
4. Metricool: reporting that does not get more expensive per client
Free tier for 1 brand with 20 scheduled posts a month. Starter from €16/month for 5 brands to €29/month for 10. Advanced from €43/month for 15 brands, €69 for 25, or €130 for 50. Annual billing advertised at up to 24% off. Verified 15 August 2026.
The monthly report is the thing that renews the contract, and building it by hand out of four native dashboards is several unbilled hours per client per month. That cost is invisible because it lands on whoever is least busy, which is usually the person you can least afford to have doing it.
What puts Metricool on this list rather than a bigger name is the pricing shape. Fifteen brands for €43 a month means reporting stays roughly free as you grow, which is not true of anything else in the category. White labelling on the higher tiers means the report goes out with your logo on it.
It also schedules, so a small agency can plausibly run social delivery and reporting from this alone.
Who it is wrong for: agencies whose reporting has to reconcile with paid media attribution. This is a social tool and it will not settle an argument about which channel produced the revenue.
5. Fathom: the client calls, at no cost
Free tier with unlimited recordings and transcriptions. Premium $20/month, or $16 billed annually. Team $19 per user per month, or $15 annually, with a 2-user minimum. Business $34 per user per month, or $25 annually. Verified 15 August 2026.
Agencies lose money to two things in client calls. Scope agreed verbally and remembered differently later, and the write-up nobody does because the next call starts in four minutes.
Recording and transcribing fixes both, and the free tier covers it with unlimited recordings, which is worth verifying yourself because it sounds like it should have a catch. When a client says the redesign was always meant to include the mobile templates, having the sentence is a shorter conversation than having a view.
The paid tiers add custom summaries, which start earning their keep once your account managers run calls to a consistent shape.
Who it is wrong for: agencies whose clients are uneasy about recording, which is common in regulated sectors. Ask when you onboard rather than at the top of a call, and check the consent rules where you and the client sit.
Agencies this list will not suit
Holding companies and networks. Your systems are chosen centrally and integrated with finance. Different problem, different budget.
Solo freelancers. Harvest’s free single seat and Fathom’s free tier will carry you a long way, and everything else here is built to coordinate people.
Production studios billing by deliverable. If nobody is on a retainer and every job is quoted fixed, utilisation matters less and this list weights it heavily.
Agencies hoping software fixes pricing. If you underquote, better visibility just tells you sooner. That is genuinely useful and it is not the same as fixing it.
Considered, and left off
HubSpot and the marketing platforms. Many agencies live in one, usually because a client does. That decision gets made by the client relationship rather than by this kind of comparison.
Canva. Almost every agency uses it and it barely needs recommending. It is on our lists for social media managers and small business owners, where creative volume is the binding constraint.
Float and the resourcing tools. Real value once you are over about fifteen people and scheduling becomes a job. Below that a shared calendar and a conversation is faster.
Time tracking with automatic capture. An interesting category promising to remove the habit problem entirely. We have not verified one we would put an agency’s billing behind, and the accuracy question matters more here than anywhere.
Questions agency owners ask us
What is the cheapest stack that tells me my margins?
Harvest at $9 a seat plus Metricool’s Starter at €16. For a five-person agency with five clients that is under $70 a month and it answers the two questions that matter, which are where the hours went and what to send the client. Move up to Teamwork or Productive when reconciling across tools costs more than the subscription.
Is the ten-seat minimum on Productive negotiable?
Its pricing page states it as a floor across plans, so plan for it rather than around it. If you are six people and want agency-native financials, the honest comparison is $120 a month for ten Productive seats against roughly $60 for six Teamwork seats, and then whether the financial depth is worth the difference.
Should I worry about Teamwork’s AI pricing change?
Worry is too strong, but plan for it. The vendor has said usage-based AI credits launch in September 2026, so anything you build a workflow around now may be metered later. Evaluate the product on its non-AI merits and treat the current AI inclusion as a bonus rather than a reason to commit annually.
How do I get profitability without timesheets?
You need something that reads the systems people already work in and attributes effort from that, rather than asking for a log. That is a different category from everything on this page, and it is the reason our directory list for agency owners leads with it.
Is AI actually useful for agency work?
For the reporting layer, yes and immediately. For the client work itself, it depends on what you sell. Agencies selling production are being compressed by the same tools their clients now have. Agencies selling judgment, positioning and accountability are mostly fine, and the ones in trouble usually knew which side they were on already.
Which client should I fire?
The one with the lowest margin and the highest emotional cost, and you probably already know which that is. The reason to measure it is not to find out. It is so the conversation with your partners is about a number instead of a feeling.
See our maintained directory shortlists for agency owners for the client profitability and retainer side of this.
Last reviewed: 15 August 2026. Every price was read off the vendor’s own pricing page on that date. Teamwork has announced usage-based AI credits from September 2026, so its AI inclusion is expected to change. We review this page quarterly.
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