Marketing agency software: What you need (+ 11 tools)

What you need from marketing agency software

Agencies rely on different tools to manage their work, most of which are built for very specific functions rather than running an entire client delivery operation. 

That’s why, instead of focusing on specific aspects of a marketing stack — like SEO tools, email platforms, or social schedulers — this section looks at the operational capabilities your agency needs to manage projects, collaborate with clients, and keep work moving across multiple teams.

From our experience working with marketing teams of all sizes, agency management software should excel in four core areas:

• Workflow management
• Creative collaboration
• Resource planning
• Financial management

1. Workflow management

While project management systems can be useful for individuals and small teams, they’re essential for agencies. When teams are delivering work for multiple clients at once, often across departments, time zones, and external partners, even small changes can affect an entire project. 

Effective workflow management provides agencies with a central system to plan, assign, and track work throughout the project lifecycle. Teams need clear task ownership, visibility into how work connects across roles, and the ability to update timelines when priorities change.

Example: Wrike supports multiple types of task dependencies, allowing agencies to model how work actually gets done across teams and deliverables. Teams can define how tasks should relate, including:

• When one task must be completed before another can begin
• When tasks can progress in parallel while remaining linked
• When multiple deliverables need to move forward together to stay on schedule

This helps agencies manage complex client workflows while reducing the time spent on tedious, repetitive tasks, such as manually rebuilding schedules.

2. Creative collaboration

In a marketing agency, you’ll be producing campaigns, content, and creative assets that need the opinion of others. But as you grow, you’ll notice that emailing your colleagues and clients is not the most convenient way to get feedback and approval. Marketing agency software that’s worth the investment will make this kind of creative collaboration easier.

Example: With Wrike, agency teams can review each other’s work, leave comments directly on files, and manage approvals without leaving the project workspace. 

This is especially useful for agencies working with multi-format assets such as design files or copy documents, where version control and clear feedback are critical.

When you’re able to keep creative reviews, revisions, and approvals tied to assets, you reduce reliance on other communication channels like long email threads. This makes creative collaboration easier for internal teams and clients, while also helping move work forward without delays.

3. Resource planning, including time tracking

When teams manage multiple clients and overlapping campaigns, resource management becomes a non-negotiable part of your agency’s workflow. Without a clear view of workloads and availability, teams risk overloading or underutilizing key contributors and missing early warning signs that a project is off track. 

The right marketing agency software should give leaders a clear picture of who is working on what, how time is being spent, and where adjustments are needed to keep work moving smoothly.

Example: Wrike’s resource planning tools help agencies visualize workloads across teams and roles, so you’re more likely to identify capacity issues before they cause delays. Teams can track time against projects, distinguish between billable and non-billable work, and rebalance assignments as priorities or deadlines change.

4. Financial management

The final critical aspect of any agency tool is financial management. This includes tools for planning budgets, tracking spend in real time, reporting on project costs, and managing basic admin such as invoicing and billing. 

If your marketing agency tool doesn’t have these as standard, ensure it at least has integrations with other reporting and invoicing software so you can still access all these insights in one centralized place. 

As they grow, many agencies find that using separate tools to manage each of these functions becomes a burden. When financial data lives across too many tools, it becomes difficult to understand project profitability or get a clear, real-time view of how work is tracking against budgets. If time entries, costs, invoices, and approvals are out of sync, it’ll be much harder to maintain accurate financial oversight.

Example: Wrike connects time tracking, project budgets, and reporting into one system. Teams can see how logged time impacts costs, identify budget risks early, and keep financial approvals tied directly to projects for better accuracy.

Now that you know what to look for, let’s dive into the actual marketing agency solutions.

The 12 best marketing agency software tools (for different workflows and use cases)

Below, we’ve rounded up some of the best marketing agency software tools available today, including:

• Wrike
• Trello
• Zapier
• Sage HR
• QuickBooks Online
• HubSpot
• Notion
• Miro
• Workable
• AgencyAnalytics
• Mention
• Jira

Each option supports different agency workflows, team sizes, and operating models, so you can compare them based on what matters most for your agency. 

1. Wrike: The complete work management platform for agencies

Wrike makes collaborative work easier in all its forms. Whether you’re a small marketing agency or an established advertising brand, we can support you to get your campaigns and projects delivered on time and on budget. 

With our experience working with over 20,000 organizations globally, we know that every workplace is different. That’s why we’ve made Wrike as flexible as possible to suit your agency’s specific needs and ways of working. 

Here, we share in detail how Wrike stacks up against the functions we shared above.

Get complete visibility on your agency workflows

One of the biggest challenges for agencies is simply finding the right system to understand and manage all the work they need to do. Such a system should be fully customizable to your needs and powered by automation, to ensure everyone has access to the deep data they need in real time.

For agencies managing multiple clients and campaigns at once, this visibility needs to extend across accounts without losing clarity at the individual project level.

Wrike is exactly that agency management system. With our platform, you can:

Customize your workflows in the way that makes sense to you

Every agency is different, and any software you choose should support you to remain unique in the way you work. Through our range of project visualizations, you can view your work however suits you, whether through Gantt charts and timelines, Kanban boards, or calendar views. 

Agencies often use Gantt charts to plan campaign timelines and coordinate dependencies between different stages (such as creative or client review), while Kanban boards are used more frequently for managing day-to-day production and approvals.

But Wrike does more than this. With our customizable structure, you’re able to organize all your work in spaces, folders, tasks, and subtasks, so you have complete clarity on where assets are located and how individual tasks relate to the bigger picture. The result is unparalleled clarity on your agency’s work.

For example, agencies can use spaces and folders to separate client accounts, organize campaigns within each client, and still maintain high-level visibility across departments such as creative, strategy, and account management.

Give every colleague their own personal window into your shared work

While the structure of your shared workflows is completely customizable, each of your colleagues can have a personal dashboard to organize and understand their own work, too. 

This can feature the data that’s most important to them, their own priorities and to-do lists, or whatever else is useful. It’s like a personal window into the work you’re doing as an agency.

Custom views are especially useful in agency environments, where individuals often contribute to multiple client accounts and need a clear view of priorities without losing sight of broader team goals.

Update everyone on status and deadline changes with a click

When it comes to understanding your shared work, it can be a real brake on productivity if you can’t trust that task statuses are up to date or information is accurate. 

That’s why Wrike uses automation to ensure that the status of tasks, dependencies, and any shared deadlines are always up to date. Whenever a colleague updates the status of a task or project, that information is automatically updated in shared Gantt charts or calendars, so everyone in the agency can stay effortlessly up to speed.

Set up dynamic intake forms to standardize your briefs

If you have a repeated process for your agency workflows, you should automate it so that you don’t have to distribute tasks or set up deadlines every time a new request is made. 

Wrike’s custom request forms make this easy. Simply create a form where other colleagues or clients can submit the information you need. Then, our automation engine will set up the entire workflow for you, allocating tasks, establishing deadlines, and tagging everyone with the info they need to complete work.

Also read: 18 best workflow automation software tools in 2026 (by use case)

Create, collaborate on, and manage your creative assets

In a marketing agency, the process of creating an asset or campaign is fundamentally collaborative. While one person may design an ad or visual, at least one other will likely edit and proof it before that asset is then passed on to the client for feedback and approval. 

That’s why your agency needs effective collaboration features to communicate about the work you’re doing. However, if you use too many disparate chat apps and platforms, important information and resources can get lost. 

Instead, with Wrike, you can:

Use @mentions and comments to discuss your work where it’s happening

Instead of chatting about creative work via Slack, Google Doc comments, and endless email threads, bring all these discussions together in Wrike. Our platform integrates with tools such as Adobe Creative Cloud and Google Workspace, so you can simply tag relevant colleagues, drop a comment, and proof the asset all within Wrike. 

Teams can leave in-context comments while reviewing ad copy, suggest changes on a design mockup, or flag specific sections of a campaign asset for revision without switching tools or losing context.

Get approval within Wrike from external clients, without having to send another email

Even people outside your agency can use Wrike to leave their opinion on your creative work. This is particularly useful for agencies managing frequent client review cycles, where feedback, revisions, and approvals must remain clearly tied to specific assets and versions.

All you need to do is set them up as guests, and they can provide feedback and approve marketing campaigns within the platform. It keeps all your work in the same place and reduces endless email threads.

Use AI to generate content

If your agency produces written content, Wrike’s AI can support early-stage creation and refinement. Teams can use it to draft briefs, generate ideas, summarize feedback, or polish existing content directly within their workflow.

This helps speed up production without moving work into separate tools. Plus, your brand and personal voice can be customized to direct all content created with Wrike AI.

Integrate with other tools that your colleagues are using

As an agency, there may be other tools that you need to use alongside Wrike, including content marketing, client management, and analytics tools. But don’t risk siloing resources or duplicating discussions in an app that doesn’t speak to the rest of your agency’s tech stack. 

Wrike integrates with over 400 other tools to ensure you’re collaborating at your best. Whether you need to connect with a messaging app, CRM, billing software, or business intelligence platform, you can do it with Wrike. 

Ensure every project has the best chance of success with advanced resource and people management tools

In an average day of meeting deadlines and managing client expectations, it can be a struggle to get a big-picture view of the skills and resources you have in place. Yet, this is often critical for the success of your projects, as on-time and on-budget delivery often depends on your having the right resources.

That’s why effective resource management functionality is a fundamental element of your agency management tools. With Wrike, you can:

Sort colleagues by skills, to get clarity on who’s best placed for each project 

No matter the size of your marketing agency, it can sometimes be difficult to find the right person for a particular project, depending on their skills, availability, and capacity. This challenge is compounded when teams support multiple client accounts with different requirements and timelines.

This is another thing that Wrike makes easy. In Wrike, you can sort your colleagues by their listed skills, so you simply find who is available and able to take on a particular job. Plus, it helps you understand if there are any gaps in your team’s knowledge that you need to fill.

Track hours and time off in Wrike, so you know who’s available for work

It often happens in agencies without effective resource management processes that projects get delayed due to sick leave or paid time off. Yet that’s something that’s really easily solved with tools like Wrike’s work schedules and workload charts.

Wrike also helps agencies track billable and non-billable hours, monitor team capacity, and identify over-allocated individuals or teams before delays or burnout occur.

Bring all your resources into one place, meaning no more frustrating flicking between apps

Resource management isn’t just about ensuring that you have the right resources, but that everyone knows they’re available and where to find them. Wrike centralizes all of your workplace docs, files, skills, and talent, so that you no longer need to waste time looking for the things you need.

For agencies, this means project briefs, creative assets, asset versions, timelines, and availability data all live in the same system, making it easier to keep client work organized and teams aligned.

Use AI to forecast which projects are most at risk of disruption

Our advanced AI suite, Wrike Work Intelligence®, gives you deeper insight into how well your projects are resourced. Using data from your historical projects, our AI tools can forecast how likely similar pieces of work are to face disruption. 

This can help agencies anticipate issues caused by stretched teams, shifting priorities, or tight delivery timelines before they impact clients or budgets. This way, you can ensure they have all the resources they need before they get delayed or run over budget.

Manage your finances and deliver your projects on budget

Speaking of budgets, you can’t run a marketing agency well without proper financial management. Wrike brings the financial planning tools and spend data together with your resource, team, and project management functions. 

Wrike enables you to:

Estimate and budget for marketing efforts in advance with cost management tools

With Wrike’s sophisticated budgeting and cost planning software features, you can automatically calculate key financial metrics, set default and custom rates for particular tasks, and use this data as the backbone of your project finances throughout the work you do.

For example, agencies can set different billable rates for designers, copywriters, strategists, or developers, and estimate campaign costs before kickoff to confirm budgets align with client expectations.

Keep an eye on costs with dashboards and real-time reports

We mentioned how you can customize Wrike’s dashboards above. If you’re a manager, you can add widgets to your personal dashboard that show project costs and KPIs in real time, so you always know you’re on budget.

This makes it easier for agency leaders to spot margin risks early, especially when managing multiple active client projects at once.

Plus, with Wrike, it’s easy to extract all that live information into beautiful, user-friendly reports. Forget spreadsheets — in just a couple of clicks, you can share key insights with stakeholders, other managers, or your team instead.

Create invoices through Wrike’s native integrations

As a project manager or finance team, you don’t need any additional admin. Instead of spending time creating invoices from scratch, you can just generate them automatically via integrated software.

It’s simple to set up automations in Wrike that follow custom when/then rules. For instance, you can tell Wrike that when a project has been marked as complete, then generate an invoice in QuickBooks. 

Agencies can also automate invoicing at the end of a retainer period or when a campaign phase is completed, helping ensure invoices are sent on time and revenue isn’t delayed.

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How 3 marketing agencies use Wrike

You’ve seen what Wrike can do. Now, we want to share three marketing agencies that are already using our platform to reduce manual processes, deliver better projects, and satisfy their clients. 

1. ROI Revolution reduced the number of meetings by half

Headquartered in Raleigh, NC, ROI Revolution is an agency focused on search engine marketing. As the team grew from five people to 150+ over the years, it realized it needed marketing agency software to keep everyone aligned.

After trying to use email and Outlook Tasks, it turned to Wrike. 

“I love the fact that Wrike hit everything in my dream list! With Wrike’s help, we get vastly better results. We get more things done and done faster,” says Timothy Seward, CEO of ROI Revolution.

One of the Wrike features the team loved was the customizable project views, which enabled each individual to see the same group of tasks in different ways. Due to this enhanced visibility, ROI Revolution found that it was able to communicate even better than it could in meetings. 

Within just the first couple of weeks that we’ve been using Wrike, I was able to immediately save 50% of the time that we used to spend on meetings.

Timothy Seward, CEO

Read the full case study here.

2. Ogilvy Australia saves time by automating their creative briefing process

Ogilvy is one of the world’s largest ad agencies, with 450 offices across 169 cities. The Australian team is based in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, and — like many agencies before it — had been relying on paper processes and email to stay aligned. 

After onboarding Wrike, it realized just how much more agency management software could do for it. One of the processes that was transformed with Wrike was briefing. Rather than collecting work requests through email and in-person meetings, Ogilvy could standardize the process entirely with Wrike. 

It helped Ogilvy’s workflows become much more manageable and project data to be available in real time — to anyone that needed it. 

Everything I see now in Wrike is live and in its current status, which is a big plus to me. We can jump on the job, look at the last couple of comments on it, and pick up the ball up and run with it from there.

Ashley Risstrom, Senior Production Manager

Read the full case study here.

3. Blue Magnet Interactive increased the number of projects delivered on time by 20%

Based in Chicago, IL, Blue Magnet Interactive is a digital marketing agency focused on working with hotel brands. Just like ROI Revolution, as it grew, it realized the manual processes it had relied on were no longer up to scratch.

“It becomes a lot more difficult when you’re relying on others to get you timely information and quality products that you can then deliver to the client,” says Matt Bitzer, CEO and Co-Owner of Blue Magnet Interactive.

Wrike offered the simplicity of being able to assign tasks to someone without having to enter too much unnecessary information. Wrike was a good balance of a simple, very intuitive interface, and complexity that made sense — it wasn’t counterintuitive.

Matt Bitzer, CEO and Co-Owner

By keeping all the information teams needed in a single software, Blue Magnet could reduce the time spent looking for key details and resources — and reduce the time spent in meetings. In fact, Bitzer estimates that the team has reduced 20% of meeting time on each project.

Read the full case study here.

2. Trello — Simple workflow and project management software

Project and workflow management tools come in all shapes and sizes. Wrike is one of the most robust, customizable, and advanced systems out there, for instance. But, if you’re a very small agency, you may prefer something more basic. 

One popular option to consider is Trello. Trello is a SaaS solution built around Kanban boards, a type of project visualization method that uses cards representing tasks that can be moved to different statuses. It can be useful for the simplest projects, but it may struggle with more complex workflows. 

Alongside Kanban boards, Trello offers collaboration features, including comments, external integrations, and different views (such as calendar or timeline views). It offers a free plan and its pricing is typically affordable for small teams and simple projects.

3. Zapier — Collaboration platform for connecting apps

There are many tools and applications out there that call themselves collaboration software, from Slack to Notion to Zoom. However, most of these require you to add an extra tool to your marketing software stack — something that isn’t always great for collaboration. 

A popular alternative is Zapier. Rather than adding yet another app to your agency, Zapier helps you integrate different platforms and automate processes and repetitive tasks across them. The aim is to boost productivity without contributing to software sprawl.

While this can be useful for many, the main drawback is that Zapier doesn’t actually create a unified space for collaboration. And so your resources and conversations may still be fragmented and hard to find.

4. Sage HR — Resource management software

You can reach a point as an agency where you may replace freelancers with full-time internal staff, which requires a dedicated HR tool to manage them. Unless you’re operating at the enterprise end of the spectrum, a tool such as Sage HR can often do the job. 

Sage HR offers tools to improve hiring, create a more positive work environment and culture, and manage employee performance. Plus, it offers standard functionality for time tracking, time off management, and more.

Of course, HR software is about managing your human resources. You’ll likely still need a documentation hub, a company wiki, or a shared drive to manage your other resources, too.

5. QuickBooks Online — Financial management software

Typically, project managers in your agency will need a financial management tool as part of the software they use daily, to ensure the work they have ownership over stays on track. 

However, many agencies, particularly the larger ones, will need a platform that helps them administer payroll, accounting, and agency-wide expenses. For this purpose, something like QuickBooks can be a good option. 

For most marketing agencies, QuickBooks Online — the cloud-based solution aimed at small businesses — will be enough. You’ll be able to manage your cash flow, pay your staff, and get oversight on the key agency-wide financial data you need.

6. HubSpot — CRM and Marketing Hub

Customer relationship management helps you understand and improve your interactions with customers and how they behave. While Salesforce is a popular enterprise option, HubSpot is generally better suited to smaller businesses thanks to its ease of use.

HubSpot also offers sales, services, and marketing tools in one platform. This includes features and solutions like a drag-and-drop landing page builder, SMS and email marketing automation, and more. 

7. Notion — Documentation tool

As agencies grow, they need to take company knowledge from people’s minds — be that about internal processes, clients, or best practices — and make it easily accessible to all team members. 

Documentation hubs are generally the best place for this, and Notion is a good option because of its intuitive collaborative interface, thousands of templates, and AI capabilities. 

With Notion, agencies can centralize documentation across teams, reduce reliance on ad hoc knowledge sharing, and keep internal and client-facing information up to date.

8. Miro — Innovation tool

If you’re working remotely as an agency, it can be useful to have a visual, digital space where you can brainstorm and share ideas with your colleagues. Miro is a popular option that’s collaborative, creative, and visually inspiring.

Because Miro is easy to use for global teams, it is commonly used for brainstorming sessions, planning new initiatives, and collaborating on ideas in a shared visual workspace.

9. Workable — Staff and recruiting tool

While there are other HR tools on the market, Workable excels when it comes to hiring. You can source candidates from its database of 400m+ candidates, set up employee referral programs, and post to 200+ job boards, all within the platform. 

It also helps agencies manage hiring pipelines and collaborate on candidate evaluations as teams grow. This makes Workable a strong fit for agencies that need to scale their teams efficiently without investing in a full HR management system.

10. AgencyAnalytics — Reporting tool

There are many tools designed to provide business insights, but AgencyAnalytics is tailored specifically for marketing agencies. It boasts intuitive dashboards, integrations with all your clients’ data channels, and automations to speed up reporting.

Marketing teams and account managers who need to deliver clear, repeatable performance reports to clients without manual data pulls will benefit most from AgencyAnalytics.

11. Mention — Reputation management tool

An additional tool that could be useful for your agency is social listening and reputation management software. A platform such as Mention enables you to perform market research, competitive analysis, and understand your agency’s reputation, all in one single platform.

Many marketing agencies rely on Mention to manage brand perception, monitor and optimize campaign impact, and support PR and social media strategies alongside other client work.

12. Jira — Agile project management tool for technical teams

Jira is designed for teams that rely on Agile methods to plan and deliver work. It supports sprint planning, backlog management, and issue tracking, making it a strong choice for marketing agencies running development-heavy projects or iterative delivery cycles.

Most technical teams will prefer Jira because of how it supports structured workflows and detailed visibility into work progress.

For a complete marketing agency software, choose Wrike

Marketing agency software comes in all shapes and sizes. However, if you need a single tool that handles most of what you need in your agency, choose Wrike. 

Equipped with project, resource, and financial management capabilities, as well as team collaboration features and integrations with all the other tools you need, Wrike is the essential software for any agency. 

Book a demo to discover how Wrike can work for you. 

For complete marketing agency software, choose Wrike

Marketing agency software comes in all shapes and sizes. However, if you need a single tool that handles most of what you need in your agency, choose Wrike. 

Equipped with project, resource, and financial management capabilities, as well as collaboration features and integrations with all the other tools you need, Wrike is the essential software for any agency. 

Book a demo to discover how Wrike can work for you. 

Start free trialBook a demo

Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about marketing agency software

1. What is marketing agency software?

Marketing agency software is a category of tools to help agencies manage client work, teams, and resources in one place. These tools often support project planning, collaboration, resource management, time tracking, and financial oversight so agencies can deliver work efficiently at scale.

2. What types of software do agencies use?

Most agencies use a combination of tools to support different parts of their workflow. This typically includes project and workflow management software, creative collaboration tools, resource and time tracking tools, CRM platforms, reporting and analytics software, and financial or invoicing tools. Some agencies also rely on specialized tools for design, content creation, or campaign execution alongside their core management software.

3. Is project management software the same as marketing agency software?

Project management software focuses primarily on planning and tracking tasks. Marketing agency software usually builds on this by adding features tailored to agency needs, such as client collaboration, resource and workload management, time tracking, and financial visibility.

4. What features should marketing agencies look for in management software?

Management software for marketing agencies should support the full lifecycle of client work. Key features to look for include customizable workflows, collaboration and approval tools, resource and capacity planning, time and budget tracking, integrations with other tools, and reporting that provides real-time visibility across projects and accounts.