Key takeaways:
  • What is project management software for creatives? Project management software for creatives helps teams plan, track, and deliver work in an organized way that doesn’t disrupt their creative process. 
  • What are the essential features for project management software for creatives? Look for automated intake, centralized approvals, customizable projects, tool integrations, and personalized visualizations.
  • How do integrations enhance project management? Strong integrations with tools like Adobe Creative Cloud streamline processes, remove context switching and manual tasks, and improve team collaboration.
  • Which is the best project management software tool for creatives? Wrike is an ideal option for creative teams (and especially for complex creative workflows) due to its robust automation, scalability, and versatility. Other tools include Asana, Monday.com, Smartsheet, Workfront, ClickUp, Trello, Hive, Basecamp, Teamwork, and Milanote.
  • Why is scalability important in project management tools? A scalable tool ensures clarity on tasks and workflows across multiple clients and projects.

There’s no single kind of creative project. But unfortunately, scattered requests, shifting priorities, multiple rounds of feedback, and tight timelines are the norm, leaving creative teams to lose momentum and underperform.

Project management software can make a real difference here. The best solutions help creative teams centralize requests, streamline approvals, and scale their workflows without sacrificing flexibility or creative freedom. 

However, to find the right solution for your creative team, it’s crucial to understand which project management solutions are actually built for the ways creatives think and collaborate. That’s why in this guide, we’ll cover:

Note: We’ll kick off this list with Wrike — our project management software used by creative teams at Sony Pictures Television, Nickelodeon, The Estée Lauder Companies, Electrolux, and many other global brands. Learn more here.

Try Wrike for free

6 key features to look for in creative project management software

As a company that’s worked with tons of creative agencies, we know that creative work is never the same across teams, organizations, and projects. However, there are still features that we know from experience are a must for pretty much any creative endeavor, such as:

  1. Automated intake and requests: It’s tough to keep track of requests that come via email, Slack, and other channels. The right project management software for creatives centralizes and automates work requests, improving visibility and accountability on tasks.
  2. Centralized approvals and proofing: Creative work demands a lot of back and forth, but feedback gets lost when spread across multiple apps. All-in-one project management and collaborative software centralizes your proofing and approvals process (super useful when clients get involved).
  3. Customizable projects and permissions: Depending on the client or job at hand, you’ll want the ability to customize project names, change how tasks relate to each other, and set who has access to specific folders and documents. 
  4. Integrations with various tools: Your creative team likely uses tools like Adobe Creative Cloud and the Miro suite to do their work. For the most efficient workflows, these should integrate with your project management system.
  5. Personalized visualizations: Across your team (or wider organization), different people will be interested in various types of questions — such as who is involved, costs, timescales, and dependencies. They should be able to see that, without having to crawl through information they don’t need.
  6. Scalability: Your team will likely be working on projects for many different clients and departments. You need a tool that gives you clarity on your tasks, even at scale.

Outside of these essentials, different creative teams might require various additional functionalities, such as cross-tagging, advanced dashboards and analytics, specific templates, or native file storage. We’ll explore tools that offer all of these and more in the next section.

The 11 best project management tools for creatives (teams and freelancers)

Now that you know what to look for, we’ll dive into the actual tools and explore their main features, use cases, integrations, and customer reviews. 

Here’s a quick rundown of all the creative project management tools we’ll cover and what use case they’re best suited for:

  1. Wrike: Best all-in-one solution for every creative workflow
  2. Asana: Best for teams interested in an attractive UI
  3. Monday.com: Best for prebuilt creative and design templates
  4. Smartsheet: Best for fans of traditional spreadsheet software
  5. Adobe Workfront: Best for syncing with Adobe tools
  6. ClickUp: Best for users in need of a robust free plan
  7. Trello: Best for creatives who prefer Kanban-style visualization
  8. Hive: Best for feedback-related growth and development
  9. Basecamp: Best for small and growing creative teams
  10. Teamwork.com: Best for client-focused teams who need to start fast
  11. Milanote: Best for saving and organizing notes, images, videos, and sketches

1. Wrike: The project management software for creatives

Wrike is an award-winning work management platform used by more than 20,000 organizations worldwide. In fact, for the third consecutive year, we were named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Collaborative Work Management.

Wrike is designed to make project management and collaborative work easier and more efficient across different departments, from creative and marketing teams to VPs and finance. 

For example, when the creative team at Sony Pictures Television uses Wrike, it takes 40% less time to deliver projects, and people send 90% fewer emails. The Fitbit team has saved 400 hours a year in meetings by using Wrike for feedback and reviews.

3 key features of Wrike that creative teams love

1. Build custom, automated workflows that actually work for you

Wrike can be completely customized to suit how their teams plan projects and deliver work. This means you can completely automate everything from intake to delivery — a massive reason why creative teams love Wrike.

Typically, most project management tools are more like task management tools. They may give some visibility over individual tasks, but it’s really difficult to see where there are dependencies across teams (at least without things getting really complex). 

Instead, with Wrike’s management software for creative teams, you can build and automate your workspace so everyone has access to the information they need, when they need it. 

Cross-tagging

This powerful tool gives everyone better visibility into project progress, all the way down to the task level. You can share the same work item across multiple teams and workflows, without having to duplicate it. This means everyone can see work in the context of their own workflows or organization. 

For instance, a marketing campaign can be tagged in your graphic design team’s core workflow, as well as in your sales team’s tasks, without cluttering your workspace. Or your engineers can keep a task in their weekly sprint project, while your PMO views it through their upcoming milestones report.

product screenshot of wrike cross-tagging on aqua background

Learn more: How cross-tagging in Wrike opens up your team’s project visibility (Infographic)

Fully automated workflows

Most project management tools have pretty limited workflow automation. Once a task is completed, people get a notification. That’s it. What makes Wrike unique is that the entire workflow is automated from the moment of intake. 

Let’s say you’re running a marketing campaign. As soon as a design project or creative asset is requested, Wrike’s automation automatically sets up the whole workflow, creating dependencies and triggers to take your team from ideation through to approval.

Complete scalability

Some project management software for creatives limits you to a certain number of project boards, while others just get really cluttered when there are too many tasks. Wrike’s unique structure, based on cross-tagged projects, keeps everything crystal clear even when there are many projects on the go. 

Basically, Wrike’s creative project management software makes it easier for teams to get work done. Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), for example, uses Wrike to streamline the way the team creates marketing materials for US sports teams. 

“A major goal from my perspective was to cut down on the time designers spent on administrative tasks, file management, and client outreach,” explains Grace Marland, Design Art Director at MSE. “They needed to spend more time where their talent lies: in the creative process.”

Author Avatar

Anyone who is looking to manage multiple projects daily should consider Wrike. The ability to customize request forms and have all our specs automatically provided to our designers once submitted is extremely useful.

Lori Meyers, Manager of Digital Assets

2. Give every team member visibility over every task

When it comes to project management for creative teams, everyone in each team, department, and organization has their own priorities and their own set of tasks. Once you’ve built out your custom workspace using Wrike, each individual has visibility over what they need to work on and when it needs to be done. 

What’s more, they can set up their own personal dashboard and visualizations so that they can work in a way that’s best for them.

product screenshot of wrike dashboard on aqua background

Dashboards

Wrike’s dashboards are another standout feature that sets our project management tool apart. Every single team member can create a fully personalized view of the projects they’re involved in and get the information they need — whether that’s costs, resources, task progression, or anything else. 

Team members can organize their workloads however works best for them. For example, they can create to-do or priority lists or see the status of tasks they’re waiting for others to complete. Wrike remains a central source of truth for all stakeholders, while being viewed uniquely from each individual’s perspective.

Custom visualizations

Wrike also helps your teams visualize project timelines and workflows in a way that makes sense for them. Some people prefer to use Gantt charts, which let you create task dependencies. They’re an essential tool to help teams overcome silos and get a big-picture view of project timelines. Other colleagues may prefer the Kanban view. This way, they can see what stage individual tasks are at, understand how many tasks are at a particular stage, and identify all the bottlenecks. 

Wrike’s entire setup is structured so that individuals can focus on their tasks without losing sight of the dependencies that are an essential part of how teams collaborate on creative work.

The best creative software saves busy teams a lot of time. “Using Wrike, I was instantly able to remove four hours of meetings a week through the use of shared dashboards,” says Jessica Wooding from Chosen Foods. “I refocused this saved time on providing education opportunities for the team, which improved our process for project initiatives, supported team growth, and had more time to focus on producing the best output in our team’s work.”

Author Avatar

Wrike eliminated the need for a role I had considered adding, a traffic controller, to support our intake and administrative system. And in 2019, we completed 2,800 unique deliverables and 93 packaging projects with an in-house creative team of two full-time and one part-time employee for a business with revenues of over $140 million a year.

Jessica Wooding, Kaizen Manager

3. Centralize all work requests and approvals

If your creative team isn’t using a comprehensive project management tool right now, you’re probably relying on a combo of email or Slack to request and give feedback on projects. You may even be using a task management tool to visualize your work — while discussing that work in a different channel.  Either way, without the right software to meet your project management needs, comments and insights will get lost and forgotten across tools.

Instead, creative teams can use Wrike to centralize all of the information related to a project — and actions that need to be taken — into a single tool.

Dynamic request forms

Instead of receiving ad-hoc, non-standardized requests for work through email or even in person, creative teams can create their own custom request forms within Wrike, which are available to the whole team. 

This way, you can ensure you have all the information you need, in the form you want it. You can make it easy for the people requesting work by using drop-down lists, checkboxes, and simple brief submissions. 

Then, once a request form has been submitted, the work itself can be automatically assigned to someone in your team. As explained above, the submission of the request will also automate the entire (customized) workflow, right through to approval.

Easy approvals

Wrike centralizes your creative approval workflows, bringing the whole proofing process under one roof. If final sign-off needs to come from someone outside of your organization, you can use our guest review functionality. 

And, because Wrike can be easily integrated with tools such as Adobe Creative Cloud, any stakeholder — depending on their permission level — can make edits and add comments directly within Wrike.

Marketing Architects is using Wrike as a single platform to keep its whole team informed and connected. As a result, the team is now 40% more efficient and can deliver impactful TV campaigns 25% faster. Approvals used to take a whole day to be returned. Now, using Wrike, the team can get a response within just 20 minutes. 

Integrations

Wrike has more than 400 app integrations to help creative teams centralize all their work — as well as communication and collaboration — in a single place. These include:

Wrike customer reviews

  • Wrike has a Capterra rating of 4.4 out of 5, based on almost 2,800 reviews.

Ready to see Wrike for yourself? We’d love to show you how Wrike’s project management for creatives can help your team do more of their best work. Get in touch, and we’ll respond within 24 hours.

Try Wrike for free

2. Asana

Asana is a popular project management software that offers a wide range of features. 

It helps creative departments, design studios, and marketing teams optimize their processes. Asana has creative project management tools for file storage, project roadmaps, dashboards, and more, all in one attractive interface. 

It’s built for businesses of all sizes, from the very smallest of teams to enterprises. Creative teams looking for an attractive user experience value its visually appealing design and user-friendly navigation.

Key features

  • Workflow builder: This is a visual tool that connects team members across departments and lets users create custom project workflows.
  • Goals: This feature allows project managers to set up goals for teams as well as metrics to track performance.
  • Gantt charts and Kanban boards: These visualizations help teams track resources, workload management, deadlines, and work progress.

Integrations

Asana has 260+ integrations, including with Adobe Creative Cloud, Slack, and Canva.

Asana customer reviews

Asana has a Capterra rating of 4.5 out of 5, based on over 13,518 reviews. 

Note: Check out ourWrike vs. Asana page for more details on how both platforms compare.

3. Monday.com

Monday.com is an “AI work platform” that comprises products for project and task management, IT and support, email marketing, and customer relationship management. For creative teams, the monday work management tool can be a good option that brings solid project management capabilities while also being easy to get started with.

Its AI-powered capabilities can help creative teams identify risks across a project portfolio, analyze and label incoming requests, and create detailed project plans with suggested tasks and phases.

Key features

  • Custom dashboards: These work by allowing teams to view project information from different angles. They’re useful for project managers and team leaders to quickly assess progress, with real-time timeline and budget information.
  • Automations: Tasks can be set up with automatic reminders of when they’re due.
  • Prebuilt templates: Users don’t have to build workflows or projects from scratch. Instead, they can use Monday.com’s library of 100+ different templates to create repeatable processes for common tasks.

Integrations

Monday.com offers 200+ integrations, similar to Asana but fewer than Wrike. 

Monday.com customer reviews

Monday.com has a Capterra rating of 4.6, based on over 5,600 customer reviews. 

Note: Check out ourWrike vs. Monday.com page for more details on how both platforms compare.

4. Smartsheet

Another popular project management tool for creatives isSmartsheet. It looks and feels like a spreadsheet, meaning it’s pretty easy to start using, especially if you’re used to managing work in Excel or Google Docs. 

Smartsheet offers a plethora of tools and features for team collaboration, resource management, digital asset management, and portfolio management. Its Dashboards and Reports are configurable to look like a document with graphs, images, and text boxes included. 

Key features

  • Automated workflows: Create blueprints to help you automate your workflows. It helps make work more streamlined, standardized, and accurate.
  • Detailed dashboards: Alongside the spreadsheet view, Smartsheet lets you get a clear overview of project information on a comprehensive dashboard. This can include team workflow management and organizational goals. Executive dashboards also give leaders a complete view of KPIs, which they can share with stakeholders.
  • Content management: You can plan, manage, and edit content from within Smartsheet — and publish that content too. 

Integrations

Smartsheet has 100+ integrations, including Adobe Creative Cloud and other popular tools such as Slack, Salesforce, and Power BI.

Smartsheet customer reviews

Smartsheet has a Capterra rating of 4.5, based on over 3,400 customer reviews.

Note: Check out ourWrike vs. Smartsheet page for more details on how both platforms compare.

5. Adobe Workfront

Workfront is a traditional project management tool that was bought by Adobe in 2020. As it’s part of Adobe, it can make sense for creatives to use it if they already use the Creative Cloud suite. Overall, it has a large variety of features that will satisfy enterprise organizations that need more complex capabilities. 

Features

  • Strategic enterprise planning and goal setting: Workfront provides one place to plan campaigns, create and launch briefs, and orchestrate work. This helps creative teams structure data, organize projects, and draw meaningful conclusions.
  • Detailed dashboards: Dashboards let you track goals and individual projects from a single central source. 
  • Workflow automation: Teams can eliminate manual work, standardize processes, and connect workflows. For example, you customize project templates that standardize execution or automatically produce campaign briefs by using AI.

Integrations

As it’s an Adobe product, Workfront integrates seamlessly with Creative Cloud. There are also some integrations available at no additional cost (such as for Slack and Microsoft Teams), but most other integrations require an extra fee.

Adobe Workfront customer reviews

Workfront has a Capterra rating of 4.4, based on over 1,400 customer reviews.

Note: Check out ourWrike vs. Workfront page for more details on how both platforms compare.

6. ClickUp

ClickUp is a well-known project management software solution that works well for most teams, including those who areworking remotely. It started life as a more customizable rival to Jira (a tool typically used by development teams) but has evolved into a platform that offers a lot of functionality for different teams, including creative ones.

Today, ClickUp has been marketed as the “one app to replace them all.” It really does have a very wide functionality — including tasks, dashboards, a document tool, and even tools for meetings and chat —  although few teams use everything that it offers. 

Features

  • Docs hub: This lets you centralize all your internal documents to build a knowledge base. It may not be a priority for large creative teams, but it can help to accelerate and smooth the onboarding process. 
  • Checklists: ClickUp lets you break down tasks into smaller activities, so you can get moving more quickly and monitor your progress.
  • Mind maps: One function that sets ClickUp apart from traditional project management solutions is that you can plot out projects and tasks visually through mind maps. It lets everyone see their specific place in the larger strategy.

Integrations

ClickUp is strong on integrations, with native connections to major third-party apps including Slack, Google Calendar, Outlook, HubSpot, and more.

ClickUp customer reviews

ClickUp has a Capterra rating of 4.6, based on over 4,500 customer reviews.

Note: Check out ourWrike vs. ClickUp page for more details on how both platforms compare.

7. Trello

A more basic offering,Trello, is aKanban tool owned by Atlassian. It lets you set up tasks that are represented by cards, which you can move from one status to the next. Trello is simple, but it’s attractive and very widely used by freelancers and small teams across industries. 

However, it doesn’t offer the sophistication that enterprise teams or more complex creative organizations would want, as it lacks advanced project management features.

Features

  • Kanban boards: Trello is one of the best-knownKanban board tools, with a colorful interface and easy, intuitive drag-and-drop functionality. 
  • Custom fields: You can tailor task cards with due dates, comments, and more to make sure everyone can see the information they need.
  • Automation: Trello lets you create automated flows between cards, based on particular schedules, that help to streamline project intake and deliver high-quality creative assets fast.

Integrations

Trello offers over 200 integrations with popular tools such as Slack, Jira, Miro, Dropbox, Google Drive, and many others.

Trello customer reviews

Trello has a Capterra rating of 4.5, based on a massive 23,000 customer reviews. 

Note: Check out ourWrike vs. Trello page for more details on how both platforms compare.

8. Hive

Hive is a project management platform that claims to help “run your entire team in one workspace”. It has lots of features like custom templates intended specifically for helping teams in the creative space. It’s also project management software designed to connect all aspects of work through group messaging, file sharing, and even native email.

Hive also has an AI-powered product called Buzz, which reads, replies, books meetings, and handles next steps, so creative teams can focus on their actual work. Plus, there are other AI-powered building tasks, projects, and workflows.

Features

  • Custom views: Hive offers different ways to view projects, including Gantt, Kanban,portfolio, and calendar views
  • Real-time analytics and tracking: Hive has a built-in time tracking tool, alongside key project data to power team performance.
  • Custom templates: These templates, such as intake forms, can help you create repeatable team-wide processes.

Integrations

Hive boasts over 1,000 integration options, including a Photoshop plugin. However, there are only 12 native integrations.

Hive customer reviews

Hive has a Capterra rating of 4.4, based on over 200 customer reviews.

9. Basecamp

Basecamp was initially born as a web design agency. The company decided to build this tool when it struggled to find project management software that suited the specific needs of creatives. Today, Basecamp is known as an easy-to-use platform that’s particularly useful for small teams. The tool’s project management functionality includesscheduling, collaborating, and monitoring features.

Basecamp also has a unique pricing plan that’s $299/month billed annually, which includes all features and updates. This makes it an attractive option for teams that don’t want to deal with per-user pricing or extra fees for specific features.

Features

  • To-do lists: You can break down complex projects into smaller tasks, so you can see, comment on, and get started with them more quickly.
  • Message boards: Teams can communicate more easily with dedicated project boards, so everyone can monitor progress.
  • Projectscheduling: This function helps users with project tracking, ensuring they don’t miss key deadlines. You can create due dates, track progress, and integrate with calendars.

Integrations

Basecamp offers integrations for 50+ tools and platforms across categories like time tracking, invoicing, accounting, customer service, and developer tools.

Basecamp customer reviews

Basecamp has a Capterra rating of 4.3, based on over 14,000 customer reviews. 

Note: Check out our Wrike vs. Basecamp page for more details on how both platforms compare.

10. Teamwork.com

Teamwork.com was founded in 2007 and now “used by over 16,000 agencies”. It’s focused on client work, which makes it attractive to the creative and marketing fields. 

It maintains all the core attributes of a leading project management platform but also includes key agency-related financial management andclient management features such as built-in time tracking, budgeting, and invoicing tools. It allows a significant range of customizations, which creative projects often require.

Its AI offering — TeamworkAI — helps teams move faster by turning updates into tasks in one click, providing fast answers with smart filtering, and instantly showing who’s over- or underbooked.

Features

  • Intake forms: These are creative briefs that allow you to customize text fields, drop-down options, and date ranges to get all the info you need from your clients and customers.
  • Templates: Teams can jump-start specific projects and common creative tasks with templates, including ones for podcasting and public relations.
  • Automations: Off-the-shelf and customizable automations are available to cut down on manual, repetitive projects or tasks.

Integrations

While there are many options for Teamwork.com users (including Slack, Microsoft Office, and Google tools), the actual integrations available to you will depend on your subscription level. 

Teamwork.com customer reviews

Teamwork.com has a Capterra rating of 4.5, based on over 900 customer reviews. 

Note: Check out our guide to the best 25 project management software platforms to see how Teamwork.com compares to other popular options.

11. Milanote

The final entry to this list is Milanote. It’s a unique entry in the sense that it’s not a traditional project management platform but a tool for saving ideas, taking notes, and brainstorming. With that in mind, creative teams still use Milanote to organize, plan, and manage projects as there are features for collaboration and monitoring tasks.

If your primary goal is to drive creativity and innovation, Milanote can be a good option. However, teams that need more than basic project management capabilities and integrations are likely a better fit for some of the other entries on this list.

Features

  • Moodboards and storyboards: These tools help creative teams set the vision and map the visuals, narration, and sequence for their projects using a simple drag-and-drop editor.
  • Visual project management: Milanote can act as a centralized place to manage creative tasks using to-do lists, organize visual assets based on project needs, and collaborate with other team members. 
  • Mind mapping: Team members can connect concepts and ideas visually and collaborate on them in real-time.

Integrations

Milanote doesn’t offer any integrations yet, which is one of the tool’s biggest limitations. The only publicly available integration for Milanote is built by Optimizely.

Milanote customer reviews

At the time of this writing, Milanote has a Capterra rating of 4.7 based on 63 customer reviews.

Choose Wrike for customizable, automated project management software for creatives

When it comes to choosing the best project management software for your creative team, the right option will depend on the size of your team (and wider organization), the complexity of your projects, and the functionality you need to get creative projects over the line. 

Wrike does more than just help you move tasks around. You get complete control over your creative workflow, meaning you can automate repetitive tasks and make the whole process smooth and efficient, from initial request through to approval. 

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Ready to see Wrike for yourself? We’d love to show you how Wrike can help your team do more of their best work. Get in touch, and we’ll respond within 24 hours.

Try Wrike for free

Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about project management software for creatives

What is project management software for creatives?

Project management software for creatives helps teams plan, track, and deliver work in an organized way that doesn’t disrupt their creative process. These solutions include features for handling briefs, assets, feedback cycles, approvals, and shifting deadlines, while maintaining collaboration and creative flexibility.

How is project management software for creatives different from standard project management tools?

Creative-focused tools prioritize visual workflows, collaboration, and iteration. They typically offer features like intake and request automation, proofing and approvals, flexible task structures, creative-friendly views, and integrations with creative software such as Adobe Creative Cloud and Miro. 

How do creative teams benefit from project management software?

Project management software provides essential benefits for creative teams, such as reducing scattered communication, unclear priorities, and confusing feedback. It helps creatives spend less time chasing information and more time actually creating by centralizing requests, files, comments, and timelines, as well as automating repetitive tasks.

Is project management software worth it for small creative teams or freelancers?

Yes, even small teams benefit from having a single place to manage requests, tasks, deadlines, and feedback. Many tools offer free or lightweight plans that help freelancers and small creative teams automate repetitive tasks, avoid missed details, and present a more professional experience to clients.

How can creative teams choose the right project management software?

Creative teams should look for software that supports their workflows and approval process, integrates with the tools they already use, scales as workload grows, and can be customized without adding unnecessary complexity.