Project management software for small agencies: isolation and access

Five client projects. A contractor joining for six weeks on one of them. A designer who works across two. And on the largest project, someone on the client side who needs to watch progress and see nothing else.

That is an ordinary month for a ten-person dev or product agency, and a harder tooling problem than a ten-person product team has. A product team has one body of work and a roster that changes twice a year. The agency has five bodies of work that must not touch, and a roster that changes faster than the projects do.

Most reviews of project management software for small agencies compare features. Access is what decides it.

The two constraints pull in opposite directions

Isolation. Each client's work is separate and no client may ever see another's. Often that is a contract term rather than a preference, and even where it is not, one competitor's name in an autocomplete is a conversation nobody wants to have.

Mobility. The same people cross those containers constantly, and the ones who move most are the marginal ones — a contractor for six weeks, a designer on two of five projects, a client stakeholder for one engagement. Their access needs granting and revoking in seconds.

Isolation wants hard walls. Mobility wants cheap doors. Most tools are good at one of those, and almost none of the difficulty is about features. What is load-bearing in a tracker at this size is a short list, and none of it is agency-specific — see what a five-person team needs from issue tracking. What is agency-specific is the access model.

What project management software for small agencies gets wrong

Per-seat billing turns access into a budget line

If every person costs money, the contractor, the designer and the client's product manager are each a small decision — and the people who lose it hold information the tracker needs. We wrote that argument out in the quiet cost of per-seat pricing and will not repeat it here.

What is worth adding is that "per-seat punishes agencies" is not universally true, because several vendors price directly around this. Basecamp states plainly: "Invite guests and clients for free. We will only bill you for employees" (basecamp.com/pricing). Teamwork.com has a distinct client-user licence that is free and capped at five active projects per client user (support.teamwork.com), on top of paid plans starting at $9.99 per user per month billed yearly with a three-user minimum (teamwork.com/pricing).

So check for a client seat type before assuming the bill scales with everyone you invite. For an agency that line outweighs most feature comparisons.

Enterprise permission models express it, and cost an administrator

This problem is solved at the top of the market. Jira has permission schemes, which "allow you to define what users can do within a space" and can be shared across several spaces — with the caveat that "any changes will be applied to all that use it". They are configured by Jira admins, and Atlassian's own documentation notes they are not available on Free Jira sites (support.atlassian.com).

That is a shape, not a criticism. The model precise enough to express agency access sits above the free tier and assumes someone whose job includes owning it. At two hundred people that person exists; at ten the role lands on whichever developer set the thing up.

One container with projects inside it leaks

Isolation lives at the container boundary, wherever the tool draws it. With one team space and client projects inside it, anything defaulting to space-wide is somewhere a client sees what is not theirs: the member list, search, an activity feed, the project switcher. Nothing dramatic happens — a name appears in an autocomplete, and you hear about it from the client.

Worth stating against ourselves: our own product has this property. In Kevta, a workspace member with no explicit board role resolves to Editor on every board in that workspace (docs). A board per client inside one shared workspace is the wrong shape in Kevta too.

The shape that fits

Put the wall at the client: one container per client, the agency inside all of them, and per-project guests for people who should see one board rather than the container.

In Kevta that is a workspace per client, with boards inside it for that client's streams of work. A board-only guest is someone with a board membership and no workspace membership; they reach that board and nothing else. Roles are set on the board: Viewer reads, Commenter can comment but not edit, Editor files and moves work. Because of the inheritance rule above, the client's product manager gets an explicit Viewer role on the one board rather than a seat in the workspace.

The pricing follows the same shape. Free is $0 with 2 workspaces, 5 boards in each and 10 members each. Pro is $10 a month per workspace — flat, not per person — raising that to 10 workspaces, 10 boards each and 50 members. Adding the client stakeholder as a Viewer and the six-week contractor as an Editor changes the invoice by nothing, and removing them is deleting a row, not reconciling a bill.

The less flattering arithmetic: Pro is bought per workspace, so five Pro client workspaces is $50 a month, and boards and members are counted per workspace, so a client workspace that needs a sixth board or an eleventh person needs its own $10. Current numbers are on the pricing page.

Where this runs out

Four limits, and for an agency the third is serious.

Ten workspaces is a ceiling. Past ten concurrent clients the shape is unavailable, and there is no larger tier to buy today.

Guests count against the member cap. Members plus board-only guests, 10 on Free and 50 on Pro. A guest is free of the invoice, not free of the cap.

There is no time tracking, no invoicing, no resource planning and no client-facing reporting. For an agency those are not conveniences: billable hours are the revenue, utilisation is the staffing decision, and a status report is a deliverable. Kevta does none of it, so an agency on it runs something else alongside. If that bundle is what you need, Teamwork.com spreads time tracking, invoicing and resource scheduling across its paid tiers (teamwork.com/pricing) — and an agency platform is a fairer comparison than an issue tracker.

Nothing reaches a client's inbox, and nothing carries a file. Kevta sends no email for task activity — updates live in the in-app inbox — and it has no file attachments, so the brief that arrived as a PDF stays where it is. For a stakeholder who opens the board on Fridays, fine. For one who expects to be told, not. There is no importer either.

Which one fits you

If billable hours, invoices and client reporting are the point of the tool, buy an agency platform. If you are one person with several clients, the isolation problem is the same and the mobility problem mostly is not — project management for solo developers covers that case.

Container-per-client is worth trying if the work is code, it lands in GitHub, and the real problem is that five clients' work must stay apart while nine people move between it every week. Kevta is in beta and pre-launch, so the honest offer is a place in the queue rather than a migration plan: if that is the shape you have been hand-rolling out of shared boards and screenshots, join the waitlist.

We make Kevta, so read the second half as an argument rather than advice. The test stands on its own: work out where your tool puts the wall, then list everyone who has to cross it this month and what it costs to let them.