Best Marketing Resource Management Software for Agencies (2026)

“Marketing resource management (MRM) software” is generally defined as a solution that supports marketing strategies and optimizes processes, which is a very broad definition and leaves plenty of room for different solutions to categorize themselves as MRM.

That's why, when you research MRM software, you'll see multiple different categories of solutions across software review guides: digital asset management (DAM) software like Bynder, Brandfolder, project management tools like Monday.com, Airtable, and Asana, and general work management software like Smartsheet.

But these tools all do totally different things — it's like comparing apples to oranges — which makes it hard to tell exactly what your agency needs.

To provide clarity, we compiled this guide on marketing resource management software to help you compare different solution types and choose the option that best fits your agency's needs.

• What marketing teams and agencies should look for in MRM software (and how software in this category differs)
• Workamajig: Our marketing resource management platform and its key features
• Alternative marketing resource management tools that meet our recommended criteria

We've been partnering with marketers and other creatives for over 35 years, developing Workamajig to help agencies overcome operational challenges and improve workflows. Our customer-centric approach allows us to configure our solution to meet each client's needs, guide them through onboarding, and provide ongoing support.

If you're interested in talking with our team after reading, you can request a demo here.

Best Practices & Considerations When Shopping for MRM Software

Since “marketing resource management” is a broad, catch-all term, it's really not worth worrying about the exact definition. It's most useful to just list what marketing agencies need to manage resources — including their people (not just internal teams, but also vendors, clients, and contractors) — projects, creative collateral, and finances (like budgets, expenses, and reporting).

So in our experience, an end-to-end MRM system should include tools for managing:

• Staff members — beyond scheduling staff members to tasks, you also need ways to track staff availability, schedules, and hours to improve resource allocation.
• Vendors — to source outside experts for projects, coordinate project activities or assign work, and manage those working relationships.
• Clients — to receive project requests and feedback, send deliverables, and invoice accurately.
• Strategy, production processes, ongoing projects, and the project portfolio — to plan new projects, assign team members to tasks, track project progress, and report on past work.
• Content for projects — such as design files, images, videos, documents, and brand assets like logos, marketing materials, etc.
• Project financials & profitability — including how much you're budgeting for a project, how much you've spent, and revenue from projects.

So, you might already be able to connect the dots and see how the solutions we listed above satisfy these criteria in one way or another. For example, DAM lets you manage creative assets, while work management systems bring structure to the production process.

The problem, though, is that almost all of the tools we mentioned above only do a few of these things — they don't cover all bases. And as a result, many marketing agencies use (and pay for) a large stack of tools. So they have to find ways to integrate the systems or reconcile data between them, which gets complicated and leads to a whole slew of issues.

This challenge is why we built Workamajig: to centralize everything agencies need to manage their people, projects, clients, and finances in one place. It combines project management, resource management, time tracking, budget monitoring, media buying, financial reporting, accounting tools, CRM, and more. All modules work in sync, so agencies can seamlessly manage their daily operations.

In the rest of this guide, we'll show you Workamajig's core modules and review a few other systems that check similar boxes.

Workamajig

Comprehensive Marketing Resource Management Software for Creatives

We built Workamajig with all the functionality creatives and marketers need to manage operations and resources in one place. Our hub allows all stakeholders to work in one system — where they can plan projects and marketing campaigns, store and collaborate on marketing content, track progress and budgets, manage invoices and payments, and report on ROI.

Juggling disconnected tools often creates more work than it eliminates. An all-in-one MRM system like Workamajig changes all that by allowing teams to:

• Manage the entire creative workflow. Build solid project plans and campaigns, ensure clear accountability from day one, maintain control over feedback loops and approvals, and see how creative assets evolve from V1 to final deliverable.
  

• Utilize team members to the fullest. Match the right people to the right tasks based on skill set, availability, and capacity. Then keep tabs on workloads, assignments, and utilization, so you can proactively rebalance schedules, prevent burnout, and ensure every resource is contributing to your bottom line.

• Streamline stakeholder collaboration. Bring your in-house team, freelancers, and clients together in one hub to collaborate on feedback, fast-track approvals, and share final deliverables —without ever having to leave Workamajig.

• Centralize their financial management. Workamajig's built-in accounting tools bring estimating, expense tracking, real-time budget monitoring, billing, invoicing, and financial reporting under one roof. Create budgets, log expenses as they're incurred, track real-time project cost burn, and reduce the reconciliation errors caused by managing finances across disconnected systems.
  

• Unlock deeper profitability and performance insights. Our reporting suite lets you combine project, resource, client, and financial data to get a clearer picture of what's driving — or holding back — your margins. Pinpoint which clients or project types are losing money, understand why, and make the strategic changes that move the needle.

To ensure everyone gets the most out of Workamajig, our team meets with each client before onboarding to learn about their processes and challenges, and what they're looking for in a software solution. Then, during setup, we can configure our software to your requirements and show you how to manage project workflows in our system.

All of our clients are assigned a dedicated account manager to guide onboarding and training, and check in to offer support as needed. We have experience working with in-house teams, agencies, and enterprise organizations, and our software can scale to match the unique needs of your operations.

In the next sections, we'll take you through how Workamajig's key features let you manage resources and work at each stage of the project lifecycle — from intake to project wrap and post-mortem reporting.

For a more detailed walkthrough of Workamajig, request a personalized demo with our team.

How Workamajig Manages Project Intake & Planning

Initiating New Projects

Workamajig offers multiple project intake tools to capture essential details upfront, in a structured way — reducing back-and-forth and ensuring all stakeholders are clear on the project scope.

In-house teams typically manage project intake with our request forms. They can create these from templates and share them with all the teams and departments that request work. Managers can instantly see new project requests from their personalized Today dashboard, review the details, and slot work into the schedule.

We also offer project templates (popular for both in-house teams and agencies). These let managers customize templates for all their most requested projects or services. They can specify tasks, subtasks, dependencies, milestones, estimates, and more.

Workamajig also features a native CRM for marketing agencies to manage new client intake. This lets teams keep a record of all their contacts, consolidate leads from different sources, develop opportunities, and track all details captured during negotiations (specs, estimates, quotes, timelines, etc.) against each contact.

Then, sales reps can convert closed opportunities into projects or campaigns, instantly transferring all those details over to the project — so managers can begin planning tasks and timelines (and nothing falls through the cracks).

Now, after intake, our project planning toolkit helps managers review the details, fill in gaps, and assign work:

• Task management. They can use these to edit and finalize task details — including subtasks, hierarchies, time allotments, due dates, and more. After projects are kicked off, everyone can see what they're responsible for, when they need to complete tasks, and how to plan their work schedule. We also send notifications about new tasks and due dates, so managers don't need to coordinate with everyone individually.

• Resource planning and vendor management. Once all project details are finalized, managers can assign work to the right people based on bandwidth, availability, and skill sets.

• Automated estimating. While project templates usually come with saved estimates, Workamajig further adjusts the estimate as PMs finalize details and assign resources, so the final estimate accurately reflects the scope and resource plan. Our system also accounts for contingency and overhead costs, giving you a more realistic estimate that's mindful of your profit margin.
  
  

Staff Scheduling & Capacity Planning

As mentioned above, our resource management tool helps managers improve staff scheduling, choose the right person(s) for tasks, and balance workloads.

Our staff scheduling dashboard conveniently displays all staff members, their total scheduled hours, utilization rates, and the number of hours they still have open in a single view.

Our system also integrates with staff calendars to account for people's availability. This saves managers from unintentionally scheduling people when they're busy in meetings or out of office.

Then, managers can adjust the dashboard to view hours by month or week and to show the project activities each resource is assigned to. Managers can conveniently monitor how workloads shift as they assign tasks, to ensure they're evenly distributing work. They can also easily reassign tasks to speed up projects, cover when staff call out, or redistribute workloads.

There's another feature that managers really love about our dashboard: the “unassigned services” roll-up at the end of the screen. By scrolling down, they get a snapshot of all the work that hasn't been assigned yet, so they can make sure they're covered before kick-off.

Vendor Management Module

Marketing projects often require external help, whether in the form of materials like printouts or specialized services provided by contractors and freelancers.

When these needs come up, managers can use our vendor management tools to source partners and freelancers for projects. They can request quotes and receive bids, choose who to work with, generate purchase and work orders, and assign them to project activities.

Managing Your Live Marketing Projects

Monitoring Timelines & Budgets

Workamajig's project monitoring dashboard allows teams to conveniently track the progress of all their live projects in one place. It displays real-time status updates and automatically adjusts budgets and timelines as users complete tasks and log expenses.

The dashboard is also visually friendly with color-coded project statuses and warnings so managers can instantly see where things stand and immediately catch any issues, as shown below:

The right-hand side features Gantt charts that track each project's progress (black bars represent the percentage completion of project tasks).

The left-hand side displays how close a project is to completion, budget status, and more, so managers can keep tabs on everything in motion (and intervene when projects need attention). The project health indicators here visually indicate the status of each project, so managers can prioritize where to intervene.

• Green signals that everything is going well
• Yellow warnings indicate that projects are at risk of exceeding budgets or running late
• Red warnings highlight projects that have already exceeded budget or timelines.

Time & Expense Tracking

As we discussed in the previous section, the project monitoring dashboard reflects what's actually happening on the ground. It does that by tracking task status, logged hours, labor costs, and any other project expenses against the project's estimated timeline and budget.

Workamajig includes all the tools to log hours as work progresses and pull in project expenses as they're incurred to ensure our system keeps timelines and budgets up to date. And Workamajig sets up these workflows to reduce friction, so your team feels empowered to track these things without being pulled away from their natural workflows.

On the time tracking side, we offer several tools for staff members to add hours directly on task cards, without leaving their daily workflows. And all time-tracking data is linked to employees' hourly rates and costs.

To log hours, users can:

• Record time while they work with our automated timers
• Connect their calendars to Workamajig to pull in meeting hours, so employees don't have to manually add hours from their calendar events
• Plug in hours the old-fashioned way with manual timesheets

After employees log their hours, managers can review them and make any changes from our centralized timesheets. They can mark entries up or down, or even write them off entirely. For example, many agencies track the time sales reps spend developing opportunities and closing deals, but they might write off those hours for high-value accounts rather than pass them on to the project budget.

Then managers can approve the entries, and Workamajig automatically updates the project's timeline and budget to reflect the changes.

On the expense management side, we provide a suite of dedicated tools to manage various types of non-labor costs as they come up. This includes:

• On-the-go receipt capture. Team members can attach and store receipts in Workamajig via mobile or desktop, then tag those expenses to specific projects, ensuring everything is accounted for and factored into project budgets.
• Credit card charges and spending account management. Our Plaid connector lets managers pull in charges and tag them to the appropriate projects. Our system can auto-sync to automatically capture these costs each night, or pull them in ad hoc via the connector.
• Vendor invoice management. Keep track of what you pay vendors vs. their original quotes by uploading invoices in Workamajig and matching them to purchase orders, work orders, and receipts. You can even pay vendors online thanks to our integrations with Edenred Pay (formerly CSI) and AvidXchange (formerly FastPay)
• Media buying integrations with Strata/FreeWheel, Mediaocean, Bionic, and GaleForceMedia. Marketing and creative teams can conveniently track media orders and actual spend against project budgets by pulling in insertion order details and logging them against projects or campaigns.
• Multi-currency expense management. Workamajig's GAAP-, GDPR-, and HMRC-compliant accounting system supports multi-currency transactions, expense tracking, and invoicing. It consolidates everything in your home currency for reporting — calculating gains and losses using your exchange rate table — and pulls in current exchange rates, applying the right rate to each transaction by date.

Team Collaboration & Digital Asset Management

Workamajig includes a variety of native collaboration tools so staff members, managers, and clients can work on tasks and content creation without taking conversations into other systems.

For starters, we offer personalized Today dashboards tailored to each user's role and responsibilities (PMs, creatives, sales reps, billing teams, you name it).

Here, each user can see the work they're assigned — alongside allocations, expectations, and due dates — directly on task cards. If a team member still has questions before or during the process, they can leave comments in task cards and loop others into the conversation.

As team members work on tasks, they can upload design files, marketing assets, documents, and other materials directly to the card for review. Our system accepts most file types, including images, audio, video, PDFs, and HTML, and lets users add URLs to share those digital assets. Then they can add others to the conversation for feedback.

Workamajig provides native proofing tools within assets so managers and other team members can review and annotate files, view version history, see versions side by side, compare changes, and choose among different options or designs.

Our system creates a centralized, searchable repository of creative assets. So during the editing and approval process, original designers can see feedback, take files back into their native editing tools to make changes, and upload new versions for clients to review.

Note: Our platform stores digital assets at the campaign and/or project level, but you can also create folders to organize files in these spaces. You can also modify file permissions to restrict what others can do with files (view, upload, rename, etc.).

Client Management

Workamajig also includes a host of tools to manage and strengthen new client relationships after you win their business and launch projects:

• Client portals. Clients can send project requests, track project progress, send feedback, and view invoices through their portal. This also makes it easier on your teams because you can work on edits with clients, send deliverables in the system, and track all communications. We don't charge separately for client portals, and you can create as many as you want.

• Email alerts. You can create client records in Workamajig's CRM and store their contact information (including email), ensuring our system notifies them when deliverables are available, they're tagged in discussions, or there are critical project updates. These notifications loop clients in when their attention is needed and show them where to dive in.

• A collaborative workspace. The creative collaboration tools that we covered above also allow internal teams to coordinate with clients — and vice versa — in a single, shared hub. Centralizing these communications streamlines processes and can improve relationships; it also ensures an easily referenceable audit trail.

Project Portfolios: Track Campaign Tasks, Schedules, & Budgets

If you're running multiple similar projects simultaneously, managing all the moving parts and keeping track of deliverables, allocations, shared files, schedules, objectives, and resources can become chaotic pretty quickly.

There's a careful balance to strike here: things like task progress and milestones should often still be tracked at the individual project level, but getting a central view of the portfolio's schedule, files, deliverables, budgets, and communication shows you the bigger picture so you know where to drill down or what snap decisions to make.

For example, say you have a fixed quarterly budget for your marketing department's media buys, digital ads, and out-of-pocket expenses. So, regardless of what's happening across your different projects, it's really important to track both the overall budget and the individual project budgets. That way, when you hit a certain threshold of overall spend, you can analyze where the money's going, compare it to performance, and decide how best to reallocate budgets.

That's where portfolio management is handy; you can conveniently set up a central budget for all linked projects, while still tracking the expenses and cost burn of each project. And Workamajig's portfolio management feature — called Campaigns — lets you do this and more.

Kicking off a Campaign

A Campaign in Workamajig is a portfolio that centralizes the tasks, schedules, budgets, digital assets, billing, and reporting for all your linked projects. Setting a campaign up is pretty similar to a project — you can manage intake through templates, request forms, or by converting an opportunity in the CRM directly to a campaign.

Then, each campaign features a highly customizable Campaign Dashboard (shown below) that acts as command central. From here, you can:

• Track all deliverables and conversations
• Navigate to the campaign billing screen
• View transactions across the portfolio
• Access files from the shared campaigns repository
• Create estimates or add new linked projects
• Add a project burn chat

Then, you can navigate to the campaign scheduling dashboard to manage work and track progress across the entire portfolio. From here, you can:

• Track how each project's timeline connects to the broader campaign picture
• Click on a specific project to drill into its details
• Conveniently edit tasks from across the entire portfolio with the same flexibility you'd have inside an individual project's schedule

Read more: Best Campaign Management Software for Agencies & Creatives

Building and Tracking Portfolio Budgets

So, as we just discussed, you can track budget burn at the campaign level. But first, you need to build out that portfolio-level budget. Workamajig gives you two options here:

Option A: Using the budget of all linked projects. If you have all the particulars of each project under the portfolio finalized — plans, schedules, estimates — then it is the way to go. Our system builds a centralized budget from estimates for all individual projects, so the final number is as accurate as possible.




Option B: Using service line estimates. If you don't have enough detail to build a portfolio budget from individual projects (maybe some of these haven't been planned out yet), Workamajig offers another way to generate an accurate estimate. You can use the estimated costs from each service line.

For example, say you've budgeted 25 hours for editing, 75 for copywriting, 20 for art direction, and 50 for graphic design for a client, but you aren't sure how these hours will be spread across different projects (such as social media advertising and SEO campaigns).

Workamajig pulls up all the services offered by the agency, along with average hourly rates and any campaign segments displayed on the right-hand side.

As managers add hours for each service, Workamajig automatically calculates the labor rates by multiplying the hours by the average hourly rate. Then our system uses the total gross labor across all services to build a centralized campaign budget.

Wrapping Up & Reporting on Project Outcomes

Most MRM systems lack native accounting tools, so you have to integrate them with third-party software like QuickBooks or Xero to get a complete, real-time financial picture of your projects and resources.

Workamajig does things differently: our system includes a GL-ready native accounting suite that's fully integrated with our project, resource, and client management suite — so you only pay for and manage one solution.

In addition to managing expenses and tracking project budgets in real time, our accounting system also lets you:

• Create detailed invoices (with all billable line items) and manage client payments. Our system supports various billing methods, including time-and-materials, fixed-fee, retainer, and media.
• Monitor revenue from projects. Our system automatically defers advanced billings to prevent overstated revenue and to provide a more accurate view of cash flow. We also provide a revenue forecasting tool.
• Measure the profitability of projects, clients, services, and departments (even individuals) to see where you're most successful and discover where you're taking losses.
• Monitor project and marketing budgets to ensure projects don't exceed what you've allotted and pinpoint ways to minimize costs.
• Dig into billable vs. non-billable hours and consider ways to improve resource allocation — for example, by creating individual labor budgets.
  
• Connect business credit card accounts to run expense reports and get a comprehensive view of all spending related to marketing operations.
  
  

Today - Accounting Dashboard

As mentioned above, accountants and billing roles have their own personalized Today page to stay on top of their everyday tasks.

Our Today - Accounting Dashboard is a central hub for all accounting-related tasks and items. Users can conveniently track:

• Things that require review, approval, or other actions (e.g., unposted transactions or open account reconciliations).
• The balances of all connected accounts, organized by account type (e.g., AR, AP, CC).
• Conversations, interactions, and task progress from their curated Daily Feed.

Our dashboard also displays quick links for all key items, so users can conveniently navigate to list views (e.g., for all client or vendor invoices) and take any required actions (e.g., paying a vendor).

Users can also take quick actions from their Today page — such as uploading a receipt, submitting a timesheet, or generating a billing worksheet — by clicking the (+) icon at the top center.

Project Billing & Client Invoicing

Workamajig's billing workflow uses billing worksheets to capture all the necessary line items up front, verify the specifics, and obtain necessary approvals before the first invoice is generated. This workflow reduces back-and-forth and saves finance teams from having to scrap invoices and generate new ones every time there's a change.

Users with the necessary permissions can generate a project or campaign's billing worksheet. Our system offers two options here: the worksheet can be based on transactions or generated as a percentage of the project's budget.

The worksheet comes pre-filled with all relevant line-items and applies the project's billing method (such as time and materials or media).

Then, our system routes the billing worksheet to whoever's responsible for reviews and approvals (usually an AE or PM). So they can check all the details, mark items up or down, transfer costs, write items off, and finally, approve it.

After the AE, PM, or other decision-maker signs off on a worksheet, it is routed back to the billing user and marked as “ready to create invoices.” From here, they can apply customizations, make any final changes, and generate invoices — either for one project or several at once — and send them to clients.

Project, Resource & Financial Reporting Suite

Workamajig stands out as one of the few MRM systems that ties together project, resource, client, and financial data — offering deeper insights into performance, productivity, and profitability.

Our reporting suite features several out-of-the-box and customizable reports — including project profitability, resource utilization, revenue forecasting, and more.

Project Budget & Profitability Reports

Workamajig offers three main out-of-the-box reports for projects so you can see what went well, where issues arose, and what contributed to overruns to improve future project plans.

First up, our Project Recap Analysis report organizes all your project performance details — budgeted vs. actual labor dollars, budget vs. actual labor hours, and the baseline due date vs. actual completion date for each task — in a single view:

Then, the variance column (labor results) includes color codes to highlight where the project's estimates were off: red indicates over budget, blue means on target, and green signals under budget.

Then, our Project Budget Analysis provides a convenient overview of the performance of all your projects in one place — so you can spot which ones faced issues (and where) and drill down.

By default, the report categorizes projects by client, but you can adjust it to suit your workflow (e.g., to display all projects under a campaign or for a specific service line). It provides a post-mortem view of each project's budgets, actuals, labor gross, outside costs, open orders, and amounts billed.

Then, you can scan for issues like labor gross overruns and even apply filters that surface bottlenecks — for example, our "Project Has Budget Warning" filter returns projects where the actuals have crossed 80% of their budget.

If something catches your attention, you can click the value to view its full transaction history and trace it back to the vendor invoice, expense line, or time entry that created it, without navigating to another screen.

Finally, we have our Project and Campaign P&L reports that pull data from posted GL transactions (instead of just actuals), so you can account for overhead and capture a more complete picture of profitability.These reports include:

• Project Profit & Loss (P&L). These come in two flavors:
• The multi-view gives you a portfolio-level look at how several projects are performing side by side, and lets you push overhead costs from the general ledger across them without doing it project-by-project.

• The detailed view zooms into a single project, breaking profitability down by general ledger account so you can see exactly where the money's going and flag overruns before they get worse.
• Campaign P&L (Multi-View). This report rolls up profitability breakdowns across all the projects under a campaign (i.e., a portfolio).
  
  

Our system offers three ways to allocate overhead:

• By labor cost — it's distributed proportionally to total labor dollars
• By total billing — overhead is distributed proportionally to revenue
• By labor hours — overhead is distributed proportionally, based on the total approved hours on time sheets charged to the client or project ➗ the total approved hours for the selected date range (e.g., if a client or project is using 30% of your resources, they will be assigned 30% of your overhead)

None of the above options is technically better than the others; what's important is to find what works for your business and apply it consistently, so that profitability reporting remains reliable.

Note: You can also generate a P&L without overhead allocation.

Resource Utilization & Productivity Reports

Our variety of utilization reports helps you evaluate your team's productivity and tie those findings to financial outcomes. For example, maybe you have senior resources spending too many hours on internal admin work when they could be better utilized on billable work.

Our three most used productivity reports are:

• Time Productivity Analysis. View and compare each resource's hours and financial contribution side by side in one place, including their utilization rate, realization rate, total cost, and revenue generated. You can see which resources are being fully utilized, who isn't bringing in more than they cost, and more.
• Chargeable Utilization Report. Get an accurate picture of how much revenue each employee actually brings in by tracking the percentage of billable hours that are chargeable to a client. In other words, it's your billable utilization rate after accounting for write-offs, redos, and scrubbed time.
• Project Hourly Realization Rate. Track what you actually realize per hour against your standard rate card to evaluate whether underlying issues (scope changes, write-offs, redos, etc.) are hurting your margins.

Our system also includes a comprehensive Agency Insights dashboard that provides a library of reports for monitoring behind-the-scenes operations and analyzing team productivity. For example, our main dashboard shows the tasks due today, as well as the time teams spend on different clients, projects, and services.

Financial Reports

Earlier, we briefly talked about how Workamajig combines and unifies data from across your business to provide deeper, context-specific insights. Our financial reporting suite is where these insights show up — you can choose from over a dozen out-of-the-box reports or create custom reports by mixing and matching data sets.

For example, teams commonly use our:

• General Ledger (GL) reports for complete financial oversight
• Cash projections and revenue forecasting to assist with future planning
• Cost breakdowns to compare budgeted vs. allocated vs. actual costs
• Other P&L reports (including corporate, service, and client) to evaluate profitability from different perspectives
• Billable summary reports to compare billable vs. non-billable hours
• Key metrics monitor to track the metrics most important to their marketing initiatives and overall business

You can also “Favorite” any of the reports across our suite for quick access. They're all just a click away in your personalized Favorites dashboard:

Pricing & Getting Started

We offer three packages: one for in-house marketing teams, another for marketing agencies, and custom plans for enterprise teams.

Pricing is per user and varies by team size:

Our team will meet with you to game-plan the migration. Then, we'll configure the software to meet your requirements and show you how to use its features.

Request a demo with us to learn more about Workamajig and see if we're the right MRM tool for your teams.

Alternative Marketing Resource Management Solutions to Support Agencies

Next up, we're going to review a few other MRM solutions that offer similar capabilities to Workamajig. These systems aren't as robust or feature-rich as Workamajig, but they're still popular tools used by in-house marketing teams and agencies worldwide.

Advantage

Advantage — recently merged with Simpli.fi — is an agency management software for enterprises.This solution is unlike the others because it includes a native media planning dashboard for campaign management and ad-space buying. If you need a media planning tool, Advantage can be a solid option.

Overall, Advantage's platform includes project management, resource management, time tracking, media buying, CRM, accounting, and financial reporting. The platform also integrates other business applications to work as a single source of truth for managing marketing activities.

Users have positive feedback about Advantage's accounting and media planning tools, but note some frustrations with the project management workflow. Advantage also divides its software functionality into separate interfaces (to limit certain team members' views), but users note that this inconsistent navigation can cause confusion and slow down workflows.

Read more Advantage reviews here.

Notable Features

• Project management
• Resource management
• Collaborative tools like proofing & reviews
• Media planning & buying — including broadcast buying, digital buying & media reporting
• Time tracking
• Risk analysis & burn rate tracking
• Financial reporting
• Budget monitoring
• Revenue forecasting
• Billing
• Invoicing
• Media Accounting
• Reporting dashboard (to monitor projects, financials, and other behind-the-scenes operations)

Pricing

Advantage does not disclose pricing on its website; you must contact them for a custom quote.

Read more:

• From Advantage to Workamajig: Why 5Points Creative Made the Switch
• Best Advantage Software Alternatives for Creative Teams

Function Point

Function Point is an all-in-one agency management platform that has served agencies, creatives, in-house marketing teams, design studios, and PR firms since 1997.

Unlike Workamajig and Advantage above, FP (and all the other systems we cover below) lacks native accounting software (relying instead on a QuickBooks integration). It also doesn't include media planning and buying tools, and its vendor management tools are quite basic.

However, it's still a pretty comprehensive solution, rolling project management, CRM, time tracking, financial management, and business intelligence reporting into a fully integrated platform.

It covers most bases for MRM, with portfolio management, creative briefs, resource scheduling, team capacity planning, a built-in proofing module (for reviewing and approving digital assets), file sharing, client management, project budget tracking, and profitability reporting tools.

Many users praise FP's friendly, intuitive interface and extensive feature set. However, it's worth noting that integrating all your workflows requires purchasing the top plan and paying separately for an accounting solution, which works out pretty expensive overall.

Find more Function Point reviews here.

Notable Features

• Client management tools, including estimates, proposals, change orders, revision tracking, and job request portals
• CRM and email integrations
• Project templates
• Project management dashboards for real-time visibility
• Project monitoring (choose Gantt charts or a Kanban board view)
• Team collaboration, including file sharing and commenting
• Resource management
• Time tracking
• Financial planning and management, including expense tracking
• Billing and invoicing
• Business intelligence reports, including in-depth profitability reports and custom reporting
• Integrations with accounting systems like QuickBooks and other business applications

Pricing

Function Point offers two standard packages:

• Standardize ($58/user/month): Full platform access.
• Optimize($68/user/month): Adds on FP's QuickBooks integration and BI reporting (custom saved reports, data visualization, report sharing).

Read more: Function Point Reviews & Alternatives

Scoro

Scoro is a work management platform that unifies projects, resources, and finances into a single system. While in-house teams can use it for MRM, the vendor primarily serves agencies (creative, advertising, digital marketing, PR) as well as consultancies, architecture and engineering firms, IT services, and other professional services providers.

Scoro generally covers the core MRM stack well: with project management, resource planning with capacity forecasting, native time tracking, a CRM module, billing and invoicing, file management, and detailed financial reporting.

The system receives high praise for its resource management and financial capabilities:

• The Planner feature offers a live view of capacity across the team, flagging gaps and balancing workloads so some people aren't drowning while others sit idle. Combined with utilization reports, role-based labor costing, and forecasting tools, it helps managers make informed staffing and pricing decisions.
• The Quote Estimation Matrix lets users break down projected deliverables by role and effort, with full visibility into costs and margins, so they can make data-driven decisions during the proposal stage.
• Scoro tracks budget burn in real time (capturing both internal labor cost and external supplier costs) and forecasts profitability at the role, service, and project level.

The two main drawbacks of Scoro to keep in mind are that:

• It's not specifically designed for marketing and creative teams — it lacks vendor management, media billing, media buying integrations, and media planning tools.
• Many essential financial and resource management features are limited to its top standard package (Performance), and Scoro also sells many tools separately as add-ons. So those costs rack up.

Read more Scoro reviews here.

Notable Features

• Project management
• Resource planning with team workloads
• Time tracking
• Collaboration features
• Quoting & budgeting tools
• Invoicing
• Cost management
• Real-time reporting on cost burn
• Retainers
• Sales CRM
• Advanced reporting
• Automated workflows

Pricing

Scoro offers three standard packages and custom enterprise plans:

• Core ($23.90/user/month): Scoro's most basic plan, which isn't suitable for MRM. It lacks expense management and deeper resource planning tools.

• Growth ($38.90/user/month): Includes core project, resource, and financial management tools, including quoted vs. actual comparisons, project budgets, role-based labor costs, multiple currencies, retainer management, and detailed financial reports.

• Performance ($59.90/user/month): Scoro's recommended package for teams that provides nearly complete platform access, including advanced financial management capabilities such as cost and profit forecasting, revenue recognition, and accounting integrations. However, even at this tier, Scoro still sells many features separately as add-ons.

• Enterprise (Custom pricing): Personalized packages that come with more advanced features, such as single sign-on, time locking, multi-account reporting, and company budgets and forecasts.

Read more: Best Scoro Alternatives for Agencies

Kantata

Professional services businesses use Kantata to manage their daily operations, processes, and finances within a fully integrated system. That's why Kantata falls under the category of “professional services automation” (PSA) platforms.

It's mainly geared towards mid-market and enterprise teams, with extensive capabilities in resource, portfolio, and financial management. Kantata offers two solutions: OX, a standalone system, and SX, built on Salesforce's infrastructure and fully integrated with the Salesforce ecosystem.

Kantata's core capabilities are, overall, pretty close to Scoro's. It lacks media planning tools and is limited in digital asset management, but its resource and financial management capabilities are among the most robust in its category.

For example, it offers all the necessary resource planning tools to match people to the right jobs based on availability, skills, and utilization. But it takes things further with tools to build your own talent network that combines staff and external resources (freelancers, external partners) into a single hub, so you can account for everyone in your project and resource plans.

Then, it features reports that compare (i) the performance, costs, availability, and hours between staff and outside workers, and (ii) the project cost impact of hiring internal vs external workers.

While Kantata is a pretty comprehensive solution overall, it notably lacks native file management and proofing tools. So marketing teams have to integrate it with third-party apps to support creative workflows.

Find more Kantata reviews here.

Notable Features

• Project planning tools, like project estimation and forecasting
• Project monitoring
• Automated project management insights to guide next steps and prevent overruns
• Portfolio management
• Resource scheduling
• Resource forecasting and capacity planning
• Effective resource management tools, such as skills inventory and vendor management, are used to source the best talent for projects.
• Time tracking
• Budget tracking
• Project accounting to track costs, monitor project burn, and set financial goals
• Automated invoicing
• Revenue forecasting
• Feedback surveys for project teams and clients to report on satisfaction and overall project success
• Team collaboration and feedback tools, like file sharing and commenting
• Business intelligence reports, with 60+ service-centric reports
• Integrations

Pricing

Kantata provides custom quotes upon request.

Read more: Best Kantata Alternatives for Agencies & Creatives

Productive

Productive is a work management tool purpose-built for agencies. The core features include project management, resource management, time tracking, budget tracking, financial reporting, and a native CRM under one roof. Beyond its core features, Productive integrates with dozens of other systems (e.g., QuickBooks to support financial reporting) to streamline workflows and centralize marketing efforts.

Productive — and Teamwork below — support MRM to an extent, but they're not as comprehensive as the solutions we've covered above. Productive's main strength is on the work and human resource management side of things. For example, its Scenario Builder lets PMs simulate project scenarios, compare outcomes, and choose the best way forward. They can adjust team members, start dates, expenses, and service rates to compare profitability and projected timelines.

Reviews suggest that Productive typically appeals to smaller teams looking to improve processes and enable better, clearer collaboration. However, the solution:

• Doesn't provide extensive support for creative asset management the way systems like Workamajig do.
• Relies on external tools to support some of its functionality, so it might not be the best choice for growing teams or those looking to reduce costs.

Check out more Productive reviews here.

Notable Features

• Project management
• Resource planning
• Budgeting
• Billing
• Sales CRM
• Time tracking
• Reporting
• Documents (to create shared docs & collaborate with teammates)
• Open API (to integrate with outside systems)
• Mobile apps for iOS & Android

Pricing

Productive offers three standard plans with varying features and customer support.

• Essential ($12/user/month): Provides very limited access to the platform — not suitable for MRM needs.
• Professional ($29/user/month for up to 50 users): Unlocks essential features such as advanced task management, billable time approvals, expense approvals, rate cards, and advanced time-off management. Teams that require more than 50 user seats will need to contact Productive directly for a custom quote.
  

• Ultimate (Custom): Productive's recommended plan, which includes features like HubSpot integrations and advanced time tracking that most teams need.

Productive also offers custom enterprise plans and pricing.

Read more: Best Productive.io Alternatives for Agencies

Teamwork

Teamwork is a work management tool that supports teams of all sizes across industries. In addition to marketing and creative agencies, they work with HR teams, IT departments, architectural firms, and other project-based organizations.

The platform combines project management, resource management, time tracking, and financial reporting. However, it offers considerably less value for money than many of the other MRM systems we've reviewed and falls short on the creative asset management side.

While users can attach files to projects and approvals, Teamwork relies on third‑party storage apps (like Google Drive or Dropbox) for broader file management, meaning teams can't build a fully searchable, in‑platform repository. Where it does stand out is proofing: reviewers can click directly on a specific area of a proof to add annotations or contextual comments, with all feedback centralized. Each new upload is tracked as a separate version within the Proofs module, complete with a historical log of feedback and full version history.

Teamwork is pretty flexible, integrating with dozens of outside systems to support core functionality. Users appreciate the extensive customization options and say Teamwork's agents are available to guide them through onboarding for a smooth setup. However, the tool is not a complete replacement for accounting systems and lacks a native CRM (so users have to integrate with a third-party solution like HubSpot).

Check out more Teamwork reviews here.

Notable Features

• Project management & customizable project monitoring dashboards
• Project intake forms
• Project templates & automation tools
• Resource & workload management
• Client management
• Expense management
• Budgets
• Invoicing
• Retainers
• Time tracking
• Collaborative tools for teams, including proofs, annotations & file sharing
• Reporting dashboards
• Integrations (including with martech tools)
• Mobile apps for iOS & Android

Pricing

Teamwork offers a (very) limited free plan, three standard packages, and custom enterprise plans. Its standard packages include:

• Basics ($13.99/user/month): An entry-level tier that lacks several essential features like billable user rates, workload planning, portfolios, QuickBooks and HubSpot integrations, and more.
  
• Accelerate ($29.99/user/month): Provides access to Teamwork's more advanced project management tools and automation features.
• Optimize (Custom pricing): Teamwork's recommended plan, which includes all its robust features and integrations. It's worth noting that Teamwork has, in the past, standardized the pricing for this plan.

Read more: Best Teamwork Alternatives for Creatives & Agencies

FAQs: Marketing & Agency Resource Management Software

How is marketing resource management software different from project management software?

Marketing resource management (MRM) software usually offers a broader range of capabilities than traditional project management software and is tailored to the creative workflow. It typically combines work management, staff scheduling, capacity planning, vendor management, client management, creative collaboration, time tracking, expense tracking, and real-time project monitoring.

Is agency resource management software different from MRM software?

Agency resource management software can typically do everything that an in-house MRM software can, but the reverse isn't always true. That's because MRM software geared only toward in-house teams usually has fewer features and falls short in managing external relationships (vendors, freelancers, clients), tracking labor and service costs, invoicing clients, collecting payments, and unifying business data to measure profitability from multiple perspectives.

How can marketing resource management software improve team collaboration?

MRM software improves collaboration by consolidating the work itself (briefs, files, feedback, schedules, and approvals) and all internal and external stakeholders into a single, fully integrated system.

When everyone is working from the same brief, the same asset version, and the same project timeline, the back-and-forth that usually slows creative work is significantly reduced:

• Everyone has visibility into who's doing what. Managers can see staff assignments in real time, so they always know who's working on what and how things are going, without micromanaging or sending endless follow-ups.
• People can leave context-specific feedback. All stakeholders can request, share, and respond to feedback directly on task cards (so things don't get buried in email chains), while the system tracks the full history of subsequent changes.
• Assets are easily accessible from a shared, native hub. Centralized file storage with version history means the team isn't hunting for the latest logo file or left confused over which deck was finalized.
• Internal teams can easily collaborate with external stakeholders. Clients and freelancers get scoped access to the same project space, so feedback, updates, and deliverables flow through the platform.
• Handoff processes become smoother. With tools to manage approvals, permissions, and knowledge sharing across teams.

How does marketing resource management improve campaign efficiency?

Marketing resource management improves campaign efficiency by creating repeatable systems that:

• Standardize workflows
• Keep stakeholders aligned
• Reinforce brand compliance
• Manage scope creep
• Surface issues early
• Ensure resources are fully utilized
• Track what worked, what went wrong, and why, so future campaign plans reflect those learnings

How does agency resource planning impact profit?

Agency resource planning impacts profits by aligning the cost of your people with the revenue they generate, and making the best use of their time:

• Tracking and optimizing billable utilization. Real-time visibility into who's available, overloaded, or underused helps managers improve strategic planning — for example, by shifting idle capacity to live projects or rebalancing workloads.
• Keeping freelance and overtime spend in check. Forecasting demand against the pipeline surfaces capacity gaps early, so managers can plan staff schedules accordingly and determine exactly when and where they'll need external support.
• Managing burnout to reduce turnover. It's often the top performers who end up saddled with more work than they can handle. Preventing this from happening helps retain your best people — reducing the hidden (but high) cost of employee turnover.

What are the key features of resource management software for agencies?

Resource management software for agencies should allow them to manage all their people, external collaborators, processes, files, deliverables, and finances in one place. So the system should include tools for:

• Resource planning. Capacity, skills, and availability are visible in the scheduling dashboard, so staffing decisions are data-driven, and managers can plan for different scenarios by forecasting the impact of their decisions.
• Vendor management. Freelancers, contractors, and other partners (e.g., external agencies) are managed in the same system as internal staff — including access, communication, and invoice management.
• Client management. Support for client communication, feedback, approvals, and deliverables, so external collaboration runs through the platform, and clients get real-time updates.
• Project intake. Standardized briefs and scoping so every project starts with clear objectives, initiatives, estimates, owners, and deliverables.
• Real-time project monitoring. Live visibility into status, hours, and budget burn so issues surface while there's still time to course-correct.
• Content management. Support for all creative assets and file types (video, image, PDF, HTML, etc.) with clear version control, shared file repositories, access control, and internal proofing.
• Change management. To establish a formal process for handling scope changes — what's a revision, what's a new request, how the change estimate is managed — that protects timelines and margins without shutting down legitimate asks.
• Comprehensive reporting. Reports that connect resource decisions to financial
  outcomes — utilization, billability, project margin, client profitability — so leaders can see what's working and what isn't.

What MRM challenges does MRM software solve?

MRM software isn't a replacement for good systems, people, and processes — all of which need to be in place to guarantee success. But if you have the right things in place, an MRM platform can help you overcome challenges like:

• Stakeholder misalignment. When briefs, timelines, budgets, and approvals live in one system, everyone works off the same data and context, reducing confusion and ensuring work keeps moving.
• Process inconsistency. Workflows break down when teams lack structured processes (for things like intake, change management, approvals) and clear accountability. MRM systems pack in various tools to standardize processes and reduce friction — such as project intake, change management, approval workflows, and permissions management.
• Resource bottlenecks. Real-time visibility into capacity, skills, availability, and utilization makes it easier to spot overloads and idle time before they translate to missed deadlines or burnt-out team members.
  
• Profitability blind spots. With time, costs, and budgets flowing through the same platform as the work itself, leaders can evaluate profitability from different perspectives — such as by project, client, and service — to improve future planning and marketing investments.
• Scattered data. Pipeline forecasts, utilization trends, productivity reports, and historical project data give leaders the inputs they need to make confident calls on pricing, hiring, client mix, and growth.

Getting Started with Workamajig

Workamajig is an end-to-end agency management solution that brings everything agencies need to manage projects, staff, clients, and finances under one roof.

Ready to see Workamajig in action? Request a personalized demo to learn how it can streamline operations, improve profitability, and support your agency's growth.

Read more:

• Best Campaign Management Software for Agencies & Creatives
• Best Marketing Operations Management Software
• Marketing Agency Software: Best Tools to Build Your Tech Stack