Best Advertising Agency Project Management Software in 2026: GoHighLevel vs Monday.com and ClickUp

Otis runs a small advertising agency and buys ads for eleven clients. (Otis is an example.) His team is good at the ads. The pain starts the day a client asks a simple question: did my spend actually make money?

That answer lives in five places. The leads sit in a form tool. The ad numbers sit inside Facebook and Google. The booked calls sit in a calendar. The sales sit in a spreadsheet a client emailed over. So Otis spends the last two days of every month stitching a report together by hand.

The best advertising agency project management software is meant to end that. Most tools only fix one corner of it.

Here is the trap I see agency owners fall into. They buy a task board to organise the work. A task board tells you who is building which ad. It does not capture the lead the ad made, follow it up, track it to a sale, or show the client the result under your brand.

This guide ranks ten platforms on the whole job, not just the board. I look at feature coverage, automation, the true cost as you add clients, and who each tool suits. Prices are the ones each company publishes, checked in September 2026. Where a plan is quote-only, I say so.

One honest note first. GoHighLevel ranks number one here, but not because it is the best Gantt chart. It is not. It ranks first because it runs client campaigns end to end and proves they worked. For pure visual task tracking, Monday.com or Asana are the better tool, and I say so again at the end.

What is advertising agency project management software?

Advertising agency project management software is any tool an agency uses to plan campaigns, run them, and report the results to clients.

The narrow version is a task board. It holds projects, tasks, owners and due dates. Monday.com, Asana and ClickUp live here. They are great for tracking who builds what.

The wide version adds the money side. It captures the leads your ads bring in, holds them in a CRM, follows them up, tracks them to a sale, and shows the client a dashboard. A CRM is a system that stores every lead and customer in one place. GoHighLevel, Scoro and Productive live closer to here.

Most ad agencies think they need the first and really need the second. A campaign does not end at "ads live". It ends at "the client saw the leads and the revenue". A tool that only tracks tasks leaves you proving the results by hand.

What actually decides the purchase?

Five things, applied the same way to all ten tools.

Campaign and lead capture. Does it only track tasks, or does it also catch the leads your ads make and follow them up?

Proof of ROI. Can it tie a lead back to the campaign that made it, and track it to real revenue? This is what clients actually pay you to show.

Multi-client setup. Can you run many separate client accounts from one login, with the same setup copied to each? This breaks first as an ad agency grows.

White-label reporting. Can clients log in and see their ad results under your brand, not the vendor's?

Cost as you grow. Not the price for one seat. Per-seat pricing behaves very differently with 12 staff and 40 client seats.

The 10 tools at a glance

1. GoHighLevel — sub-accounts, an agency dashboard and a white-label portal clients log into

GoHighLevel is not a task board first. It is a platform for running many client campaigns from one login, and for showing each client what those campaigns produced.

Each client gets a sub-account. A sub-account is a full, separate workspace for one client. It holds that client's leads, pipeline, calendar, email, SMS, landing pages and reports. You switch between them from one agency dashboard, the single screen that lists every client account.

So Otis stops stitching reports. Every client's leads and results sit in one place, set up the same way, under his brand.

Why can GoHighLevel prove a campaign worked without a manual report?

Here is the technical reason, in simple words.

In GoHighLevel, everything about one lead lives on one contact record. A contact record is the single page that holds a person's details, the ad they came from, their messages and their pipeline stage. The CRM, the calendar, the SMS and the email all read from that same record.

Because they share one record, one event starts the next step with no extra tool. Follow a lead from an ad:

• Trigger: someone clicks a client's Facebook or Google ad and fills in the landing-page form.
• Action: a contact is created, tagged with the campaign name, sent a text and email at once, and offered a booking link. It enters the client's pipeline at "New lead".
• Result: the lead is contacted in seconds, and every step is logged on one record, tagged to the campaign that made it.

A normal ad-agency stack needs one tool to catch the lead, another to text it, and a spreadsheet to prove it came from that campaign. That is the step GoHighLevel removes: the hand-off between separate tools. There is no Zapier hop, because the tools are already one tool. Zapier is a connector app that passes data between tools that do not talk.

Now the client logs into a white-label dashboard and sees it live. Leads this month, calls booked, deals won, all split by campaign. No CSV exported at midnight.

Do this across eleven clients, or ninety. Build the campaign setup once. Save it as a snapshot, which is a saved copy of a whole account. Load it into the next client sub-account in minutes.

Why it usually works out cheaper

GoHighLevel charges one flat monthly fee, no matter how many client accounts you run. The plans are $97, $297 and $497 a month.

Per-seat tools charge for every person. A $12 seat looks small. Now add 12 staff and a seat for each of 40 clients who want to see their own reports. That bill grows every month you grow.

The $297 Unlimited plan adds unlimited sub-accounts. The $497 SaaS Pro plan adds white-label mode, so you resell the platform under your own brand. Priced against a separate lead tool, CRM, email tool and reporting tool, one subscription is usually the smaller bill.

What the same subscription also covers

The same GoHighLevel plan also gives you:

• Unlimited client sub-accounts
• A CRM and sales pipeline for each client
• Funnels, landing pages and forms
• Calendars and online booking
• Email and SMS campaigns
• AI agents for chat and voice
• A client dashboard, so each client sees their own campaign numbers
• White-label resale, so it all carries your brand

Where it stops: GoHighLevel is not a rich visual task board. It uses pipelines, tasks and workflows, not a detailed Gantt or Kanban view with dependencies and workload charts. For deep visual campaign planning across a big production team, it is not the best tool, and the next two entries are.

2. Monday.com — best for visual campaign tracking

Monday.com is the tool people picture when they say "project management software". The boards are bright, clear and easy to scan.

Strongest at: visual task tracking. You can see every ad build, owner and deadline on one board, and switch views in a click.

Where it stops: it is a board, not an ad-agency system. It does not capture the leads your ads make, run client follow-up by text and email, or show a client the revenue their spend produced. Pricing is per seat: $9 Basic, $12 Standard and $19 Pro a month, billed yearly, with a three-seat minimum.

Best for: teams that mainly need a clear, shared board for who is building which ad, and will report results elsewhere.

3. ClickUp — most configurable if you like building your own

ClickUp tries to do everything, and it lets you shape it however you like. Tasks, docs, goals, dashboards and time tracking all sit in one app.

Strongest at: flexibility. If you enjoy building your own campaign workflow, ClickUp bends further than most tools.

Where it stops: that same flexibility takes time to set up, and it can overwhelm a small team. It is still a work tool, not a lead-capture CRM with ad-source tracking and a branded client dashboard. Pricing is $7 Unlimited and $12 Business per user a month, billed yearly, with a free plan and quote-only Enterprise.

Best for: hands-on teams that want to design their own ad-production workflow from scratch.

4. Asana — cleanest task management for delivery teams

Asana is the calm, tidy option. It is easy to learn, and delivery teams get moving quickly without a manual.

Strongest at: clean, simple task management. New staff understand it in an afternoon, and the rules keep campaign work moving.

Where it stops: like the others here, it tracks work but not the lead or the result. There is no CRM, no client SMS follow-up, and no dashboard that ties leads back to the ads that made them. Pricing is $10.99 Starter and $24.99 Advanced per user a month, billed yearly, with a free Personal plan.

Best for: delivery teams that want the simplest board that still scales with the workload.

5. Teamwork — best built-in time tracking and client billing

Teamwork was built with agencies in mind, and it shows on the billing side. Time tracking and invoicing are baked in, not bolted on.

Strongest at: tracking billable hours on client work and turning them into invoices, all in one place.

Where it stops: it handles delivery and billing well, but it does not capture ad leads or prove campaign ROI, and there is no white-label reporting portal. Pricing is $10.99 Deliver, $19.99 Grow and $54.99 Scale per user a month, billed yearly, with a free tier.

Best for: agencies that bill by the hour and want time tracking and invoicing built in.

6. Basecamp — simplest for small teams and clients

Basecamp keeps things plain on purpose. Projects, to-dos, messages and files, and not much else to learn.

Strongest at: simplicity. A small team and its clients can start the same day with no training.

Where it stops: it is deliberately basic. No CRM, no lead capture, no automation, and no ad-performance reporting. Pricing is simple, though: $15 per user a month, or a flat $299 a month for unlimited users on Pro Unlimited.

Best for: small teams that want a calm, no-fuss space to share campaign work with clients.

7. Notion — best flexible internal wiki plus tasks

Notion is a blank canvas. You build pages, databases and task lists however you want, and it doubles as your team wiki.

Strongest at: flexible internal documents and light task tracking in one place. It is excellent as a campaign knowledge base and brief library.

Where it stops: it is not built to run client ad campaigns. There is no real CRM, no lead follow-up, and no client dashboard, and heavy tracking needs a lot of manual building. Pricing is $10 Plus and $18 Business per user a month, billed yearly, with a free tier.

Best for: teams that want their briefs, wiki and tasks in one flexible workspace.

8. Productive — best for agency profitability reporting

Productive is aimed straight at agencies that want to know if each account actually made money for the agency. Budgets, margins and resource planning are the heart of it.

Strongest at: agency profitability reporting. It ties time, cost and budget together so you see your real margin per client.

Where it stops: it reports your profit, not the client's ad results. It is not a marketing CRM with ad-lead capture, SMS follow-up and a branded client portal. Pricing is $10 Essential and $25 Professional per user a month, billed yearly, with a three-user minimum and quote-only Ultimate.

Best for: agencies that want tight control over their own project profit and staff use.

9. Scoro — best end-to-end agency management

Scoro tries to cover the whole agency in one system: quotes, projects, time, billing and reports. It is the most complete of the traditional agency tools here.

Strongest at: end-to-end agency management, from the first quote to the final invoice, in one place.

Where it stops: it is powerful and can be heavy to set up, and it reports on internal work rather than the leads and revenue a client's ads produced. Pricing is $26 Essential, $37 Standard and $63 Pro per user a month, billed yearly, with a five-user minimum.

Best for: established agencies that want one internal system for quotes, delivery and billing.

10. Wrike — best for large structured teams

Wrike is built for scale. It handles complex projects, approvals and proofing across big teams with many moving parts.

Strongest at: structure at size. Custom workflows, request forms and creative proofing suit large teams that need control.

Where it stops: all that structure is more than a small ad agency needs, and it is still a work platform, not a lead-capture CRM with ad-source tracking and a branded client dashboard. The Business plan is $25 per user a month, sold in blocks of five users, with a free tier and quote-only Enterprise.

Best for: large, structured teams managing high volumes of creative production.

So which one should an ad agency choose?

Be honest about the job you are solving.

If you just want a clear, shared task board for who builds which ad, choose Monday.com or Asana. They are the better pure trackers, full stop. If you love building your own system, ClickUp bends the furthest. If billable hours are your whole world, Teamwork tracks and invoices them best. If you want the simplest shared space, Basecamp keeps it calm. And if your own profit per account is the number that worries you, Productive or Scoro will tell you the most.

But if the real problem is Otis's problem — leads in one tool, ad numbers in another, and two lost days proving it all worked — then a task board will not fix it. You need to capture the lead, track it to revenue, and show the client under your own brand. That is GoHighLevel.

For a wider look at the same tools, read our guide to the best creative agency project management software, and if you run mixed campaigns, our project management software for marketing agencies comparison.

Platform versus service — who sets this up?

Here is the honest split, because it matters.

GoHighLevel is the platform. You subscribe to it directly from HighLevel, using the free trial link. GHL Spark is not HighLevel. We do not resell the subscription, and we do not sell you a CRM.

What GHL Spark does is the build. We set up your sub-accounts, your agency dashboard and the white-label client dashboards. We create one standard campaign build — the landing page, the lead tracking, the follow-up and the reporting — and deploy it to each client account. Multi-client setup is exactly what the monthly plan configures.

We charge three ways:

• $28 an hour, pay as you go, for a specific job with the hours estimated up front.
• $995 one-time, the complete build, done once and yours to keep.
• $1,495 a month, an ongoing build team if you are shipping campaigns continuously.

The pricing page shows what each covers, and a short call is enough to tell which fits.

Where to go next

See the pricing page for what a done-for-you GoHighLevel build costs and how to start.