What Is Teamwork?
Teamwork is one of the best cloud-based project management tools that lets you organize projects and tasks however you work best. Choose from different views, such as List, Chart or Board and get hyper specific about your task and workflow processes.
Teamwork is easy enough to use but offers a lot of customization options, making it a dense platform overall. Its interface is colorful and cheery, which could be a plus if your company has a similar ethos.
What Sets Teamwork Apart
Teamwork is notably simple to use but doesn’t sacrifice breadth with its simplicity. You can build completely customized workflows in a matter of minutes with little to no technical know-how.
Pros
Unlike some of its competitors, Teamwork doesn’t fall privy to being too technical or jargon-y. Whereas platforms, such as Jira, have steeper learning curves due to the use of terms, such as “epic” and “issue,” Teamwork’s terminology makes it easier for anyone, regardless of their profession or background, to get the hang of.
Teamwork’s automation features are impressively simple to use as well—and this is another area where competitors may fall short. You don’t need to read any lengthy tutorials to make tasks move forward on your kanban board automatically, per se.
Time tracking, budget tracking and invoice calculations are all built-in as well, giving you a better view of how your projects are faring financially.
Rather than shoehorning a bunch of different tools to work together, Teamwork also offers additional products that can serve other areas of your business, such as Teamwork Chat, Teamwork Desk and Teamwork CRM. All of its other products are designed to integrate seamlessly with Teamwork.
Cons
Teamwork is very marketing agency-friendly by design, which means it might not be an ideal solution if you don’t run an agency. The product is also quite dense, which means runtime can be slow, especially if you have a lot of projects and tasks that are ongoing.
There is also no way for site administrators to enforce all other users to turn on two-factor authentication (2FA), nor is there any way to see who has 2FA turned on or off. This could pose a huge security risk for any firm.
Featured Partners
1
monday.com
Yes
From $8 monthly per user
Zoom, LinkedIn, Adobe, Salesforce and more
2
HubSpot
Yes
Available
Google Contacts, Mailchimp, Xero, Aircall, Airtable and more
3
Smartsheet
Yes, for one user and two editors
$7 per user per month
Google Drive, Slack, Tableau, Miro, Zapier and more
4
ClickUp
Yes, for unlimited members
$7 per month
Slack, Microsoft Outlook, HubSpot, Salesforce, Timely, Google Drive and more
Teamwork Core Features
Teamwork has several core features that allow you and your team to work collaboratively and cross-functionally. Teamwork can also help you spot areas for improvement and warn you when budgets and tasks are not going as expected.
Role Assignment Features
Teamwork allows you to add different teams and subteams to your workspace. The level of customization you have when adding a team will depend on which plan you have.
You can give each team a name, handle and logo as well as assign it to a company. This means that only people from that company can be added to the team. People can be added to more than one team, though, so that is not a limitation that you need to worry about.
If you have tasks or projects that are only associated with certain members of a company/team, you can create a subteam if you’re on the Premium/Grow plan or above.
You can then add teams to assignments and milestones, rather than individual users, if that suits your workflow more optimally.
For user roles, there are three options:
- Standard
- Client
- Collaborator
Client users can do almost everything that standard users can do, with the exception of adding forms and getting administrator-level access. Collaborators don’t count toward your subscription cost, but they can’t add anything to the workspace and are more akin to observers, if anything.
Gantt Charts
Gantt charts are not available in the free version of Teamwork but are accessible in the paid versions. The Gantt chart view is interactive and allows you to adjust project timelines in addition to letting you add tasks and milestones.
Software Integrations
Teamwork offers over 80 integrations with some of the most popular tools, such as G-Suite, Microsoft Office and Zapier. Some integrations can be prompted through regular use of the platform, such as Google Drive, QuickBooks and Xero but others require you to seek them out through your profile settings.
Only administrators will have the option to import integrations.
Task Dependencies
Adding dependencies to a task is as easy as adding the task itself. In the task creation window, you can add dependencies based on the other tasks you’ve created.
A limitation here is that you can’t add new tasks from this flow, so make sure you’ve already created the tasks that your new task will be dependent on.
Budgeting
Budgeting is a new feature within Teamwork that lets you set an hourly or fixed-fee budget on any project.
Set a budget amount, start and end date and whether it’s based on billable, nonbillable time or both. You can set budgets to repeat at any frequency and automatically email the relevant stakeholders when budgets are approaching a certain percentage.
To get even more granular, you can segment each budget base on your task lists. Allocate dollar amounts to your task lists and send stakeholders specific notifications for each.
In order for your budgets to be tracked accurately, you must also diligently track and log your hours for each task within Teamwork. If you don’t, the budget feature won’t be of much use.
Teamwork Pricing and Plans
Starter
The Starter plan goes beyond the Free Forever plan in terms of integrations, but not much else. You still can’t unlock intake forms, reporting capabilities, client users or budgeting/expense features without upgrading to the Deliver plan.
Deliver
Deliver lets you run a more advanced operation, with full client relationship capabilities unlocked. However, Deliver does not let you track budget expenses or create custom reports. HubSpot and OneDrive integrations are not available on Deliver, either. For those features, you need to upgrade to the Grow plan.
Grow
The Grow plan is advertised on Teamwork’s site as the most popular plan, but there is no visible data to back this claim. The Grow plan has everything the Deliver plan has and more: more templates, automations, proof and custom reports.
Beyond the Grow plan, there is a Scale plan that’s available upon request. The Scale plan gives you room for an unlimited amount of projects and 500 GB of storage as well as more sophisticated admin controls.
Setup and Customization
Setting up and customizing Teamwork is not difficult but could be time-consuming depending on how many employees, clients and projects you’re working on. For a book of 10 clients, it could take several hours to customize everything to your liking. Factor in additional time for building automations and you could see this number jump higher.
You can also customize your Teamwork site’s name, URL, logos and color theme to create a more branded feel.
Teamwork lets you upload team members and important contacts in bulk via a comma-separated values (CSV) file. If you choose to bulk upload people as users, they will be given the standard user permissions by default. You can downgrade them to clients or collaborators later on.
Once you’ve created your foundational boards, lists and tasks, you can start to copy and paste what you’ve done once new work comes in.
Ease of Use
Teamwork is easy enough to use, but certain features are oddly hidden or placed in nonintuitive places on screen. For example, the finance tab being hidden from view by default makes it more difficult to access. Similarly, the budgeting feature being an offshoot of invoices means it takes more clicks to reach it, which is cumbersome.
Teamwork’s breadth of features is great, but your workspace could easily become chaotic if your team is not properly briefed or trained on best practices. It’s highly recommended that you train each employee and client in the same manner and establish ground rules for how tasks should be added, prioritized and moved forward.
Security
Teamwork offers AES-256 encryption for data at rest, which is the industry standard. It does a good job of providing transparency surrounding how passwords are stored, the protections in place regarding Teamwork employees being able to access certain data and how secure their physical offices are.
Teamwork boasts a 99.99% uptime. Each database performs a full backup every morning and backups are stored for a year.
You can also turn on two-factor authentication (2FA) for any account, but you cannot force any users to turn it on—which means your data could be open to vulnerabilities. Teamwork uses Google Authenticator for 2FA. Single sign-on (SSO) is only available with the Advanced Security add-on.
Customer Service and Support
Teamwork’s customer service team can only be reached through email or live chat. Its customer service team works Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to midnight Eastern time, with limited weekend cover. Through its online contact form, you can designate your message as low, medium or high priority.
We reached out at 7:15 p.m. ET on a Thursday and received a response by Friday at 5:30 a.m.ET.
In addition to email and live chat, it has a robust library of tutorial videos, webinars and knowledge base articles, which include screenshots, that are easily accessible from within the platform.
Additional features
Teamwork has several additional features that can make your company appear more professional and your team more productive.
Customizable Templates
In addition to having dozens of premade templates to go off of, Teamwork allows you to build your own. You can create templates for welcome emails. tasks, projects and more.
Creating a template is straightforward. Follow the prompts on screen to customize your template’s name, requirements, description and time frame.
Milestone Tracking
Under any project, you have the ability to add milestones. Milestones are attached to task lists and can help you and your team understand how tasks come together to achieve greater goals.
When you add a milestone, you need to set a due date and the person responsible.
You can then attach one or more task lists to the milestone.
Each milestone has a percentage goal tracker underneath it so you can see how close you are to achieving it. People can leave comments and attach files under milestones as well, making them similar in function to tasks.
Expense Tracking
Expenses can be added and tracked through the Finance tab, which is hidden under the “More …” tab.
To add an expense, all you need to include is a name, the cost, the date (this could be the date the expense was purchased or the date you put in the expense). Descriptions are optional. Once you add an expense, it will appear under the “Unbilled Expenses” tab.
You can sort expenses by date, cost, name of expense and user. The expense will remain unbilled until you move it to an invoice by clicking “Move Items.” There, you can move it to an open invoice or create a new invoice. Teamwork will tell you the number of the invoice that was last created, which is very helpful.
You cannot bill clients directly through Teamwork, however, as discussed in the Billing section. You will need to connect an external accounting platform to your Teamwork account.
Kanban Board
Teamwork’s kanban view is easily accessible from the top of the screen. You can completely customize your kanban board to your liking by adding and naming columns however you see fit. Tasks you’ve added from the list view will populate in your board, but you can drag and drop them however you see fit. You can also add cards right from the kanban board, which will appear in the List view under “Cards.”
One key feature that makes Teamwork’s kanban board particularly powerful is the ability to add automations quickly and easily. The automate menu in the top right will allow you to automatically send emails, move tasks to the next boards, add new tasks once certain ones are complete and so much more. This can be a huge time saver if used effectively.
Billing and Invoicing
Teamwork lets you create invoices from within the platform and export them to your account software. Supported accounting software includes FreshBooks, Harvest, Blinksale Classic, Xero and QuickBooks Online. You can also export invoices as Excel spreadsheets or PDFs.
Note that without linking your accounting software, you cannot get paid through the invoices you create through Teamwork. The invoicing tool is more of a creation/organization tool. If you don’t use supported accounting software, this feature will only help you create invoices—you’d need to then forward them to your client.
Guest/Client Access
You can add clients to Teamwork if you have a Pro/Deliver subscription plan or higher. Client users are similar to standard users in that they can add tasks and milestones, leave comments and reply to messages, but they can only be added to a maximum of five projects at a time. If you need your clients to be added to more than five projects, this may be a big limitation.
Once you’ve added a client user, you can customize their access beyond the default permissions. For example, you can turn off the ability to add milestones to specific projects if you don’t want your client to have that capability.
You can also downgrade existing standard users to client users at any time.
Teamwork Alternatives and How They Compare
Teamwork vs. Wrike
Wrike and Teamwork are very similar in that they’re both very marketing agency-oriented and offer high levels of customization during setup. Wrike, however, is pricier than Teamwork, making it less ideal for smaller teams. Wrike’s time tracking feature is only available on its more expensive plans as well, which could also be a dealbreaker when choosing between the two companies.
Teamwork vs. Monday.com
Monday.com has the same core and additional features as Teamwork does: time tracking, budgeting, invoicing, reporting and more. However, Monday.com has 24/7 customer support and allows you to add client users on its Basic plan.
Teamwork vs Asana
Asana’s feature set is more pared down than Teamwork’s. There’s no built-in time tracking, and you can’t get as granular with client customizations. Asana also only offers email support and is not transparent about its customer service hours of operation or expected response times.
Who Is Teamwork Best For?
Teamwork is best suited for small to midsized agencies or other small client-facing businesses. The ability to add client users as well as keep track of paid and unpaid invoices right from the platform are two key features that make Teamwork suitable for agency work.
If your business does not need or would not benefit from client input or signoff during a project, Teamwork might not make the most sense.
Featured Partners
1
monday.com
Yes
From $8 monthly per user
Zoom, LinkedIn, Adobe, Salesforce and more
2
HubSpot
Yes
Available
Google Contacts, Mailchimp, Xero, Aircall, Airtable and more
3
Smartsheet
Yes, for one user and two editors
$7 per user per month
Google Drive, Slack, Tableau, Miro, Zapier and more
4
ClickUp
Yes, for unlimited members
$7 per month
Slack, Microsoft Outlook, HubSpot, Salesforce, Timely, Google Drive and more
Our Expert Take
While testing Teamwork, I found the platform’s capabilities to be both exciting and overwhelming. The deeper I dove into setting up my projects and tasks, I found I was uncovering feature after feature, which was a lot to handle. It’s a powerful tool if you set it up correctly, but can easily turn into a disorganized mess if you don’t. The security risks, however, were a shocking hole. If you have a larger organization, Teamwork is not going to scale well—both work-wise and risk management-wise.
If you’re serious about switching project management platforms or looking for your first one ever, Teamwork would require some time to get used to and tweak to your liking. I highly recommend using the free trial to your advantage to get a feel for the product before committing to it.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Does Teamwork have kanban boards?
Yes. You can create and manage kanban boards using the kanban board view.
Is Teamwork cloud-based?
Yes. Teamwork is a cloud-based platform, meaning you can log into it from anywhere on any device.
Is Teamwork a customer relationship management (CRM) tool?
Teamwork offers a CRM product called Teamwork CRM that’s separate from its project management product. Teamwork and Teamwork CRM are designed to work together, which could benefit your business if you’re in the market for both a project management tool and CRM. Learn more about the best CRM software for small businesses.
