Teamwork.com

What Teamwork actually does

Teamwork.com is project management aimed squarely at client work. The distinction matters: general-purpose tools organise tasks; Teamwork organises tasks that get billed. Time tracking, billable rates, budgets and workload management are native to the platform rather than bolted on through integrations, and the wider product family — a help desk (Desk), document collaboration (Spaces) and a CRM — covers the rest of a service business's client lifecycle.

For an agency, consultancy or professional-services firm, that means the chain from "client signed" to "work delivered" to "hours invoiced" lives in one vendor's ecosystem instead of four disconnected tools taped together with Zapier.

Who it's for

Teamwork is at its best in teams that sell time and deliverables: marketing and creative agencies, dev shops, accountancies, consultancies. If your projects have external clients, budgets and billable hours, the platform's opinionated structure works with you. If you are a product team tracking internal sprints with no billing dimension, more general tools are a more natural fit — and often cheaper at small scale.

The pricing reality

The Free Forever plan supports up to 5 users and 5 projects at $0 with no credit card — a real, permanent tier, not a trial. Paid plans are per-user: Basics at $9.99 per user/month billed yearly, and Accelerate — where the platform's meat lives — at $24.99 per user/month billed yearly. Teamwork states annual billing saves 29% versus monthly, so month-to-month rates are materially higher; a 10-person team on Accelerate is committing roughly $3,000 a year on annual billing. Optimize and Enterprise tiers are custom-quoted. All paid plans carry a 30-day free trial.

That per-user maths is also how you should value the startup programme. A 10-person team on Accelerate pays about $250 a month on annual billing — call it $3,000 a year — before counting whatever the help desk, document tool and CRM would have cost as separate products from other vendors. A free year is not a token gesture at that scale; for a small services firm it is a meaningful line item handed back to payroll.

How the startup offer works — and the fine print

The headline is simple: all Teamwork.com products — the project management platform plus Desk, Spaces and CRM — free for one year, at the level of their "Deliver plan, or equivalent" across each product. You apply through a review form at teamwork.com/startups with your company name, website, industry, size, annual revenue and country, and Teamwork assesses eligibility on length of time in business, revenue and employee numbers. The specific thresholds are not published, which we would grade as the programme's main annoyance: you cannot self-qualify, you can only apply and see.

Three conditions deserve your attention before you apply. First, the programme "and its continued use is subject to a testimonial/case study during the course of the program" — in plain terms, part of the price is your logo and your story. Second, it is not available on accounts that already hold a monthly or annual subscription, so it is for new commitments, not retroactive refunds. Third, when the 365 days end, your account downgrades to a limited free plan unless you move to a paid subscription — so the smart move is to treat month ten as your evaluation deadline and negotiate or budget from there.

One small wrinkle: the programme page references the "Deliver plan" while the current pricing page sells "Basics" and "Accelerate", suggesting the startup page predates a plan rename. Worth clarifying with their team during application exactly which current tier you will receive — in writing.

Honest limitations

The undisclosed eligibility bar means some genuinely early startups will be declined without knowing why. The testimonial condition is fair value-for-value but is a real obligation, not boilerplate. And the year-end cliff is the classic startup-programme trap: a 10-person team that embeds Teamwork across projects, help desk and CRM for twelve months faces a real bill in month thirteen, with the switching costs stacked in the vendor's favour. That is not a criticism of Teamwork specifically — it is how every free-year programme works — but go in with the exit maths done.

Beyond the programme, the platform's own trade-offs are the usual ones for an all-in-one: each individual product in the family is competing with a specialist (the help desk against dedicated support desks, the CRM against dedicated CRMs), and the value case rests on the whole being more convenient than best-of-breed parts. For a lean services team that is usually the right trade; for a team with one deeply embedded specialist tool already, it may not be.

How it compares

Against Monday.com: Monday is the more flexible general-purpose work OS with a slicker interface, and it scores slightly higher with us overall. But its client-work story — billable time, budget burn, invoicing-ready reports — requires more assembly. For a services firm, Teamwork's opinionated defaults get you to a working operation faster.

Against Asana: Asana is excellent at cross-functional task orchestration inside a company, but it has no native answer to billable-hours-and-budgets. Agencies that run client work through Asana almost always end up paying for a separate time-tracking and budgeting layer; Teamwork includes that layer in the price.

Our verdict

Buy — and if you are early-stage, apply to the startup programme before paying a cent. A verified free year across a project platform, help desk, document tool and CRM is worth thousands of dollars to a small services team, and the conditions (eligibility review, a testimonial, the year-end decision) are transparent and reasonable. If you are past startup eligibility, the calculus is narrower but still sound: for client-services teams specifically, Accelerate at $24.99 per user on annual billing replaces a project tool plus a time-tracking tool, and the Free Forever tier means the evaluation costs nothing.