Teamwork review: The project manager for those billing by the hour
Teamwork is a project-management tool with very powerful time-tracking and billing features
Pros
- Good free plan
- Great time-tracking and billing features
- Easy to use
Cons
- Not the most versatile
- Information overload in selected views
Teamwork is a project-management tool that is mainly geared towards teams that bill by the hour, though smaller teams on a tight budget may like it, too. It comes with a few quirks that may turn out to be deal-breakers, though. How does Teamwork hold up as a project management tool?
Teamwork review: What do you get for the money?
Teamwork has five plans to choose from, starting with a generous free plan and then adding users and functionality as you scale up. The free plan is pretty good, offering plenty of functionality – almost everything you need to run even fairly complicated projects – but limiting you to only five users.
To remove that limit, you must sign up for the Starter plan, which is £5.99 per user per month and lets you add unlimited users and minor functionality. I like this approach, I praise ClickUp for something similar, and it’s smart marketing to offer a reasonable upgrade at a reasonable price.
The next plan up is called Deliver and will set you back about £9.99 per user per month. It mostly expands Teamwork’s automations and includes forms, as well as adding advanced budgeting functions. Though it’s expensive when compared to other options out there – such as Smartsheet – it does offer unique tools that justify the price.
Finally I come to the Grow and Scale plans. Grow costs £18 per user per month, while Scale is priced up on quotation. Like most enterprise-focused plans, these two remove all caps and add security and scalability options, as well as some nifty accounting functions that may partially replace whatever budgeting software you’re using.
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Teamwork review: What’s it like to use?
Teamwork is an odd program. It’s easy to get to grips with initially, but as you navigate menus and look around more you realise there are rough patches here and there. Though it’s nothing to condemn the software for, it can get fiddly at times.
Like most project management tools, Asana being a good example, the focus is the table and list view, which in Teamwork’s case are two separate entities. The table is by far the better of the two, offering plenty of versatility while also giving you a decent overview of what’s going on. You can add and remove columns as you wish, and add all kinds of information to them. 
The list, on the other hand, is a jumbled mess. All the information you carefully added to your table is rammed in, making it like reading ticker tape. You lose all overview, and it seems to defeat the purpose of even having a list. While I’m sure some teams could get some use out of it, it left me scratching my head.
There’s one thing I do like about the list view, namely the ability to divy up lists into several different smaller lists, much like Monday.com does. For example, you can have different lists for different kinds of tasks, or divide them by step in the workflow process (“to-do”, “doing”, “done”, for example). That said, there is a small problem here – these sublists don’t transfer to another important view for Teamwork, the board.
Unlike in Asana or Monday.com, where a sublist can form a column in the kanban board, it seems you can only set a column’s status to be a column. This means you can track several sublists at once anywhere but the board. This makes Teamwork less flexible than its competitors. It’s not a critical flaw, but you get the feeling that Teamwork gets to decide how you manage your work. 
A more serious problem with the board is that it’s less of an information flow and more of an information assault. Teamwork crams tons of information onto each card. With only a few cards, as in my example, it’s not a big deal, but I get the feeling that a full board will have your head spinning.
This stands in stark contrast with the Gantt view, which is actually one of the cleanest of its kind. Though I miss some of the functionality of Wrike, such as subtasks and lines to show dependency, it’s still good enough for any organisation where Gantt charts play a role, though maybe not a central one.
Overall, I’m not blown away by Teamwork’s basic functionality. While it gets the job done, others do it better. However, it’s not these features that carry the day here, but rather the things Teamwork does that nobody else can.
Teamwork review: Are there other useful features?
Teamwork’s greatest strength isn’t its management tools, but the extra functionality it offers, especially when it comes to billing and time tracking. This focus permeates the entire program, from the views to the way task details are managed. Every task has the option to add time spent, for example. The dashboard even has slots where you can track billables and hours worked, which is pretty nifty.
There are few project management tools that combine task management so well with tracking employees’ time. I have a feeling that anybody that bills by the hour – lawyers, consultants, etc. – will love Teamwork.
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Teamwork review: Should I sign up?
Teamwork has limited appeal. Though it’s far from bad, I find it hard to recommend as a general project-management tool given the strength of the competition. But if you manage a large team with staff charging clients by the hour, I have a feeling you will gladly put up with Teamwork’s shortcomings so you can utilise its billing strengths. There’s a 30-day trial to help you make up your mind.
