We Evaluated the 8 Best Workload Management Software for Creative Agencies in 2025

Running an agency means keeping clients happy, keeping your team sane, and keeping the work excellent. But of we’re being totally honest, most tools out there are built for task trackers—not creative agencies. They give you to-do lists, but not the workload visibility. And in most cases, the number of tasks is not necessarily equivalent with the amount of creative juices used.

This post serves as a definitive guide for agency workload planning. These are the eight best workload management software for creative agencies in 2025. Pick the one that fits your team—and protect your people and your margins.

Why creative agencies need workload management software

Task trackers can organize projects. Creative agencies need something more: visibility into capacity and deliverables. It comes down to three unique needs:

• Agencies rarely deal with just one project at a time. Chances are, you have multiple clients, projects, and services running in parallel. Each has different priorities, timelines, and demands. Without a way to see everything in one place, your team juggles timelines that don’t line up, guessing which client gets priority.
• Some team members are overloaded while others sit waiting for work. That imbalance burns out your top creatives and wastes payroll on idle talent. More importantly, overloaded creatives make mistakes and underutilized ones disengage. Both outcomes cost you clients.
• Agencies need workload planning that connects to client deliverables. You’re committing to services that have fixed dates promised. Else, deadlines slip and revisions pile up. 

Benefits of a dedicated workload management tool:

With a dedicated workload management tool, you can cater to these special creative needs. Here’s exactly what happens when your workload tool is built for creative agencies

• Visibility into team capacity: A dedicated workload management system surfaces everyone’s bandwidth in real time, so you can see capacity gaps before they become urgent problems that derail projects.
• Smarter resource allocation: You can allocate resources based on availability, skills, and project priorities—so the right people are on the right work at the right time.
• Prevention of burnout + missed deadlines: You get a real-time picture of capacity so you can keep workloads balanced, protecting both your people and your delivery promises.

How we evaluated these workload management tools

To find the right tool for that job, we used these criteria to evaluate the tools on this list:

1. Workload visualization: The tool must give a real view of who’s doing what—capacity planning, timelines, Gantt charts, or heatmaps that make workload clashes impossible to miss.
2. Ease of use for creative team: It has to work for designers, copywriters, and multimedia specialists—not just ops folks. If the UI slows people down, adoption won’t stick.
3. Scalability. The team workload software should grow with you—handling more clients, projects, and users without collapsing under complexity when your agency grows.
4. Agency-specific features. We looked for tools that support real agency operations: billing, client portals, request intake, and other built-for-agency workflows.

The best workload management software for creative agencies in 2025

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1. ManyRequests

The only all-in-one workload + client delivery platform

ManyRequest is an all-in-one solution that balances client work and workloads seamlessly. It provides a client portal that makes onboarding smooth and keeps every request organized. And a visual workload dashboard that shows exactly who’s doing what and who’s maxed out—so you can assign work without tipping anyone into burnout. 

Key features: 

• Central intake hub to collect all client work requests (tagged by service type, priority level, client name, or due date) in one place.
• Visual workload dashboard that lets you see who’s overloaded—or underbooked—in real time.
• Smart task assignment so you match every request to the teammate best equipped to handle it in terms of skill, capacity, or role—work isn’t just done, it’s done right.

Limitations:

• Less suitable for non-agency businesses.

Sample use case/scenario: Juggle urgent client asks without sidelining ongoing retainers, thanks to real-time visibility into who’s available.

Pricing: Starts at $19/month, billed annually—$29/month when billed monthly.

2. ClickUp

A workload view that balances work & capacity

ClickUp is a workload management tool that gives you a visual snapshot of who’s loaded and who’s still got room in your creative team. No more guessing who to assign that urgent client task to. You can zoom in/out to see workload by day, week, or month—best for planning or making quick adjustments in the middle of a task. 

Key features:

• Intuitive color codes to represent different workload levels visually, making it easy to spot resource strain at a glance.
• Drag-and-drop functionality makes it easy to quickly reassign tasks between team members when priorities or availability change
• Zero in on your creative’s workload with advanced filtering options.

Limitations:

• Workload management features depend on specific plans.

Sample use case/scenario: A project manager notices two designers in “red” while others are “green.” She reassigns tasks to balance output and prevent burnout.

Pricing: Plan with Workload Management starts at $12/month, billed annually—$19/month when billed monthly.

3. Productive

Plan and track task efficiency

Productive is built to help creative agencies balance capacity, prevent burnout, and keep creative projects moving. Its visual workload view makes it instantly clear to see who’s overloaded or underutilized, so tasks can be reassigned in seconds. And the system factors in holidays and time off, ensuring that timelines actually match reality.

Key features:

• Adds time estimate on a task—automatically deducts hours from that person’s daily capacity.
• Considers personal time off, holidays, and schedules in workload planning to provide accurate capacity views.
• Real-time progress tracking contrasts estimated task duration with actual time spent for continuous adjustment and optimization.

Limitations:

• Configuring some reports can be difficult.

Sample use case/scenario: You see holiday blocks—or someone’s PTO flagged—as gray days. Push the due date instead of packing their week full anyway.

Pricing: Plan with Workload Management starts at $24/month, billed annually—$28/month when billed monthly.

4. Float

Flexible, visual capacity planning

Float gives you real-time visibility into your team’s capacity. With real-time, utilization indicators and built-in flexibility for every work style—full-time or only part-time—it keeps your team balanced and your projects moving without the double-booking drama. Everything around your agency workload planning is wrapped around your team’s actual hours.

Key features:

• Stores every person's real working hours and days (leaves, regional holidays, and time-offs factored in) —no phantom availability.
• Detailed availability settings accommodate full-time, part-time, or flexible schedules.
  Supports setting up structured, searchable team profiles so you can easily match the best people to the right tasks or projects.

Limitations:

• Mobile version still needs improvement.

Sample use case/scenario: You can plan for someone on an 80% work schedule with Mondays off and build availability around their true hours—not your expectations.

Pricing: Plan starts at $7/month, billed annually—$8.50/month when billed monthly.

5. Teamwork

Short-term resource management & capacity planning

Teamwork is a step up from spreadsheets or simple scheduling. Instead of gut-feel assignments, you get live visibility into who’s available, what they can handle, and when projects are at risk of slipping. Moreover, since the team workload software is for short-term capacity planning, you’re looking at visible, immediate workloads. Who’s busy this week, what deadlines are coming, and who’s taking sick/vacation/training time off.

Key features:

• Live data about each team member’s workload and availability, so you can distribute tasks fairly and prevent bottlenecks.
• Build and maintain schedules more efficiently with plans that update every week.
• Beyond the week-to-week view, Teamwork gives you forecasting and utilization reports so you can see future capacity needs and profitability impact.

Limitations:

• UX is a bit clunky.

Sample use case/scenario: See when workloads will spike, spot capacity gaps early, and plan hiring or reallocation before shifting priorities throw projects off track.

Pricing: Plan with Workload Management starts at $19.99/user/month, billed yearly—$25.99 when billed monthly.

6. ResourceGuru

Flexible and intuitive resource scheduling 

ResourceGuru is built to bring flexibility, visibility, and confident planning to teams struggling with managing limited availability alongside shifting project demands. Yes, it’s flexible enough to schedule any resource, not just people.

Key features:

• Color-coded bookings and heatmaps show at a glance who's overloaded, free, or about to burn out.
• Uses a waiting list for unresolved bookings—so work that can’t be placed yet doesn’t get lost or forgotten.
• Drag, split, duplicate bookings—or use placeholders when roles aren’t filled.

Limitations:

• Reporting feature can be improved.

Sample use case/scenario: See a red heatmap on your teammate’s calendar? Easily move one task to the Waiting List or approve overtime—no project disruption.

Pricing: Starts at $4.16/user/month, billed yearly—$5 when billed monthly.

7. ScreenDragon

Comprehensive enterprise marketing work management

ScreenDragon is a workload management software for streamlining complex creative workflows and operations, built for enterprise marketing teams that need everything—briefs, resources, budgets, workflows, assets, approvals—all in one place. From content to campaigns and everything in between, ScreenDragon keeps processes flowing, people aligned, and leaders confident that marketing works are delivered on time, on budget, and with full visibility.

Key features:

• Immediately see availability, conflicts, and team bandwidth so you’re never planning in the dark—task-based, hour-based, or percentage-based views.
• Want to filter by skill set, region, department, or custom roles? Screendragon lets you do that. Custom views mean you quickly pull up the people you need.
• Got a new project? Screendragon can suggest or assign the “best fit” team members based on role, skills, and availability, so you won’t manually vet everyone.

Limitations:

• Pricing is available upon request, which may limit quick comparisons against competitors.

Sample use case/scenario: You’re planning a last-minute campaign and need a senior copywriter with fintech experience who’s not already overloaded. Instead of combing through spreadsheets, you instantly narrow down the team by role (“copywriter”), skill tag (“fintech”), and seniority level. In seconds, you spot someone with the right expertise and enough capacity.

Pricing: Available upon request.

8. Bonsai

Resource management & capacity planning for service teams

Bonsai gives service teams a single place to plan, allocate, and oversee their resources with confidence. Instead of juggling spreadsheets and guessing at availability, you see exactly where your team stands today—and where capacity is headed tomorrow. It’s built to help you balance workloads, protect margins, and keep delivery smooth even as priorities shift.

Key features:

• Instantly see who’s swamped, who can take on more, and where gaps are forming with live capacity tracking.
• Time-off management made simple by automatically blocking time off for team members who have approved vacation or sick days—no double-booking.
  Scope-to-schedule flow by turning project scopes directly into resource assignments. 

Limitations:

• Customer support can be difficult to work with.

Sample use case/scenario: You start by defining the scope—tasks, deadlines, and estimated hours for each piece of work, and Bonsai automatically populates the schedule with the right people at the right time.

Pricing: Plan with Workload Management starts at $29/user/month, billed yearly—$39/user when billed monthly.

It’s time to take control of your creative workload

Spreadsheets won’t warn you when someone’s on the edge of burnout—or where untapped bandwidth is hiding. In a smarter agency workload planning setup, you can see everyone’s capacity in one view, assign tasks based on availability and strengths, and hit client deadlines without pushing your team past their limits.

And that’s what “taking control of workloads” really looks like. Thanks to workload management software, it’s completely achievable. We’ve already done the heavy lifting by reviewing the 8 best platforms for creative agencies. Now it’s your turn to choose the one that fits your team.

If you want a single system that combines client delivery, workload visibility, and billing, ManyRequests is built for you. Sign up for your free trial.

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