We analyzed 6,357 agency reviews of Asana, ClickUp, Jira, Monday.com, Notion and Trello. This page is the short version of what we found, and what we built because of it.
How we did it
We started from 50,185 Software Advice reviews across the six tools, then filtered to companies that look like agencies: marketing, design, media, and consulting industries, between one and fifty people. That left 6,357 reviews. A complaint only counts as a pattern here when it recurs independently at least three times within a single tool's reviews.
Where we quote a review, it is verbatim, typos included, as reviewed on Software Advice. We never tidy a quote to make it land harder.
The five failure points
1. Too much setup and administration
The most repeated story in the corpus: a capable tool that only works if somebody on the team becomes its full-time administrator. In a 10-person agency there is no such person, so the workspace quietly decays until the team stops trusting it.
"The flexibility that makes it powerful also makes it easy to set up poorly and hard to enforce consistency across users. If you have someone dedicated to maintaining the workspace it probably works great. If you don't, it quietly becomes a mess."
3★, Marketing and Advertising, 11-50, April 2026
In Flowboard: Flowboard opens as a working agency setup, not an empty canvas. Templates carry the operating model, and customization is opt-in after the team is running.
2. Missing connections between time, billing and delivery
Agencies run one loop that matters: hours logged, retainer burned, invoice sent, margin known. No general-purpose tool closes it, so owners rebuild the loop in spreadsheets every month.
"You cannot run a team within Asana unless you want to waste a LOT of time figuring out the status of all your projects. They are missing such basic features that I ultimately had to build a spreadsheet to handle reporting instead of using their system for it."
1★, Marketing and Advertising, 11-50, February 2019
In Flowboard: The timer sits on the task, the hours roll into margin per client, and the same entries become invoice lines. The loop closes in one workspace.
3. Information spread across multiple tools
The project board knows the tasks, the time tracker knows the hours, the accounting tool knows the money, and nobody knows the whole picture. Every handoff between tools drops something.
"[...] If you are trying to integrate your schedule, personal tasks, team member tasks, project file sharing, time sheets, invoicing, etc. this software will be not able to easily help you. You'll always be craving for more features."
3★, Marketing and Advertising, 2-10, April 2018
In Flowboard: Projects, time, CRM, invoicing, capacity, forms, proposals, and the client portal share one data model, so the same client record runs through all of it.
4. Guest-seat pricing that punishes client collaboration
The client is the point of agency work, and most tools charge you to let them in. Reviewers describe paying for seats nobody uses, or keeping clients out entirely because the pricing made collaboration a cost center.
"Their payment options are misleading. They promote their pricing based on seats. $24.99/seat/year. But they force you to pay for seats that you don't use. If you have 7 users, you MUST pay for 10+ users. Which will cost us $1000+ per year for literally nothing."
1★, Marketing and Advertising, 2-10, May 2023
In Flowboard: Client users are free and unlimited, and are never billed as team members. Inviting a client never changes your bill.
5. Profitability discovered after the project ends
The margin number exists inside the logged hours the whole time. Because no screen computes it live, owners find out a project lost money when the books close, which is a lesson instead of a save.
"it doesn't allow folks to track their time at the task level and then offer an overview by task. This is essential. The integrations don't do it either. We are having to use a completely separate time tracker and re-write each task. A waste of time."
4★, Marketing and Advertising, 2-10, March 2021
In Flowboard: Every logged hour updates live profitability per project and per client, so the overrun shows up in week two, while there is still time to fix it.
The full theme list runs ten deep; these five shaped the product most. The per-tool detail, with hedged feature tables and each tool's own reviews, lives on the comparison pages.