Teamwork review

They're all credible, and we've tried a fair few. Teamwork won on being the easiest for our team to understand, which matters more than a feature comparison suggests. The structural difference is that it starts from client work, not product work: billable versus non-billable time, per-client rates, retainers, and profitability sit in the core instead of a bolted-on integration.

Yes, and it's the detail that made it stick for us. Each client gets their own user account in their portal and sees only the parts they should, without wandering through internal notes. That turns a project tool into a shared workspace instead of something you export status updates from.

When your team is small enough that everyone already knows what's happening. A few people with a short list are better served by a simpler board that everybody actually updates; an accurate simple tool beats a neglected capable one every time. This earns its place as the team grows and the work in flight outgrows anyone's memory.

The usual risk with capable software: it does enough that a team can invent five conflicting ways to use it, and then nobody trusts the data. Agree the conventions before you roll it out (what a task means, who owns statuses, how time gets logged), rather than discovering six months in that three people use it three ways.