Best project management software for marketing teams in 2026

Most in-house marketing teams are best served by a project tool that keeps each campaign on one board, takes requests through a form, and gives reviewers an easy way to comment, with their access costs included in the budget. Asana, monday.com and Wrike do that with deeper planning and higher prices. Breeze, Trello and Zoho Projects do it more simply and for less. Proofing, meaning markup and sign-off on the images and videos themselves, is the feature that splits the list, and only a few tools include it.

This comparison is for marketing teams inside a company, running campaigns, content and launches for their own brand. If you run campaigns for clients, the agency software comparison weighs client access and billable hours instead.

Disclosure: We make Breeze, which is one of the tools below. The comparison looks at campaign structure, request intake, reviewers from outside the team, a calendar tied to tasks and launch dependencies, and draws on vendor pricing pages, help centres and public reviews on G2 and Capterra. The reviews show day-to-day experience, not a representative survey.

What should a marketing team expect from project software?

It should hold a campaign from the first request to the launch: the brief, the asset list, the review rounds and the publish dates, in one place everyone can see. Marketing work differs from most team work in four ways, and those four decide which tool fits far more than the length of the feature list.

• Reviewers who do not live in the tool: legal, product, sales and the founder all want to see the headline before it ships, and none of them will learn a new app to do it. How those people get in, and what they cost, matters more than the number of views.
• Many small assets meeting on one date: a launch can mean a landing page, three blog posts, an email, a run of social posts, paid ads and a sales deck, each with its own review loop and all due the same week.
• A calendar that has to match production: an editorial calendar kept in a separate spreadsheet goes stale within weeks, and nobody notices until a slot comes up empty.
• Campaigns that repeat: the webinar, the product launch, the monthly newsletter. A tool that copies a whole campaign setup saves more time than any single feature.

Dashboards, AI assistants and automation are nice to have on top. A five-person team that gets the four basics right in a simple tool is better off than a thirty-person department with a powerful setup nobody updates.

Why do campaigns still slip after a team adopts a tool?

Usually because of process gaps that no tool fixes on its own: thin briefs, feedback spread across channels, handoffs that rely on someone remembering, and a calendar that lives somewhere else. Each one looks small. Together they are why launch week so often feels improvised.

• The brief is a chat message: a request arrives as "we need a landing page for the new feature", work starts, and three rounds in someone realises the audience or the offer was wrong. Every campaign needs a brief that names the audience, the goal, the channels, the assets and the launch date before production starts. If the person asking cannot fill it in, the campaign is not ready. There is more on organizing briefs and drafts for content teams.
• Feedback arrives in five places: a comment in a doc, a reply in chat, a recorded video, a forwarded email with meeting notes. The designer has to reconcile all of it, misses one, and gets another round. One review window, one place for comments and one person who consolidates them fixes this faster than any software change. Two rounds is a good target. Five usually means the brief was wrong.
• Handoffs nobody announces: the writer finishes, but the SEO lead does not know. The hero image is done, but nobody routes it to whoever updates the website. Legal approves a claim, and the live copy still has the old wording. Any handoff that depends on a message being sent will fail eventually. An owner on every task and columns that show what is waiting on whom prevent most of it.
• The calendar disagrees with the board: the calendar says the post goes out on the 14th, the post is not written, and the panic starts on the 12th. A calendar is only useful if it reads its dates from the production tasks, so that a slipped task moves the date where everyone can see it. Keeping a calendar the team follows is mostly about that connection.

How does one campaign run from request to launch?

Take an illustrative example: a five-person in-house team, with a marketing lead, a content writer, a designer, a performance marketer and someone in marketing operations, launching a new product feature in six weeks. The example uses Breeze, but the same structure works in most tools on this list.

Take the request through a form

Build a project form whose questions are the brief: audience, goal, channels, the assets needed, the launch date and who signs off. Share the link with product and sales. Each submission lands as a task in the list you choose, with the answers in the description and any files attached, so the marketing lead reviews a brief instead of decoding a chat message.

Give the campaign its own board

Create one project for the launch and name its task lists after the stages work moves through: Brief, In production, In review, Approved, Scheduled and Live. Every asset becomes a task with one owner and a due date. Add a swimlane for each channel, such as web, email, social and paid, so the board reads as a grid of what is where. If your team prefers filtering to lanes, a drop-down custom field for the channel does the same job.

Drafts, image exports and video cuts go on the task itself. Breeze shows previews for images and videos, and files kept in Google Drive or Dropbox can be linked instead of uploaded, so the latest version stays where it already lives.

Batch the reviews and let outsiders comment

A review round is a task in the In review list with a due date for the window, not "whenever you get a chance". Reviewers comment on the task, the marketing lead consolidates, and the owner works through everything in one pass. People outside marketing can be invited as client users, which are free in Breeze: they see only the projects they are invited to and can comment and add files. For a one-off reviewer, a public task link with commenting switched on lets them comment after entering their email, without an account.

Approval here is simple: the marketing lead moves the card to Approved and notes in a comment who signed off. Be clear about the limit. Breeze has no markup on images or video and no formal approval step that records each sign-off. If legal needs an audit trail on every asset, that is where Asana Advanced, Wrike Business or the Hive proofing add-on earn their higher price.

Make the calendar and the board the same thing

Every task with a start or due date appears on the calendar, in month, week or day view. Dragging a task there changes its dates on the board too, so the editorial calendar cannot drift away from production. Anyone who lives in Google Calendar or Outlook can subscribe to the project calendar, which is read-only there and, in Google's case, refreshes about once a day. The monthly newsletter and weekly social batch can be set up as recurring tasks, and an editorial calendar template gives a starting structure.

Draw the launch dependencies

Launches fail on order more often than on effort. The press release cannot go out before the page is live, the page cannot go live before legal signs off, and the email cannot send before the page exists. In Breeze, task dependencies are switched off by default and turned on in the project settings, and they can link tasks across projects, which helps when the engineering release lives in another project. A short launch plan with no-go criteria belongs at the top of the board.

Copy the campaign next time

When the launch is done, the project becomes the template for the next one. In Breeze any project can be a template, and a new project started from it copies the lists, tasks, people and permissions. Start with the campaign type you run most often, run it twice, fix what broke, and only then move to the next type. Trying to set up the whole department in the first week is how a new tool ends up ignored.

What does each tool cost a six-person marketing team?

Prices in US dollars for six people, on yearly billing where the vendor offers it, and on the plan a marketing team usually needs rather than the cheapest one:

Tool and plan	Monthly cost for 6 people	What to know
Zoho Projects Premium	$24	the free plan stops at 5 users and 3 projects
Hive Starter	$30	up to 10 members and 10 projects; Teams with the proofing add-on is $102
ClickUp Unlimited	$42	AI is a separate per-user add-on
Breeze	$54	every feature included, client users free
Basecamp Studio	$59	flat price, up to 10 active projects, time tracking only from Pro at $99
Trello Premium	$60	calendar and timeline views need Premium; Standard is $30
Notion Plus	$60	full Notion AI needs Business, $120 for six
Asana Starter	$109.90	10-seat bundle; proofing and approvals need Advanced at $249.90
monday.com Standard	$120	sold as a 10-seat bundle, and new accounts also buy AI credits
Wrike Business	$250	10-seat bundle with proofing, request forms and time tracking; Team is $100 without them

Compare the plan you need and the seats you must buy. Six Asana users require a 10-seat subscription, as do six Wrike users. Proofing raises the cost again: Asana Advanced is $249.90 and Wrike Business $250 per month on annual billing. ClickUp Business also includes proofing on images and PDFs, so include it when comparing file-review workflows. Check what guest reviewers can do before treating a cheaper plan as equivalent.

Which marketing project management tools deserve a trial?

Shortlist two: one that matches how much structure your team will actually maintain, and one that covers proofing if your reviews need it. The list runs from the deeper planning tools to the simpler and cheaper ones.

• Asana
• monday.com
• Wrike
• Breeze
• Hive
• ClickUp
• Trello
• Notion
• Basecamp
• Zoho Projects

Asana

• Pricing: Personal is free for up to 2 users. Starter is $10.99 per user per month billed annually or $13.49 monthly. Advanced is $24.99 billed annually or $30.49 monthly. Enterprise is quote-based. Every paid plan includes 5 AI requests per user per month, up to 50 per account below Enterprise, and extra requests cost $0.50 prepaid or $0.60 on demand. Plan details.
• Rating: 4.5/5 on Capterra from 13,699 reviews, 4.4/5 on G2 from 13,979 reviews.

Asana suits a marketing team that plans well ahead and wants that plan visible to the rest of the company. Starter covers most of what a campaign needs: timeline view, forms for incoming requests, rules for routine handoffs and free external guests. An internal product manager or legal reviewer using your company email domain counts as a member, so include them when calculating seats. Calendar view is on every plan, and dependencies show what a slipped design task does to the launch date.

The marketing-specific parts sit one step up. Proofing, approvals, portfolios for seeing every campaign at once, workload and time tracking are on Advanced, which takes a six-person team from $109.90 to $249.90 a month on annual billing because both subscriptions require ten seats. A team on Starter runs reviews as comments on tasks, which works well enough, but it is not proofing.

Where Asana isn't the right fit: Small teams that want proofing without paying for Advanced, and teams without someone willing to set naming conventions and tune notifications in the first weeks.

If Asana feels like more than you need, there is a separate list of Asana alternatives.

What reviewers say about Asana

Reviewers keep returning to one benefit: work leaves email threads and spreadsheets, ownership becomes obvious, and the chasing stops. The complaints on Capterra and G2 are just as consistent. Many say the features they wanted sit on higher plans and that costs climb as the team grows, and a fair number found it overwhelming until an admin set conventions and turned the notifications down.

Sources: Capterra, G2

monday.com

• Pricing: Free for up to 2 seats. Basic is $9 per seat per month billed annually or $12 monthly, Standard $12 or $14, and Pro $19 or $24. Enterprise is quote-based. Paid plans start at 3 seats and are sold in seat bundles, so a team of six pays for ten. Accounts opened on or after May 6, 2026 must also buy a monthly AI credit bundle, which the pricing page currently offsets with an introductory discount.
• Rating: 4.6/5 on Capterra from 6,116 reviews, 4.7/5 on G2 from 17,221 reviews.

monday.com is the most visual tool in this list. Colour-coded status columns make a campaign board readable from across the room, and editorial calendars and product launches are among the most common uses reviewers describe. Boards are flexible enough to model almost any campaign, and automations handle the reminders nobody wants to send.

For a marketing team the realistic starting plan is Standard, not Basic. Calendar view, the timeline and Gantt views, guest access and 250 automation actions a month all start there. Pro raises automations to 25,000 actions and adds time tracking. Combined with seat bundles, that makes monday.com one of the pricier options for a small team.

Where monday.com isn't the right fit: Teams of four to nine people paying for empty seats in a bundle, and teams that want a ready-made campaign structure rather than designing their own boards.

For simpler or cheaper options, see the monday.com alternatives.

What reviewers say about monday.com

Praise on Capterra and G2 centres on boards anyone can read at a glance and automations that take over the follow-up work, with editorial calendars and launches among the uses described. The frustration is cost: seats come in blocks, and several reviewers say their company rations them. Others mention a learning curve for complex dashboards and slowdowns on very large boards. A few reviews cover monday CRM, so filter for project work.

Sources: Capterra, G2

Wrike

• Pricing: Free with unlimited users. Team is $10 per user per month for 2 to 15 users. Business is $25 per user per month for 5 to 200 users. Pinnacle and Apex are quote-based. Prices are per month, billed annually, and Business and above are only sold as annual subscriptions. Plan details.
• Rating: 4.4/5 on Capterra from 3,040 reviews, 4.2/5 on G2 from 4,537 reviews.

Wrike is the most configurable tool here, and the one best suited to a large marketing department running many campaigns at once with shared writers and designers. Team brings calendars and an interactive Gantt chart. Business adds the features most marketing teams buy Wrike for: file proofing and approval, approvals from guests, request forms that route work to the right people, and time tracking.

The cost is setup and price. Business at $25 a seat puts a six-person team on a ten-seat, $250-a-month subscription billed annually, and getting custom item types, blueprints and dashboards right is a project of its own. For a department of thirty with an operations person to own the configuration, that effort pays back. For a team of five, it usually does not.

Where Wrike isn't the right fit: Teams under about ten people, teams that need proofing but cannot justify Business pricing, and anyone without a person to own the setup.

For lighter tools, see the list of Wrike alternatives.

What reviewers say about Wrike

Configurability is what G2 and Capterra reviewers rate highest: custom item types, request forms, blueprints and dashboards that let different teams work their own way, which suits overlapping campaigns. The flip side appears just as often. Many describe a steep first month, colleagues who needed training, and screens that clutter with nested subtasks. Smaller teams in the samples tend to say it was more than they needed.

Sources: Capterra, G2

Breeze

• Pricing: $9 per user per month billed yearly, or $10 billed monthly, with every feature included. Client users are free and unlimited. A single-user Solo plan is $14 per month. 14-day free trial, no card required.
• Rating: 4.4/5 on Capterra from 45 reviews, 4.1/5 on G2 from 22 reviews.

Breeze is the simple option on this list, and the walkthrough above shows a whole campaign in it: a request form that creates tasks, a board with stages and channel lanes, reviews in task comments, a calendar fed by the same task dates, launch dependencies and a project reused as a template. Every feature is on the one plan, so there is no upgrade when the team wants the calendar, dependencies or time tracking.

Free client users matter more for marketing than the name suggests. Legal, product and leadership reviewers can be invited to the projects they need, comment on tasks and add files without anyone counting seats. The team workload view shows who is overloaded before launch week, and time tracking is built in for teams that report hours to finance. More on how Breeze fits marketing team workflows is on the product page.

Where Breeze isn't the right fit: Breeze has no proofing or markup on images and video, no formal approval step that records each sign-off, no portfolio dashboard across dozens of campaigns, and lighter automation than Asana, monday.com or Wrike. A large department that needs a sign-off record on every asset should start with Wrike Business or Asana Advanced.

What reviewers say about Breeze

Reviewers mostly describe a tool people pick up quickly, clients included, with time tracking and adjustable boards in daily use. The recurring requests are deeper reporting, better team-wide overviews and more depth for complex projects. Both listings are small, many Capterra reviews come from one 2024 collection drive, and one review there describes a different product called Breeze, so read individual reviews rather than leaning on the score.

Sources: Capterra, G2

Hive

• Pricing: Free for up to 10 workspace members. Starter is $5 per user per month billed yearly or $7 monthly, for up to 10 members and 10 projects. Teams is $12 billed yearly or $18 monthly, with unlimited members. On Teams, proofing and approvals, timesheets and other add-ons cost $5 more per user per month each. Enterprise is quote-based. No card is needed for the trial.
• Rating: 4.4/5 on Capterra from 219 reviews, 4.6/5 on G2 from 667 reviews.

Hive is the mid-priced way to get proofing. Starter already includes a Gantt view, an in-app calendar and unlimited storage, and every plan has chat and email inside the workspace, so campaign conversation stays next to the tasks. Teams adds shareable forms for requests, time tracking, portfolios and custom fields, labels and statuses, and Hive offers a ready-made marketing team template to start from.

Proofing is an add-on rather than part of a plan. A six-person team on Teams with proofing pays $17 per user per month on yearly billing, about $102 in total, which is still well below Asana Advanced or Wrike Business for the same team.

Where Hive isn't the right fit: Teams that want one all-in price instead of a base plan plus add-ons, and teams that need deep reporting or budget tracking across many campaigns.

What reviewers say about Hive

Hive's reviews are friendly but mostly older. Capterra reviewers praise quick onboarding, views each person can shape to their own work, and chat that replaces a separate messaging app, and a handful of marketing teams mention proofing and approvals. Complaints focus on missing pieces, from reporting depth to integrations, and a weaker mobile app. Most Capterra reviews date from 2019 to 2024, so check whether a gap still exists.

Sources: Capterra, G2

ClickUp

• Pricing: Free Forever plan. Unlimited is $7 per user per month billed yearly or $10 monthly. Business is $12 billed yearly or $19 monthly. Enterprise is quote-based. An upgrade applies to the whole workspace. AI is a separate per-user add-on, with Brain AI from $9 per user per month billed yearly. Plan details.
• Rating: 4.6/5 on Capterra from 4,631 reviews, 4.6/5 on G2 from 14,333 reviews.

ClickUp suits a marketing team with one person who enjoys building systems. A space for brand, content and paid, a list for each campaign, custom statuses that mirror your review stages, and docs for briefs sitting next to the tasks they describe: all of it is possible, and the same work can be viewed as a list, board, calendar or Gantt chart.

The risk is sprawl. The more a team customises, the more the setup depends on the person who built it, and occasional reviewers from outside marketing can find the screens crowded. Price is not the problem. The Unlimited plan is one of the cheapest here, but AI comes on top of it.

Where ClickUp isn't the right fit: Teams that want something that works on day one without configuration, and campaigns whose reviewers log in once a month.

For less configurable options, see the ClickUp alternatives.

What reviewers say about ClickUp

Flexibility dominates the praise on both sites: custom statuses, fields and views, plus docs, chat and dashboards that let teams retire several other tools. The complaints mirror that. Reviewers describe an overwhelming start, crowded screens and lag on large workspaces, and a few mention bugs after big updates. The lesson from the samples is to trial it with your real campaign setup rather than an empty workspace.

Sources: Capterra, G2

Trello

• Pricing: Free for up to 10 collaborators per workspace and 10 boards. Standard is $5 per user per month billed annually or $6 monthly. Premium is $10 billed annually or $12.50 monthly. Enterprise is $17.50 per user per month billed annually. Trello's AI is included from Standard, and the calendar and timeline views start on Premium. Plan details.
• Rating: 4.5/5 on Capterra from 23,619 reviews, 4.4/5 on G2 from 14,064 reviews.

Trello is the fastest tool here to get going. A board for the campaign, a card for each asset and lists for the stages are enough for a small team running one campaign at a time, and nobody needs training. Labels can mark the channel, checklists hold the review steps, and Butler automation moves cards or sets dates when something changes.

It stops being enough when campaigns overlap. There are no real task dependencies for a launch sequence, it is hard to see across several boards at once, and the calendar view that most marketing teams want sits on Premium, which doubles the price of Standard.

Where Trello isn't the right fit: Teams running several campaigns at once, launches with a strict order of tasks, and anyone who needs a view across every board.

When the board gets crowded, see the Trello alternatives.

What reviewers say about Trello

Few tools earn warmer comments about getting started. Reviewers on Capterra and G2 describe teams productive within minutes and a board that shows what is pending without a meeting. Almost as many describe the ceiling: no real dependencies or timeline for bigger work, thin reporting without add-ons, and boards that become hard to read once they pass a few dozen cards.

Sources: Capterra, G2

Notion

• Pricing: Free plan available. Plus is $10 per member per month billed yearly or $12 monthly. Business is $20 billed yearly or $24 monthly. Enterprise is custom. Notion AI is fully included from Business, while Free and Plus get a trial. Custom Agents run on Notion credits that Business and Enterprise workspaces buy separately at $10 per 1,000 a month.
• Rating: 4.7/5 on Capterra from 2,825 reviews, 4.6/5 on G2 from 13,847 reviews.

Notion is the best place in this list for the written side of marketing: briefs, brand guidelines, messaging documents and campaign retrospectives. Its databases can show the same content items as a table, a board or a calendar, so a team can build its own editorial calendar with exactly the fields it wants.

The word that matters there is build. Notion starts as a blank page, and task management, workload and deadlines are things you assemble rather than things that come ready. Many marketing teams end up keeping briefs and brand docs in Notion and running production in a dedicated project tool.

Where Notion isn't the right fit: As the only tool for a team juggling many deadlines and reviewers from outside marketing, or for anyone who does not want to design their own system.

For tools that pair docs with stronger task management, see the Notion alternatives.

What reviewers say about Notion

Both sites file Notion under knowledge management, and reviewers praise it on those terms: one place for docs, wikis and notes, shaped exactly the way a team wants. The common complaint is the blank canvas, which takes tutorials and trial and error to turn into a working system. Several reviewers also say it feels clunky as a dedicated project manager, and large databases can load slowly.

Sources: Capterra, G2

Basecamp

• Pricing: A flat monthly price per account, not per user. Free covers one project and up to 5 users. Freelancer is $25 per month for up to 3 active projects and 20 users. Studio is $59 per month for up to 10 active projects with unlimited users. Pro is $99 per month for up to 25 active projects and adds time tracking. Unlimited is $299 per month billed annually. Only Unlimited is billed annually. 30-day free trial, 45 days on Unlimited.
• Rating: 4.4/5 on Capterra from 14,448 reviews, 4.1/5 on G2 from 5,488 reviews.

Basecamp suits a team whose main problem is scattered campaign communication. Each campaign is a project with a message board, to-dos, a schedule, docs and files, and chat, so the discussion and the list of what is due live side by side. Because the price is flat, a team can invite everyone in the company who ever reviews marketing work without counting seats.

The limits show in production. The active-project caps matter for a marketing team that runs many small campaigns at once, since Studio allows ten, and planning features such as dependencies and Gantt-style timelines are not what Basecamp is built around.

Where Basecamp isn't the right fit: Launches with a strict order of tasks, teams that run more small campaigns than the active-project cap allows, and anyone on Freelancer or Studio who assumed time tracking was included.

For more structure at a similar price, see the Basecamp alternatives.

What reviewers say about Basecamp

Capterra and G2 reviewers like having messages, to-dos, files and schedules for a project in one place, and many call it learnable without training. The flat price earns praise from teams that invite a lot of people. The main criticism is depth: reviewers miss Gantt charts, dependencies and real reporting as work grows. G2 scores it noticeably lower than Capterra, and some reviews predate Basecamp 5.

Sources: Capterra, G2

Zoho Projects

• Pricing: Free for up to 5 users and 3 projects. Premium is $4 per user per month billed annually or $5 monthly. Enterprise is $9 billed annually or $10 monthly. Ultimate is $14 billed annually or $15 monthly. Local taxes are added on top. 15-day free trial, no card required.
• Rating: 4.5/5 on Capterra from 872 reviews, 4.4/5 on G2 from 567 reviews.

Zoho Projects is the cheapest paid option here and stronger on planning than its price suggests. Premium includes unlimited projects, custom views and statuses, task blueprints for enforcing a review sequence, recurring tasks, and time logs with timesheets. Gantt charts, dependencies and milestones suit a launch with a strict order of work.

It makes most sense for a company that already runs Zoho CRM or Zoho One, where campaign work can sit next to sales data. On its own, expect a more dated interface than the newer tools and some setup effort before the first campaign runs smoothly.

Where Zoho Projects isn't the right fit: Teams that want a modern, visual tool that occasional reviewers will happily open, and teams that need proofing on creative assets.

What reviewers say about Zoho Projects

The value argument is strongest here. Capterra and G2 reviewers call it full-featured for the price and like the Gantt charts, dependencies and links into other Zoho apps. The common complaints are an interface that feels dated and cluttered on larger projects, and a setup that is hard to work out alone. Some reviewers use it inside the Zoho One bundle, so their praise covers the suite.

Sources: Capterra, G2

Where should an in-house marketing team start?

Start with the process, then the tool. Pick the campaign type you run most often, turn its brief into a request form, give it one board with stages and owners, batch the reviews, and let the calendar read from the tasks. That setup works in most tools above, and running it once tells you more than any feature comparison.

Then trial two tools with that same campaign. If your reviews are comments and a named approver, compare a simple tool such as Breeze with a deeper one such as Asana Starter. If legal or brand needs markup and a sign-off record, compare Hive with proofing against Asana Advanced or Wrike Business. After one launch you will know which one your team keeps updating without being asked.