monday.com for agencies performs well when the setup reflects how agencies actually work: projects tied to clients, creative resources shared across accounts, deliverables moving through predictable review and sign-off cycles. The platform gives you the building blocks; it does not hand you a finished agency operating system. With the right monday.com implementation behind it, boards shaped around retainers, campaigns, and project management workflows become a genuine creative operations platform. This guide covers how agencies configure monday.com, how it compares to the tools you are probably already using, and where the most common setup mistakes happen.
Most project management tools are designed for a team building a single product. Agencies operate differently:
These realities demand cross-client visibility, creative capacity tracking, and structured approval flows running in parallel. A tool optimized for a single internal team does not handle that naturally. A platform you can configure from the ground up does.
That is the core argument for monday.com in an agency context: it is flexible enough to model how your agency works, not how a software vendor assumed you work. The catch (and it matters) is that the platform does not configure itself. The quality of your setup determines the quality of your experience.
Here is what well-configured agencies actually run on monday.com:
Each client account or campaign gets its own board, or an item per project on a shared board if your work follows a standard shape. Columns track deliverable status, assigned creative, due dates, brief links, and review rounds. Automations trigger when a deliverable moves into review, route it to the correct reviewer, and escalate if a deadline passes without a status change.
A resource management board combined with monday.com’s workload view shows which designers, copywriters, and strategists are at capacity across your account roster and which have room to absorb new briefs. Account leads can see creative hours burned against a campaign retainer in real time, before the client realizes there is a problem.
Using monday.com’s guest access, monday workdocs, or an integrated proofing tool, agencies route proofs and sign-offs through one place rather than email threads and shared drives. Every version, comment, and approval is logged against the deliverable item, creating a clear audit trail for each creative asset.
Boards can include budget columns, hours logged, and threshold columns that flag when a campaign is approaching or over retainer scope. This is not a full accounting system, but it closes the gap between creative delivery and billing and eliminates the end-of-month scramble to reconstruct what happened on an account.
Prospect boards track pitch dates, proposal status, RFP deadlines, and follow-up activity. Account managers see which opportunities are live and which need a nudge, without switching between a separate CRM and the delivery workspace.
For live examples of agencies running content operations at scale on the platform, see monday.com’s customer stories.
Structure is where most agency setups go wrong. The natural instinct is one board per project, which turns into hundreds of boards within months and a workspace nobody can navigate. Three better approaches:
Works for agencies with a small, stable roster of retainer clients and consistent project shapes. Cross-client dashboards pull from each client board to give leadership a single view of delivery health.
Better for high-volume agencies running many similar-shaped campaigns or briefs. A “Campaign Delivery” board holds every active campaign across all clients. Client name, account lead, and due date are columns rather than separate boards. Status filtering replaces the need to open individual boards.
Right for larger agencies where account teams operate with some independence. Each client folder contains a project board, a content calendar, and a resource log. Account managers work inside their folder; leadership works from cross-workspace dashboards that aggregate across folders.
Every agency setup, regardless of structure, needs a few things in common:
The agencies that outgrow their setup fastest are those that skip the automation layer. Manual status updates and chat pings replace what should be a configured system, and the platform stops delivering value within a few months.
| Tool | Creative production strengths | Honest limitations for agencies |
|---|---|---|
| monday.com | Flexible approval workflow builder; multi-account creative resource views; new-business pipeline alongside delivery in one workspace | No native proofing tool; creative review configurations require deliberate setup |
| Asana | Clean task structure; reliable for deadline-driven deliverable tracking | Less flexible for iterative creative feedback loops; advanced dashboards on higher plan tiers |
| ClickUp | Highly customizable; multiple view types suit varied campaign shapes | Complexity can overwhelm creative teams; learning curve steep for non-technical users |
| Smartsheet | Grid-based tracking works well for structured production schedules | Non-grid views feel secondary; less intuitive for teams who work visually |
| Wrike | Native proofing and markup built for creative review cycles; strong version management on assets | Can feel rigid if your creative workflow does not match its assumed model; steeper learning curve |
| Trello | Low entry barrier; visual card boards familiar to creative teams | Limited reporting and cross-account visibility; agencies outgrow it as client count grows |
The honest comparison: Wrike and monday.com are the two most purpose-fit tools for agencies at the mid-market level. Wrike has native creative proofing built in. monday.com has broader coverage across creative delivery, new-business pipeline, and multi-account resourcing in a single workspace, with a more accessible configuration layer for non-technical operations leads.
If your agency needs proofing-specific features today and creative review is your only pain point, Wrike is worth evaluating. If you want one platform that grows with your agency across campaign delivery, client approvals, resource planning, and new business, monday.com is the stronger long-term bet. The condition that applies in both cases: the implementation quality determines the outcome, not the tool name.
Beyond board structure, a well-implemented agency workspace typically requires:
Getting these elements right in the initial build saves significant rework in the first year. The most common failure mode is agencies that configure monday.com themselves, hit avoidable structural limitations after a few months, and conclude the platform does not work. The actual problem was the setup. A poorly structured workspace creates the same friction as no system at all.
If your agency already uses monday.com but the setup is causing more problems than it solves, a monday.com Scan is a structured review of what is working, what is creating friction, and what to rebuild first.
For agencies that work across related verticals, see how the same platform adapts: monday.com for events teams, monday.com for e-commerce, and monday.com for marketing teams.
monday.com is a strong fit for agencies when the implementation reflects your real creative workflows, your client structure, and your team’s habits. A well-built setup gives account leads real-time visibility into campaign delivery, creative teams clear handoffs through each review stage, and finance accurate retainer billing data, all from one place.
Book a free intro call with Tryve to talk through your agency’s specific workflow and what a well-configured monday.com environment would look like for your team.
Tryve is a monday.com Platinum Partner. Every engagement starts with a structured discovery session built around your actual processes, not a generic template. Senior consultants stay involved through adoption, not just go-live. Book a free intro call.
Tryve is a monday.com platinum partner and helps companies with implementing state-of-the-art project management tools!
