What do project management software buyers wish they had known before buying? In Alium Research's verified interviews, the central lesson is that the tool matters less than the build around it and the people asked to use it. Buyers describe six recurring lessons: the licence may be the smaller cost next to the setup, the people who submit and follow work need seats and a reason to log in, Jira is rated by the job it is given, teams keep their own tools beside the official one, unhappy users rarely leave, and some of the AI that saves time is something teams build around the tool. These accounts come mainly from marketing, e-commerce and digital teams rather than engineering departments. For the two most-compared tools side by side, see Asana vs. monday.com; for Workfront inside the wider Adobe stack, the Adobe Experience Cloud stack; and for the agents and automations several of these teams now build, what is AI workflow automation software?
The six lessons
The licence may be the small cost; the build can decide whether it works
For several buyers of the more configurable tools, the implementation and the upkeep after it weigh as much in the economics as the subscription. A hotel group's marketing-workflow director puts the implementation at about four times the licence cost: “The licenses are cheap. We spend nothing on licenses. The money we've spent so far since I've had Workfront in two years is like four times what I spent on licenses for implementation.” An airline's digital-experience lead rates Workfront a 7 rather than higher because “it's an extremely complex product, you need a consultant to be able to set it up.” The same comes up beyond Workfront. A home-services company's e-commerce marketing head says of Jira that “You need an entire person, if not an entire team, to be able to set up the Jira infrastructure,” and an apparel brand's chief digital officer says of Airtable “There's a ton of functionality, but you have to build it all correctly.” These are individual implementations, not a typical ratio for the category. Several buyers also tie their satisfaction to how well the system was built. A regional bank's marketing-technology SVP rates Workfront a 5 because the team is “really only using it as basically a spreadsheet today,” and says that has nothing to do with the product itself, while the bank in the stories below saw its view rise as its implementation matured. Setup can shape satisfaction a great deal, though these accounts cannot say how much of a product's overall rating it explains. The Asana vs. monday.com comparison finds the same about who owns the setup; these accounts show it applies to the heavier platforms too. The implication — ours, not a buyer's — is to price the build, any outside help and an internal owner alongside the licence.
Named in this context: Adobe Workfront · Jira · Airtable
Plan for the people who submit and follow work, not only the people who run it
The people who run these tools tend to defend them; the complaints come from the people around them. A real-estate company's digital-marketing associate director says Workfront is “not something super user-oriented. It's more a project manager-oriented solution.” A consumer-electronics company's brand director says “Designers and writers see Workfront as an administrative overhead rather than a helpful tool.” Access is the other half. A membership-services company's head of CRM says colleagues on Jira “can raise tickets, but a lot of times they can't actually see, like, updates on tickets and get notifications,” and wonders whether that is the company's own configuration. At a medical-technology company, Workfront has come and gone more than once: “So limited licenses brought limited adoption, and it kind of went away from there.” It is back, with a request-and-approval process built around it. Adobe's documentation, checked in November 2026, describes four licences: Standard, to plan, create and track projects; Light, to view and approve work and follow reports; Contributor, to submit, track, update and approve requests; and External, unpaid, to view shared documents and calendar reports and approve shared documents. Light and Contributor users can be assigned work but cannot complete it; External users cannot be assigned work. On newer plans, Contributor and External users have a monthly, plan-dependent limit on proof and document decisions; Adobe says a Contributor who reaches it is upgraded to Light automatically and the administrator is emailed. The buying question — ours, not a buyer's — is what each requester, reviewer and occasional collaborator must do in the tool, not only how many managers need a full seat.
Named in this context: Adobe Workfront · Jira
Jira is rated by the job it is given
Marketing and digital buyers judge Jira by how their own setup handles their work. Some describe a workspace shaped around bugs and IT tickets that is heavy going for briefs and assets; others have built workflows that fit marketing operations. A global apparel retailer's lifecycle strategist gives it a 5: “Jira as a tool is great when you're listing bugs, but for my use case, I'd give it a five.” The time goes into copying links and assets into each ticket by hand — “Those are real big time sucks for me.” An insurance company's digital-communications director, whose team chose Basecamp, says “Jira is better suited for the digital and IT space.” Some companies split the work by job: a digital-health company's digital-experience director says “We prefer to use Jira, which is what we use for our own internal work. But when we work with the creative team, we have to use Asana.” The counter-case is real. A digital-media company's marketing-operations VP, whose teams run their work in Jira, says “it's just easy to build in Jira.” Atlassian's own pages for marketing teams offer templates, forms for creative requests, approvals and automation, so these accounts describe each team's setup rather than a fixed limit of the product. The implication — ours, not a buyer's — is to test the configured workflow rather than the product's reputation elsewhere: have marketers submit a brief, attach assets, request an approval and hand work off in the exact setup they would use, and run a bug or a sprint through the same setup before deciding whether one configuration can serve both teams.
Named in this context: Jira · Asana · Basecamp
Expect more than one tool — teams keep their own
The official tool is often not the only one. A global beauty company's digital product director says there is no single enterprise tool for project management: “So every team kind of just does their own ad hoc thing.” A nonprofit publisher's digital-asset director asks “Why are we this area using Smartsheet and this area using Airtable, and this area using Work Otter to do their work.” A hospital system's digital-marketing director explains why the split lasts: “People are happy with them if they contain the one thing that they need. They kind of ignore all the other things, and if it doesn't contain the one thing that they need, then they like the other platform.” Sometimes nobody chose the split. At a consumer-goods group, the marketing and creative teams that picked Asana “were not aware that Wrike was available within the organization.” Others make it deliberate: a global electronics company's marketing head rates Wrike an 8 for “people that really manage complex projects,” and runs “Microsoft Loop for everyone and Wrike for the people that are more involved and engaged in more complex projects.” For how consolidation played out between Asana and monday.com, see the comparison.
Named in this context: Wrike · Smartsheet · Airtable · Asana · Microsoft Loop
Unhappy users rarely means leaving — the tools many teams lean on are the hardest to move
A low rating and a move are different things here. A travel company's marketing director rates Smartsheet a 3 and would like a different tool, but “There's a lot of company history with Smartsheet and a lot of teams that use it outside of the marketing and tech teams,” so the team is working with the vendor to make it fit instead. At an industrial manufacturer, IT considered cutting Smartsheet off, found how widely it was used, and “the decision is just to stay with Smartsheet and then have us try and standardize the use.” A consumer-finance company says of Workfront “It's something that we tolerate and everyone in the business uses,” because changing it “would delay a variety of campaigns,” and a real-estate company evaluated a replacement and kept Workfront because it “didn't make sense for us to start building a lot of connectors and new solutions and migrating all our data and projects.” Where companies did move, the reason given is specific. A regional grocery chain “stopped using Workfront due to its extremely high cost” for its creative work, and a month into the replacement says teams are not thrilled with that either. A healthcare distributor's customer-success team moved from Smartsheet to monday.com because “Smartsheet just was lacking in their delegation, and it just became like this big, huge notetaking Excel.” These are individual decisions, not a trend in either direction. The implication — ours, not a buyer's — is that the cost of leaving grows with every team and connection a tool picks up, so the first rollout is the cheapest moment to choose.
Named in this context: Smartsheet · Adobe Workfront · monday.com
Some of the AI saving time is built around the tool, not bought with it
Several buyers who describe AI saving them time on project work point to agents and automations their teams built around the tools they already had, rather than to the tools' own AI alone. A European fashion retailer's e-commerce product owner says creating tickets once took “more than four hours” and now “maybe lasts one hour together with the agent, who creates all the Jiras for me.” A small-business software company chases missing inputs automatically: “Anytime someone makes a ticket, if they're missing inputs or have technical dependencies, we have a campaign manager agent that pings that person.” Two teams went further. A furniture retailer's integrated-marketing director says the team “replaced one of our project management tools with a self-built AI project management site or interface,” and the software company says it is “unsubscribing from Airtable and moving fully to our in-house AI-built tool” — a planned exit, not yet a completed one. The vendors' own AI draws mixed accounts. A construction company's marketing VP says “I really don't trust the AI portion of Airtable yet,” and a publishing and information company's marketing VP found at a monday.com event “there were new AI-enabled modules and features that we weren't actually aware of that wasn't on our version of it.” Both describe one company's plan and version, not what the current product can do, and the agents above are individual workflows, not evidence that a tool's own AI cannot do comparable work. Jira itself now lets teams assign work items to AI agents, mention them in comments and start them from a workflow step, third-party agents included; Atlassian opened this in beta in February 2026 and made it generally available in May. The choice — ours to frame, not a buyer's — is whether to use the AI built into the tool, connect an agent the team already runs, or build a separate workflow.
Named in this context: Jira · Airtable · monday.com · Zapier
How buyers rate the tools
Among the project and work-management tools rated by enough buyers to carry a decimal, monday.com has the highest average at 7.9/10, followed by Asana at 7.7 and Jira at 7.6; Adobe Workfront rates 6.9. Wrike, Airtable and Smartsheet each rate around 7 on fewer ratings, and three tools have too few ratings to publish a number. Every figure is the tool's average across verified buyer interviews, on published transcripts, from every buyer in the corpus who rates it.
| Tool | Rating | What buyers describe |
|---|---|---|
| monday.com | 7.9 | Flexible boards and an interface new users pick up; a good build takes upfront work, and some find dashboards and notifications hard to manage. |
| Asana | 7.7 | Easy to use, with task structure and templates for marketing and creative work; getting every team onto it is the recurring complaint. |
| Jira | 7.6 | Strong for bugs, sprints and website projects; marketers using it for briefs describe many fields, manual copying and a setup that needs a dedicated person. |
| Adobe Workfront | 6.9 | Praised for intake, approvals and an audit trail; buyers describe long implementations, outside consultants, seat costs and requesters who resist it. |
| Wrike | around 7 | Rated well by people running complex projects; some teams beside it found another tool easier to adopt. |
| Airtable | around 7 | A flexible database that spreads once built; buyers say it needs someone who knows it well, and some call it expensive. |
| Smartsheet | around 7 | Familiar to anyone who knows spreadsheets and widely used across departments; critics call it a sophisticated Excel. |
| Notion | not rated | Praised by a few buyers for search across their documents; too few ratings to publish a number. |
| Trello | not rated | Kept by some teams as their own board beside the company tool; too few ratings to publish a number. |
| ClickUp | not rated | Chosen by a few companies as their main tool, including some leaving Workfront or Wrike; too few ratings to publish a number. |
The stories behind the lessons
The counter-current: when the build is done, the tool works
Not every buyer is fighting their tool. A telecommunications company runs its campaign intake through Workfront, where campaign and program owners enter their own requests, and says “we have been pretty successful in using it to its potential. I would rate it a nine.” A digital-media company's marketing-operations team avoids the access problem by connecting Jira to the tools other teams already use: “If you're not necessarily on a team that's working in Jira, we can bring Jira to your particular platform with really no friction.” The satisfied buyers here tend to have finished the build, named someone to own it, and decided who works in the tool and who only feeds it.
Want a review of your own stack?
Get my review →What this means for your project-management decision
Across these interviews, the decisions that matter are less about the feature list than about the build, the people and the tools already in place. Based on these buyer experiences, our recommendations — not practices buyers describe — are these. Price the whole rollout: the licences, the implementation, any consultants, and an internal owner who will maintain the structure. List everyone who will submit, follow or approve work, check which seat type each needs on the plan you would buy, and price each role. Test the tool on your team's own work — a creative brief and an approval as well as a task list — with the people least keen on a new tool. Decide which work has to sit in one shared tool, usually what several teams hand off or executives report on, and let teams keep their own boards for the rest. Check which AI features come with the plan you would buy, and whether the tool connects to the agents and automations your team already runs. And choose with care at the first rollout, because the cost of leaving grows with every team that joins. For the two most-compared tools side by side, see Asana vs. monday.com; for whether tools travel with the people who choose them, do marketing tools follow people?
Common questions
What do project management software buyers wish they had known before buying?
Six things recur in these interviews. The licence may be the smaller cost: the more configurable tools can take a long, often consultant-led build, and several buyers tie their rating to how well that build went. The people who submit and follow work need planning as much as the people who run the tool, because seat types and permissions decide who can see what. Jira is rated by the job it is given, high for bugs and web work and lower as a creative brief. Teams keep their own tools beside the official one. Unhappy users rarely leave, because the tools many teams depend on are the hardest to move. And some of the AI that saves time is built around the tool rather than bought with it.
Is Adobe Workfront worth it?
It depends on the build. Buyers praise it for campaign intake, approvals and an audit trail, and one team that runs its whole intake through it rates it 9/10. Others describe implementations that took months and outside consultants, designers and writers who see it as overhead, and licence costs that limited who got a seat. Adobe Workfront rates 6.9/10 across the buyers who rate it. Our recommendation, not a practice buyers describe: price the implementation and the seat types for everyone who will submit or approve work, not only the licences for the people who run it.
Is Jira good for marketing teams?
For some marketing work. Buyers rate it well for bugs, sprints and website projects, and one marketing-operations team runs its work in Jira and calls it easy to build in. Others rate it lower when it is used as a campaign or creative brief form, describe filling in many fields and copying links by hand, and say setting it up takes a dedicated person. Some companies run Jira for digital work and Asana or another tool for creative teams. Atlassian offers marketing templates, request forms, approvals and automation for Jira, so these accounts describe each team's setup rather than a fixed limit of the product. Jira rates 7.6/10 across the buyers who rate it.
Which project management tool do buyers rate highest?
Among the tools rated by enough buyers to carry a decimal, monday.com rates 7.9/10, Asana 7.7, Jira 7.6 and Adobe Workfront 6.9. Wrike, Airtable and Smartsheet each rate around 7 on fewer ratings, and Notion, Trello and ClickUp have too few to publish a number. Buyers' ratings of the same tool vary widely with how it was set up, so the rating says less about fit than the build and the people who will use it.
Should a company standardize on one project management tool?
These interviews do not settle it. Several companies run two or more tools, sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose, such as a simple tool for everyone and a heavier one for people who run complex projects. Consolidations do happen, and several of the moves here followed a cost decision, a new leader or an acquisition rather than a product comparison. Our recommendation, not a practice buyers describe: put the work several teams hand off or executives report on in one shared tool, and let teams keep their own boards for the rest.
A tech stack review, powered by the buyers who've been there
What matters most to you, a shortlist for your stack, and the next steps to take — built from hundreds of verified buyer interviews.
Get my stack reviewFree · no password · your answers are anonymized before they inform research like this.