Monday.com vs Notion vs Asana for Project Management in a UK Digital Agency Under 50 People

Digital agencies do not manage projects the way software teams do. They run parallel client retainers with different scopes, juggle creative briefs that change mid-sprint and need to show clients enough visibility to justify their fees without exposing internal chaos. Monday.com, Notion and Asana all claim to handle this. They handle it differently. Monday.com is strongest on visual workflows and automations but charges per seat with a three-seat minimum that pushes small teams into spending more than they expected. Notion is the cheapest per head and unmatched for documentation, but its project management is bolted on rather than native. Asana is the cleanest for structured task management but gates its reporting behind the Advanced tier at roughly £21 per user per month. None of them is the obvious winner. The right choice depends on whether your agency's bottleneck is coordination, documentation or client reporting.

What a Digital Agency Actually Needs From a PM Tool

A 30-person digital agency running eight client accounts simultaneously needs five things from its project management software. First, multi-project visibility — the ability to see every active engagement on one screen without clicking through boards. Second, time tracking or a clean path to connect a time-tracking tool, because agencies bill by the hour or against fixed-fee budgets and need to know when they are bleeding margin. Third, client-facing views that show progress without exposing internal notes, timesheets or margin data. Fourth, automations that handle status updates, handoffs between departments and deadline reminders without requiring someone to babysit a Kanban board. Fifth, pricing that scales linearly — not a tool that costs £4 per head at 10 users and £25 per head at 40 because you hit a tier boundary. All three platforms deliver on the first two requirements. They diverge sharply on the last three.

GBP Pricing for UK Agencies in 2026

Monday.com prices in US dollars globally. For UK agencies, the effective GBP cost after conversion and VAT runs roughly as follows. The Free plan supports two users with three boards — it is a demo, not a working tool. Basic starts at $9 per seat per month billed annually, which converts to approximately £7.20 per seat before VAT. Standard is $12 per seat per month, roughly £9.60. Pro is $19 per seat per month, roughly £15.20. All paid plans enforce a three-seat minimum and seat counts ascend in blocks of five after that. A 25-person agency on the Standard plan pays around £240 per month before VAT, or £288 including VAT — roughly £3,456 per year.

Notion prices in GBP directly for UK customers. Free covers unlimited members with limited block storage. Plus is £7 per user per month billed annually. Business is £12.50 per user per month. Enterprise is £22.50 per user per month. Notion AI is bundled into Business and Enterprise tiers at no extra cost; Plus users pay an additional £6.50 per user per month for AI. A 25-person agency on the Business plan pays £312.50 per month before VAT, or £375 including VAT — roughly £4,500 per year.

Asana prices in US dollars. Personal is free for up to 10 users — genuinely usable for a very small team. Starter is $10.99 per user per month billed annually, roughly £8.80. Advanced is $24.99 per user per month, roughly £20. Enterprise is custom pricing. A 25-person agency on the Starter plan pays around £220 per month before VAT, or £264 including VAT — roughly £3,168 per year. But Starter lacks custom fields, advanced reporting and portfolios. To get those, you need Advanced at approximately £6,000 per year for 25 users.

Automation and the Hidden Ceiling

Monday.com's automation engine is its strongest selling point for agencies. Standard plan users get 250 automations per month. Pro gets 25,000. The jump matters because a busy 25-person agency will burn through 250 automations in a fortnight if it automates status changes, deadline alerts and task assignments across eight client boards. Hitting the ceiling means your automations silently stop working until the next billing cycle. This catches agencies out routinely. The fix is the Pro plan, but that adds roughly 60% to your annual bill.

Notion's automations arrived late and remain limited compared to Monday.com. You can trigger actions on database property changes — moving a task to Done can notify a channel or create a follow-up. But the logic is simpler, the triggers fewer and there is no native time-based automation. Agencies that need complex workflows typically pair Notion with Zapier or Make, which adds £15 to £50 per month depending on volume.

Asana offers rules-based automations on every paid plan, but the Starter tier restricts you to basic triggers. Advanced unlocks custom rules with branching logic, approval workflows and cross-project dependencies. For an agency managing creative approval chains — brief to designer to client review to revisions to sign-off — Asana's Advanced rules are the closest to a proper workflow engine of the three.

Client Collaboration Without Exposing the Sausage Factory

Agencies need to show clients progress. They do not need clients seeing internal Slack threads pasted into task comments, margin notes or the fact that the junior designer has been reassigned three times. Monday.com handles this through shareable boards with guest access. Guests are free on Standard and above, which is a material advantage. You can create a client-facing board that mirrors the internal board with filtered columns. It works, but keeping two boards in sync requires discipline or automations — and automations count against your monthly allowance.

Notion handles guest access differently. Free external guests can view published pages. Paid guest access on Business and Enterprise allows editing. The strength is that Notion pages double as client-facing deliverables — a content calendar, a brand guidelines wiki, a project tracker — all live in one workspace. The weakness is that permission granularity is coarse. It is harder to show a client row-level data from a database without giving them access to the entire database.

Asana's guest model charges nothing for guest access on any paid plan. Guests see only the projects they are invited to. The permissions are cleaner than Notion's and the interface is less overwhelming for clients who are not daily PM tool users. For agencies whose clients want a login to check progress rather than receive weekly PDF reports, Asana's guest experience is the smoothest of the three.

Reporting That Helps You Track Retainer Burn

Retainer tracking is the function that separates PM tools that work for agencies from those designed for product teams. A digital agency running a £5,000 monthly retainer needs to know by week two whether the team has already consumed 70% of the budgeted hours. Monday.com's dashboards on Pro plan can do this, combining time-tracking columns with formula columns and chart widgets. It takes configuration but it works. Standard plan dashboards exist but lack the formula columns that make retainer tracking meaningful.

Notion can track retainers using database relations and rollups. A time-logged database linked to a client database with a rollup summing hours gives you the data. But there is no native chart view — you need a third-party embed or export to a spreadsheet. For a 15-person agency comfortable with Notion's database model, this works. For a 40-person agency where the ops lead needs a dashboard they can glance at, it does not.

Asana's workload view and portfolio dashboards on the Advanced tier provide the clearest out-of-the-box retainer visibility. You can see hours allocated versus hours spent per project, per team member, per week. But you only get this on Advanced. On Starter, your reporting is limited to basic project status and you are back to exporting data to Google Sheets.

Where Each Tool Wins for a UK Digital Agency

Monday.com wins for agencies where cross-department handoffs are the bottleneck. If your workflow moves from strategy to design to development to QA to client review, and tasks get lost in those transitions, Monday.com's automations and visual board structure keep things moving. It also wins on free guest access and the flexibility of its column types. It loses on price at scale — a 40-person team on Pro pays over £8,700 per year before VAT.

Notion wins for agencies where documentation is the product. Content agencies, SEO agencies and consultancies that deliver strategy documents, wikis and knowledge bases alongside project work get more from Notion than from either competitor. The workspace doubles as a delivery platform. It loses on structured project management — there is no native Gantt chart, no workload balancing and no built-in time tracking.

Asana wins for agencies that need clean task management with minimal configuration. If your agency runs on task lists, due dates and dependencies rather than visual boards, Asana's interface is the fastest to learn and the hardest to misconfigure. Its guest access is the friendliest for client-facing use. It loses on flexibility — the structure is opinionated, and agencies that want to customise their workflow extensively find it rigid compared to Monday.com.

The Decision Framework

Start with your agency's primary pain point, not a feature comparison. If projects are falling through the cracks between departments, trial Monday.com Standard for 14 days with your real client boards. If your team spends more time writing documentation than managing tasks, trial Notion Business. If your current tool is too complex and nobody uses it properly, trial Asana Starter. Run the trial with your actual projects, not sample data. Invite two or three clients as guests and see whether they find it usable. Check whether the reporting gives you retainer burn data you can act on. At the end of 14 days, you will know more than any comparison article can tell you — including this one.

What About Switching Cost

The cost of switching PM tools is not the subscription. It is the three to six weeks of reduced productivity while your team learns the new system, the risk that half your team quietly goes back to spreadsheets and the client-facing disruption of changing how you share progress. For agencies already on one of these three tools, switching only makes sense if you have a structural problem the current tool cannot solve. If your Asana setup works but you wish the dashboards were better, add a reporting layer rather than migrating 40 people to Monday.com. If your Notion workspace has become a graveyard of half-maintained databases, the problem might be process rather than tooling. The best PM tool is the one your team actually uses. That is not a platitude. It is the single variable that predicts whether the subscription delivers value.