Spoiler alert: Most project management tools aren’t built for creative work. They work well for task management, but not so well for everything else. That’s where creative project management tools like Superspace come in. Learn about today’s best platforms and find your team’s ideal fit for more creative output and less spreadsheet acrobatics.
When it comes to project management, creative work at scale is an entirely different beast. Campaigns move fast, deadlines shift and feedback comes in from every direction. Yet most project management tools were designed for linear workflows, not the creative chaos of complex campaigns and projects.
Over half (55%) of project managers say budget overruns are the top cause of failure, and nearly 70% of projects fail to deliver what was promised. Organizations that invest in modern project management systems waste 28 times less money than those that don’t, proof that the right tools pay for themselves.
Still, creative work doesn’t fit into rigid project templates. Design, content and marketing teams lose hours chasing updates and approvals across platforms, apps and threads.
Most agencies estimate that between 15% and 40% of their time is spent on rework. And even with design project management software in place, 84% of marketing leaders say they experience “collaboration drag” caused by too many meetings, unclear ownership and disconnected systems.
That’s where creative project management tools come in. The best ones combine structure, visibility and seamless collaboration so creative teams can move fast and stay in control. Some focus on workflow and proofing, others on dashboards and reporting.
Then there’s Superspace, built for creative and marketing teams that move fast, scale globally and can’t afford any bottlenecks. Available only to Superside customers, this intuitive platform connects creative execution with real-time budget visibility, so every project stays on time, on brand and on budget.
In this article, we unpack the project management challenges creative and marketing leaders face, what sets the best creative management tools apart and how to pick the perfect solution for your enterprise, with insights from Superside’s Senior Product Marketing Manager, Monica Romaniuc.
The challenges creative leaders face
Creative projects rarely move in a straight line. Campaigns shift when launch dates change, business priorities pivot or new opportunities emerge. In this dynamic environment, creative directors and their teams are forced to adapt assets on the fly.
All too often, team leaders are stuck in spreadsheets, trying to answer even the simplest questions:
- Which teams are at capacity?
- Where is the budget going?
- What’s delayed?
- Which expenses are draining funds the fastest?
Without the proper creative project management and collaboration tools, creative teams lose hours as they chase feedback, search for files and untangle conversations spread across threads and channels. Every launch and update becomes a scramble, and teams spend more time reporting on time spent than doing the creative work.
This chaotic cycle impacts not only delivery speed but also creative quality, team morale, and, ultimately, business outcomes, as our “Overcommitted” report unpacks.
What 200+ creative leaders had to say
There’s a reason we called it the Overcommitted Report.
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What to look for in a creative project management tool
An effective creative project management tool makes the messy parts of creative operations more straightforward to manage. It combines clarity, collaboration and control. That means:
- Clear briefs. Every project starts with the right context and goals.
- Smooth feedback loops. Reviews stay organized and in one place.
- Useful reports. Data is presented in a format your CMO and CFO will actually read.
- Real-time budgets. Every cost is accounted for, so there are no end-of-month surprises.
Generic project management tools often stop at task lists and project timelines, but today’s creative teams need much more.
The best tools bring everything together: Assets, budgets, file sharing and workflow visibility, so creative work connects directly to business goals. These platforms let teams work freely within clear boundaries and help leaders maintain control.
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The top 10 creative project management tools
On the hunt for the best project management software for creatives? Here are the 10 platforms most enterprise teams rely on.
1. Superspace (by Superside)
Superspace, the central hub that’s used for every project you run with Superside, is at the top of this list for a reason. It’s exclusive to our customers and combines project tracking, collaboration, digital asset management and real-time budget visibility in one intuitive workspace.
Built by Superside’s global creative teams and powered by AI-driven workflows, Superspace blends human expertise with smart automation to help teams deliver high-quality creative faster and more efficiently than with traditional project management tools.
Superspace brings your creative partner, budget and projects into one place so you can see work, track spend and shift budgets as priorities change, making it easier to plan ahead, course-correct in real time and prove impact.
Instead of using multiple software tools, teams can brief work, monitor progress, review assets and control budgets seamlessly via a single platform. Every stage of creative production, from intake to delivery, is centralized, which reduces endless feedback loops and panicky “where’s that file?!” moments.
What makes Superspace different?
Like other project management platforms, Superspace shows you where a task sits in a workflow. But here’s the difference: It also shows you how the work impacts budgets across teams.
Every request, approval and asset delivery updates your spend in real-time, so you can see your output and cost in one view.
New: Teams and budgets that move with your priorities
Recently, we introduced the Teams & Budgets feature, which marks a major step forward in creative operations.
The Teams & Budget Feature for Superspace came from seeing the same challenge pop up again and again, especially with our larger customers. They’re managing creative work across multiple departments, regions, and campaigns, all with different needs and different budgets.
With this feature, you can now also:
- Assign budgets by team. You can create teams based on departments or campaigns and set a clear budget for each. Everyone knows what they can request and deliver, with no risk of overspending.
- Reallocate funds on the fly. If the brand team finishes early and the product marketing team needs extra design work, you can shift funds between teams in seconds. No paperwork or waiting on the finance team for approvals.
- Get real-time usage and alerts. You can see spending as it happens and get notified when teams are close to their limit. This means you can adjust things before the budget blows up.
- Easily handle rollovers and overages. You can carry over unused budgets when it makes sense, or reset each cycle to keep teams accountable. Any overages are tracked clearly for planning and reporting on key metrics.
- View mini balance sheets per team. You can see what’s been used, what’s in progress and what’s left to spend. Each team’s creative and financial activity is visible at a glance.
At scale, access to design isn’t just about having more creatives; it’s about managing that work effectively across teams, timelines, and budgets. If teams are constantly vying for resources or struggling to understand where things stand, creative output slows down.
Monica adds, “this feature helps remove those bottlenecks. It brings clarity to who owns what, how much budget they have, and where it’s being used. This way, creative teams can focus on delivering, not chasing approvals or tracking spend.”
How does work flow in Superspace?
Another benefit is that Superspace keeps every stage of creative production connected:
- Intake without friction: You can start every project with pre-built request templates that capture goals, audience details, specs, channels, deadlines and examples. Scope and creative requirements are clear from the start, so production can begin fast.
- Plan with templates and team capacity in mind: You can apply task templates that mirror your creative stages, and assign work by skill and availability. You can see at a glance what’s blocked, what’s in motion and what’s next.
- Review and approve with fewer loops: You can share preview links that work for any stakeholder. They can then comment directly on assets, frames or copy via a single intuitive interface. Approvals lock automatically, with a full audit trail for each project, so there’s no confusion about who said what.
- Track budgets as work ships: Your team and account balances update in real time. You can move funds when priorities shift and report by team, project or owner for clean, ready-to-share readouts.
The result is faster delivery, stronger collaboration and total transparency, from brief to hand-off.
What can you replace with Superspace?
Once you use Superspace, you can say goodbye to:
- Spreadsheets for tracking creative spend.
- Ad-hoc project boards that don’t connect to spend.
- Long feedback threads in messenger apps or email.
- Manual leadership reports built from multiple tools.
Where does Superspace fit best?
Our proprietary platform is ideal for:
- Enterprises that manage multiple brands, markets and campaigns.
- Leaders who need visibility across teams and budgets.
- Ops teams focused on efficiency and governance.
- Creative teams that want fewer meetings and faster approvals.
Superspace keeps everyone aligned and accountable, without the usual bottlenecks.
Asana, Monday, and Wrike are all excellent at task tracking, workflow management, and cross-team visibility. They give you timelines, boards, automations, and dashboards — but they stop short when it comes to one of the biggest pain points for creative leaders: budget visibility and control.
Superspace: Example scenarios
Want an even clearer picture? The three scenarios below illustrate how Superspace can streamline your operations.
Superspace was built specifically for creative operations: it organizes projects and approvals and ties them to real-time budget management. With it, you can assign budgets by team, track usage as work progresses, reallocate funds when priorities change, and get alerts before a team overspends. You can also generate reports by team, project or timeframe that satisfy both CMOs and finance leaders.
Scenario 1: Urgent launch without budget drama
The growth team urgently needs creative assets next week, and the brand team hasn’t fully exhausted its monthly budget. With Superspace, funds can be instantly shifted from the brand team to the growth team within the platform.
Work begins right away, approvals happen seamlessly in-app, and the finance team gets real-time budget updates without any manual tracking.
Scenario 2: Quarter-end reporting in an hour
It’s time for your quarterly report, but you have a million things on the go. With Superspace, you quickly pull detailed usage data by team, owner and project, which highlights budget rebalances, overages and rollovers.
Within an hour, you can have summaries that anticipate the finance team’s questions before they get a chance to ask.
Scenario 3: Governance without bottlenecks
You grant trusted requesters access to submit work within clear budget limits. This means teams can self-serve within clear guardrails. Approvals remain tight and audit-ready but flow quickly.
In a nutshell: The right tool makes all the difference. Designed for creative teams that operate at enterprise scale, Superspace can help you expand your creative output with ease. You get the reach and flexibility of an agency, minus the sky-high costs and delays.
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Other creative project management tools
Many creative teams use a mix of project management tools to keep their campaigns and creative projects on track. Some platforms focus on collaboration, others on workflow visibility or analytics.
Here are nine more project management platforms to consider for your team:
2. Wrike
(Source: Wrike)
Wrike helps large teams bring structure and visibility to complex projects. It combines task tracking, Gantt charts, resource planning and advanced reporting in one scalable workspace.
With more than 400 integrations (e.g., Adobe Creative Cloud, Slack and Salesforce), the project management tool gives teams a clear view of every campaign across departments and regions.
Best for: Large organizations that manage multi-team creative or marketing projects with complex dependencies and tight deadlines.
Limitations: The depth of features and layered permissions can add setup time, which may slow teams that prefer to move fast from the get-go.
3. Monday.com
(Source: monday.com)
Monday gives creative teams a flexible, visual space to plan, track and deliver work. It supports multiple views (Kanban, Gantt, Timeline) and hundreds of integrations with tools for managing creative projects such as Slack, Google Drive and Microsoft Teams.
Automations help simplify repetitive tasks, so teams can focus on output instead of admin. It’s also especially useful for project management for content teams.
Best for: Marketing and content operations teams that want a customizable, visual project management tool with built-in automation.
Limitations: Advanced proofing, version control and budget tracking often rely on third-party add-ons, which can add cost and complexity.
4. Asana
(Source: Asana)
Asana remains one of the most recognizable tools for creative teams. It’s clean, intuitive and helps teams stay aligned with clear owners, timelines and milestones.
Creative teams use Asana as a central place to assign tasks, manage deliverables and visualize campaign progress.
Best for: Teams that want a simple, structured project management tool to manage priorities and keep projects in flow.
Limitations: Asana doesn’t include native budget/financial tracking, which means many teams add finance integrations to close the loop.
5. ClickUp
(Source: ClickUp)
ClickUp positions itself as an all-in-one workspace where teams can manage projects, docs, chat, time-tracking and more.
The platform includes robust design collaboration software capabilities, such as proofing and multi-format previews (List, Board, Gantt, Whiteboard).
Best for: Marketing and design teams that need a flexible, feature-rich platform to manage campaigns and cross-team collaboration.
Limitations: Its deep customization can introduce a steep learning curve for new users and a longer setup time before teams reach full speed.
6. Adobe Workfront
(Source: Adobe Workfront)
Adobe Workfront is built for enterprise-scale creative operations. The project management tool offers a unified system that lets teams plan, assign, execute, review and report on work from a single platform.
Workfront supports advanced workflows, automations, proofing and approval processes, and integrates deeply with the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem. It’s also one of the most established creative operations tools for enterprise teams that prioritize governance and compliance.
Best for: Large organizations with strict brand, regulatory or governance requirements.
Limitations: Its enterprise depth may feel heavy for small or agile teams that value flexibility over process.
7. Hive
(Source: Hive)
Hive brings projects, communication and feedback together in one platform.
It supports multiple project views (Kanban, Gantt, Table), unlimited tasks, built-in chat and email integration, and proofing and approval workflows for creative assets.
Best for: Mid-sized creative or marketing teams that juggle multiple marketing campaigns and need a single task-management solution.
Limitations: While strong on collaboration, Hive doesn’t yet include advanced budget-tracking or governance features for large enterprise setups.
8. Notion
(Source: Notion)
Notion is a flexible, all-in-one workspace where teams can plan, document and track work in one place. It combines notes, databases, boards, calendars and wikis, so teams don’t need to hop between multiple tools for managing creative projects.
Best for: Small to midsize creative or marketing teams that want to manage brand guides, content calendars or brainstorming sessions in one shared space.
Limitations: Notion lacks built-in proofing workflows, advanced automation and budget tracking for enterprise-scale creative production.
9. Trello
(Source: Trello)
Trello’s visual boards make it easy to see which projects are in the pipeline and who’s responsible for them. It’s great if you’d like to map marketing campaign stages, assign deliverables and track smaller projects.
Trello’s card-based system feels intuitive for creative workflows and quick iteration.
Best for: Small creative or marketing teams or freelancers that manage straightforward projects or content pipelines.
Limitations: This platform doesn’t include advanced analytics, budget tracking or native proofing tools for high-volume creative operations.
10. Basecamp
(Source: Basecamp)
Basecamp focuses on clear communication and simple project tracking. It includes message boards, shared to-do lists, document storage, scheduling and chat, all in one hub.
This platform was designed to replace messy email threads and help small teams stay aligned.
Best for: Small creative or marketing teams that want an easy communication and collaboration hub.
Limitations: Basecamp is light on native proofing, budget tracking and detailed performance dashboards. Time tracking is usually handled through integrations.
Each of these tools can support creative teams in different ways. But only Superspace was designed to combine creative workflow and budget visibility in the innovative way it does.
How to choose the right creative project management tool
The right project management platform depends on your team’s size and complexity. Small teams need speed and simplicity; enterprise teams need proofing, capacity planning and budget visibility.
When you compare options, ask yourself:
- Does the tool connect creative briefs, projects and budgets?
- Can it adapt when priorities shift?
- Does it cut admin or create more of it?
- Does it give leaders a clear view of creative and financial performance?
Once again, Superspace stands head and shoulders above the rest. It combines creative performance and financial control in one platform, which allows creative teams to create freely and leaders to scale securely.
The future of creative project management with Superside
Creative work has outgrown generic project management tools. Modern creative teams need systems that give them the visibility to plan budgets, report results and reallocate resources instantly.
Superspace, which treats budgets as part of the workflow rather than an afterthought, represents the next evolution of creative project management.
Where Asana, Monday, and Wrike require external spreadsheets or add-ons to manage spend, Superspace eliminates that manual layer. It becomes both the creative workflow hub and the financial oversight tool, built into one platform for Superside customers.
If your teams are still tangled in messy spreadsheets and lengthy status meetings, it’s time for a 21st-century upgrade. Superspace is the only platform designed specifically for creative leaders who demand scalability, speed and financial clarity, all in one connected space.
Ready to leave the creative chaos behind? Then, Superspace is the answer.
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