Which project management tool gives your clients a real portal?

Teamwork.com is the only tool here built for agencies from day one, and it shows in how it treats your clients. There are three account types. Your team members take paid seats. Client users are free: you attach them to an external company, set their rights project by project, and they follow progress without admin powers. Collaborators, also free, can check off tasks assigned to them, comment and view files, but can't create tasks or log time. Note that the Free plan doesn't let you invite client users: they come with Basics. On branding, Teamwork.com offers visual customization, not full white labeling.

On price, Basics is $9.99 per user per month billed yearly with a three-seat minimum, and Accelerate is $24.99 with a five-seat minimum. Paying yearly saves around 29% over monthly. Accelerate is where an agency gets real value: you invoice the client from time logged on their project, no spreadsheet in between. A five-person team on Accelerate runs about $125 a month, with every client added at no cost.

The catch you only hit with a big account: a client user can be active on 5 projects at a time. If a client has ten jobs open with you, move secondary contacts to collaborator accounts or consolidate their work into fewer projects. Reviewers complain about the learning curve, an interface that feels less intuitive than rivals, and some slowness. The praise lands right where this page cares: one project per client, with limited access the client logs into to follow along.

SuiteDash flips the usual order. It's a portal first: your client logs into a space with your logo and colors, drops and picks up files, signs contracts, pays invoices and follows the projects you share. The branding goes as far as a white-labeled mobile app, from the entry plan.

Price is its strongest argument. Clients and team members are unlimited on every plan: START is $19 a month ($180 a year), THRIVE $49 ($480 a year), PINNACLE $99 ($960 a year). Plans differ mainly on storage (100 GB, 500 GB, 2 TB) and advanced features. Five clients or three hundred, the bill stays the same. There's also a lifetime license, paid upfront, from $2,240 to $6,840 depending on the plan.

The downside shows up in almost every review: a steep learning curve. It does a lot, and each piece needs setting up. Some users also report slow pages, up to about ten seconds. Our advice: block a day or two for setup before inviting anyone, and open the portal to one friendly client first. Before buying a lifetime license, use the full 14-day trial: it's a one-time payment with no way back.

For years Asana treated clients as plain guests. With Client Management, it added a real portal: clients follow their projects, review deliverables and send feedback that becomes tasks in your workspace. Portal access needs no seat and costs the client nothing. Just know where it lives: the portal exists only on the Advanced tier. Client Management's Starter tier is a client directory.

Starter costs $10.99 per user per month billed yearly ($13.49 monthly), Advanced $24.99 ($30.49 monthly). Guests are free and unlimited from Starter, which is enough if your client only comments on tasks. Advanced brings approvals and proofing on PDFs and images: the client circles what needs fixing, leaves a note and approves the final version. For a creative agency, that's the feature that kills the email back-and-forth.

One thing to watch, raised on Asana's own forum: Client Management billing is unclear. One member described it as an alternative to the Advanced plan; another user saw it added on top of her invoice and had to go through finance. Our tip: before turning on the portal, ask in writing whether Client Management replaces or adds to your subscription, and check the next invoice line by line.

Nifty solves the client-cost problem the simplest way: on its flat plans, from Pro up, guests and clients are unlimited. Billed yearly, Pro comes to $79 a month for 10 members, Business to $124 for 30 members, Unlimited to $399 with no member cap; month to month, it's $99, $149 and $499. There's also per-member pricing ($10 on Pro, billed yearly), but it only includes 5 guests per paid seat, so an agency inviting lots of clients is safer on a flat plan. A free plan exists, limited to 2 projects and 100 MB of storage.

Inside a project, your client sees milestones, the tasks you show them, files and discussions. White labeling, which swaps Nifty's name for yours in the product, is included on Unlimited; on other plans it's a $30/month add-on billed yearly ($40 monthly). Nifty notes that a few spots keep its name.

Reviews are strong overall but flag three limits that matter for a portal. A guest can only chat with the admin or in project discussions. Guests have no dashboard of their own, so they navigate project by project. And storage runs short when you serve many clients. The mobile app also gets mixed marks. Our tip: create a "client sign-off" milestone in every project; it's often the only thing the client looks at.

monday.com has two ways to open a board to a client, and the difference changes your bill. Viewers are free and unlimited from the Basic plan: they see, but can't edit. Guests arrive from Standard and can work on the boards you share. They take up seats under a ratio monday.com sets: check it in your account before inviting clients.

On monday.com's US pricing page, Basic is $9 per seat per month, Standard $12, Pro $19, Enterprise on quote, plus a free plan for 2 seats. The trap is Basic: no guests at all. If your client has to comment or tick something off, you need Standard at least.

Our most useful setup: add any client who only follows progress as a viewer, and keep guest status for the one who really has to respond. Give each client a separate board fed by mirror columns from your internal board, so they never see your team's notes. The limit doesn't change: monday.com has no white labeling and no invoicing, so the client sees your tool.

ClickUp has no client portal, but its guest access is among the most flexible around, as long as you know the rules. On paid plans, read-only guests are free and unlimited. Guests who can comment or edit use a quota tied to your plan; past it, ClickUp adds a paid member seat to your bill. On the Free plan, guests only come with full rights, which isn't what you want for a client.

Unlimited is $10 per user per month, Business $19. You can invite a client to a specific list or folder, share a public view, or send a form so they submit requests that land as tasks. That combo often works best: the client fills a form, the request becomes a task on your side, and you share a read-only view so they can track it.

The limit: everything happens inside your ClickUp workspace, with its busy interface. A client who isn't comfortable gets lost quickly. Keep their projects in a separate space, and check monthly how many guests have edit rights: that's where paid seats appear without warning.

Wrike opens projects to outsiders through external users. They see the tasks shared with them, comment, attach files and change a status, but can't share anything themselves. On Pinnacle you can fine-tune their rights. Their big strength is proofing: the client marks up a visual or a document directly, and approval can run through several steps if your process needs it.

The catch is in the plan grid. External users exist on Free, Business, Pinnacle and Apex, but not on Team, the $10 per user per month plan. The Free plan has them, within its limits; once you pay, Team won't do, you need Business at $25 per user per month. Add a list of paid add-ons and a ten-person team's bill climbs fast.

Wrike is the lowest-rated tool in this ranking, mainly on ease of use and support. For a client who just follows a project, it's too heavy. For a team getting dozens of visuals approved every week, its proofing is still among the best.

Basecamp has a reputation as a calm tool that clients understand without training: a project, its messages, its to-dos, its files. You invite clients into the projects you open to them. The issue is in the pricing: on every plan except Pro Unlimited, each client counts toward your user limit.

The current lineup is flat: a free plan (1 project, 3 users), Freelancer at $29 a month (3 projects, 5 users), Pro at $79, Pro Plus at $99, and Pro Unlimited at $199 a month billed yearly ($329 monthly) with unlimited users. On Freelancer, two clients with two contacts each and your five seats are already gone.

Our take: Basecamp suits an agency with enough clients to justify Pro Unlimited, or a small team that invites one contact per client. It has no invoicing, no white labeling and no approval module: your client talks to you through messages, like a well-organized thread.