Why marketing and design agencies should switch to Plane

Use cases

Why marketing and design agencies should switch to Plane

Vihar Kurama

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30 May, 2024

In the world of agencies, every minute counts. Tight deadlines, multiple clients with shifting priorities, endless email + Slack threads, and the time wasted gathering information from scattered tools and teams. At the end of the day, you wish for more time or even a clone of yourself just to keep up.

The truth is that you don't need more time or your clones. What you need is better work management supported by tools that live up to their claims of making you faster, more efficient, and—let’s not forget the darling catchphrase of those tools—more productive. One of those is and should be a project management solution that is not just powerful, but also flexible enough to handle a range of projects with their unique complexities.

What you should look for in a project management tool?

While there’s no one-size-fits-all for agencies, there’s a few must-haves, nice-to-haves, and shouldn’t-haves your go-to project management tool should line up to.

Feature	What you want	What you don’t
Ease of use	Before anything else, you want your PM solution to let you hit the ground running – something that’s easy to set up and learn, with an interface that’s intuitive, fast, responsive, and easy to engage with and navigate around.	Tools that are too complex to set up, even for small, 2-5 member teams. Or ones that take 10 seconds to show anything, have a laggy UI or hide essential workflow behind multiple clicks. (e.g., Jira)
Issue tracking	At its core, any project management solution should give you a flexible way to record work items, assign them to team members, set deadlines, and track their progress – both individually and as part of larger projects.	Hyper-advanced features on the surface, but with complex, cluttered, and unintuitive UI/UX, steep learning curves, rigidity, and little room for flexibility or customization (e.g., Jira). Too simple tools (e.g., Trello) might not be enough.
Workspace management	Work spans diverse clients and projects. Ideally, you'll need a project management solution that lets you create different workspaces and different projects within those workspaces – even one for each client if needed.	Tools that limit the number of workspaces and projects (or lock them behind a paywall, e.g., Linear), hindering your ability to effectively organize work with diverse clients.
Collaboration	With multiple internal and external stakeholders, seamless collaboration is crucial. You need to bring team members and clients into your workflows without juggling separate apps – or paying a premium.	Solutions that complicate inviting collaborators, granting stakeholders access to projects (Asana), paywall it (Jira’s JSM license), or put too restrictive limits on team compositions (Linear) to move you into higher pricing tiers.
Scalability	A project management solution that scales with growing teams and projects. Ideally, you could start with a simple task tracker and easily adopt Agile methodologies like Scrum or Kanban later, with minimal growing pains.	Many tools don’t have support for methodologies at all (Notion), have Agile capabilities but can be overly complicated (Clickup), while some were meant only for the Agile model and lack either depth or flexibility for implementing anything else (Jira).
Insights and analytics	To make data-driven decisions, you need visibility. Your PM software should offer real-time task progress, workload balance across team members, and detailed views – at both project and sprint levels – with export options.	Every organization does things differently, and values and measures work differently. So, PM solutions that insist you stick only to predefined models the vendor thought were best, instead of letting you generate custom reports (except past a paywall, e.g. Asana), are not ideal.
Security	You need to implement access control over sensitive project and client data and ensure standards compliance (like GDPR) for auditors whenever required. Self-hosting and retaining full control over your data is ideal.	Solutions entirely on the cloud that require you to trust the company, or necessitate expensive on-prem licenses to do security your way (e.g., Jira).

If your current project management tool feels like it's holding you back instead of moving your team forward or costing too much in license fees for the value it brings to your team, it's time to consider a change.

Meet Plane, an alternative to Monday.com, Asana, Trello, and Jira

Plane, an open-source, self-hosted, project management tool promises simplicity, flexibility, and, most importantly, progress. Designed for teams that work with multiple customers on several projects simultaneously, Plane takes out the management headaches of the tool itself and frees up time for meaningful work.

What makes Plane simple, flexible, and extensible

Workspaces → Teams + Projects → Everything else makes getting started a matter of minutes.
Start with the simplest workflow, adopt more complex workflows in days.
No configuration loops, approvals, and jumping through hoops to manage the tool. “Set it up, let it run” is how Plane works.
Contextual toggles make life much easier when the need for just-in-time configuration does arise.
A three-pane layout with collapse-expand menus that make screen real-estate your choice.
Full-media editors everywhere so you can write beautifully and naturally
Bring clients closer to everyday work with custom shares, Publish, and Inbox.
Tons of experience delights AKA quality-of-life features to save clicks and headaches.
APIs and webhooks to have Plane + other tools work together
Open source, community-focused, and designed with thoughtfulness

Getting started

Create your workspace

Workspaces are where your projects, your team, and your org-wide settings live on Plane. Think of a workspace as the equivalent of a Monday.com Workspace or an Asana Organization. They are the highest level in Plane’s hierarchy. You ideally want one for your internal use.

Create your free workspace in three simple steps

Quality-of-life delights

You can create as many workspaces as you want with the same email address. This is useful when you have dedicated teams per client or when your client insists on complete separation of data. This also helps you apply different pricing plans to workspaces depending on a client’s needs or features you want to unlock for them.
Soon, we will bring you Teams to organize your projects better with smaller groups of members responsible for a project. Workspaces will still have projects of their own, but you will want to use those projects for teamless or company-wide work.

Start your first project

Projects house everything you need to add and manage work, track progress, and store your agency’s tribal knowledge. You can create as many projects as you want in a workspace.

How to use projects internally and for client management

Depending on the size and scale of your company, you may choose one of two approaches.

Have one internal project for goal-specific work and create one project per client.
You may want to track several projects, say, one for your website, one for client acquisition, and yet another for operations. Similarly, your clients may want several projects running in parallel.
This isn’t the best option if you have more than one client.
Have several projects internally and create as many projects as your client needs in workspaces dedicated to them.
This is the best option for when you scale, so you may just want to start with this set-up.

Start your first project

Managing work

Add work

Inside Plane, issues are the building blocks for all work management. Borrowed from software engineering, an issue can be anything you want to record and track—a piece of content, a design asset, billing tasks, SEO work, or just hygiene stuff like organizing labels in Plane.

Add issues from anywhere in Plane.

When in a hurry, create them one after the other, saving three clicks per issue compared to any other tool.

Not sure about adding a task? A call popped up as you were writing one. Your dog won’t stop barking?
Fret not about half-written issues. They are saved automatically and stored in drafts even if you have to click away from the modal. Come back to them whenever you want.

Sub-issues let you organize work without limits.

Treat an issue like a high-level parent, say, Web v2.0.
Create the first level of sub-issues, say, Design, Content, and Tech stack.
Create the next level of sub-issues, say, Exploration, Visual language, and Design system for Design. Add the second level of sub-issues for the other two first-level sub-issues.
Continue breaking down work as it fits your workflow.

Edit and contextualize work

When you are just dipping your toes in, adding just an issue title could maybe work. Pretty soon and by default, you will want to add context, edit details on the fly, and track progress in sensible ways.

With a full-media editor for details, drag-and-drop capabilities for images, and properties in a peek-over view, you save more than just clicks. You save yourself from furrowed foreheads.

Write issue details as you would on Google Docs or Notion or have our OpenAI integration write something for you using the issue title as a prompt.

Assign more than one person to an issue or a sub-issue, especially when you have small groups in teams with shared responsibility.

Set start and end dates from easy-to-use and pretty date pickers.

Create dependencies when, say, content blocks design, design for an asset is related to overall design, and content itself is blocked by ideation.

Declare duplicates, especially when you and your client have added the same task.

Quality-of-life delight

Forget hunting for issues, clicking through to them, and setting dependency props. Select an issue from any dependency field via a neat, search-enabled pop-up.
Blocking ⇔ Blocked by is automatically set between two issues when you set either one.

Set a parent when an issue is better than being a sub-issue.

Set labels to visualize work in views.

Keep brainstorms and discussions in the context of an issue right inside Plane.

See work how you like it

Plane comes with five layouts to help members see work that suits their preferences.

The List is useful when you want to see nested sub-issues sorted, say, by dates and priority.

Select the Kanban when you want to see cards for work by stages.

The Calendar helps you take a weekly or monthly view of work.

The Gantt is great to see overlaps and dependencies.

The Spreadsheet’s for those who like working with data in columns and want every bit of information at their fingertips.

Investigate bottlenecks

Each layout works with any view of issues, be it All issues—popular amongst project managers—or the *me-*specific ones like Assigned, Created, and Subscribed.

But often, that’s not enough. Helpful, sure, but just not enough. “Different folks, different strokes” is no truer than when managing work. You may want to see work assigned to just you by state and priority. Your boss, on the other hand, may want to see work by labels, say, Web 2.0 and end dates, say, May 31.

Plane makes it super-easy to identify and investigate bottlenecks with custom views. With just a few clicks, you can set filters and sort options to get the exact view you want.

Customize it further with Display options to configure on-screen elements. For example, you may not want to see sub-issues, but just their count per issue. Deselect and select those from Display options and you are set.

Love the view that you have effortlessly achieved? Let’s save you that effort for all other times you need to use the same filters + display options with Save view.

Create views

by a member’s role on your team
as one-and-done granular investigations
for ongoing same-page reviews to save a ton of time, usually spent in hunting for info on other project management software

Share options in views are coming soon to Pro. Click here to know when it comes out.

Tracking progress

The primary existential reason for a project management tool is monitoring, next-best actions, and reporting on progress. Everything else you do in Plane is in service of progress, which is also our central tenet.

Progress tracking unlocks when you add content to issues via properties as detailed above. Each of those properties are framed around States. States and State groups in Plane let you visualize work in phases, see how work’s moving through those phases, and zoom in on phases that need attention.

Set your states under state groups for each project with the whole color wheel available to pick from. Each project can have its own states under pre-set state groups.

Customizable state groups are coming to Pro. Stay in the loop.

Add multiple states per state groups if you would like to. This is useful when you have client-specific phases for moving work or want more granularity per group. For example, your Backlog could be Not started, Brainstorming, and Needs approval.
Edit states when your internal or client-specific language changes.
Set States from the dropdown when editing an issue.

Bulk ops like selecting a bunch of issues and changing their state are coming soon to Pro. Know when it comes out.

When you have set states, all of your views will show state info by default.

When you see an issue that needs your attention, say, Design for Pricing page and you want to see who changed its due date, you don’t need to Slack or call them. Just find its Activity and scroll through a list of all changes.

Click Home at any time to see the 10,000-feet view of all your projects, broken down by widgets that offer real-time snapshots from across your workspace personalized to each member.

As your project evolves and you find that a simple issue tracker will no longer cut it, Plane makes the transition to more complex methodologies seamless.

Enter Cycles

Central to Agile and borrowed from Engineering, sprints or, in Plane’s case, Cycles let you timebox issues to a pre-determined period, say, two weeks, and track them as a group.

Get started simply by adding existing issues to cycles or new ones to a cycle you have created.

When Cycles are most helpful

If your agency is all about Agile, you want to use cycles to stay true to promised timelines.
If you aren’t but are working with clients who are engineering-first, timeboxing work into cycles spanning whatever period you have agreed on with a client makes communication systemic and streamlined.

Quality-of-life delight

Compared to other tools that make sprints inflexible, Plane lets you change the period per cycle. You could have one cycle spanning two weeks and the next one spanning four.

Track a campaign’s work in several cycles, each with a pre-set period that you can change.

Each cycle comes with an overview analytics screen.

Clicking through to a cycle lets you see progress for that cycle.

Burndown charts are included in all cycles to show you upfront completed-versus-pending work and help your team stay on track or course-correct.

Active Cycles

Pro

One

What if you have several projects per customer and want an on-demand snapshot of progress across all of them? Even if you set-up is one project per client, there are times when you just want one overview of all active in-flight work. Clicking through to the running cycles in each project is both a hassle and makes it difficult to keep information in context

Active Cycles is a Plane-only feature that solves for those exact needs.

Active Cycles lives in your sidebar for easy access.

Clicking it shows you a snapshot of all running cycles in a workspace.

Clicking through to any cycle from there shows you cycle-specific issues and analytics.

Overlay repeating groups of work on cycles

Yet another way to adopt frameworks like Agile is to group work, especially repetitive work that comes up from time to time, in Modules.

Say, a client has a quarterly marketing campaign that differs only in the content they are promoting. Creating cycles for this kind of work would quickly become exhausting, but with modules, this is as easy as 1-2-3.

Create the module for one campaign just like you would create a cycle.

Assign a lead to the module.

Unlike cycles that cut across a project, a module is run independently as a project within a project with its own lead, members, and issues.

Duplicate the module each quarter, say, Q1, Q2, Q3, and so on.

Product updates, quarterly marketing campaigns, monthly financial reporting, regular software maintenance, and annual compliance audits are all good examples of modular work that you can get quick progress snapshots for with just a click.

When Modules help the most

You have a repeatable chunk of work with the same nature and cadence.
This chunk of work is best suited to the same members and lead to maintain context over time.
It has to be trackable for its own similar timebox, say, every month or quarter, with the same or similar goals.

Analyzing and reporting on progress

Plane gets you essential analytics upfront and on-demand on your Dashboard that houses pre-set and customizable widgets.

For more granular analytics and insights, Plane lets you turn your entire workspace or a single project into a structured dataset that you can tweak for views of overall performance, resource utilization, and team productivity.

Scope and demand

Scope creep is a significant problem in any modern-day project affecting 52% of all projects across all industries per a PMI report. Scope and demand in Plane lets you identify new work over planned volume, pit all work against on-demand views of progress, and see how it all affects your timelines.

You can also use it to learn from the last rolling year per project or at the overall workspace level and predict resource needs for the amount of work you see coming in.

Custom analytics

Predefined charts are a smart default, but they’re never completely enough for all your analytics needs. In Plane, you can slice your project and workspace data by any dimension and metric to inform different stakeholders, KPI records, or trends and strays.

CSV exports

For very niche and specific data use cases, export your data into CSVs that you can then import into preferred tools of choice.

Analytics is upleveling with PDFs, on-demand reports, and more. Stay in the loop.

Collaborating with customers

Plane is built for cross-functional collaboration not just internally within your agency, but also externally with clients and their customers + users. Where other project management tools advertise extensions, apps, and workarounds, Plane unlocks this for you natively.

No security, logistical, and maintenance nightmares. No additional subscriptions. No configuration loops.

Add Guests or Viewers

A client’s primary stakeholder could be a viewer or a guest in a project, able to granularly see work but prevented from adding issues without first going through your team—helpful when a client wants to be involved with the day-to-day without disrupting your team’s workflows.

Get feedback without disrupting your project

Toggle Inbox on to let Guests or Viewers add issues to a triage area that lets you decide if a suggestion or feedback deserves a place on your project.

Publish your project externally with whatever’s private to you hidden away

When managing work for a client, you may also need to collect feedback from their customers and users. With Publish, you can share a custom view of a project publicly on the Internet in just three clicks.

Anyone on the link can then react, upvote, and even leave public comments on issues, say, a new version of the client’s website. Should you need to triage those comments internally, you can leave private notes for members of your teams.

When is Publish most helpful

You need to get feedback from external members without adding them to your project.
You want to share a persistent link that you don’t have to bother hosting.
You want to offer the full context of the work that you are seeking feedback for including issue titles and descriptions, dates, states, priority, and more.

Other layouts are coming to Publish soon. Click here to stay updated.

Integrate Plane with GitHub

For times when an agency partner or team is on GitHub or another project management tool, just connect your Plane workspace to their GitHub and anything with a plane label comes into your project as an issue. When done, add the github label and the issue reflects its Plane state on GitHub.

This two-way sync is awesome when your client’s working with a software studio and your agency needs to be hand-in-glove with them.

Connect Plane to other collaboration tools

Prefer Slack over Plane’s comments? Need to get Figma links in without worrying about Figma share permissions? Your client’s Zendesk tickets need your attention?

All of this and more is possible with Plane’s APIs and webhooks that are well-documented, performant, and open.

Connect Plane with anything.

We’re building out native integrations with several collaboration tools in phases. Click here to stay in the know.

Organizing knowledge

Plane replaces knowledge management tools, unifying projects and the knowledge to run them well in one interface.

Plane offers Pages for every project, letting you write naturally as you would on Confluence, Notion, Google Docs or other word processors.

With custom sharing permissions, you can share pages with your entire company, your team, a few project members, or externally. Private pages let you keep your personal notes to just yourself.

Embed issues in Pages with our Pro plan. Coming soon →

Store files, links, and media

Forget switching between Drive, OneDrive, Dropnox, and Box. Plane Drive, out soon, keeps a record of all your links, files, and media shared in issue details, comments, and Pages. You can create your own folders and upload files to Drive, too.

Drive will be out in Q3, 2024. Know when it comes out.

7 reasons why Plane is best-fit project management for your agency

Remember the matrix of needs for a project management solution? Plane checks all those boxes.

1. Quickstarts with simple set-ups, adoption per your pace, and design choices that flex to your changing business needs
2. A hierarchy that’s straightforward and flexes to your choices
3. Great for adding, editing, duplicating, and tracking work
4. Tons of quality-of-life delights baked into every action, saving you three to seven clicks each time
5. Brings customers closer to your work without involving them in parts that are private to you
6. Plays well with other tools in your workflow
7. Open source, self-hosted, performant software that puts you in control of your data and privacy

#1 on GitHub in project management, 100,000+ users, and several global agencies.

Plane is currently used in mission-critical situations across Digital Marketing, e-Commerce, and Publishing at global 500 companies and easily handles 500 concurrent members in a workspace creating 2,000+ issues in a month.

Trust Plane for your projects

Every team, every use case, the right momentum

Hundreds of Jira, Linear, Asana, and ClickUp customers have rediscovered the joy of work. We’d love to help you do that, too.

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