Looking to implement or upgrade a project management solution within your association? You’re not alone. Many of our association clients are seeking better ways to help their teams juggle multiple tasks and projects while improving collaboration.

Like our clients, YGS Association Solutions must plan and execute projects across many functional areas, including design, editorial, sales, marketing, finance, and IT/technology. Some of our projects are handled by a single team member, while others require detailed schedules and time-sensitive handoffs among a dozen or more contributors.

In 2025, YGS Association Solutions began searching for a replacement for our existing project management software, WebVantage. While functional, the platform lacked several key features we felt were necessary to streamline internal processes, improve communication, and better serve our association clients. As part of this effort, we first sought to understand the differences among the types of project management platforms currently available in the market.

Project Management Software vs. PSA Software

Professional services automation (PSA) software is an integrated platform that combines project management with financial and operational capabilities such as resource planning, time tracking, billing, and profitability analysis. In contrast, traditional project management (PM) software focuses primarily on task management, scheduling, and team collaboration.

While PM software manages how work gets done, PSA software manages the broader scope of business performance, with an emphasis on profitability and the client experience. Early in our evaluation, it became clear that we needed a PSA platform—one that could meet our current needs while also supporting scalable growth in the future.

Project Management Software

• Focus: Streamlining project delivery, task execution, and team collaboration
• Key Features: Task lists, Gantt charts, timelines, file sharing, communication tools, basic resource allocation
• Best For: Teams that need to organize and track project tasks across a wide range of industries

PSA Software

• Focus: Automating and integrating business operations for professional services firms, with an emphasis on profitability and client satisfaction
• Key Features:
  • Everything included in PM software, plus:
  • Resource Management: Advanced allocation, utilization, and forecasting
  • Financials: Time tracking, automated billing and invoicing, revenue and cost tracking, profitability analysis
  • Sales-to-Delivery: Connecting the sales pipeline with service delivery
  • Client Focus: Optimizing the end-to-end client experience
• Best For: IT providers, consulting firms, marketing agencies, and other service-based businesses that bill for time and manage complex operations

Our Platform Selection Criteria

When selecting a project management platform, it’s important to look beyond feature lists and consider how well the tool aligns with your team’s workflows and goals. Key criteria include ease of use and adoption, scalability, integration with existing systems, and the quality of reporting and visibility. Security, reliability, and the level of customer support are equally critical—the right platform should reduce friction, improve collaboration, and help teams deliver projects more efficiently.

Key features on our “must-have” list included:

• A modern, user-friendly interface
• Role-based visibility so users see only what they are assigned, reducing noise and distractions
• Custom workflows for unique client and internal team needs
• Customizable access and settings by role
• Built-in communication across teams to reduce reliance on email and maintain a centralized project history
• Customizable email notifications and the ability to add followers at the task and project level
• Resource planning tools to evaluate workloads and make adjustments as needed
• Time logging to compare projected versus actual lift for a task
• Centralized space for team, client, and project-specific notes
• Robust reporting within the platform and via Excel export
• Freelancer and vendor access without requiring full licenses
• Quoting features based on historical project data
• Support for assigning varying user rates to assist with project cost estimation
• Profitability reporting by project
• Scalability across all YGS Group business units

Platforms We Explored

At the start of our evaluation, we reviewed more than a dozen platforms to understand how project management technology has evolved since we implemented WebVantage many years ago. We reviewed websites and online demos, allowing us to quickly rule out several options.

After narrowing the list to approximately seven solutions, we scheduled live demos with vendor representatives to review features and discuss our specific needs. Based on those demos and pricing evaluations, we narrowed the field to two finalists. Each provided a demo environment so our team could test the platforms using real-world scenarios.

Platforms evaluated included:

• Adobe Workfront 
• Asana 
• Celoxis 
• ClickUp 
• Jira 
• Monday.com 
• Planview 
• Productive 
• Rocketlane  
• Smartsheet 
• Teamwork.com 
• Trello 
• Wrike
  

Where We Landed

YGS Association Solutions, and our broader group of business units across The YGS Group, ultimately chose to transition to Teamwork.com’s solution.

Teamwork is best described as a hybrid PM and PSA platform designed for agencies and client-facing teams. While it originated as a project management tool, it has evolved to include robust PSA features, positioning it as a “client operations” platform that bridges the gap between basic project tracking and full-scale business automation.

The most positive outcome of our transition to Teamwork is the increased ease of day-to-day collaboration. The platform includes features that genuinely save time and promote efficiency, from quickly reassigning tasks to team members to cloning project schedules with ease. Teamwork takes collaboration beyond a buzzword and turns it into something practical and effective in the workplace. 

Jason Sweigert is a production manager for YGS Association Solutions.

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