How do small web development agencies manage their projects and clients?

I mainly use Trello as a simple Kanban board to manage all my projects. For invoices, I rely on an Italian app that helps create them and sends them off to the tax collector. It's pretty straightforward.

Most small dev teams I know juggle between Trello or Asana for project management, Google Drive for file storage, and QuickBooks for invoicing. The biggest headache is constantly switching between apps and struggling to keep everything synced. If I could change one thing, it would definitely be to have a single platform to manage everything without the hassle of hopping from one tool to another.

As a solo developer running a small shop, I use Notion for projects, Stripe for invoicing, and I’m afraid my client communication is a mess with Gmail. The most frustrating part for me is tracking scope creep—clients' DMs on Slack often lead to disputes about what was originally agreed upon. If I could fix one thing, it would be having an automatic logging system for scope changes showing the cost and time impact—would have saved me a lot recently! By the way, what size agency are you focusing on? Total solo or up to five developers?

For smaller agencies, it rarely boils down to just one tool; it usually ends up being a mix of Notion or ClickUp for project management, Slack or Email for communication, and Stripe or Xero for payments. The hardest part isn't managing tasks; it’s maintaining context over time—details about decisions, changes, and the purpose of projects often get lost. We encountered similar issues at Valtorian, and honestly, that fragmentation is more frustrating than lacking features in any specific tool.

I've been using Monday and I really dig it. But honestly, project management software is a huge market—there's a ton of research, money, and development behind it. I think it’s going to be really tough for a single developer to make something that gains traction without serious marketing and sales backing.

I switch between Asana, Linear, and Monday for different project boards and use ClickUp for syncing. For time tracking and invoices, I’m all in with Harvest. I tried building a CRM in Notion once, but it ended up being a total flop for me.