awork

awork is built by awork GmbH in Hamburg for the way agencies actually run: projects with phases, time tracked against them, and a workload view that shows who is over-committed before the week starts rather than after.

It is the best-looking tool in this category and the one non-technical teams take to fastest, which matters more than feature lists when the people using it are designers and account managers rather than engineers.

The hosting deserves a precise description. awork states that its infrastructure runs on ISO 27001 certified Microsoft servers in Germany. The servers are German and so is the company; the infrastructure provider is not. For most buyers that is fine, and for anyone whose procurement rules reach the subprocessor it is the thing to check first.

What awork does well

• Workload planning across people, which most tools in this category leave to a spreadsheet
• Time tracking built in rather than bought as an add-on
• German company with servers in Germany, and ISO 27001 certification
• From EUR 5 per user per month on annual billing, below most of this category
• Built for agency work: phases, budgets and client projects rather than sprints

Where awork falls short

• Runs on Microsoft infrastructure, so a US provider sits under a German company
• No free plan, only a trial
• Not built for software delivery: no sprints, no backlog in the agile sense
• A smaller integration catalogue than the American tools it replaces

Standout feature. The workload view. It answers who is booked and how hard before you commit to a deadline, which is the question agencies get wrong most expensively.