Comparison
Productive is a well-built, mature piece of agency management software. If you run a larger agency with real resourcing complexity, several departments and someone whose job includes utilisation forecasting, it does that job properly and we would not pretend otherwise.
Orbit Studio is built for the other end of the market: small creative and marketing teams of two to ten, and freelance designers who need a CRM, a client portal and retainer billing without the price or the setup effort of an enterprise tool.
Based on each product's public documentation and pricing pages at the time of writing. Check Productive's own site for the current position before you decide.
| Feature | Orbit Studio | Productive |
|---|---|---|
| Best suited to | Studios of 2 to 10 people, and freelance designers who work with retainer clients | Agencies of roughly 10 to 100+ people with dedicated ops or finance staff |
| Pricing | £15 per user/month, one plan, everything included | Tiered per-seat pricing with higher tiers for advanced features, plus minimum seat counts on some plans |
| Clients and CRM | Clients, contacts, projects and campaigns in one hierarchy | Full CRM with deals, pipelines and sales forecasting |
| Resource planning | Workload gauge and simple capacity view per person | Detailed capacity planning, scenario planning and utilisation forecasting |
| Retainer billing | Committed hours, rollover, overage and ad hoc quoting built in | Recurring budgets and retainer tracking, with strong revenue recognition reporting |
| Client portal | Branded portal for approvals, comments, deliveries and invoices, included | Client access is more limited and mainly report or document sharing |
| Profitability reporting | Budget vs actual, billable revenue and overdue value | Deeper financial reporting, forecasting and multi-currency support |
| Setup effort | Usable the same afternoon, no onboarding call needed | More configuration up front, onboarding support available |
| Integrations | Calendar feeds, Stripe billing and CSV export | Large integration catalogue including accounting, HR and BI tools |
If your agency has grown past about ten people, has a sales team, or needs forecasting and utilisation modelling to make decisions, Productive is the more capable tool and worth its price.
If you are a small studio or a freelancer and most of your week is clients, projects, tasks, retainers and getting invoices out, Orbit Studio covers the same core ground with far less to configure and far less to pay for.
£15 per user, per month. Everything included, no card required to start.