A Worksection Alternative for Agencies That Need to See the Money, Not Just the Tasks
By the CrewDriven team · 10 min read · Updated July 25, 2026
Worksection is one of the most mature project management tools built in Ukraine — more than 1,800 companies run their tasks, Gantt charts, and Kanban boards on it, and in pure task management it is genuinely hard to beat. But an agency is not a list of tasks. It is clients, people, rates, invoices, and a margin that either exists or does not. Worksection answers the question "is the work moving?" — it was never designed to answer "which client is making us money?". This page is an honest comparison: where Worksection is stronger, where CrewDriven is, and how to decide. With exact prices for both.
What Worksection does well — and what it costs in 2026
Credit first. Worksection has been building project management software in Kyiv since 2009, and it shows: the task system is deep and battle-tested. Tasks break down into subtasks, projects carry Gantt charts with dependencies, boards switch to Kanban view, and checklists, files, and comments live right on the task where they belong. More than 1,800 companies work in it daily, the ecosystem of integrations and guides is established, and support answers in Ukrainian. If your agency's biggest operational pain is "work falls through the cracks between people", Worksection solves that pain well.
Pricing is per-seat, and this is where the math starts to matter. The Free plan covers up to 5 users. Basic costs $5 per user per month, Business — $10, Premium — $15, with a 25% discount on annual billing. The catch for agencies: time tracking and the finance features (budgets, costs) only appear from the Business tier up. So a 10-person studio that wants to track hours pays roughly $100 a month — $1,200 a year — and gets a view of that time through the lens of tasks. What each hour cost you, what it was billed at, and which client ended the month in the black stays where it has always been: in a spreadsheet.
That is not a flaw in Worksection — it is a decision about product scope. Worksection is a project management tool, and time and budgets exist there to serve project control. But if you are searching for a Worksection alternative because of the money side — rates, team cost, client profitability, invoices — you are not looking for a better task tracker. You are looking for a different center of gravity.
PM-first vs operations-first: two different centers of gravity
Every tool has a center — the object everything else hangs off. In Worksection the center is the task: people, comments, time, and budgets all attach to tasks inside projects. In CrewDriven the center is the money: clients and team members are connected by assignments, each assignment carries a cost rate and a bill rate with a full history of changes, logged hours turn into payroll cost and invoice lines at the same time, and every payment rolls up into a multi-currency P&L per client.
The consequence is which questions each tool can answer. Worksection answers: is the project on schedule, who is overloaded, which task is stuck. CrewDriven answers: which client earned money last month and how much, what a team member actually costs on each engagement, which retainer quietly slid into the red after the latest raise, and how many delivered hours are still unbilled. An agency needs both kinds of answers — but only one of them decides whether you still exist in a year.
The typical team we built CrewDriven for looks like this: 5–15 people, a few retainers plus project work, part of the team on hourly contracts, clients paying in two or three currencies. On Worksection Business that team pays about $100 a month for task control — and keeps answering the profit question with a Sunday-evening spreadsheet. How exactly that spreadsheet lies to you is a separate story: our breakdown of project profitability with multi-rate billing.
Worksection vs CrewDriven: an honest comparison
| Capability | Worksection | CrewDriven |
|---|---|---|
| Task management | Mature: subtasks, checklists, statuses, owners — refined since 2009 | Lighter: enough to run the work, but not a full PM suite |
| Gantt & Kanban | Built-in Gantt with dependencies, Kanban boards | No Gantt — CrewDriven does not compete here |
| Client CRM | Projects, not clients: no acquisition channel, contacts, or engagement history | Full client profiles: contacts, terms, acquisition channel, documents, per-client history |
| Invoicing | None — invoices happen outside the tool | Invoices from tracked hours or fixed amounts, sent from the platform |
| Multi-currency P&L | Budgets inside projects, single-currency thinking | Every payment in its original currency with the FX rate locked; P&L per client and month in normalized reporting |
| Per-assignment rates | One time/budget view per project | Cost rate + bill rate per employee–client pair, with dated rate history |
| Time → invoice loop | Time tracking from the Business tier ($10/user), reports | Logged hours count as payroll cost and become invoice lines in one flow |
| Price | Free up to 5 users; $5–15 per user/month (−25% annual) | Free during launch; flat workspace pricing later — not per-seat |
Pricing and features checked July 2026. For current Worksection plans see worksection.com.
What CrewDriven adds that a task tracker cannot
Five things agencies actually open CrewDriven for. None of them are about tasks — all of them are about what happens around the tasks: people, rates, money.
Clients and team in one operational CRM
A client in CrewDriven is not a project name but a full record: contacts, engagement type, payment terms, currency, documents, and the team assigned. Who works for whom at what rate is a first-class record in the system, not an assignee field on a task. When a client arrives or leaves, you see what changes in the money — not just in the task list.
Per-assignment rates with history
Cost rate and bill rate live on the pairing of one team member with one client — not globally on the person. A raise is recorded with an effective date: hours before it keep the old rate, hours after pick up the new one. Last quarter's margin does not get rewritten retroactively.
Multi-currency P&L per client
A client pays in EUR, a contractor is paid in UAH, reporting is normalized to USD. Every payment stores its original currency and the exchange rate at the moment of the transaction, and monthly rollups show margin per client — ranked, so a bleeding retainer cannot hide behind the company average.
Time tracking that feeds payroll and billing at once
One logged hour counts twice: as cost through the person's cost rate and as revenue through the bill rate. The same tracking that produces what you owe the team also shows how much delivered work has not been invoiced yet.
Invoicing built in
An invoice assembles from tracked hours or fixed amounts and goes out from the platform. A paid invoice becomes an incoming payment, the payment lands in the client's P&L — the time → invoice → payment → margin chain closes without exports.
Who should stay on Worksection
If your operational pain is task chaos — dropped handoffs, blurred responsibilities, deadlines nobody saw coming — Worksection remains the stronger tool, and switching would cost you real capability. Fifteen-plus years of PM refinement are not something CrewDriven replicates: deep task hierarchies, Gantt dependencies, workflows built around task-level estimates.
Teams with construction-style delivery — long dependency chains, phase gates, dozens of nested subtasks per deliverable — should not move their delivery management anywhere. The same goes for teams that fit inside the free 5-user tier and do not need finance features at all: free and familiar beats free and new.
Who should switch — or run both
Agencies whose real question is about money: which clients are profitable, what the team costs on each engagement, how much delivered work is still unbilled. If you are paying for Business specifically to get time tracking and budgets — and then exporting everything into spreadsheets to compute margin — you are paying about $100 a month (at 10 people) for the task layer of a process whose money layer is still manual.
And it is not either-or: some teams keep the task tracker for delivery and run CrewDriven as the operational-financial layer — clients, rates, hours, invoices, P&L. The loop CrewDriven owns starts where the task tracker stops. And if your pain is more about money accounting than task management in the first place, read the CrewDriven vs Finmap comparison.
Moving from Worksection: under an hour
There is no "migration project". What CrewDriven needs from your current setup is compact and concrete: the client list (name, contacts, currency, terms), the team list, and the rates on each active assignment. Clients and people go in via CSV import or by hand; assignments and rates are entered manually. For a 10–15 person agency this is realistically under an hour of work.
Historical tasks stay in Worksection, and that is fine — you are not migrating tasks, you are standing up a money layer that did not exist before. From the first logged hour, labor cost and billable value start accumulating in the right places; from the first invoice, per-client P&L becomes real.
You can create your workspace now and check the platform against one month of real numbers — or see the pricing roadmap to see how flat pricing will work after the launch period.
Frequently asked questions
- Is CrewDriven really free, or is this a trial?
- Free during launch means all modules — clients, team, rates, time tracking, invoicing, P&L — with no time-boxed trial and no credit card. After launch, pricing will be flat per workspace rather than per-seat, and existing workspaces will get advance notice before anything changes.
- Can CrewDriven fully replace Worksection's project management?
- Honestly — no, not if you need deep PM. Work management in CrewDriven is lighter: enough to see who does what for which client, but without subtask hierarchies or Gantt dependency chains. If your delivery depends on those, keep Worksection for tasks and run the operational-financial layer in CrewDriven. If your task needs are simple, one tool may be enough.
- Does CrewDriven work in Ukrainian?
- The site and all guides are fully bilingual — English and Ukrainian. The workspace interface itself is currently in English, and we say that plainly. The hryvnia is supported as a payment currency alongside USD, EUR, and others.
- How does multi-currency work?
- Every payment stores its original currency, the exchange rate at the moment of the transaction, and a USD-normalized amount for reporting. A client paying in EUR and a contractor paid in UAH reconcile into one comparable P&L that does not jump when the FX market moves.
- Is CrewDriven a free Worksection analog?
- There is no full analog, and it is more honest to say so: CrewDriven does not replicate Worksection's deep task management. But if what stands behind the search for a free Worksection alternative is "I do not want to pay ~$100 a month to see hours, budgets, and clients" — that is exactly the part CrewDriven covers for free, and it adds what Worksection does not offer on any tier: invoicing, rates with history, and per-client P&L.
See your clients, money, and time in one place — free
Create a workspace in under a minute. Free during launch, no credit card.