Worklenz Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

TLDR

Worklenz is an open-source project management and agency operations tool covering tasks, time tracking, resource planning, budgets and a client portal. The free tier is real, the integrations are thin. Best for: small agencies and consultancies that bill by the hour. Price: free plan, Pro from $9.99 per user per month. Free plan: yes. Rating: 7.4/10.

What is Worklenz?

Worklenz is an all-in-one platform for agencies: task management, time tracking, timesheets, resource allocation, project budgets and client-facing dashboards in one system. It is released under the AGPLv3 licence, so you can clone the repository and run the whole thing on your own infrastructure for nothing, or pay for a hosted plan. The repo has passed 3,000 stars on GitHub. The stack is React with Ant Design on the front end and TypeScript, Express and PostgreSQL on the back, deployable with Docker Compose if you want the fast route.

The origin story is unusual and worth knowing. A team of developers in Bandarawela, Sri Lanka, built it as an internal tool because Jira and Asana were either too complex or, during Sri Lanka’s economic crisis, effectively unaffordable once foreign exchange restrictions made overseas SaaS subscriptions hard to maintain. After roughly two years of internal use, they released it publicly and open-sourced it in 2024. That history explains the product’s shape: it is deliberately narrow, focused on the operational things an agency needs to stay profitable, and priced for teams that count every dollar. Worklenz says it now serves over 11,000 agencies and professionals.

What Are Worklenz’s Key Features?

Time tracking and timesheets

One-click timers on any task, plus manual entry for the hours you forgot to log, feeding into timesheets that a manager approves. This is the feature that separates Worklenz from generic kanban tools, and it sits on the Business plan rather than the free tier. Because the time data connects to project budgets, you can see whether a fixed-fee project has already burned its margin instead of finding out at invoice time. Note that users have complained about gaps in exporting time data, including the absence of a simple CSV export, so check that your reporting workflow is covered before you commit.

Project finance and profitability

Budget tracking, cost tracking and profitability analysis per project, with invoicing on top. For an agency, this is the reason to look at Worklenz over ClickUp or Asana, both of which treat money as an afterthought or an integration. You set a budget, log hours against it, and the dashboard tells you the margin. It is not going to replace proper accounting software, but it answers the question most agency owners actually care about: which clients are making us money.

Resource planning and team utilisation

A capacity view showing who is over-allocated and who has room, across projects. Combined with the utilisation reporting, it covers the staffing decisions that eat an operations manager’s week. This is genuinely useful and usually reserved for pricier tools like Float or Runn, both of which cost more and do less around task management.

Task management and workflows

The base layer is standard but well executed: tasks with subtasks, dependencies, custom statuses, kanban and list views, file attachments and real-time updates. Custom workflows sit on the Business tier. Worklenz deliberately stops short of docs, whiteboards, forms and the rest of the modern all-in-one arms race, and after testing enough of those tools we count that as a plus. A smaller surface area means less time spent configuring the tool and more time doing work in it, and it is the main reason teams migrating from ClickUp describe the move as a simplification rather than a downgrade.

Client portal and templates

A read-only portal gives clients real-time visibility into project status without giving them a seat in your workspace, which cuts down the “any update?” emails. Project and task templates let you standardise a recurring engagement so you are not rebuilding the same 40-task structure every month. CRM and HR modules are advertised on the site as coming soon, which is worth reading as: not here yet, do not buy for them.

How Much Does Worklenz Cost?

Worklenz has a free forever plan with unlimited users, up to 3 active projects, core features and community support. That is a genuinely generous free tier by project management standards, since almost every rival caps users instead of projects. Paid cloud plans split by team size. For teams of 1 to 5 people, Pro is $9.99 per user per month and Business is $14.99 per user per month, both with unlimited projects. Above five users the pricing flips to flat bundles: Pro is $69 per month billed yearly for 15 included users, up to 50 maximum, with extra users at $5.99 each; Business is $99 per month billed yearly for 25 included users, up to 100, with the same $5.99 overage. Enterprise is custom. There is a 14-day trial and no credit card required.

That flat bundle is the actual bargain here. Fifteen seats for $69 a month works out to $4.60 per person. ClickUp’s Unlimited plan is $7 per user per month on annual billing, so 15 seats costs $105. Teamwork.com’s Deliver plan is $10.99 per user per month, which puts the same team at about $165. Worklenz is roughly a third to a half the price of both, and it includes time tracking and budget tracking that ClickUp gates behind higher tiers.

Do the sums for your own headcount before you decide, because the 1 to 5 user band and the flat bundles cross over awkwardly. Five users on Business at $14.99 each is $74.95 a month, which is more than the 15-seat Pro bundle at $69 and gets you fewer features than the 25-seat Business bundle at $99. If you are close to five people, the bundle is almost always the better buy.

Self-hosting is the third route. The Community edition is free under AGPLv3 with unlimited users, core task management and source code access. The self-hosted Business tier is $99 per month billed yearly and adds SSO, custom branding, advanced reporting, backup and restore, and access to a plugin marketplace that the site still lists as coming soon. Self-hosted Enterprise is $499 per month with 24/7 phone support, custom development and a white-label option. Be honest with yourself about the running cost: you need Node 18 or newer and PostgreSQL 15 or newer, plus someone to keep it patched.

Who is Worklenz Best For?

Use Worklenz if you run a small agency, consultancy or dev shop where billable hours and project margin are the numbers that matter. The combination of time tracking, budgets, utilisation and a client portal in one affordable tool is unusual, and the flat pricing above five seats is hard to beat. Use it if you have a data residency requirement or a client contract that says project data cannot sit on a US SaaS platform, because the AGPLv3 self-hosted route solves that completely.

Use the free tier if you are a freelancer or a two-person team running three projects or fewer. You get unlimited collaborators, which means you can pull clients or contractors in without paying anything.

Skip Worklenz if:

• Your workflow depends on integrations. The catalogue is thin, and users have specifically flagged the absence of a GitHub integration. If your team lives in GitHub, Slack automations and Zapier chains, ClickUp will hurt less.
• You need a strong mobile app. Mobile accessibility is a repeated criticism, and field teams will notice.
• You want docs, whiteboards, forms and AI features in the same tool. Worklenz is deliberately narrow. That is a feature, but only if narrow is what you want.
• You are buying for a large enterprise. The company is small, the plugin marketplace is unreleased, and the CRM and HR modules are still promises.

Best Worklenz Alternatives

ClickUp

The obvious comparison and the tool most Worklenz users are leaving. ClickUp has a free plan and Unlimited at $7 per user per month on annual billing, with a vastly bigger integration catalogue, docs, whiteboards, forms, automations and AI features. It is also the reason people burn out on project management software: the feature sprawl is real, and configuring it properly takes a dedicated admin. Pick ClickUp if you need breadth and integrations. Pick Worklenz if you want a smaller tool that already knows what an agency does.

Teamwork.com

The most direct commercial competitor, because it is also built specifically for client work. Teamwork.com’s Deliver plan runs $10.99 per user per month and it covers time tracking, billing, client users and profitability reporting with a far more mature product and much better integration support. It costs roughly double Worklenz at typical team sizes and there is no self-hosting. If budget is not the constraint and agency features are, Teamwork.com is the safer buy.

OpenProject

The other serious open-source option, and the more established one. OpenProject’s Community edition is free and self-hostable, with cloud plans from around $7.25 per user per month for Basic and $13.50 for Professional, minimum five users. It is stronger on classic project management, Gantt charts and enterprise governance, and weaker on the agency money features Worklenz leads with. Choose OpenProject for structured project delivery and compliance, Worklenz for billable-hours operations.

Final Verdict: Is Worklenz Worth It?

Worklenz gets a 7.4. The value is not really in question. A free tier with unlimited users, 15 seats for $69 a month, AGPLv3 source code and a self-hosting path is an outstanding deal, and the agency-specific features, time tracking, budgets, utilisation and client portal, are exactly the ones that pricier generalist tools charge extra for or ignore. The interface is clean, the product is opinionated, and the team ships.

The reasons to hesitate are all about ecosystem rather than the core product. Integrations are thin, mobile is weak, some export paths are missing, and several advertised modules are still marked coming soon. That is what a young open-source project from a small team looks like, and it is a fair trade at this price. If you are a small agency spending too much on ClickUp or Teamwork.com and you do not depend on a web of integrations, start on the free plan, run one real client project through it, and upgrade if the time and budget reporting earns its keep. If your team’s workflow is glued together with third-party apps, wait another year.