Most agencies hit the same wall somewhere between eight and fifteen clients. The founders are still writing the proposals, someone is copying numbers from four dashboards into a monthly report by hand, and the shared drive has three folders called “Final.” Growth at that point comes less from hiring and more from fixing the stack.
I’ve run and worked inside agencies long enough to see which tools actually save hours and which just add another login. This list is sorted by job to be done, with a few notes on where each one fits. Pricing changes often, so I’ve kept that qualitative; check each vendor’s page before you commit.
Presentations and pitching
1. Quillbot
Agencies spend a surprising amount of time on decks: new business pitches, quarterly business reviews, strategy readouts, and campaign recaps. Quillbot, best known for its paraphraser, grammar checker, and summariser, now has an ai presentation maker that fits neatly into that workload.
You can start from a typed prompt, or upload material you already have (a PDF brief, a Word doc of meeting notes, an existing PowerPoint, even images), and it generates a full set of slides in a few seconds. It then offers several layout and theme options based on your content, so you pick a direction rather than hunting through a template gallery. From there you edit text, reorder slides, and adjust layouts by hand. There are image tools for cropping and background removal, and teammates can be invited by email or link to edit at the same time.
Export is where it earns a place in agency work. Decks download as PPTX, which opens directly in PowerPoint, or as PDF and image formats. That means an account manager can build the first draft quickly, then hand it to a designer who finishes it in the agency’s master template.
A prompt I’ve had decent results with: “10-slide Q3 performance review for a D2C skincare brand. Organic sessions up 18%, paid CPA down, email revenue flat. Recommend three priorities for Q4.” You still have to replace placeholder numbers with real ones and tighten the headlines, but the structure is there.
In practice the draft for that prompt tends to land close to this outline, which is roughly what I’d want anyway:
- Q3 at a glance (three headline metrics)
- Organic search: what grew and why
- Paid media: efficiency gains
- Email: flat revenue and the likely causes
- What we tested this quarter
- Q4 priority one
- Q4 priority two
- Q4 priority three
- Timeline and owners
- What we need from the client
My edits are predictable. I rewrite slide titles as sentences, swap in real charts exported from the reporting tool, and add a slide on anything that went wrong, because clients trust a QBR more when it isn’t all good news.
The other Quillbot tools matter too. Running a client-facing summary through the grammar checker, or using the summarizer to condense a long audit into an executive page, are small jobs that pile up across a team. The presentation maker itself is free to use, and the Premium plan adds unlimited presentations and access to the full toolset.
2. Gamma
Gamma builds presentations, one-page documents and simple web pages from a prompt. Agencies like it for quick internal strategy docs that can be shared as a link rather than a file. The card-based format reads well on a phone, which is handy when a client reviews things between meetings.
3. Beautiful.ai
Beautiful.ai’s “smart slides” adjust layout automatically as you add content, which keeps decks tidy when several people touch them. Best for teams that want strict visual consistency.
4. Pitch
A collaborative deck tool with good version control and templates built for startups and agencies. Useful when a pitch deck has five contributors and a deadline tomorrow.
SEO
5. Semrush
The workhorse for many agencies: keyword research, position tracking, site audits, competitor analysis and backlink data in one place. Its client-facing reporting features also help if you don’t want a separate reporting tool yet.
Where Semrush really pays off for an agency is in the prospecting phase. Before a sales call, a junior strategist can pull a prospect’s organic trend, top competitors and a handful of quick-win keywords in under an hour, which turns a generic pitch into one that references the prospect’s own numbers. That single habit tends to lift close rates more than any template redesign.
6. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is the other big SEO suite, and plenty of practitioners prefer its backlink index and Site Explorer for competitive research. Many agencies end up running both.
7. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
A desktop crawler that finds broken links, redirect chains, missing tags and duplicate content. It’s the first thing I open on a technical audit. There’s a free version with a crawl limit that suits small sites, and a paid licence for anything bigger. Exporting the crawl into a spreadsheet and filtering by issue type gives you a prioritised fix list in an afternoon.
8. Surfer
Content optimisation against top-ranking pages, with a writing editor that scores drafts. Good for agencies producing high volumes of SEO content with junior writers.
9. Google Search Console
Free, and still the most reliable source for what Google actually shows and clicks on. Get access on day one of every engagement.
Social media
10. Sprout Social
Scheduling, a unified inbox, listening and reporting. It’s pricier than lighter tools but suits agencies managing community engagement for larger brands.
11. Hootsuite
A long-standing social management platform with scheduling across the main networks and approval workflows. Familiar to a lot of clients, which smooths onboarding.
12. Buffer
Simple and pleasant to use. Great for smaller accounts where you just need a reliable publishing queue.
13. Later
Built around visual planning for Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest, with a calendar view clients understand immediately.
Email and CRM
14. HubSpot
Marketing automation, CRM, landing pages and email in one system. Many agencies use it internally for their own pipeline and also manage it for clients. Running it for your own new business first gives the team hands-on familiarity before they touch a client’s portal.
15. Mailchimp
Still the default email platform for a huge number of small businesses, so your team will run into it constantly.
16. Klaviyo
The go-to for ecommerce email and SMS, with deep Shopify integration and strong segmentation on purchase behaviour. If your agency takes on online stores, someone on the team should know it well.
17. Brevo
Formerly Sendinblue. A cost-conscious option covering email, SMS and basic automation.
Design and creative
18. Canva
Everyone on the team can make a social graphic or a quick banner without waiting on a designer. Brand kits keep fonts and colours consistent across client accounts.
The practical win is fewer small requests landing on your senior designers. If the social team can resize a carousel for three platforms themselves, designers get their afternoons back for the work clients actually pay a premium for. Set up one brand kit per client on day one and lock the core elements so nobody drifts off-palette.
19. Figma
The standard for UI work, landing page mockups and collaborative design reviews. Comments directly on frames save a lot of email back and forth.
20. Adobe Creative Cloud
For finished production work in Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and After Effects, most creative teams still live here.
21. CapCut
Fast short-form video editing with captions and templates. Handy for social teams turning out reels at volume.
Project management and operations
22. ClickUp
Tasks, docs, goals and time tracking in one tool, with enough customisation to model a retainer workflow per client. The flexibility is a strength and a risk: set up a standard template early or every account manager will invent their own structure.
23. Asana
Clean task management with timelines and dependencies. Tends to suit agencies that want structure without much configuration.
24. monday.com
Board-based work management that non-technical clients can read easily if you give them guest access.
25. Notion
Wikis, SOPs, meeting notes and lightweight databases. Where I’d keep the agency playbook. Onboarding checklists, reporting SOPs, the approved prompt library for AI tools and a page of client quirks all belong here, searchable and linked, instead of scattered across old emails.
26. Slack
Internal chat, plus shared channels with clients. Shared channels cut down on long email threads and make approvals faster.
27. Harvest
Time tracking and invoicing. If you bill hourly or need to check retainer profitability, this is the honest mirror.
Reporting
28. Looker Studio
Google’s free dashboarding tool connects natively to GA4, Search Console and Google Ads. With a few community connectors, it covers most client reporting needs.
29. AgencyAnalytics
White-label dashboards and automated reports built specifically for agencies, with a long list of marketing integrations. It’s the tool that most directly removes the monthly copy-paste ritual. Clients get a branded login, account managers get scheduled PDF reports, and the conversation in the monthly call shifts from “what are the numbers” to “what do we do next.”
30. DashThis
Straightforward automated reporting with templates. Quick to set up for smaller clients.
AI writing
31. Grammarly
A writing assistant that checks grammar, clarity and tone across email, docs and browser fields. Useful as a last pass on anything client-facing. For agencies with writers in several countries, a shared style setting helps keep spelling and tone consistent across accounts.
Which stack fits which agency size
Nobody needs all 31 at once. This is roughly how I’d sequence them as an agency grows:
| Stage | Core tools | Add when it hurts |
|---|---|---|
| Solo or 2 to 5 people | Google Search Console, Looker Studio, Canva, Buffer, Notion, Quillbot | One SEO suite (Semrush or Ahrefs) |
| 6 to 15 people | SEO suite, ClickUp or Asana, Slack, Harvest, a social scheduler, Quillbot for decks | AgencyAnalytics or DashThis for reporting |
| 15 to 40 people | Sprout Social or Hootsuite, HubSpot, Figma, full Adobe for designers | Surfer for content scale, second SEO suite |
| 40+ people | Standardised stack per service line with admin ownership | Dedicated ops person to manage tools |
The “add when it hurts” column is the important one. Buying the tool before the pain shows up usually means paying for months of a login nobody uses.
How to roll new tools into an agency without chaos
Most of the effort goes into getting a team of twelve to use a new tool the same way.
Start with the task that eats the most hours. For most agencies, that’s reporting or decks. If your account managers each spend half a day every month on a client presentation, putting an ai presentation maker into the process and building one shared prompt template for quarterly reviews will pay back faster than almost anything else on this list. Write the prompt once, including the slide order you want and the metrics that always appear, then store it in Notion so nobody starts from scratch.
Next, standardise before you scale. One project template per service line. One reporting template per client tier. One naming convention for files. These sound boring and they are, but they’re what lets a new hire become useful in their second week instead of their second month.
Audit the stack every six months. Tools overlap more than people expect: you might be paying for social scheduling inside HubSpot and in a separate tool at the same time, or keeping two SEO suites when the team only really uses one. Cancel the ones nobody opened in the last quarter.
Assign an owner to every tool. One person per platform who handles seats, integrations, and the short internal guide on how the agency uses it. Without an owner, settings drift, logins get shared, and when someone leaves, nobody knows which client dashboards were connected to their account.
Train in short sessions, with real client work. A thirty-minute walkthrough using an actual account sticks far better than a vendor webinar, and it surfaces the awkward questions (who approves posts, where final files live) that a generic demo never does.
Finally, give clients visibility where it helps them. A live dashboard, a shared Slack channel and a clean monthly deck build more trust than a long email ever will, and they reduce the “just checking in” messages that quietly consume account managers’ days.
A few quick answers
Do small agencies need all 31? No. A lean starting stack might be Semrush or Ahrefs, Canva, one social scheduler, ClickUp or Asana, Looker Studio, and Quillbot for decks and writing clean-up.
Which tools are free? Google Search Console and Looker Studio are free outright, and several others on this list have free plans or free tiers. Check current terms before rolling anything out to a team.
What should I set up first? Reporting and project templates. They remove the most repetitive work and make every other tool easier to adopt.
How do I get clients to accept AI-drafted decks? Don’t send the raw draft. Use AI for structure and first-pass layout, then have a strategist rewrite headlines, check numbers and add the analysis. Clients judge the thinking on the slides, and that part still comes from your team.
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