A creative director appears on three timelines. The senior strategist is technically free, provided nobody counts the pitch deck, the client call, or Friday's half-day. A new retainer has been sold with a Monday start, while the producer who could make it happen is already carrying two launches. The project board looks organized. The agency is still overcommitted.
This is the distance between task management and resource scheduling. Tasks describe work. A resource plan confronts the scarcer question: which named person can do it, when, with what share of a real working day? For agencies and consultancies selling expertise across concurrent engagements, that question is where delivery, morale, and margin meet.
Resource Guru, Float, and Teamwork all address it, but their resemblance is mostly visible from far away. Resource Guru behaves like a fast, disciplined booking desk. Float turns the schedule into a capacity and project-finance model. Teamwork embeds resourcing inside a larger system for client delivery. Picking among them is less about counting features than deciding how much of your operating system belongs around the calendar.
Start with the promise, not the task
A typical project tool starts with work to be done and assigns it to someone. A scheduling tool starts with the person, their availability, and every claim already made on their time. That reversal matters when specialists move among clients. A designer can own six tasks that each look reasonable while the combined hours make the week impossible.
The useful schedule also has to include the inconvenient parts of reality: public holidays, leave, part-time hours, meetings pulled from outside calendars, tentative work in the sales pipeline, and the unnamed role that will eventually need a real person. If those inputs stay elsewhere, the colorful plan becomes theatre.
Resource Guru makes the booking the product
Resource Guru is easiest to understand by imagining an agency traffic manager with one excellent screen. Its Schedule shows people and other resources, their bookings, and their availability. Dragging, splitting, duplicating, or reassigning a booking is central. Heatmaps expose overuse and spare capacity. Custom fields help find people by skill, team, or role.
Its clash management is the memorable idea. When a person lacks room for a booking, demand can move to a waiting list instead of becoming an invisible double-booking. Approval workflows can protect sought-after specialists. Tentative bookings and placeholders let the agency record work that is likely but not ready for a name. Leave management and calendar sync make availability more believable.
The product can also schedule equipment, vehicles, and rooms, a useful detail for studios whose bottleneck may be a photographer on Tuesday and a production kit on Wednesday. Its current annual pricing begins at $4.16 per person per month. Reports, timesheets, project rates, budgets, and custom fields begin on the $8 Blackbelt plan at annual billing.
The tradeoff follows from the focus. Resource Guru integrates with task and project tools, including Jira, Asana, ClickUp, Trello, and Teamwork, because it does not ask to become every layer of agency operations. That separation is attractive when the existing project stack works. It becomes another system to reconcile when it does not.
Float gives the schedule financial weight
Float also puts a live Schedule at the center. Teams allocate in hours per day or percentages of capacity, drag work between dates, split it across people, book time off, and see overlap as plans change. Standard hours, custom workdays, public holidays, existing allocations, and approved leave feed the capacity calculation.
Its distinguishing move is to carry that plan toward project economics. Rate cards, cost rates, bill rates, budgets, expenses, and margin tracking make each allocation part of a commercial picture. On the $7 Starter plan, teams can schedule, scope projects, manage time off, and track margin from planned work. The $12 Pro plan adds project estimates, actuals tracking, time tracking, delivery dashboards, and comparisons among estimates, planned hours, and actuals. Prices shown are per scheduled person per month at annual billing.
That makes Float a natural fit for an agency whose operations lead needs to answer two questions in the same meeting: can we staff this, and does the planned team still make the fee sensible? It has more financial context than a pure calendar while remaining recognizably a resource-management product.
The discipline required is equally clear. Rates, budgets, and logged time only help when the agency maintains them. A planning model with stale inputs produces confident-looking fiction. Float is strongest when project leads already think in estimates, allocations, and actuals, or are ready to learn.
Teamwork wants the rest of client delivery
Teamwork approaches resourcing from the other direction. It is already a project and client-work platform, with tasks, time tracking, budgets, retainers, forms, invoices, and client collaboration. Its planning layer brings those records into a Workload Planner for nearer-term balancing and a Schedule for allocations and longer-range demand.
The current Schedule supports unavailable time, placeholders, and tentative projects. Agencies can reserve blocks of time before assigning individual tasks, model work in the pipeline, and forecast utilization, budgets, and financial impact. Role and skill data helps turn a placeholder into the right person. Calendar connections can bring outside events into planning views.
Current annual pricing places project basics and billable time at $9.99 per user per month. The $24.99 Accelerate plan adds workload planning, live capacity, time budgets, retainers, invoices, and more automation. Optimize is quote-priced and adds tentative and active work, scheduling by role or skill, multi-currency budgets, and profitability insight.
Teamwork earns its keep when fragmentation is the larger problem. The account manager, project lead, finance team, and resourcing lead can work from connected records instead of stitching together a schedule, task system, timesheets, and budget report. That breadth also makes implementation heavier. A team that only needs to stop double-booking its editors may resent the extra machinery.
| Decision | Resource Guru | Float | Teamwork |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core mental model | Book a person or resource | Model capacity and delivery economics | Run client work with resourcing attached |
| Best first buyer | Traffic or operations manager | Resource or delivery operations lead | Agency operations or project leadership |
| Strongest reason | Fast schedule and conflict control | Capacity connected to rates and margins | Shared project, time, budget, and client context |
| Watch for | Another system beside project delivery | Input discipline for rates and actuals | Broader setup and change management |
| Entry point | $4.16 annually | $7 annually | $9.99 basics; $24.99 capacity tier |
Run the ugly week through the trial
A polished demo will show how a booking is created. Your trial should show how the plan behaves when reality objects. Load one genuine month of work. Include the shared specialist requested by several accounts, someone on leave, a part-time teammate, a deal at fifty percent confidence, and a fixed-fee project already consuming too many hours.
Then change the scope on Wednesday. Ask who sees the effect, how quickly another person can be found, whether the budget moves with the allocation, and what the individual contributor receives. The right product is the one that leaves fewer side conversations and fewer private spreadsheets after that exercise.
The five-part trial
- Book one scarce specialist across two concurrent clients.
- Add leave and an outside-calendar conflict.
- Model a tentative project before naming the team.
- Move a deadline and rebalance the affected people.
- Compare the revised plan with budget or actual time.
There is no universal winner here because the products draw their boundaries differently. Resource Guru wins by making the schedule direct. Float wins by making the schedule economically legible. Teamwork wins by making it part of a larger client-work record.
The more important choice comes before software: decide that the agency will treat people's time as a finite commitment instead of an infinitely assignable field on a task. Once that principle is real, the product choice gets much less mysterious.
Questions agency operators ask
Which tool is best for straightforward scheduling?
Resource Guru is the clearest fit when the main job is booking people, preventing clashes, tracking leave, and seeing availability without adopting a full project-management suite.
Which tool is strongest for capacity and margin planning?
Float combines a live resource schedule with rates, budgets, utilization, and margin visibility. Its higher plans add actual-versus-planned reporting and time tracking.
When does Teamwork make more sense?
Teamwork suits agencies that want resourcing connected to task delivery, time, retainers, clients, budgets, invoicing, and profitability in one platform.
Do these products replace project management software?
Resource Guru and Float can sit beside an existing project tool. Teamwork includes project delivery, so it can replace more of the stack.
What data has to stay current?
At minimum: working hours, leave, confirmed and tentative allocations, project dates, and role or skill information. Budget and actual-time data matter when financial forecasting is part of the decision.