Zioan for Agencies: Manage Clients and Projects in One Self-Hosted App
Client portal, CRM, project boards, and team chat in one app. Unlimited client accounts at no extra cost.
Agencies juggle two worlds at once. Internally, your team needs to plan work, share files, track hours, and communicate fast. Externally, clients need to see progress, leave feedback, approve deliverables, and feel informed without getting access to your internal conversations.
Most agencies solve this with a stack of separate tools: Slack for internal chat, Asana or ClickUp for project management, Google Docs for shared documents, and maybe HubSpot for tracking client relationships. Each tool has its own login, its own per-seat pricing, and none of them were designed to give clients a clean, branded experience.
Zioan is a self-hosted workspace that combines all of this into one application. Your team gets chat, documents, kanban boards, CRM, and calendars. Your clients get a branded portal with exactly the access they need. No per-client fees. No per-seat charges. One payment and you own it.
What makes agency tooling so painful
Client access is either too much or too little
You want to show a client their project board and share documents for review. In Asana, that means adding them as a guest with limited permissions and hoping they don't see things they shouldn't. In Slack, guest accounts have restrictions and still count toward your billing. Most teams end up sending status updates via email because it's easier than managing permissions across three different apps.
Every new client multiplies your tool costs
Slack charges full seat price for multi-channel guests. Asana Business is $24.99/user/month. ClickUp charges per member. When you onboard a new client and their three stakeholders need access, your monthly tooling bill grows by hundreds of dollars. For agencies with 10 or 20 active clients, the numbers add up fast.
Project context is scattered everywhere
The brief lives in Google Docs. The task board is in ClickUp. Feedback came in via Slack. The contract details are in HubSpot. When a project manager needs to bring a new team member up to speed, they spend 30 minutes collecting links from different tools. When a client asks "where are we on this?", someone has to check three apps before answering.
No tool does CRM and project management together
HubSpot tracks client relationships but has no project boards. Asana handles tasks but has no CRM. You end up maintaining two parallel systems: one for what you promised the client and one for what your team is actually doing. Client notes in the CRM are disconnected from the project where the work happens.
How Zioan works for agencies
A branded guest portal your clients actually use
Each client gets access through a branded login page with your logo. You control exactly what they see: specific documents, boards, chat channels, or folders. Clients can view project boards, leave comments on tasks, and access shared documents without seeing your internal conversations or other clients' work. Unlimited guest accounts at no extra cost.
One space per client, everything inside it
Create a space for each client or project. Inside that space: a project board with task cards, shared documents, a chat channel for quick communication, and a calendar for milestones and deadlines. Your team works in the same space where the client has access. No duplicating updates between an internal tool and a client-facing one.
Built-in CRM connected to projects
Track client contacts with notes (general, call, email, meeting, follow-up, issue, feedback), follow-up reminders with due dates, custom fields, and file attachments. The CRM lives in the same app as your project boards and documents. When you log a client call, you can reference the tasks discussed. When a follow-up is due, it shows on your dashboard alongside your project deadlines.
Time tracking with real reports
Log hours directly on task cards. Each board generates time reports with per-team-member breakdowns, estimated vs. actual hours, and over-budget detection. Export to CSV or PDF for client invoicing. No need for a separate time tracking tool like Harvest or Toggl.
Documents with version history and client access
Write briefs, proposals, and project docs in a rich-text editor with formatting, tables, and image support. Every document has version history so you can track changes and restore previous versions. Import existing files from Markdown, PDF, DOCX, or HTML. Share specific documents with clients through the guest portal while keeping internal docs private.
Team chat with video calls
Internal channels for your team, project channels shared with clients, and direct messages for private conversations. Audio and video calls with screen sharing run on your server. Pin messages, set reminders, search across all channels. When you need to show a client something quickly, start a call from the same app where the project lives.
Stop paying per client
An agency with 8 team members and 15 active client contacts might pay $70/month for Slack, $200/month for ClickUp, and $45/month for HubSpot Starter. That adds up to over $3,700/year, and it goes up every time you add a team member or need a higher plan tier.
Zioan is a one-time purchase. Unlimited team members, unlimited client guest accounts, all features included. Optional renewal for updates and priority support in subsequent years.
30-day trial, all features, no credit card. Install on your server and run a real client project through it before you decide.