The Rocketlane alternative for digital marketing agencies

What changes on Phloz

• Full client relationship lifecycle — onboarding, retainer, deliverables, reporting, all in one workspace
• Real CRM with contacts, retainers, and an audit log
• Native tracking infrastructure map
• Per-active-client pricing

Should you actually switch?

A switch is real cost — a few days of structural mapping, a parallel-running week, training time, and the friction of breaking habits your team has built. Worth it when the new tool meaningfully changes how you work; not worth it when the gain is incremental.

The five signals that you're ready to leave Rocketlane: (1) you're paying for seats or contacts you don't use, (2) you're running the tracking stack in a separate Sheet because the CRM has nowhere for it, (3) onboarding a new team member takes more than a day because the configuration is tribal knowledge, (4) clients ask "where do I see progress?" and you don't have a clean answer, (5) you're duplicating client data across two or three tools because no single tool fits.

If three of those five describe your agency, the structural upgrade is likely worth the switching cost. If only one or two, stay where you are and revisit at the next pricing renewal — switching for marginal gain is usually a worse decision than the marginal gain.

When Rocketlane is still the right choice

The honest counter-positioning. Rocketlane isn't wrong for everyone — these are the cases where staying makes more sense than switching. If any of them describe you, weigh the trade carefully before migrating.

• Your service IS onboarding — implementation consultancy, software-rollout services, change-management projects. Rocketlane's onboarding-flow primitives are the value; you'd lose them on Phloz.
• Most of your client engagements are 4-12 weeks, not 12+ months. The onboarding shape matches the work shape.
• You charge clients for the onboarding portal experience and the polish matters. Rocketlane invests heavily here; Phloz portals are functional but more utilitarian.
• You're not a digital marketing agency — Rocketlane targets implementation services more broadly.

Migration: what to plan for

Rocketlane exports projects + tasks + customer data; customers and their contacts come in through Clients → Import (a CSV), and projects and tasks are re-created by hand. Map customers to clients, projects to parent tasks with subtasks on the client, tasks 1:1. Stakeholder portal users → client_contacts with portal_access enabled. Migrate when an onboarding project completes (clean break) rather than mid-flight.

The structural rethink — mapping Rocketlane's shape to Phloz's opinionated agency model — matters more than the data move. Read the marketing agency CRM buyer's guide for the six capabilities that should drive the decision, and the pricing page to run the per-active-client math at your client count.

Rocketlane migration FAQ

The questions agency owners ask before signing the switch decision. Honest answers — same data we'd give a friend evaluating the move.

I run both onboarding and ongoing retainer work. Should I keep Rocketlane for onboarding?

For most digital marketing agencies, no — split tools make handoff messy. Phloz covers both phases in the same client record: onboarding starts from a one-click starter tracking map (or Import from Google) and built-in task templates such as SEO onboarding and Tracking infrastructure audit (see /use-cases/client-onboarding-audit), then the same record carries the ongoing retainer work. One workspace, no handoff.

When should I migrate — mid-onboarding or after?

After. Migrating mid-onboarding loses the project context the client just lived through. Wait for the current cohort's onboarding to complete, then start new clients on Phloz directly. Existing retainer clients can move on quarterly cadence to align with reporting.

Will my Rocketlane templates carry over?

Project templates need manual reconstruction — rebuild the repeating parts as recurring task templates. Phloz's built-in task templates (SEO onboarding, Tracking infrastructure audit, New campaign launch, and a few more) are fixed: you apply them to a client, but you can't edit or fork them per workspace.

What you keep when you migrate

The honest list of what survives the move from Rocketlane. Your client list and contact records. Your active tasks and their assignees, statuses, due dates. Your custom fields only in part: Phloz has no custom fields, so map each one to a fixed client or task field, or into notes, as you go. Clients and contacts import from a CSV (Clients → Import); tasks are re-created by hand, so budget the time. Your inbound email addresses if you set up forwarding (re-pointed at the per-client Phloz inbound addresses).

What doesn't survive: historical activity logs (keep your old tool's export if you may need them). Bespoke automation rules built on Rocketlane's specific automation engine — these need to be re-expressed in Phloz's patterns (recurring tasks, assignment notifications, inbound thread routing) or kept as manual steps; Phloz has no Zapier connector, webhooks, or public API. Past time entries stay in your old tool's export — Phloz doesn't import them, but new time is logged in Phloz against each client (optionally a task) and rolls up against the retainer.

The trade is a lighter, more opinionated tool that runs your agency's shape natively — at the cost of some per-tool customisation that, in retrospect, was usually a workaround for a missing primitive. See agency project management software for the broader buyer's guide on what to evaluate alongside this switch decision.

Want the head-to-head, not the switch story?

The Phloz vs Rocketlane comparison covers what each tool does, what each doesn't, and when Rocketlane is the right choice — for the cases where you're evaluating rather than already unhappy.

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