ConsultancyOS vs Kantata vs Mavenlink vs Office plus Notion.

Most IT services firm owners shopping for a system underneath the firm look at three options. A PSA tool like Kantata or Mavenlink. A knowledge base stack like Office plus Notion or SharePoint. Or status quo with spreadsheets. None of those is the right answer for a firm in 2026.

Here is the honest comparison.

Status quo. Office plus Notion plus spreadsheets.

What it does well. It is familiar. It is cheap. It has no contract. Every team member already knows how to use it.

What it does badly. It does not deliver work. It stores work. The four spreadsheets and the folder of decks are the artefacts of delivery, not the engine of delivery. The senior consultants are the engine. When they leave, the engine leaves.

Best fit. Firms under fifteen people, founder led, where the founder still personally touches every engagement.

Bad fit. Firms over twenty five people. The friction of spreadsheets and Notion compounds faster than the firm can absorb.

PSA tools. Kantata. Mavenlink. Projector.

What they do well. Resource planning. Time tracking. Billing. Invoice generation. Utilisation reporting. The core operate layer of a services firm.

What they do badly. They do not deliver work. They were never built to. They are operating systems for the back office, not the delivery front. The agent layer that compresses delivery is not part of their model. The IP encoding system is not part of their model.

They also tend to cost between USD 60 and USD 120 per seat per month plus implementation fees that often run to six figures. For a 30 person firm that is USD 30k to USD 50k a year before the implementation cost.

Best fit. Firms that have systematised delivery elsewhere and just need a clean PSA to manage the operate layer.

Bad fit. Firms that want a single platform that runs both delivery and operations.

Knowledge tools. Notion. Confluence. SharePoint.

What they do well. Document storage. Wiki style organisation. Templates. Collaboration.

What they do badly. They are passive. They wait for someone to read them. They do not act. A playbook in Notion is a document. A playbook in an operating system is a workflow that runs.

Best fit. As a knowledge surface inside a firm that already has the operating system running.

Bad fit. As the operating system itself. The illusion that "if we just organise our Notion better, we will be fine" is what costs firms three years of compounding delay.

AI copilots. ChatGPT Enterprise. Microsoft Copilot. Claude.

What they do well. General language tasks. Drafting. Summarisation. Research.

What they do badly. They are not trained on the firm's IP. They cannot govern outputs. They cannot be embedded in a delivery workflow. They are productivity tools, not delivery tools. The consultant pastes data in and pastes results back out. The firm does not own anything that was created.

Best fit. As a personal productivity layer for individual consultants.

Bad fit. As the firm's AI strategy. Pasting client data into a public chat is a governance and IP risk most firms have not yet processed.

ConsultancyOS.

What it does. The PSA layer. The knowledge layer. The agent layer. The client portal. The Profit First module. The partner network instrumentation. All in one system, trained on the firm's IP, governed by the firm's guardrails.

What it does not do. It does not pretend to replace your accounting system. It integrates with Xero. It does not pretend to be your CRM if you already love yours. It plugs in. It does not pretend to be a Microsoft 365 replacement.

Best fit. IT services firms and consulting firms between 5 and 100 staff that want to operate like a software company. Founder led or partner led. Strong IP that is currently trapped in heads.

Bad fit. Pure software product companies. Solo operators. Firms with no appetite to systematise.

The decision frame.

Ask three questions.

One. Do you have IP worth encoding? If no, none of this matters. Pick the cheapest option. If yes, the answer is not a PSA. It is a system that includes the agent layer.

Two. Are your seniors the bottleneck? If yes, every quarter you wait is a quarter of compression. PSA tools do not fix this. Encoded IP does.

Three. Is your firm trying to compete with the big SIs? If yes, you cannot match them on bench. You can match them on system. The system has to do more than resource planning.

Apply for the founding cohort if those answers add up to yes.