At Choco Media, we talk a lot about AI-first workflows and lean operations, which means the tools we pay for are a direct expression of what we actually believe. The marketing agency tools stack question comes up in almost every new client discovery call — people want to know whether we are using the same platforms they have been pitched, or something more considered. This post is the honest answer: what we pay for today, what we dropped, and the thinking behind each decision.
We are a small team based in Rovaniemi. That context matters because our stack decisions are not the same as a 40-person agency in Helsinki. We cannot afford tools that need a dedicated admin, and we do not have the volume to justify enterprise pricing on platforms designed for much larger teams. Everything on our active list has to earn its place by doing real work, not by being impressive in a pitch deck.
This is not a comprehensive review of every tool in each category. It is a snapshot of what we run as of mid-2026, what each subscription costs us in time and money, and — where relevant — what we cut and why.
How We Think About the Marketing Agency Tools Stack
Before the list, the framework. We run a quarterly stack review. The trigger question is simple: if our revenue dropped 50% tomorrow, would we renew this subscription? That filter removes tools we keep out of habit, tools we thought we would use more, and tools that are genuinely useful but not for us.
A second question runs alongside it: is this tool in the critical path of client work, or is it overhead? Tools in the critical path — the ones that touch deliverables — get more tolerance for cost and complexity. Overhead tools that mostly generate reports nobody reads get cut first.
- Critical path test: does client work stop or slow meaningfully without this tool?
- Adoption test: was this used in the last 30 days by more than one person?
- Alternative test: could a built-in feature or cheaper tool do 80% of the job?
Three no answers and the tool goes on a 60-day notice period. Not everything that fails the test gets cut immediately — sometimes a tool is in transition, or we are mid-project with a client who relies on it. But the intent is to keep the stack honest.
AI Drafting and Writing
This is the centre of our production workflow, so it gets the most deliberate attention.
Claude (Anthropic) — Active
We use Claude Pro as our primary drafting environment. The reasons are specific: long context window, strong instruction-following on structured briefs, and consistently better behaviour on nuanced tone tasks than we have found elsewhere. For client content that needs to sound like the client, not like a generic language model, Claude holds up better under stress.
Cost: approximately €18/month per seat. We run two seats.
ChatGPT (OpenAI) — Active, supporting role
We keep a ChatGPT Plus subscription primarily for tasks that involve tools or plugins where GPT-4o has better integrations — particularly browsing tasks and certain structured data generation workflows. We no longer use it as a primary drafting environment.
Cost: approximately €20/month.
What we cancelled: Jasper AI
We ran Jasper for eight months in 2023. At the time it offered workflow templates that felt genuinely useful. By 2024 the gap between its output and what we could get from a well-prompted Claude had closed to zero, while the cost had risen significantly. We cancelled it and have not missed it.
SEO and Content Research
Ahrefs — Active
Ahrefs is the one SEO tool we would keep even at twice the price. The keyword data, content gap analysis, and backlink explorer are all part of weekly client work. We use it for our own site too — the competitive content analysis workflow we run for new clients starts with an Ahrefs site audit.
Cost: approximately €99/month (Lite plan). For a small agency doing genuine SEO work, this is non-negotiable.
Screaming Frog — Active
Technical SEO crawls. The paid licence costs around €209/year and covers unlimited URL crawls. We use it at the start of every website engagement and quarterly for larger retainer clients. It is one of the few tools where the paid version is dramatically better than the free version — the free tier caps at 500 URLs, which covers almost nothing in practice.
What we cancelled: SEMrush
We ran SEMrush in parallel with Ahrefs for two years, partly because clients expected to see it in reports. We eventually ran a side-by-side comparison on ten client sites. For our specific use cases — keyword research, competitor gap analysis, and rank tracking — Ahrefs was consistently more useful. SEMrush was not bad; it was redundant. Cancelled at renewal.
Project Management and Client Communication
Notion — Active
Notion is where we run almost everything: client workspaces, the internal content calendar, briefing templates, the SOPs we actually follow, and meeting notes. We have tried to replace it with Linear (good for dev work, not for us), ClickUp (too many features, too little clarity), and Basecamp (good but not the right fit for a two-person team). Notion stuck.
Cost: approximately €8/month per seat on the Plus plan. We also use it as a client-facing portal for retainer clients, which removes the need for a separate client portal tool.
Slack — Active, limited
We use Slack for async client communication on larger retainers where clients prefer it over email. We do not use it internally in any meaningful way — a team this size does not need another inbox. Cost is variable depending on which client workspaces we participate in; our own workspace is on the free tier.
What we cancelled: Asana
We used Asana for project management for about eighteen months. It is a well-made tool. The problem was that we were maintaining it alongside Notion, which meant double-entry on everything. We consolidated into Notion and have not needed a dedicated PM tool since. For a larger team with multiple concurrent projects and dedicated project managers, Asana would be the right call. For us, it was redundant overhead.
Paid Media and Analytics
The most expensive analytics tool we use is GA4 — and it is free. Before paying for anything in this category, we ask whether we have actually extracted the value from what we already have access to.
Google Analytics 4 — Active (free)
GA4 is the primary analytics layer for every client site we work on. We have strong opinions about its limitations — the event-based model is more powerful than Universal Analytics was, but the interface is genuinely hard to use — but the data quality is good enough for the decisions we help clients make. For clients with more complex attribution needs, we layer in server-side tagging. See our post on attribution in 2026: GA4, server-side tracking, and what we actually use for the detail.
Meta Ads Manager and Google Ads — Active (platform tools)
We run paid media directly in the native platforms. We have tested several third-party bid management and reporting tools over the years. For the budget levels our clients operate at, the native tools are sufficient and the third-party overhead is not justified. Above roughly €50,000/month in managed spend, the calculus changes.
What we cancelled: a third-party reporting dashboard tool
We used a mid-tier reporting tool (one of several that pulls from Google Ads, Meta, and GA4 into a branded dashboard) for client reporting. The dashboards looked good. The problem was that clients rarely opened them, and when they did, the data required explanation rather than being self-evident. We replaced it with a lighter Notion-based reporting format. Our AI automation service now handles the data-pull-to-draft layer of monthly reports more efficiently.
Design and Creative
Figma — Active
We use Figma for website wireframes, landing page designs, and social creative. We are on the Starter plan (free), which covers a small team adequately. If we moved to a higher production volume of design deliverables, we would upgrade.
Canva — Active
Canva runs in parallel with Figma for client-produced content — templates that clients maintain themselves, social media assets that need to be updated without a designer, and presentation decks. Canva Pro costs around €15/month. For retainer clients who produce their own social content, we set up a branded Canva workspace as part of onboarding.
What we cancelled: Adobe Creative Cloud
We used Adobe CC — primarily Photoshop and Illustrator — until approximately late 2023. The combination of Figma for design work and AI image generation for product/concept imagery removed most of the remaining use cases. The cost (approximately €60/month for a full suite licence) was not justified for the frequency of use. We retained a single Adobe Firefly subscription for specific image editing tasks at a much lower cost.
Automation and Workflow
Make (formerly Integromat) — Active
Make is our primary automation platform. We use it for: scheduling social posts from a content queue, triggering AI report drafts, moving data between platforms (Notion → Google Sheets → client dashboards), and a handful of client automations we have built and handed over. The Core plan costs around €9/month and covers the operation volume we run.
We have also tested Zapier for specific client builds where the client already had a Zapier account. Zapier is easier to set up; Make is more powerful for complex multi-step workflows. For a marketing agency building non-trivial automations, Make wins. For simpler integrations, either works.
n8n — Active, selectively
We run n8n self-hosted for specific AI agent workflows where data privacy or cost per run would make Make impractical. The self-hosted option is free; the cloud version starts at around €20/month. We use it for content pipeline automation and the type of AI automation work we build for clients who want an agent rather than a simple trigger-action workflow.
What we cancelled: Zapier (own account)
We ran a Zapier Professional account for about a year. The cost (approximately €49/month for the volume we needed) was hard to justify once we had fully migrated to Make. We kept access for one client project during a transition period, then let it lapse.
The Stack in Numbers
Our active paid subscriptions, annualised:
- Claude Pro × 2: ~€432/year
- ChatGPT Plus × 1: ~€240/year
- Ahrefs Lite: ~€1,188/year
- Screaming Frog: ~€209/year
- Notion Plus × 2: ~€192/year
- Canva Pro: ~€180/year
- Make Core: ~€108/year
- Adobe Firefly: ~€60/year
Total: approximately €2,609/year, or roughly €217/month. That covers the primary production, SEO, automation, and design infrastructure for a small AI-first agency doing real client work. The tools we cancelled over the past two years would have added roughly €3,000/year on top of that.
The pattern we notice when we look at what we kept versus what we cut: the tools that survived have very specific jobs and do them reliably. The ones we cancelled were either general-purpose platforms that did many things at mediocre quality, or specialist tools whose niche had been absorbed by something we already owned.
What We Are Watching
A few categories where we expect our stack to change in the next twelve months:
- AI search and GEO tooling: dedicated tools for tracking AI Overview and Perplexity citation are maturing. We are evaluating several. None has fully replaced the Ahrefs + manual monitoring combination yet.
- Video production: AI video tools are moving fast. We have not committed to a paid subscription yet because the quality and workflow integration for marketing content is not stable enough to rely on.
- CRM: We currently manage our own pipeline in Notion. If volume grows, we will need a proper CRM. We have no preference locked in yet.
Final Thought
The stack is not the strategy. We see agencies — including some that compete with us — spending €1,500/month on tools and producing generic output because the workflow between the tools is broken. The tool bill is a lag indicator of operational clarity. If you want to audit your own stack, our contact page is the right starting point — we run a one-session stack review for new clients as part of onboarding, and it usually surfaces two or three subscriptions that can be cancelled on the spot.