--- title: "Design Software With Team Permissions Compared" date: 2026-10-28 lang: en url: https://archiboard.ru/blog/design-software-with-team-permissions-compared --- # Design Software With Team Permissions Compared ## What Team Permissions Control in Design Software Ask a studio what they want from design software with team permissions and you'll usually hear the same thing: let colleagues work inside a project, but limit what clients and junior staff can see. Role-based permissions do this by showing different information to different people on the same project. A lead designer sees everything. A procurement assistant sees orders and delivery dates. A client sees selections and totals, but never the studio's markup. The job that matters most is protecting margins. Trade markup is the designer's margin on top of product costs, and in most studios it has to stay out of the client's view. A good permission model hides it on screen and in anything that leaves the system, like a PDF estimate or a shared link. If it only hides the markup column in the interface and leaves it in an export, the protection is cosmetic. Beyond margins, permissions typically govern four areas: - **Financial visibility:** who sees costs, markups, supplier prices and profit per room. - **Editing rights:** who can change quantities, swap products, approve selections or adjust budgets. - **Project scope:** which projects a person can open at all, which matters when a studio runs several jobs for different clients. - **Client-facing output:** what appears in proposals, invoices and shared boards. This matters more than it first appears, because generic tools weren't built for it. A generic to-do app can't track vendor lead times, trade markup or client-approved selections with a price attached. Generic project tools also tend to fall apart once a team has to manage visual assets, collaborate on mood boards or follow dozens of vendor orders. Their permissions are usually coarse: you're either in the workspace or out of it, with no concept of a field that only some roles can see. ## Leading Options and What Each Covers The market splits into two groups: general project tools and specialty platforms built around procurement and trade markup. Which group a product belongs to tells you most of what you need to know about its permission depth. General tools such as Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, Notion, Trello and Basecamp cover task boards and team coordination. They suit studios that mainly need to assign work, set deadlines and keep conversations in one place, and they're flexible and cheap. Their weakness here is structural. They have no native idea of a product price, a markup or a client-approved selection, so hiding a margin means building workarounds, such as separate boards or private databases, that someone has to maintain. Anyone who has tried to keep a client-visible board and an internal cost sheet in sync knows how quickly that breaks. Specialty platforms, including Studio Designer, Design Manager, Programa and Houzz Pro, are built for the design workflow. Studio Designer and Design Manager add purchase orders, trade markup and product clipping, and Studio Designer describes its tools as covering several clients across several projects, proposals, invoices, orders and expediting details. They fit firms whose main pain is procurement and billing. Financial logic sits at the center of these products, so markup is a first-class field rather than a hack. Two caveats apply to any comparison here. First, published material from vendors and review sites lists features like client portals and budget tracking, but it rarely explains how roles are configured, which fields each role can edit, or how client exports are filtered. Treat "includes role-based permissions" as a starting claim, not a finished answer, and test the specifics yourself. Second, one frequently quoted statistic, that firms using specialty project and procurement software billed 34% more revenue per designer and had 61% fewer failed deliveries, is attributed to the 2025 ASID Interior Design Industry Outlook but turns up second-hand on a vendor blog. Check the original before relying on it. For a broader look at how task tracking fits into the same decision, our [interior design task management software guide](/blog/interior-design-task-management-software-guide) covers the workflow side in more detail. ## Pricing Models and How to Compare Them Pricing for interior design project management software runs from $0 to $79 per user per month in one survey, and up to $119 per user per month in another that includes pricier suites. The gap comes mostly from which products each reviewer chose to include, so read any range as a rough indicator, not a fixed market boundary. Two pricing models dominate, and they behave very differently as a studio grows. Per-user pricing is the most common: you pay for each seat, so costs rise with headcount. That suits solo designers and very small teams, but it penalizes studios that want everyone to have access, including part-time staff and contractors. Flat or tiered pricing charges a set monthly amount for a plan with a bundle of seats and features. It's easier to budget and encourages broader adoption, though you may pay for capacity you don't use. The question designers ask most often is whether these platforms charge per user or per project. In practice, per user is the norm among the specialty platforms, and some offer flat tiers. Per-project billing is rare in the research, so confirm it with any vendor that proposes it. When you compare, watch for four traps: - **Permissions gated behind higher tiers.** Role-based controls are sometimes reserved for the top plan. Ask which plan includes the margin-hiding features you need before you compare headline prices. - **Currency and date.** Competitor figures in published reviews are in US dollars and change often. If you budget in euros, convert at current rates and treat any quoted price as a snapshot, not a quote. - **Seat definitions.** Check whether clients, contractors and read-only reviewers count as paid seats. - **Migration cost.** Moving off spreadsheets takes time. A cheaper tool that needs weeks of setup can cost more than a pricier one that imports your data quickly. ## How to Choose a Permission Setup for Your Team Start with the people, not the product. List every role that touches a project: principal, senior designer, junior designer, procurement or purchasing staff, bookkeeper, and the client. For each role, write down what they must see, what they must edit, and what they must never see. That short document becomes your test script. Then apply concrete criteria to any design software with team permissions that you evaluate: 1. **Does it hide markup at the field level?** Costs and markups should be visible to the roles you choose and absent for everyone else, not just tucked into a hidden column. 2. **Is the client view filtered in exports too?** Generate a PDF estimate and a shared link as a test client and confirm no cost data survives in either. 3. **Can roles differ by project?** Studios often need a junior designer on one project and not another. Per-project access beats workspace-wide access. 4. **Can you change roles quickly as the team grows?** A role you can reassign in a minute is worth more than one that needs a support ticket. 5. **Does it keep collaboration open?** Permissions should restrict margins, not stop people from commenting, assigning tasks and tracking deadlines together. 6. **What does it cost at your headcount?** Price the plan at your real team size, including the seats that only need partial access. A solo designer rarely needs elaborate roles; a flat, low-cost plan with a clean client view is enough. A growing studio of four to fifteen people needs real role separation, because that's the point where one wrong export can reveal margins to a client. Run a one-week trial on a real project instead of a demo project, and have a colleague play the client to check what they can actually see. ## How ArchiBoard Handles Roles and Hidden Margins ArchiBoard is built on the idea that a design team should collaborate fully while keeping profit out of the client's sight. It brings estimates, product sourcing, room planning, task tracking and team collaboration into one workspace, and its role-based permissions keep margins hidden from clients while everyone else works together. Estimates are live, multi-currency and broken down per room, and they export to PDF, so the client gets a clean document, not your internal numbers. The workflow around that is designed to save time. The AI-powered Web Clipper pulls product photos, prices and SKUs from a supplier's page, so nobody retypes data into a spreadsheet. A timeline view tracks order deadlines and delivery dates, which lets procurement staff and designers work from the same schedule. Because everything sits in one place, a junior designer can add products and update tasks without ever seeing the markup behind the estimate. You can browse the [shared interior product catalog](/catalog), which draws on real supplier websites and lists brands, prices and dimensions, to see how sourcing feeds an estimate. When you're ready to test the permissions model on your own project, [create a free account](/register) and try the Starter plan first. The Pro plan at €20 per month suits a solo designer, and the Studio plan at €100 per month adds multiple seats and advanced analytics for teams. One honest note: the published research doesn't confirm which individual permission features come with each plan, so check the plan details on the pricing page before you assume access, and test the client PDF yourself before sending anything real.