Comparison
Manage Agency vs Kitchen.co
Kitchen built one of the calmest client portals on the market. We respect that — and copied the good parts. What Kitchen doesn't solve is the operating side: contracts, invoicing, audit, AI. That's what Manage Agency adds on top.
Pick Manage Agency if…
- — You want the client portal to handle billing + contracts too, not just messages and files.
- — You want to drive the workspace from Claude / Cursor / n8n via native MCP.
- — Audit trail, signed URLs, and acquisition-grade compliance posture matter.
- — You'd rather pay seats + usage than a lifetime deal that caps your scale.
Stay on Kitchen if…
- — You bill manually outside the tool and don't need contracts.
- — A lifetime deal beats recurring pricing for your maths today.
- — You like “calmer Slack” positioning for creatives and don't need agency operations depth.
- — AI / agent automation isn't on your roadmap this year.
Feature by feature
Calm, all-in-one client portal
Kitchen's biggest strength — and ours too.
Two-way email-to-thread sync
Embed any URL as a portal tab (Figma, Loom, Notion)
Custom email domain for client notifications
Annotated comments on images + PDFs
Contracts: send + lightweight e-sign + audit
Kitchen has zero contract layer.
Real invoicing + Stripe Connect payment links
Kitchen has billing as a concept, not a Connect-onboarded payment rail.
Webhook reconciliation (auto-mark-paid)
Onboarding checklists tracked both sides
Operational audit log per client
Slack-native operations + alerts
Slack cron for overdue invoices, payout failures, blocker digests.
Notification delivery health + retries
Per-client time tracking
Cross-client delivery queue (review, revision, due)
AI / agent surface (20+ MCP write verbs)
Manage Agency speaks MCP natively — Claude Desktop, n8n, Cursor all drive it.
Public capabilities index for AI agents
/api/agent/capabilities + auto-generated /docs/api.
Usage-based credits pricing
Lifetime deals
Kitchen sells LTDs. We don't — they burn ARR for our model.
Free-forever 2-seat tier
RLS-audited tables + private buckets + signed URLs
Same calm portal. Real operations underneath.
If you love Kitchen for the client-side calm, you'll like ours too — and you'll get back the billing, contracts, and audit trail you currently bolt on elsewhere.