Projetex, made by AIT (Advanced International Translations), has managed translation agencies for a long time. It is the agency-scale sibling of Translation Office 3000: a client-server desktop system that centralises clients, projects, freelancers, quotes, and invoices for a whole team. Agencies that adopted it years ago have often stayed, because it does the core job and they know it well.
This is not an argument that Projetex is bad software. It is an honest look at its architecture. Projetex runs as Windows workstations talking to a server on your local network — a sensible design when it was built, and increasingly the thing that shapes how your agency has to work. If Projetex is fine but the way your team connects to it is starting to feel like overhead, this article is for you.
The local-network model
Projetex installs on each project manager’s Windows PC and connects to a shared workgroup server. On a local network that is straightforward. Off-site, it means one of a few IT routes: a VPN, a remote-desktop session, or publishing the server to the internet with a static IP or hostname and the firewall and port-forwarding rules that entails. Either way it is a server your agency hosts and secures, and non-Windows machines run the client in a virtual machine.
VectorLingo is a cloud application. Every project manager signs in from a browser, wherever they are, with no client to install and no server to maintain. A distributed team, a home-working PM, and someone on a client site are all looking at the same live data through the same login. The network stops being something your agency has to run.
Growth as an install, not an invite
Adding a project manager to a workstation-licensed desktop system means buying a licence, installing the client on a machine, and giving it network access. It is a procurement and IT task every time your team grows. VectorLingo adds a user with an invitation: they accept, sign in, and they are working. Scaling the team up for a busy quarter — or down again — is a setting, not a rollout.
Coordination that lives in email
Freelancers sit outside your office network, and in a desktop-first system much of the work with them tends to happen over email: files out, files back, status tracked in inboxes and spreadsheets. VectorLingo gives every vendor a self-service portal built into the platform, where they accept jobs, download source files, deliver their work, and raise invoices — and the agency sees each language pair move through its workflow in real time, without chasing an inbox. The coordination lives in the system, where a progress view is one screen rather than an assembly job.
Invoicing that does not reach your accounts
Projetex generates client invoices and vendor payables, and it handles that well. What it does not do is connect to the UK accounting platform your finance function works in. FreeAgent, Xero, and Sage are where UK agencies and their accountants keep the books — FreeAgent especially, for its Making Tax Digital support. Without a live connection, every invoice is entered a second time in the accounting software. VectorLingo’s FreeAgent integration is OAuth-connected and native, so invoices and bills sync directly rather than being re-keyed or exported as CSVs.
The migration checklist
Agencies ready to leave a desktop client-server system tend to describe the friction in specific ways. Each signal below is a place where the local-network model is costing you flexibility, resilience, or coordination time that a cloud platform would not.
Your team runs Projetex against a self-hosted server, and off-site staff reach it through a VPN, a remote-desktop session, or a server you have exposed to the internet.
A self-hosted server has to be kept reachable and secure — on the LAN, over a VPN, or via a static IP or hostname with the firewall and port-forwarding rules that entails.
Adding a project manager means another workstation licence and an install on their machine.
Growth is a procurement and setup task, not a self-service invite. Each seat is provisioned by hand.
Coordination with freelancers happens largely over email rather than in the system itself.
When vendor coordination lives in email threads, status lives in inboxes and spreadsheets rather than in one place everyone can see.
The server PC that holds your project data is a single point of failure for the whole agency.
When the workgroup server is down or lost, every project manager is blocked at once. Continuity depends on your own backup discipline.
Onboarding a new PM is an IT job, not an invitation link.
A new hire needs software installed, network access configured, and a licence assigned before they can open a project.
Your accountant re-enters invoices into FreeAgent or Xero by hand.
The invoicing is built in, but it does not sync to the UK accounting platform your finance function actually uses.
Nobody can check a project’s status from a phone or a machine that has not been set up to reach the server.
A quick check from a client site or from home means getting back to a workstation that can connect to the Projetex server.
Mac users on the team run Projetex inside a Windows virtual machine.
Projetex is a Windows application. Non-Windows staff keep a VM alive purely to reach it.
If one or two of these describe your agency, Projetex is probably still serving you. If five or six do, the constraint is not the feature set — it is the network the software has to run on.
“Projetex asks your team to come to the network. VectorLingo goes to wherever your team already is.”
When Projetex is still the right answer
If your whole team works from one office on a stable network, you prefer a perpetual licence to a subscription, and you have the IT support to run and back up a server, Projetex’s model may still suit you. On-premises software keeps your data physically in your building, which some agencies require for policy reasons, and an established deployment your PMs know well has real value. If none of the friction above describes your agency, there is no need to move for its own sake.
When VectorLingo is the better fit
VectorLingo is built for UK agencies whose people are not all in one building. If you have hybrid or remote PMs, a self-service vendor portal removes the email coordination and a browser login removes the VPN, remote-desktop, and exposed-server setup. If your accountant works in FreeAgent, the native sync removes the re-entry. If you run multi-language projects, per-language workflow tracking gives you a single progress view instead of a parallel spreadsheet. Agency pricing is £49/user/month, or £39/user/month billed annually, with a 30-day free trial and no card required to start.