The workplace has been forever altered by COVID-19, as many workers discovered – and want to keep – some or all the remote, work-from-home flexibility they grew accustomed to. Employers are looking for ways to balance the desires of their workforce with the necessity of doing business. Project management software bridges the gap among in-office and at-home colleagues and serves multiple purposes by:
Business executives say their companies responded to COVID-19 changes, including an increase in remote working and/or collaboration, much more quickly than they thought was possible. Get more insights from McKinsey & Company. Project management software is one-way businesses of all sizes can streamline and accelerate the delivery of their products and services and efficiently manage all facets of operations.
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While your business needs will determine the features that best suit you, any type of shared digital workspace is a step forward in saving time and wasted dollars on inefficiencies from duplicated efforts or initiatives stuck in the weeds due to poor planning and scheduling.
The list below is a result of our reviews of some top project management tools. Here are our picks for the best project management software:
Time to Change the Spreadsheets?
Preferred by agencies, creative teams, and marketing teams, Teamwork brings ease, convenience, and broad efficiencies to managing client work. It’s intuitive and easy to use, allowing you to move beyond spreadsheets and boards. Teamwork offers a Forever Free plan with basic features and messages for individuals and small teams who are just getting started with project management.
Deliver – $10/user.mo. (billed annually)
Grow – $18/user/mo. (billed annually)
Everything in Deliver plus:
For advanced security, extra speed, and other high-level features, contact Teamwork for an Enterprise quote.
No More Manic Mondays
Small and medium-sized businesses can run all aspects of the company in one place with Monday.com. From project management and inventory tracking to HR onboarding and sales and marketing. Easily access progress reporting, budgets, and status to save time and avoid re-dos. If you thought it wasn’t possible to know what’s going on in all corners of your company, think again. Monday.com also integrates seamlessly with existing tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Calendar.
Free
Basic – $8 seat/mo.
Includes individual plan features, plus:
Standard – $10 a seat/mo.
Includes Basic features, plus:
Pro – $16 seat/mo.
Includes Standard, plus:
Enterprise solutions are available to meet your organizational needs.
Graphics and Templates Keep Business Buzzing
If you appreciate graphics to visualize your data, you’ll like Hive’s flexible project views, including Kanban, Gantt, portfolio, calendar, table, and summary. Using Hive templates, you can save time by building efficiencies that come with duplicating repeatable tasks and projects. Hive also boasts a first-of-its-kind email integration with Gmail and Outlook.
Pricing starts with one base cost with optional add-ons that apply to all users in your workspace.
$12 per user/mo. includes:
Add-ons – $4 to $6 per user/mo.
Ready, Set, Go with Ready-made Templates
Full features at an affordable price, GanttPro gets you up and running quickly with professional, ready-made templates that create charts within minutes. Of course, you can customize based on your needs and save your plans to use as templates later.
Individual – $15 per user/mo.
Team – $8.90 per user/month
Enterprise – Contact GanttPro to learn more.
Off and Running with Drag-and-Drop Features
Project management software is only as useful as your ability to integrate it easily with a disparate team. The drag and drop simplicity for TeamGantt allows you to change start and end dates, rearrange tasks and update timelines with one click. To ensure no one is overextended, see conflicts right away by viewing all of your projects in one Gantt chart.
Free – One project for personal use
Standard plan – Starts at $24.95/mo.
Advanced plan – Starts at $29.95/mo.
For large teams with unique needs, contact TeamGantt to learn about their Enterprise Plan.
Permissions Keep You in Control
Plan.io recognizes that there are different roles on every project management team. Its robust role-based access model means the team lead has total control with detailed permissions tailored to customizable roles. The good news is if you don’t need that, there are convenient, pre-loaded default settings, too.
All plans include SSL encryption, continuous updates, backups, and maintenance, unlimited issues and incidents, an unlimited number of Git and Subversion repositories, free imports of existing data, and super-friendly support via email and phone.
Platinum – $199 / month
Diamond – $99 / month
Gold – $49 / month
Silver- $25 / month
Need more? Get an Enterprise solution, starting from $399/mo.
Breaking Down Barriers
It’s not unusual for even mid-sized companies to have silos in their organization. But very few can optimize results when true cross-departmental collaboration is a wish and not a reality. Wrike’ s customizable dashboards, workflows, request forms, and more, you can 360◦ visibility into your project management instantly, enabling you to find information and make decisions faster.
Shorten your feedback process with visual proofing and automated approval systems.
Free – With the free account, you get some basic features, including a board view, task and subtask management, file sharing, some basic integrations with Google Drive and Office 365, and some storage space.
Professional – $9.80 per user/mo.
Additional features with the Profession plan include Gantt Chart, advanced integrations with MS Project, Excel and RSS, shareable dashboards, collaborators, and extra storage.
Business – $24.80 per user/mo.
This level becomes even more robust with custom fields and workflows, shared real-time reports, graphical analytics, calendars, an automation engine, and more. Additionally includes a free trial of Wrike Proof.
Enterprise – Contact Wrike for a custom solution with advanced security and controls.
Do you want to answer the question that plagues most project leaders: When? LiquidPlanner’s project management software has a predictive scheduling engine, which is a fancy way of saying automatic scheduling adapts to changes in real-time to keep your team focused and on track. Schedule views, workload views, and task boards help with prioritizing.
Free
Essentials – $29 per user/mo.
Professional – from $39 per user/mo.
Customizable pan with the following available add-ons:
Ultimate – $59 per user/mo. (Price is for annual billing.)
Empower Employees to Succeed
Multi-tasking project management is made easy with Proofhub bringing your teams, projects, and clients together in one convenient platform. Targeted discussion topics do away with long email threads that are hard to follow when the subjects are all over the place. Bring organization to your project planning and rollout by dividing and conquering essential tasks, allowing team members to self-manage in the process.
Two packages have flat pricing with no per-user fee.
Essential: $45/mo. billed annually
Core features like task management, discussions, calendar, file sharing, group chat, private items, file versioning, project templates, notes, email, integrations, announcements, multilingual, and request forms.
Ultimate Control: $89/mo. billed annually
Core features, plus:
Zoho offers a full suite of project management software to run your business with 45+ integrated applications. Options are a unified customer experience platform, business finance platform, HR platform, IT management, marketing, automation, and more. Zoho’s business intelligence and analytics app gives you fresh insights into your operation and the customers you serve to plan for and reach your business goals. In addition, resources, seminars, and webinars ensure you get the most out of your projects.
Free – Up to 3 users
Premium – $5 per user/mo. for up to 50 users
Free Features, plus:
Enterprise – $10 per user/mo. (No upper limit)
Premium Features plus:
Universal Reporting Gives the Full View
With Asana’s Universal Reporting, you’re assured a real-time view across all your projects to pinpoint issues and act quickly to resolve them. Sharable dashboards keep your teams and projects on track, and graphical presentations help everyone visualize key data to act on.
A free plan is ideal for managing tasks and personal to-dos, with multiple features including unlimited tasks, projects, messages, activity logs; collaboration with up to 15 teammates, list board, calendar views; and more than 100 app integrations.
Premium – $10.99 per user/mo.
Business – $24.99 per user/mo.
Everything in Premium, plus:
Enterprise – Contact Sales for details.
Everything in Business, plus:
Coders Give it a Thumb’s Up
Backlog is a favorite with coders who appreciate the project management tool’s bug tracking software because, let’s face it: any time you release new code, there’s a chance for error. By logging them as issues in a central hub, your team can work together to identify and resolve issues. In addition, on all projects, organization and big-picture overviews with task management are accessible anywhere with Backlog’s free iOS and Android native apps that sync with the online workspace.
Free Plan
Starter – $35/mo.
Standard – $100/mo.
Premium – $175/mo.
Enterprise includes a private server with unlimited projects and storage. To learn more, contact Backlog.
Powerful software development for agile teams
Jira is a perfect solution for software development businesses that allows team members to plan, track, and release great software. Through real-time reporting and visual data you can improve team and project performance from start to finish. Additionally, integrate a host of tools and save time with automations through the feature-rich platform to ensure that your team’s workflow is performing at it’s best.
Free
For small teams to plan and track work more efficiently
Standard – $7 per user/mo.
For growing teams focused on collaboration
Premium – $14 per user/month
For businesses that need to scale their collaboration and tracking
Enterprise – Contact Jira to learn more
For enterprises with a global scale requiring security and governance needs
At a Glance or Deep Dive
Take the mystery out of why some projects go off the rails with Podio’s progress update at a glance feature, knowing you can quickly dive deeper into the data for details. Podio integrates with most file-sharing services, customer support products, and marketing tools like Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft Exchange, Campaign Monitor, and GoToMeeting, to name a few. The project management software is designed to increase sharing and peer recognition, both essential to positive team culture.
Free for five employees
Basic – $7.20 per user/mo.
Plus – $11.20 per user/mo.
Everything with BASIC and:
Premium – $19.20 per user/mo.
Every with PLUS and:
Ready for Every Department
Creative projects, human resources, IT, and marketing departments all appreciate the ease and convenience of streamlining workflows with a simple project management tool. With ProProfs Project time tracking, task management, and resource planning are just three of the ways you can simplify your processes. Plan meetings using a shared calendar and visualize milestone progress along the way.
Essentials – $2 per user/mo.
Premium – $4 per user/mo.
All the features with Essentials, plus:
Proven and Trusted Worldwide
Microsoft Project eases planning, scheduling, file sharing, and collaboration among teams from simple to complex, whether they are across the hall or the world. Desktop and mobile experiences are built on Azure, a secure and trusted enterprise cloud.
Project Plan 1 – $10 per user/mo.
Project Plan 3 – $30 per user/mo.
All the features of Project Plan 1, plus:
Project Plan 5 – $55 per user/mo.
All the features of Project Plan 3, plus:
An Original Gets Even Better
Basecamp wrote the book on working remotely – literally. Work is broken down into separate projects, and each project keeps those involved. Every discussion, document, file, or task is where it’s supposed to be, making it easy for a far-flung workforce to collaborate and stay on track. Tutorials and help guides get you started; detailed help is a click away. Basecamp does not charge you based on how many users you add, unlike most group project management software.
Basecamp Business – $99/mo. flat
Includes every feature like project templates, a company HQ, advanced client access, team projects and priority support plus unlimited projects, unlimited users and no per user fees.
Basecamp Personal – Free but limited
Great for personal projects, students, freelancers, families, and light use, you get three projects, 20 users, and 1GB of storage space.
Playing the Right Cards
Trello’s building blocks are lists and cards. You can open a card on your project management portal to find all your assets. Bigger cards can be broken down into steps with attachments, previews, and reminders. Software integrations include Confluence, Slack, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Evernote.
Free for individuals and teams with:
Business Class – $10 per user/mo.
A 10,000-Foot View to See Up Close
Company leaders and executive teams appreciate a global view of all projects across departments, clients, or campaigns. The Workzone project dashboard is easy to read with colors and symbols that represent on track, late or overdue. For complex initiatives, task dependencies and workload reports help to realign assets or expectations to maintain timelines.
Every plan includes unlimited training and support.
Team – $24 per user/mo.
Professional – $34 per user/mo.
All the features of Team, plus:
Enterprise – $43 per user/mo.
All the features of Professional, plus:
Keeping the Conversation Going
You can keep clients, vendors, and partners in the loop by sharing a Slack channel. The channels help teams stay focused with a dedicated space for conversations, files, and tools. Video conferencing with screen sharing improves communication, as does the integration with dozens of apps.
Free
Pro – $6.67 per active user/mo.
Business – $15.50 per active user/mo.
Enterprise solutions offer advanced security and large-scale collaboration.
Few organizations can’t benefit from project management software as the marketplace gets even more competitive, and any edge against your competition is critical. Consider the features, price, support and integrations as you review what’s available. Here are our picks for leading platforms and why we think they are standouts:
Last updated on by Joshua Holdeman
