How do you and your team manage your projects? Are you updating and sharing spreadsheets, sending hundreds of emails back and forth, or having post-its all over the workplace? or are you using capable project management tools? Project management involves planning, running meetings, discussions, scheduling tasks, one-on-one messaging, allocating resources, managing budgets, analyzing reports, and billing.
Using a project management tool for these operations saves your time, energy, money and increases your productivity. These tools are increasingly becoming smarter with Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities. But which project management tool should you use? There are hundreds out there. To help you select the right one, we have rounded up the top project management tools for 2021.
Table of Contents
What is a project management tool?
Before we dive into the best project management tools, let’s first understand what exactly a project management tool is?
A project management tool is a computer application or software that assists individuals and teams to plan, organize, schedule, and manage their projects efficiently.
A project management tool saves the time and efforts of a Project Manager by automating recurring tasks and bringing visibility into planning and project execution. Apart from task scheduling, you can collaborate with your project team and stakeholders, view your project’s timeline, allocate resources, control your budget, and document the entire project process.
What are the qualities of a good project management tool?
Which project management software should you choose? The answer depends on your team size, project size, project goals, project duration, budget for the tool, industry type, and other factors.
Below are some essential features that make up a good project management tool.
- Project planning and scheduling – The project plan, outline, and task lists are visible to everyone. You can assign tasks to individuals, prioritize specific tasks, and schedule tasks with the calendar.
- Collaboration – Your team members can share resources. Features such as file sharing, messaging, sharing calendars and contacts, team and dashboards make collaboration easy.
- Documentation – All data related to your project is available in one place and accessible to every team member. They don’t have to waste time by asking each other for the data and resources.
- Reporting – The tool generates reports for project progress, project budget, expenses, completed tasks, pending tasks, deadlines, team member’s performance, issues, testing, and budget.
- Integration – A good project management software allows you to integrate with third-party applications. It saves your time and keeps you organized.
- Invoicing and budget management – You can have weekly and monthly reports of your project expenses. Billing and invoicing allow you to calculate the billable hours and additional costs to share with your clients.
- Time tracking – It allows you to track your team members’ performances and calculate the billable hours.
What are the best project management tools in 2021?
As promised, below are the best project management tools in 2021, in no specific order.
Trello is a leading project management tool that enables the implementation of the Kanban method. It has a simple interface and allows you to visualize the whole project in a single view. Therefore, this tool is suitable for both individuals and small teams.
Trello uses cards to store task details like people assigned, deadlines, descriptions, attached files, and scheduling. You can collaborate within the cards and leave comments for your teammates. The lists and boards help you to organize and manage one or more projects.
Price: You can try the basic plan for free. But the paid plans come with many third-party integrations, customer support, automation, and many more features.
Asana is a tool focused on collaboration with its various functionalities for task management with to-do lists, projects, conversations, and dashboards. You can automate recurring tasks, add custom fields and reminders, integrate with other applications like Google Drive, Dropbox, GitHub, and MailChimp.
Asana is good for all-size businesses as it has strong collaboration and management features. You can view your tasks in the Kanban format as well.
Price: The basic version is free for up to 15 users. The paid versions have more features like timelines, reporting, workflow approvals, portfolios, and other advanced integrations.
Wrike is a cloud-based project management software that allows many customizations. For example, you can switch between different views for your tasks like Kanban board, traditional lists, or Gantt charts. In addition, its real-time newsfeed feature will enable you to collaborate with all your stakeholders.
Wrike has many features like tracking your tasks and subtasks, monitoring deadlines, prioritizing tasks, scheduling, shared workflows, file sharing, real-time communication, reporting, and resource management.
Pricing: It has a free version limited to 5 users. The paid versions like professional, business, marketers, and enterprise have more features and integrations.
Teamwork is a web-based project management tool with a simple and easy-to-use interface. You can view your tasks as both Kanban board or the traditional lists.
Teamwork has almost all the features that you could ask for in a project management tool. You can create tasks and sub-tasks, generate reports, track time, see Gantt charts and milestones, and manage different user permissions. It also has messaging, file storage, automation, budget management, third-party software integration, and many more.
Pricing: Teamwork has a free version for individuals and small teams. They have a couple of paid versions that include a customized enterprise package.
Basecamp is one of the oldest but still popular project management tools, thanks to its versatility across industries. In addition, it has a social media-like interface where you can applaud your colleagues!
The various features of Basecamp are message boards, scheduling, calendar, and email integration, powerful search tool, reporting, customized notifications, separate presentations for clients, and many more.
Pricing: The personal version is free but with limited features, while the business version costs you $99/month with all the features.
Zoho Projects is another tool that has almost all the features that you need for project management. It has features like task automation, task management, Kanban or traditional task view, issue tracking, Gantt charts, reporting, third-party app integration, time tracking, built-in chat, project timesheets, and billing.
With its simple interface, you can plan, organize and manage your projects for better collaboration with your stakeholders. It is helpful for both traditional managers and agile teams.
Pricing: Zoho Projects is free for up to 3 users with very few features. You can try the premium or enterprise versions for full features.
Liquid Planner is an adaptive project management tool thanks to its intelligent scheduling feature. It can prioritize tasks, assign resources to users and estimate the hours for task completion. Other features include analyzing project performance, viewing costs and profits, managing resources, integrating with third-party cloud storage, and issue tracking.
With Liquid Planner, you can view the progress, risks, and budgets for multiple projects in a single view. It is better suited for large organizations as they don’t offer a free version. But they do offer a 14-day trial.
Pricing: Liquid Planner has only paid versions that you can choose depending on your team size.
Celoxis is a popular and robust project management tool thanks to its interactive Gantt charts. It supports on-premise as well as SaaS deployments. Decision-makers and business owners with medium or large size organizations are primary target users for Celoxis.
With Celoxis, you can build dynamic project plans, manage resources, track expenses, collaborate with clients, create custom fields, view real-time reports, and integrate with other software.
Pricing: Even though Celoxis doesn’t have a free plan, you can enjoy a free trial or request a demo before buying the SaaS or the self-hosted program.
Monday.com is a simple project management tool known for its visuals and colorful interface. It allows customization, color coding, and highlighting to manage your tasks, time, and project. It helps you to focus only on the essential things to save your time.
Monday.com has other standard project management features such as resource management, time tracking, reporting, file sharing, commenting and messaging, and a dashboard to view all your reports and data.
Pricing: It offers a free plan for individuals and various paid plans depending on your team size. You can also have a customized enterprise package.
Like the previous one, ProofHub is a project management solution that focuses on simplicity. This online app is well suited for freelancers, small and growing businesses. You can collaborate with both your team and external clients.
ProofHub offers key features such as table views to plan and organize your projects. It also has Kanban boards to manage your tasks, Gantt charts to view your project timeline, custom workflows, roles, time tracking with timers, reports for workload and resources, discussion boards, and a calendar.
Pricing: ProofHub does not have a free plan. But they do offer you a free trial to check out their Essential and Ultimate Control plans.
Other tools
We have left out a couple of obvious and most talked about tools. These include Microsoft Projects and Primavera. Primarily focus on the enterprise market, these are capable suits of tools that can facilitate the entire project management functions for complex projects starting from portfolio management to individual project management, including resource allocation and management, project schedules, task dependencies management, and critical paths.
There is also Atlassian Jira which many Scrum teams favor for all kinds of projects, including complex projects. It also has great complementary tools to enable team collaboration and provides superior integration capabilities.
ClickUp is another tool that provides exceptional capabilities and is fast rising as a challenger to many established tools.
If you are looking for just project scheduling and are okay with a desktop app, GanttProject is a capable and mature tool available for free, even for commercial use. However, you can also buy it for $5 if you want to support the development team. It is also open-source with a GPL3 license that allows you to modify the source code.
There is a wide range of project management tools such as Nifty, Mavenlink, TeamGantt, GanttPro, Workzone, Clarizen, ProWorkflow, and Backlog. This list is not exhaustive but indicative.
Conclusion
The project managers, team members, upper-level managers, and other stakeholders use a project management tool. Therefore, consider various factors like budget, team size, industry, and the features you require before choosing a project management tool. Because no matter how good a software is, it all comes down to how useful it is for you and your team.
