Disclosure: Some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, which can provide compensation to me at no cost to you if you decide to purchase a paid plan. We review these products after doing a lot of research, we check all features and recommend the best products only.
From the emergence of the business model to the multinational companies era, the component that keeps the foundation strong is the diverse set of teams in an organization. Every establishment has a segregated working model.
For instance, a finance team, a marketing team, HR, administration, production, and others based on the industry of the organization.
It is crucial to have a seamless work system within the enterprise to have a streamlined workflow. Internal communication among the different fundamental departments of a business builds a strong network of data exchange and roles allocation.
In a small business or a start-up, the requirement of a platform to connect and manage might not be that pestering. However, in an organization with multiple departments and employees let alone the clients and affiliates, it is imperative to have a unified platform or forum where all the fundamental bodies collied to share data and manage their tasks.
Is there a platform that can help you track, manage, communicate and report all the activities in your organization in one place?
Indeed, a PMS (Project Management Software)!
Our Top Picks
Embed monday.com boards, dashboards, videos, and more directly into work docs.
Gantt, Kanban, Timeline, Workload, and other powerful views transform your data.
200+ pre-designed templates and over 20 column types.
A project management software is a platform that provides various tools under its umbrella to manage, track and schedule tasks across the departments of the company. Contingent upon the complexity of the product, it can oversee assessment and arranging, planning, cost control, budget management, asset distribution, collaboration, correspondence, independent direction, quality administration, using time productively, and documentation or organization frameworks.
The project management platform assists authorities with controlling their expenses and hitting cutoff times. It assists individuals with conveying the activities they focus on. It even assists them with following whether or not they've been paid on schedule and in the perfect sum.
These platforms are available for content, contract, and database management on various web-based platforms and some are even accessible for the mobile interface.
Steps for Choosing the “Best Project Management Software”
Choosing the right option for your business is very difficult and to make the right decision in terms of which software to choose there are a few criteria the software should pass when there are many free project management tools available in the market.
Following are the criteria you can follow to choose the right alternative;
Your business type: Whether you have large teams in your enterprise or a few that can be managed on fewer user IDs
Team Collaboration Tools: Ease of use for clients and users in collaborating and communicating with other co-workers.
Scheduling Tools: Seamless scheduling of tasks and projects.
Reporting and Analysis: Visual means utilized to display reports and real-time analysis.
Task and Data Management: The features provided for securing data and allocating tasks.
Versatile in use: Can work on desktop and cellphone interface.
Automation and Integration: Automated emails and notifications for task update, completion, and progress.
Best Project Management Softwares Reviewed 2024
Asana – Best All-in-one Platform
Monday.com – Best Pre-designed Templates for All Industries
Trello – Best Task Scheduling Tools
Zoho Projects – Best Timeline Tracking Tool
LiquidPlanner – Best Data Customisation
Smartsheet – Best Beginner-Friendly Platform
Basecamp – Best Team Communication Tools
Wrike – Best Team Collaboration Tools
Celoxis – Best Task Management Tools
Hive – Best Democratic Project Management Platform
Kintone – Best Centralized Workflow Management
ProWorkflow – Best Reporting and Analytics Tools
Awork – Best Task Automation Tools
Podio – Best Internal Communication Tools
14 Best Project Management Platforms of 2024
Let's go through the list of top project management platforms and choose the best option for your business.
Asana
Asana is a San Francisco-based versatile interface work management platform intended to assist groups with sorting out tasks, tracking the assigned tasks, and managing their work founded in 2008 by Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein. It's one of the best project management software for individuals.
Key Features
Plan Projects – Organize work like sticky notes and track tasks through every stage. Boards help make your work processes more transparent. Use a to-do list to capture every step of project work or processes in one place, and manage each step from start to finish. Map out project plans on a timeline so you can see the relationship between tasks and keep work on track and even when plans change. View your work on a calendar to easily spot holes and overlaps in your schedule and make adjustments.
Reporting – Organize your work into shared projects as lists or Kanban boards for your initiatives, meetings, and programs and break work into manageable pieces for you and your team. Group tasks into sections in any project to match workflows, break up types of work and keep tasks organized. Visualize significant checkpoints in your project to measure and share progress. Add files from your computer, Dropbox, Box, or Google Drive to any task or conversation. You can see files on individual tasks, or at the project level and eliminate time spent recreating your team’s common workflows.
Management – Get a real-time overview of how busy team members are across projects, and rebalance work to keep projects on track. Monitor the status of all your projects in real-time, so you can keep initiatives on track and report updates to your team. Get automatic updates about the projects, conversations, and tasks that matter to you. Get real-time project data in one place. Customize charts to see where work may be blocked or off track. Enterprise customers have additional controls with SAML and our Admin API.
Communication – Comment directly on a task to clarify exactly what needs to be done, and with ‘@’ mention teammates or other tasks or projects so everything stays connected. Add teammates as followers so they can stay in the loop with work on the task and receive relevant notifications with task updates. Discuss a project’s progress to keep the momentum going. Create a space for all team conversations and announcements.
Pros
Goal Setting / Tracking
Graphical Workflow Editor
Guest Access
Idea Management
Internal Meetings
Kanban Board
Remote Access/Control
Reporting & Statistics and Reporting/Project Tracking
Resource Scheduling
Cons
Lacks Cost-to-Completion Tracking
Limitations in real-time updates
Pricing
Asana offers a free plan that it terms as a basic plan and two other paid plans that are billed monthly and yearly. It also offers an enterprise plan where you can choose the features and projects and bill accordingly.
Following are the features of the free plan. These are the basic features that you will find all the plans.
Unlimited tasks, projects, messages, activity log, file storage (100MB per file) and collaboration with up to 15 teammates.
Premium Plan: $13.49/month and $10.99/month when billed annually.
Business Plan: $24.99/month and $19/month when billed annually.
From the offered plans the most suitable plan is the Premium Plan but again it totally depends on the required features for your workspace and business type.
Monday.com is an Israel-based cloud-based task and team management software established in 2012 by Eran Zinman Roy that permits clients to make their applications and work on the planning, tracking, and task executing program.
Key Features
Collaboration – Co-edit in real-time, instantly share comments, and drag and drop your text without disrupting your team members. Embed monday.com boards, dashboards, videos, and more directly into work docs. Every component is automatically synced and updated as you work. Transform every part of your Monday work doc into live-action items, that seamlessly connect to all of your ongoing workflows.
Centralized Platform – Monday.com equips you with the tools to create custom dashboards and track progress, timelines, and budgets at a glance. Easily run reports from a high-level overview down to the very last detail. Use data tools to smartly assign and prioritize tasks, share files, and see who is doing what anytime. Our customizable boards keep everyone synced and working towards the same goal. Use timeline, calendar, charts, and other views to track progress and get a clear breakdown of your team's resource capacity to improve workflow.
Kanban Style – Use ready-to-use templates or create your own so your agile team can get started in a snap. Automate the mundane tasks so your team can focus on the work that really makes an impact. With all communication and updates in one place, work better together to push the product forward. Use dashboards to easily track iterations and backlogs to see where your team stands against each milestone.
Automation – Instantly send emails when due dates arrive, and receive real-time updates when tasks are completed so your team is always aligned. Leave repetitive work behind. Avoid unnecessary meetings, lengthy email chains, and more by setting up customizable automation within minutes. Easily set up code-free automation to create the perfect workflow for every team. Continue working with your existing tools inside monday.com. Sync due dates with your Google Calendar, instantly share your Dropbox files with your entire team, and more.
Reporting – Easily visualize important dates, milestones, and set dependencies for your projects to make sure everything gets done on time. Easily turn old-fashioned spreadsheets into smart boards that you can view as Gantt charts. Put your work in context and collaborate with your entire team, seamlessly. Gantt, Kanban, Timeline, Workload, and other powerful views transform your data, so you can make sure your team's workflows run smoothly and efficiently. Instantly improve team collaboration with real-time updates to everyone’s devices and connect your existing tools to monday.com and have all your work in one place.
Pros
Unlimited boards and work docs.
200+ pre-designed templates and over 20 column types.
Offers an interactive dashboard with Kanban view, Timeline view, Calendar view, Map view, and Chart view.
Collaboration Tools
Customizable Reports
Email Marketing
Lead Management
Marketing Automation
Mobile Access
Cons
Lacks Cost-to-Completion Tracking
Limitations in reporting and statistics
Lacks work configuration
Pricing
Monday.com offers three paid plans billed monthly and yearly and one enterprise plan where you can connect with them and get a plan according to your business requirements.
Basic Plan: $8 seat/month and $24/month if billed annually.
Standard Plan: $10 seat/month and a total of $30/month if billed annually.
Pro/Professional Plan: $16 seat/month and a total of $48/month if billed annually.
The Standard Plan from all the offered plans is a reasonable alternative as it provides you with all the features while maintaining the affordability for each seat.
Trello, an auxiliary of Atlassian, is an Australian web-based programming organization and was established in 2014 by Fog Creek Software. The interface utilizes the Kanban-style work ethic, i.e., the client can use constant and real-time correspondence capacity and clarity of work. It one of the free options and best project management software for small teams.
Tasks are addressed outwardly on a Kanban load up, permitting colleagues to see the condition of each piece of the project anytime.
Key Features
Trello Board – Lists and cards are the building blocks of organizing work on a Trello board. Grow from there with task assignments, timelines, productivity metrics, calendars, and more. You and your team can start up a Trello board in seconds. With the ability to view board data from many different angles, the entire team stays up-to-date in the way that suits them best. Using a Timeline view for project planning calendar helps with time management table view connects work across boards see board stats with dashboard, and more.
Trello Card – Trello cards are your portal to more organized work where every single part of your task can be managed, tracked, and shared with teammates. Open any card to uncover an ecosystem of checklists, due dates, attachments, conversations, and more. Spin up a Trello card with a click, then uncover everything it can hold. Break down bigger card tasks into steps with file attachment previews, reminders, checklists, and comments emoji reactions included! Plus, gain a powerful perspective by seeing all cards by list and status at the board level.
Trello Butler – Let the robots do the work so your team can focus on work that matters. With Trello’s built-in automation, Butler reduces the number of tedious tasks (and clicks) on your project board by harnessing the power of automation across your entire team. Butler uses natural language commands to automate just about any task in Trello; Automate common actions like moving lists Create custom buttons to build process quickly Surface upcoming deadlines to the team Schedule teammate assignments, and more!
Power-Ups – Easily connect the apps your team already uses into your Trello workflow, or add a Power-Up that helps fine-tune one specific need. With hundreds of Power-Ups available, your team’s workflow wishes are covered. From Reporting to Custom Fields to your beloved software integrations we’ve got functionalities, your favorites, and more such as Confluence Slack Dropbox Google Drive Evernote.
Pros
Cost-to-Completion Tracking
Customizable Dashboard
Customizable Templates
Data Import/Export
Discussions / Forums
Drag & Drop
Inventory Management
Kanban Board
Marketing Automation
Cons
Limitations in reporting and statistics
Lacks work configuration
Limitations in real-time updates
Pricing
Trello provides three paid plans that cost according to the number of users per month and are billed annually. It also offers a free plan to explore the platform. Following are the basic features that are included in the free plan;
Standard Plan: $6 user/month and $5 user per month if billed annually.
Premium Plan: $12.50 user/month and $10 user per month if billed annually.
Enterprise Plan: $210.00 annual price per user and $17.50 per user per month if billed annually.
Zoho Projects, an Indian cloud-based project management software established by Sridhar Vembu, assists you with arranging your undertakings, tracking work productively, and working together with your group independent of any place they are.
Key Features
Task Management and Automation – Manage both simple and complex projects by breaking them down into milestones, task lists, tasks, and subtasks. Visualize project plans and track progress efficiently with the help of Gantt charts and Kanban boards and set up dependencies between related tasks to make sure you always stay on schedule. However simple or complex your task processes may be, design the workflow easily in our blueprint editor using the drag and drop function. Set up task statuses, identify the people responsible for each stage, and make sure the right process is always followed.
Time Tracking – Every project has a timesheet where the team members can log their task hours. These records keep track of the pace of your project and help identify bottlenecks accurately. Start task timers to log hours automatically. Pause your timer when you take a break and end the timer to create a new timesheet entry. Managers can review their team's timesheet entries and approve or reject them as needed. With the Zoho Books or Zoho Invoice integration, Projects helps record your expenses, set up a budget for your project, and turn your timesheets into invoices for client billing and payroll purposes.
Charts and Reporting – Use multiple types of charts to easily plan your projects and manage your team, track your project progress accurately with detailed reports, and get deep insights into how work is moving forward. Plan your work thoroughly with the help of Gantt charts, create dependencies between related tasks, reschedule tasks easily, and track progress closely. This chart helps you manage your team's workload by distributing work evenly among your team members. Easily parse your data with the help of basic and advanced reports and get deep insights about your project, work items, and timesheets.
Collaboration – Make the most of your collaboration software by holding your detailed discussions and lengthier posts on forums. Organize these topics into folders to keep tabs on important subjects. Projects allow teams to create personal or group chat rooms to simply have a conversation or to debate and make important decisions together. Add comments and attachments in reply to an issue or status update and start a discussion right there.
Pros
Alerts / Escalation
Assignment Management
Billable & Non-Billable Hours
Billing & Invoicing
Content Management
Cost-to-Completion Tracking
Customizable Templates
Client Portal
Collaboration Tools
Task Board View
Cons
Lacks Cost-to-Completion Tracking
Limitations in reporting and statistics
Lacks work configuration
Limitations in real-time updates
Pricing
Zoho offers two paid plans that are billed monthly and a free plan with basic features such as simple task tracking, gantt chart viewer and mobile apps (iOS, Android) for 2 projects and 10MB storage space.
The Premium Plan: ₹350 ($4.65)user/month and up to 50 users
The Enterprise Plan: ₹700 user/month with no upper limit
From the offered plans, The Premium Plan is the most popular among small businesses and start-ups as it provides all the features at an affordable price.
LiquidPlanner is an online project management software company situated in Seattle established in 2006 by Charles Seybold and Jason Carlson. It is an autonomous platform with an online project organizing framework that features assessments to communicate the vulnerability in project plans with the teams and partners.
Key Features
Priority-Driven Dashboard – Move your tasks from one status to the next while keeping priorities aligned across all projects and all teams. Use target dates to guide predictive scheduling and alerts will automatically point out schedule risk. Know exactly when work will finish and how late it might be based on the uncertainty built into your estimates.
Task and Portfolio Management – Manage all of your projects in a prioritized portfolio that builds your organization’s priorities into the schedule from the start. Time tracking instantly updates the schedule and provides a way to know where the time actually goes. Leverage data-driven insights to improve performance and support key decisions in your project portfolio.
Reporting and Tracking – Capture uncertainty in your plan through estimation that empowers your team with best-case – worst-case predictions. Determine what team members can see across the portfolio, as well as what they can do. Fast-moving teams make many changes. Rich change tracking and undelete make it easy for teams to work together.
Data Customization – Enrich categorization and analysis by adding your own properties to projects, resources, and tasks every project has a timesheet where the team members can log their task hours. These records keep track of the pace of your project and help identify bottlenecks accurately. . Import your tasks to build projects quickly and export out project data and time tracking entries. Team members get a personalized Workload, Board, and Timesheet View to help them get the right work done.
Pros
Progress Tracking
Project Planning
Release Planning
Reporting/Analytics
Template Management
Gantt/Timeline View
Time & Expense Tracking
Utilization Reporting
Offers collaboration Tools
Workflow Management
Cons
Lacks Cost-to-Completion Tracking
Limitations in real-time updates
Pricing
The Essential Plan: $15 per user per month with annual billing.
The Professional Plan: $25 per user per month with annual billing.
The Ultimate Plan: $25 per user per month with annual billing.
Smartsheet is an American-based software as a service(SaaS) platform for cooperation and work management, created and showcased by Smartsheet Inc in 2006. It is utilized to dole out assignments, track project progress, oversee schedules, share reports, and manage other tasks, utilizing an even and tabular user interface.
Key Features
Team Collaboration – Plan, manage and review content production in Smartsheet to finalize more assets faster. Oversee the production process from your project sheet and use automated alerts and reminders to keep designers on schedule. Include content tasks in reports and dashboards for greater visibility and allow colleagues, vendors, and clients to review content proofs without sheet access. Provide detailed feedback via pinned annotations, conversations, and individual approvals and avoid process bottlenecks with simultaneous proof reviewers.
Eliminate version confusion with easy updates and automatic locking.
Work Automation – Implement simple and powerful automated workflows in a matter of minutes. Automate repetitive processes by sending alerts, requesting approvals and updates, and locking rows based on sheet changes and preset times. Empower business users to automate their own workflows by combining multiple actions and conditional paths in an intuitive visual editor. Improve collaboration and decision-making with real-time visibility into critical business systems. Enable powerful collaboration capabilities with connectors by automatically synchronizing data across critical business platforms, including Salesforce, Jira, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Content and Process Management – Find the best project team, resolve conflicts, and forecast hiring needs. Project budgeting is where you see planned versus actual hours spent to keep projects on budget. Portfolio management that confidently schedules projects based on team capacity. Time tracking makes it easy for team members to submit their hours with pre-filled timesheets. Reporting and analysis to understand performance across the business, spot trends, and plan for growth.
Administration – Configure and manage your Smartsheet Account with ease from one location. Easily view and interact with your admin tools in one centralized control console and experience streamlined navigation between User and Group Management, Usage Reports, and Enterprise Configuration Options. Enjoy a simple Admin experience, making it easier to keep track of who is licensed, what groups they belong to, and what integrations they can access. Improve visibility of security and account settings available and utilize our recommended next steps to optimize your account configuration based on Smartsheet best practices.
Pros
Incident Reporting
Real-time Updates
Functions/Calculations
Gantt/Timeline View
Goal Setting / Tracking
HIPAA Compliant
Public Dashboards
Quotes/Estimates
Recurring Tasks
Roadmapping
ROI Tracking
Cons
Lacks Cost-to-Completion Tracking
Limitations in reporting and statistics
Lacks work configuration
Pricing
Smartsheet offers two paid plans that are billed annually on the basis of the number of users in a month and an enterprise plan that can be opted by organizations that have a quantitative number of users and clients.
The Pro Plan
$7 user/month and a total of $21/month.
Billed annually (min. 1 user, up to 25 users)
The Business Plan
$25 user/month and a total of $75/month if billed annually.
Basecamp is an American web-based project management tool launched in 2004 by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Its essential elements are daily agendas, management and administration, discussions, and forum like communication, record sharing, and time tracking.
Key Features
Task Management – Basecamp’s activity view gives you one place to see everything that’s going on. You can see all the tasks that are overdue, all the work that’s due soon, everything that’s on someone’s plate, and upcoming milestones. Your assignments across every project, your schedules, things that you've bookmarked, etc. Heartbeats summarize the last ~6-weeks of work for a given team, department, or individual if that person is a department of one. Kickoffs are essentially the opposites of Heartbeats. Rather than reflecting, they project. They're all about what the team plans on taking on over the next 6 weeks. Projects, initiatives, revamps, whatever it might be, if it's on the slate, it gets summarized in the Kickoff.
Communication – Basecamp follows the internal communication system that means all company-wide discussions, social chatter, project-related work, sharing of ideas, internal debates, automatic check-ins, status updates, policy updates, and all official decisions and announcements happen in Basecamp. A single centralized tool keeps everything together and creates a single source of truth for everyone across the company. Basecamp does not use email internally but externally, we don't use separate chat tools like Slack or Teams, and we rarely have in-person meetings. We do use Zoom or Skype for the occasional video conference between two or three people. And we occasionally discuss a pull request in GitHub.
Data Analysis – Analyzes complex business problems and issues using data from internal and external sources to provide insight to decision-makers. Identifies and interprets trends and patterns in datasets to locate influences and constructs forecasts, recommendations, and strategic/tactical plans based on business data and market knowledge. Creates specifications for reports and analysis based on business needs and required or available data elements. Provides consultation to users and leads cross-functional teams to address business issues and directly produces datasets and reports for analysis using system reporting tools.
Administration – Discussion about tasks and how to complete them prior to starting work is required. Basic familiarity with networking, configuration management, containers, orchestration, and other major systems, and with common processes and procedures. Mostly carries out low-risk, isolated system maintenance tasks; passively participates in emergency problem resolution. Now to track progress, the user can turn on Hill Chart tracking for each list. This will reveal a Hill Chart on the top of the To-Dos screen with a dot for the list we’re tracking. Updates can be annotated with commentary, and you can even comment on or Boost someone else’s Hill Chart update. This enables a new level of fast, asynchronous communication about high-level progress on projects.
Pros
Idea Management
Live Chat
Milestone Tracking
Mobile Access
Customizable Templates
Discussions / Forums
Document Management
Drag & Drop
Surveys & Feedback
Third-Party Integrations
To-Do List
Cons
Lacks Cost-to-Completion Tracking
Limitations in reporting and statistics
Lacks work configuration
Limitations in real-time updates
Pricing
Basecamp offers a business plan that starts at $99/month with the following features,
Unlimited projects and unlimited users with 500GB storage space, company HQ, team projects and unlimited clients. Work with clients and contractors in Basecamp and advanced client access. Project templates and priority support.
It also offers a free plan to understand and explore the platform before upgrading. The plan does not have all the features but the limited features cover all the important aspects of the platform.
The Wrike is an American-based task management platform is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) item established in 2006 by Andrew Filev that empowers its clients to oversee and follow projects, deadlines, plans, and other work system processes. It additionally permits clients to work together with each other.
Key Features
Interactive Dashboard – Consolidate to-dos from all of your projects as well as tasks that aren’t part of a project. Easily manage your daily work by dragging tasks to “New”, “In Progress”, “Completed”. View your project schedule and set dependencies in real time using drag and drop. Easily adjustable to keep everyone on track and on time. Create Custom Workflows to keep your team on the same page. Easy to implement and simple to use. Set up your workspace to fit your team’s working style perfectly. From customizable dashboards, shared calendars, and multiple options to organize information across Spaces, folders, projects, and more, Wrike adapts to you, not the other way around.
Analysis – Easily edit or build a report from scratch using Wrike’s easy-to-use report wizard. Share real-time, interactive reports and schedule notifications for report updates or reviews on a regular basis. Mark images to add comments, eliminate miscommunications, needless revisions, and delays. Receive timely approvals and keep a clear system of record. Works with documents and videos as well. Track your team’s project performance and accomplishments without needing a degree in statistics. Wrike gives you the insights you need with visual, dynamic reports you can easily share with all your stakeholders.
Collaboration – Wrike helps you turn every meeting, chat, and brainstorming into real plans and results. Collaborate on tasks and projects together with live editing. Keep everyone in the loop and notify only who needs to be updated with @mentions and comments. Manage your team’s bandwidth with Wrike Resource and ensure your team isn’t either under-or overworked with easy time and effort tracking, as well as workload management.
Automation – Create one central hub with every tool you use – Wrike offers 400+ integrations with leading software providers. Wrike is designed to minimize the time spent on repetitive tasks. Personalize your workflows by automating them with 400+ tools – create a path whereby each process is kick-started without manual intervention. Notify the right people and accelerate tasks at every stage.
Pros
Asset Sharing
Audit Trail
Backlog Management
Campaign Management
Change Management
Collaboration Tools
Customer Journey Mapping
Customizable Branding
Transformation Roadmapping
Version Control
Workflow Management
Cons
Lacks Cost-to-Completion Tracking
Limitations in reporting and statistics
Lacks work configuration
Limitations in real-time updates
Pricing
Wrike offers two paid plans and an enterprise plan for large enterprises and teams. It also provides beginners with a free plan with limited features for exploring the platform and then upgrading.
Celoxis is an Indian-based project management software established in 2001 by Ravindra Wankar that comes with a combination of important elements so your group or team can zero in on being useful rather than exchanging between various external tools. The ideal mix of exemplary task management and current light-footed patterns Celoxis gives class highlights, dynamic dashboards and ranking customizations in one reasonable arrangement.
Key Features
Task Management – Collate project requests from various sources in one place. Sort requests based on your business KPIs. Easily match demand with capacity and choose projects that maximize business value. You can create from emails, forms, or spreadsheets, configurable ranking logic, custom fields, workflow and KPIs.Build dynamic project plans that automatically adjust to changing real-world conditions using powerful planning and scheduling tools. Automatic scheduling, inter-project dependencies and multiple resources per task. Address problems with milestones, tasks and projects without leaving your dashboard. Stay on top of your projects with automatic email alerts.
Reporting and Analysis – Gather consolidated 360-degree real-time insights across projects and teams with our super-powerful reports and dashboards. You can use them in filters, columns or charts and even field formulae. You can drill down and perform bulk actions on records in one go. You can download reports and even dashboards in PDF format and schedule reports to be delivered via email to multiple people. Users can have multiple shared dashboards assigned to them and almost all reports can be viewed on dashboards. Resize them as necessary.
Project Accounting – Get real-time visibility into budget spending, receivables, and profitability across projects and portfolios. Get aggregated information about your projects with our fully customizable portfolio dashboards. Customize and track important portfolio KPIs with ease. Easily allocate resources to tasks based on availability, demand and skills. Optimally utilize your workforce with accurate, real-time charts.
Automation – Our project management software integrates seamlessly with over 400 popular business applications and our easy-to-use and powerful API makes it easy to integrate with any custom or in-house software that you use. Our project management software comes with a web-based and platform-independent API for quick integration with your other business applications. Our API is easy-to-use and well-documented, allowing you to connect seamlessly with your existing tools.
Pros
Activity Dashboard
Agile Methodologies
Billing & Invoicing
Budget Management
Customizable Templates
Document Management
Due Date Tracking
Forecasting
Client Portal
Gantt/Timeline View
Template Management
Testing/QA Management
Cons
Lacks Cost-to-Completion Tracking
Limitations in reporting and statistics
Lacks campaign management
Limitations in real-time updates
Extra charge if there are no minimum users.
Pricing
Celoxis offers two plans which are billed on the basis of the deployment of your projects, that is if it is on-premise or cloud-based. The plans can be billed for three years at once.
Cloud-Based Deployment: Access to Celoxis’ application is only via the latest 2048-bit industrial-grade SSL certificates.
$25 user/month and $22.50 user/month if billed yearly. Free support and clients & virtual users with 2GB file space per user.
On-Premise Deployment: Celoxis’ On-Premise version seamlessly integrates with all popular enterprise platforms and is easy to install, configure and maintain. The solution has the lowest TCO compared to other self-hosted project management software.
$450 billed once. Free support for 1 year and clients & virtual users with all upgrades included.
Note that there is a minimum purchase. Your account will always need to have at least 5 licensed (purchased) users.
Hive is an American democratic project management platform established in 2017 by Kevin Guo. A democratic platform implies that the product is built by the user, for the users, through input on Forum. With adaptable task designs, local email, resourcing, group informing, and record sharing, Hive associates all parts of your work.
Key Features
Project Management – Track projects, tasks, and subactions without limits. Assign the next steps and add due dates to keep everyone accountable. View projects and tasks in the way that makes the most sense to you, including Gantt, Kanban, and more. Visualize multiple projects in one clean view with our Summary and Portfolio views equipped with custom fields for your team. Collect information quickly and easily with Forms. All data will be stored and easily accessible from Hive. Easily access all tasks that are assigned to you and quickly view due dates with your “My Actions” to-do list.
Time Management – Understand and visualize your team’s workload and project breakdown with a few clicks. Resourcing can be set hourly or by percentage and track your time spent on any action and project or on behalf of another user across your workspace and sort by category. View and access calendar events from Google or Outlook directly in Hive and quickly schedule a meeting related to a task directly from the Hive card itself. Know that one task you repeat every week? Save yourself time with recurring tasks.
Automation – Access a variety of individual and team-wide statistics about project progress. Use labels to group individual actions and report on actions across projects. Set triggers to automate basic work. Create buttons and easily trigger processes to streamline workflow. Apply templates at both the action and project levels to expedite repeatable processes. Auto-add any email to the project or workspace by accessing your unique Hive address.
Team Collaboration – Message teammates in real-time with Hive chat, or import your Slack account for seamless communication. Use custom statuses to signal if you are busy. Get feedback on your project’s creative assets. Internal and external approvers can leave comments, annotate, and approve multi-stage design processes. New: the ability to proof URLs. Designate priority levels for urgent tasks to help your team understand how they can chip in. Filter and sort tasks by priority with a few clicks. Give teammates additional visibility into tasks by adding them as read-only members, external members, or full-access members.
Pros
Resource Scheduling
Roadmapping
Search/Filter
Skills Tracking
Status Tracking
Customizable Templates
Gantt/Timeline View
Goal Setting / Tracking
KPI Monitoring
Tasks and projects summary views
Cons
Lacks Cost-to-Completion Tracking
Limitations in reporting and statistics
Lacks campaign management
Limitations in real-time updates
Pricing
Hive offers a paid plan and an enterprise plan that can be utilized by large enterprises and a forever free plan with all the fundamental features of the platform.
Hive Teams
$16 user/month and $12 user/month if billed annually.
Note all the features are add-ons and are to be paid for separately. Excluding Analytics, all other features are $4/month and the former is $6/month
Kintone is an American all-in-one workplace platform established in 2011 by Cybozu Inc. that permits profoundly cooperative groups to construct, share, and mechanize custom work processes and cycles for information and data-driven outcomes.
Key Features
Workflow Management – Map out your steps, assign tasks, and automate the tedious stuff so everyone’s always on the same page. And changing workflows takes just a few clicks, so your processes can evolve as quickly as your business. Let your team know when the ball’s in their court and set up automated reminders so everyone knows when deadlines are approaching. Access, edit, and manage workflows from any device or desktop—perfect for busy teams on the go. Make sure only the right people can see your workflows and data with hyper-specific permissions settings and custom approval processes.
Project and Task Management – Automate task management with workflows, see the status of projects in progress, and never forget a thing with notifications and reminders. You can even prioritize and filter tasks—so your boss’s requests come before the party planning committee’s. Give out tasks one-by-one, assign en masse, or let your workflows do it for you. In the office, on the go, at home: you can access your tasks on any desktop or device. Kintone lets you organize tasks by importance and urgency.
Team Collaboration – Discuss projects with your team and track meeting minutes directly in Kintone, meaning you never have to dig through your inbox or chat messages again. Organize your communication by topic or project so your team can easily find the info they need and share updates. Your conversations happen in a comment panel right alongside the task or project data, so you always have all the relevant information to get your work done. With everything in one place, your team can catch up on past conversations whether they happened yesterday or even last year.
Automation – Kintone’s platform gives you the flexibility to build the business applications you need as you go. Whether it’s a new step in your workflow, a completely new process, or more data fields, you can change it right in Kintone without asking your IT team to help. Kintone’s drag-and-drop interface is the source of its power. Now anyone of any technical level can create their own custom business applications and workflows from scratch. Kintone takes the skills of a software developer and puts it in the hands of every individual who needs business software, no coding required.
Pros
Milestone Tracking
Deployment Management
API
Collaboration Tools
Cost-to-Completion Tracking
Gantt/Timeline View
Kanban Board
Multiple Programming Languages Supported
Remote Access/Control
Status Tracking
Cons
Need to pay extra for an additional guest or client
Lacks campaign management
Limitations in real-time updates
Pricing
Kinteone offers three paid plans on the basis of the industry of the user which can be billed monthly.
ProWorkflow is American comprehensive project management established in 2002 by ProActive Software that tracks Gantt diagram tasks, Kanban boards, time, reports, correspondences, statements, and solicitations. The strong API and adjustable elements let you effectively tailor ProWorkflow.
Key Features
Project and Task Management – The project board view allows you to see all the projects in a quick overview and move them across different lists based on the phases the projects are in. It also has summary information such as tasks left to finish and completed so managers can keep on top work pipeline and schedule them accordingly. In ProWorkflow, you can easily add tasks to projects that have already started. There are multiple ways to do that but the easiest way is to use the inline task add the feature. You can even paste in a list of ‘to-do' items in bulk and all the tasks will be created automatically for you. Templates are available for tasks that occur regularly.
Reporting – Custom reports let you select any data you've entered into our system to use as filters or included information. With those tools, you'll be able to make any report that you need and even share the report with your team. If you're not ready to get into building your own reports yet, ProWorkflows Standard Reports provide detailed information on workload and performance as well as your Projects, Tasks, Time, Staff, Clients & Financial data. Remember, you can customise any one of these reports and save it, so don't be afraid of experimenting.
Collaborate – Make sure your Projects run smoothly and your customers are up to date with comprehensive messaging features perfectly integrated with your existing emails. Our messaging tool does all this. Send a message with a file attached, you can even choose to make it private or public. This is a powerful messaging tool that'll keep the discussion going and projects on track. You can collaborate with your teams and access the following Message notification alerts, Reply to messages via email, public/private messages, WYSIWYG editor, upload files with messages, and threaded discussions.
Timeline and Management – There are a few options for entering time in ProWorkflow and 2 are found in the time tab. Here you can either drag & Drop time entry/editing or do a Direct Entry for bulk time recording. This view gives you an overview of the week so if you are someone who likes to enter the time at the end of the week this is the page for you. Permissions can be set where you can approve and lock hours in the timesheet as well. We also have a time report here as well if you want a quick report on how much time was tracked per project/task, client or staff.
Pros
Cost-to-Completion Tracking
Gantt/Timeline View
Milestone Tracking
Percent-Complete Tracking
Prioritization
Time Summary
Organizational Chart
Divisions/Teams Editor
Internal Project Requests
Custom Fields
Custom Forms
Client Project Requests
Roles/Permissions
Cons
Lacks campaign management and tracking
Pricing
ProWorkflow offers two paid plans that are billed monthly.
Awork is a Hamburg-based online project management software established in 2019 by Tobias that conveys programmed project management to teams. It packages your tasks into records, kanban sheets, and Gantt charts. Coordinate assignments, track times and correspond with your groups and teams.
Key Features
Team and Task Management – Plan multiple projects simultaneously across all members of your team. With Awork’s team planner, you’ll quickly recognize resource peaks and ensure that projects are finished on time. In Awork, you can organize your work in simple to-do lists by topic or timeframe. To get an even better status report, switch to Kanban or timeline views. Standardize your projects and save time by reusing tasks and timelines. Assign roles and permissions to make sure that every user sees exactly what they’re supposed to see.
Automations – Choose among 400+ automation to accelerate your workflows in Aworka and visualize your tasks on a timeline and add dependencies and milestones. Updates, feedback, discussions, and decisions are immediately visible to your team. Awork notifies project teams and updates managers automatically. Everyone on the team will immediately see what deadlines are due next. Tasks in Awork are a central hub for your work: Detailed descriptions, sub-tasks, attachments, and integrated communication everything is in one place. Individual dashboards create transparency and show your team’s status at a glance.
Database Management – Attach files to your tasks and projects or link them directly from your Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive/Sharepoint accounts. Awork notifies you of all important developments, milestones, and deadlines. Connect Awork to your communications tool to receive updates, create tasks and comments from your channels and groups. Some tasks can only be started once all requirements have been met. Connect tasks in the timeline to have Awork notify you when it’s time to start.
Time Tracking – Tracking times needs to be fast and convenient. We integrated it directly into your projects and tasks to include as much information as possible automatically. Use Awork’s timer, insert times by dragging in your timeline, or connect your calendar to transform appointments into times. Create flexible reports from your times by team, project, or client. Send tracked times to your billing tool directly from Awork’s time reports and connect your Google, Microsoft, or Apple calendar to turn your appointments into times with a click.
Pros
Gantt/Timeline View
Percent-Complete Tracking
Prioritization
Status Tracking
Kanban Board
Milestone Tracking
Collaboration Tools
Cons
Lacks Cost-to-Completion Tracking
Limitations in reporting and statistics
Lacks campaign management
Limitations in real-time updates
Pricing
Awork offers two paid plans on the user-per month algorithm. The plans can be billed monthly, bi-annually and annually.
The Premium Plan: €10 ($10.35) user/month if billed annually.
The Enterprise Plan: €15 ($17) user/month if billed annually.
Podio is a Denmark-based comprehensive work management platform established in 2009 by Jon Froda, Anders Pollas, and Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen that changes your work information and database into one device to adjust every content matter, conversation, and cycle into one joint effort point.
Key Features
Task Management – It’s easy to keep everyone on the same page, with Podio tasks. Assign tasks, attach files and discuss details by adding comments. You’ll get a simple overview of what’s being done, without everyone being slowed down by status emails. Podio tasks are designed to be integrated with all your work on Podio – and can even be automated using workflows. For example, you’re managing a design project – adding a Podio workflow will create a task for you to approve the designs, once they have been uploaded to Podio. Saving time for you and your team.
Communications – Social activity streams reduce time-consuming cc-email threads, increase transparency and boost knowledge sharing. Every workspace in Podio includes an activity stream – displaying the latest activity from the apps in the workspace and status posts from the members of the workspace. Boost peer recognition and employee motivation with the ability to like status posts, comments, tasks, and any work you execute in your Podio apps. Video and audio calling enables a complete, real-time collaboration experience – right inside of Podio.
Content Management – You can share files anywhere in Podio: as part of status posts, chat messages, attached to tasks, or attached to anything you manage with your Podio apps. This adds business context to all of your files – making them part of the bigger picture and not scattered in folders on desktops or separate file-sharing services. Podio integrates with all major file-sharing services. For example, designers can manage their projects with Podio and attach hi-res files from Dropbox. Services include Google Drive, Dropbox, ShareFile, Box, HighTail, and OneDrive.
Task Scheduling – Customizable calendars on Podio give you the option to view only events and deadlines directly related to you, or to get an overview of everything going on in a department or company-wide. Your personal calendar is customized to suit the view of your schedule that you need. From the most narrow view that shows you only your meetings and tasks due in the coming days to add the projects and other app items, you're in charge of, to the broadest view of everything going on in all the workspaces you're a member of. Shows you everything happening in a particular workspace, for example, all the deadlines for a project.
Pros
Activity Dashboard
Activity Tracking
Collaboration Tools
Commenting/Notes
Cost-to-Completion Tracking
Gantt/Timeline View
Kanban Board
Milestone Tracking
Cons
Lacks Cost-to-Completion Tracking
Lacks campaign management
Limitations in real-time updates
Pricing
Podio offers three paid plans that are billed monthly and a free plan with limited features listed below;
Task management
Apps and workspaces
The Basic Plan: $9/month and $7.20/month if billed annually.
The Plus Plan: $14/month and $11.20/month if billed annually.
The Premium Plan: $24/month and $19.20/month if billed annually.
Scheduling: One of the most well-known project management programming instrument types is the scheduling tool. Planning devices are utilized to group project exercises and relegate dates and assets to them. The detail and complexity of a timetable delivered by a scheduling instrument can change significantly with the project management and strategy utilized, the elements given, and the scheduling and planning techniques supported.
Data Exchange: Project arranging software can be anticipated to give data to different individuals or partners and can be utilized to gauge and legitimize the degree of exertion expected to finish the projects. Familiar prerequisites could include
Outline data on how long the project will take to finish.
An early admonition of any risks to the venture.
Data on responsibility, for arranging occasions.
Recorded data on how projects have advanced, and specifically, how real and arranged execution is connected.
Ideal usage of accessible resources.
Cost upkeep.
Coordinated effort with each colleague and clients
Moment correspondence with collaborators and clients.
Collaboration: A cooperative framework is intended to help various clients alter various segments of the arrangement immediately; for instance, refreshing the regions they by and by are liable for to such an extent that those appraisals get incorporated into the general arrangement.
Web-based tools, including extranets, for the most part, fall into this classification however have the limit that they must be utilized when the client has live Internet access. To address this impediment, some software utilizing client-server design gives a rich client sudden spikes in demand for clients' work station and reproduces projects and tasks data to other task colleagues through a focal server when clients interface occasionally to the organization.
A few devices permit colleagues to look at their timetables tool and others as perused distinctly to work on them while not on the organization. When reconnecting to the data set, all changes are synchronized with different timetables.
Visual Reporting and Analysis: A typical issue in project management is the trouble with both surveys and seeing a lot of fluctuating project information. To handle this, in some task management use data representation, with the goal that clients can all the more effectively find, break down and make changes to their information. To stay away from data over-burden, the representation mantra of “outline first, zoom and channel, then, at that point, subtleties on request” is frequently followed.
Let's move now to the comparison part of best project management software so that we can choose the right option for our business as per the requirements.
Comparison of Best Project Management Platforms in 2024
Monday.com equips you with the tools to create custom dashboards and track progress, timelines, and budgets at a glance.
Trello
Lists and cards are the building blocks of organizing work on a Trello board to grow from there with task assignments, timelines, productivity metrics, calendars, and more.
Zoho Projects
Every project has a timesheet where the team members can log their task hours. These records keep track of the pace of your project and help identify bottlenecks accurately.
LiquidPlanner
Every project has a timesheet where the team members can log their task hours. These records keep track of the pace of your project and help identify bottlenecks accurately.
Smartsheet
Plan, manage and review content production in Smartsheet to finalize more assets faster.
Basecamp
Basecamp follows the internal communication system that means all company-wide discussions, social chatter, project-related work, sharing of ideas, and internal debates.
Wrike
Consolidate to-dos from all of your projects as well as tasks that aren’t part of a project.
Celoxis
Collate project requests from various sources in one place. Sort requests based on your business KPIs.
Hive
Track projects, tasks and subactions without limits. Assign next steps and add due dates to keep everyone accountable.
Kintone
Map out your steps, assign tasks, and automate the tedious stuff so everyone’s always on the same page.
ProWorkflow
Custom reports let you select any data you've entered into our system to use as filters or included information.
Awork
Choose among 400+ automation to accelerate your workflows in Aworka and visualize your tasks on a timeline and add dependencies and milestones.
Podio
Social activity streams reduce time-consuming cc-email threads, increase transparency and boost knowledge sharing.
Final Verdict: Best Project Management Platforms
Having explored the above software, each has its own unique element and stands out respectively. If we were to choose the best alternative that is suitable for your business, it would be based on the combination of the availability of business types and all the features mentioned above in our ‘Steps to Choose a Project Management Software’ section.
And the all-rounder standing tall is Asana!
Asana provides a wide range of templates for the users to choose from according to their industry needs and for the fundamental bodies of the business. It offers all the features that a business may require when collaborating and communicating with teams. Hence, it is our top choice.
The top alternatives to Asana are Monday.com and Trello which offer an equally good case as a project management platform.
FAQs
How We Choose the Best Project Management Apps?
To choose a project management software you need to introspect on your business type, priority in task formation, integrations that can help you use external tools, team collaboration and communication and finally task management and reporting accessibility. Once decided, you can choose the best alternative for your business.
How much does a project management tool cost?
A project management tool ranges from the price of $4.50 user/month to $24 user/month and there are also lifetime plans that cost $450 and are billed once.
What are the top features of project management tools?
The top features of a project management tool are: -Task and Project Management -Team Collaboration and Communication -Workflow Management and Configuration -Reporting and Analysis -Automations and Integrations
What is the most popular software for project management?
Having many options available in the market, selecting the best tool always depends on your needs. We have covered enough tools in this post to make your buying decision easier.
Jitendra Vaswani is a leading authority in digital marketing, known for his vast expertise and impactful contributions to the industry. As an international speaker, he has shared insights on stages worldwide. He is the founder of Digiexe.com, a digital marketing agency & Bytegain.com, a tool for SEO copywriting and local SEO. With his strategic acquisition of AffiliateBooster, Jitendra solidifies his position as a leader in the digital marketing industry. He is set to revolutionize affiliate marketing by providing advanced solutions that drive sales and performance. His best-selling book, "Inside A Hustler’s Brain: In Pursuit of Financial Freedom," has sold over 20,000 copies globally, showcasing his expertise and influence. Jitendra continues to inspire and empower digital marketers and entrepreneurs worldwide, establishing new benchmarks for success in the industry.
