10 Best Free Project Management Software Reviewed for 2023

Transitioning from spreadsheets and a heap of apps to dedicated project management software is often challenging. You can’t just choose a project management software at random — it’s crucial to test the best free management software solutions in practice before committing to a particular provider.

In this guide, we’ve reviewed the 10 best free project management software, looking at their features, functionalities, and pros & cons to help you choose the best project management software for your business.

Top 10 Free Project Management Software Ranked

Here’s a quick breakdown of the best project management software with free accounts or free trials that you can start using today to streamline your workflows and maximize productivity:

1. Monday.com — Rated as the best free project management software product overall, this service empowers teams with real-time collaboration, 200+ workflow templates, and the ability to integrate your existing software stack.
2. Wrike — Get full control over managing your projects with this flexible service, offering templates, workload charts, and native time tracking.
3. Smartsheet — A simple solution to save time with smart automation and get notified about project discrepancies so you can reprioritize tasks as needed.
4. ClickUp — Powerful solution to maximize productivity by breaking down projects and allocating resources where they matter most. Connect external apps or build your own integrations via ClickUp API.
5. Teamwork — Allows small teams to easily connect with clients, contractors, and other stakeholders while staying on top of all projects.
6. Resource Guru — Protect your team from burnout while staying productive with tools like automated scheduling, built-in time-off planning, and resource allocation insights.
7. Work Otter — Designed to help SaaS companies make data-driven decisions for their projects, financials, and team management.
8. ProWorkflow — Unifies all parts of your project management process, from pasting to-do lists to generating invoices and reports.
9. Zoho Projects — Solve problems as they happen with issue-tracking capabilities on top of comprehensive project management features.
10. Asana — Get rid of project bottlenecks with rule-based automation while enhancing cross-functional collaboration across your entire organization.

Top Free Project Management Tools Reviewed

Here are in-depth reviews of the best free project management software solutions on the market, so you can see how they compare and make an informed decision.

1. Monday.com — Overall, the Best Free Project Management Software in 2023

Monday project management software lets you leverage over 200 professional templates to visualize your workflows, create table, board, and list views, monitor project performance, and generate in-depth reports that greatly facilitate budgeting and forecasting.

The project management tools Monday offers allow you to create complex workflows and closely monitor every aspect of your business, from budgeting and resource allocation to individual task progress.

Each task status is color-coded and assigned a priority, so you’ll be able to quickly see what every team member is working on and how far they’ve progressed on each task.

Monday also lets you leverage automations to eliminate manual work and ensure the right people are notified whenever a task status changes. For example, when a team member changes a task status to “Stuck,” a manager can step in and remove the bottlenecks that are preventing them from completing it.

Additionally, everyone working on the project can leave comments on particular tasks, share crucial project files, and see task dependencies. This eliminates the need for daily standups and lengthy email threads and ensures everyone is on the same page.

Another huge benefit of Monday.com is that it can easily integrate with your existing software stack. This way, you’ll have all the key information in one place, with your project management software acting as a single source of truth across the organization. For more, read our in-depth Monday.com review.

2. Wrike — Flexible Project Management Tool With Custom Item Types and Native Time Tracking

Wrike is a versatile platform that simplifies project management and task tracking and maximizes resource utilization through easy-to-read workload charts.

Wrike’s intuitive UI greatly simplifies the intake process, allowing you to create tasks, folders, and requests with a single click. You can even create an entire workspace for your team, fully customize it according to your organization’s needs, and have full control over access and visibility through granular permissions.

Beyond this, you can leverage Wrike’s templates to build and configure list, board, and table views and visualize all your workflows to easily monitor project progress. Alternatively, you can use the custom item types to distinguish between task types more easily, attach files, leave comments, and provide in-depth instructions for every task.

Wrike project management platform also lets you use the Resource Bookings functionality to reserve time for individual team members of a particular role in your team. This ensures no task overlap and helps you organize work to ensure that tasks are optimally allocated according to your resources and the team’s capacity.

With Wrike’s native time tracking, you can easily track the exact hours worked by your employees, freelancers, and contractors. You can then easily sync the data with your finance department to ensure the complete accuracy of your payroll runs.

3. Smartsheet — Scalable Project Management Solution That Helps You Standardize Processes, Project Creation, and Reporting

Smartsheet is a scalable project management solution that lets you visualize your work, track project progress, allocate your resources optimally, and generate in-depth reports with actionable insights.

With Smartsheet, you can build comprehensive project plans, break them down into individual tasks, and assign the required resources and team members to ensure everything gets done on time. You can see crucial task dependencies using Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and Card and Grid views, so every team member can organize their dashboard depending on their preference.

The best part about project planning in Smartsheet is that the tool automatically tracks all discrepancies between estimates vs. actuals, allowing you to re-prioritize tasks and reallocate resources if you assess that the project won’t be delivered according to the projected deadline.

You can further streamline your work using Smartsheet thanks to its smart automations. This eliminates the need to manually create recurring tasks and ensures everyone with task dependencies is notified whenever a relevant task is completed.

What we also love about Smartsheet is the fact that it lets you standardize project structure and processes. You can use the existing projects to create templates for future project creation and reporting, which makes scaling your business almost effortless.

Another key aspect of Smartsheet is the ability to communicate easily and collaborate on different projects. All team members working on a project or task can see all the attached documents, instructions, and comment history and contribute their thoughts and ideas. Managers and team leads can also request changes or approve the current version of the deliverable with a single click.

4. ClickUp — Fully Customizable Tasks and Unlimited Free Plan Members

ClickUp helps you maximize your team’s productivity and move projects from ideas to execution as quickly and efficiently as possible.

It saves you project prep time by letting you leverage pre-made templates, helping you break down complex projects into customizable tasks, and you can set up and measure goals to track productivity and project profitability.

Task customization is one of ClickUp’s strongest suits. You can adapt each specific task according to the project or department, which includes task layout, dependencies, automations, attached documents and screen recordings, custom fields and statuses, and even time tracking. You can even create sub-tasks and checklists for more complex work, making tracking project progress much easier.

ClickUp also facilitates team communication and collaboration, letting team members leave comments on individual tasks and start group chats with their coworkers to discuss tasks, provide project updates, and share crucial reports.

Another aspect ClickUp excels at is resource allocation. With over 15 views, you’ll see exactly what everyone is working on, how crammed their work schedules are, when different members will be on vacation, and what your team’s capacity looks like for the next sprint or month. This information is invaluable for assigning and re-prioritizing tasks to ensure that your business is running at full steam and that nobody is under or overworked.

Finally, ClickUp has superb integration capabilities. You can easily connect it with Slack, GitHub, Webhooks, HubSpot, and a dozen different applications, or use the ClickUp API to build your own custom integrations.

5. Teamwork — Simple Project Management Solution for Small Organizations Working With Contractors and Freelancers

Teamwork is a simple, easy-to-use project management tool, ideal for smaller teams. It provides a bird’s-eye view of all ongoing tasks and projects, including owners, due dates, task progress, budget, and task health.

Teamwork truly shines when it comes to managing employees, contractors, freelancers, and clients. The tool greatly facilitates communication by letting you provide permission-based access to your boards to all stakeholders. This lets clients directly comment on tasks and leave feedback regarding all deliverables, saving a ton of time you’d otherwise spend on client and internal meetings.

In addition to comments and attachments, Teamwork provides real-time chat functionality, so your executives, managers, and creatives can easily communicate without going back and forth between their inbox, a communication app like Slack, and project management software. With Teamwork, everything they need to complete their tasks is in one place.

Another area where Teamwork truly shines is time tracking. Every team member can track the time spent on each task, so you’ll have a 100% accurate view of all billable hours. This saves you valuable time during client invoicing and payroll and eliminates the possibility of human error.

6. Resource Guru — Intuitive Resource Utilization and Leave Management Tool for Remote Teams

Resource Guru, as the name suggests, was primarily designed to help companies optimize their resource utilization. The tool lets you easily schedule, prioritize, and reassign work to ensure every team member is as productive as possible without being overbooked and risking burnout.

Apart from helping you organize work in the most efficient manner, Resource Guru also lets you set up automated email reminders and create personalized dashboards for every member of your team to ensure they’re always up-to-date with what they need to work on.

The tool also includes built-in time off planning, so you can easily adapt project schedules according to vacations and sick leave to ensure everything gets done on time. It also provides valuable insights regarding overtime, time off, and billable and non-billable hours, taking out the guesswork from resource management.

Resource Guru also offers project planning, scheduling, and automations but lacks advanced project management functionalities like task dependencies and complex workflow visualization.

It also doesn’t offer a free forever plan, but you’ll still be able to try it out in practice for free for 30 days before committing to a paid subscription.

7. Work Otter — Minimalistic SaaS Portfolio and Resource Management Software With a Simple Drag-and-Drop Interface

Work Otter is a project portfolio and resource management software for SaaS (Software as a Service) companies, designed to help simplify and streamline your workflows and help you confidently commit resources.

Work Otter’s key selling point is its simplicity. Rather than trying to wow users with impressive visuals, Work Otter adopts a minimalistic design and focuses on functionality. It allows you to easily create complex workflows and eliminate the chaos by standardizing core processes thanks to its simple drag-and-drop interface.

You’ll be able to easily add new tasks, assign them to the right owners, set due dates, and leverage the drag-and-drop functionality to set up task dependencies in seconds. Every task can hold multiple assignments (sub-task), which lets you monitor every team member’s progress more closely.

Additionally, you can leave notes, comments, and instructions on each task and automatically calculate the financials and see estimates vs. actuals, so you’ll have an accurate view of individual performance and project profitability at all times.

Work Otter also provides over 200 professional report/dashboard templates, making it easy and convenient to generate in-depth reports that provide all the key information you need to make smarter, data-backed decisions.

8. ProWorkflow — Online Project and Resource Management Tool With Project, Task, Quote, and Invoice Templates

ProWorkflow is an online project and resource management platform that facilitates asynchronous work and unifies project management, task and time tracking, and team communication on one centralized platform.

With ProWorkflow, you can manage every aspect of your project, from ideation and planning to execution and monitoring. The best part about the tool’s task scheduling is that you can simply paste your entire to-do list. ProWorkflow will automatically convert every item into a new task, so you don’t have to manually create every task and subtask.

There are multiple ways to track time, including a live time tracker, traditional time entry on a personal timesheet page, and manual time entry per task. This helps keep track of all billable hours and gives you an accurate overview of the time spent on each task and project, so you can see your team’s overall productivity and project profitability.

Another reason for opting for ProWorkflow is its template library, which lets you create workflows, projects, tasks, quotes, invoices, and reports in seconds.

9. Zoho Projects — Robust Project Management Software With Issue Tracking and Advanced Automations

Zoho Projects is an intuitive online tool that facilitates project planning, task tracking, and team collaboration.

In addition to project management, workflow visualization, and Gantt charts, Zoho Projects allows you to automate individual tasks using a simple drag-and-drop interface. This includes adding collaborators, sending a finished deliverable to QA, and auto-updating all stakeholders via email. You can easily clone existing task structures for recurring tasks and eliminate the need for manual input.

Another handy feature is issue tracking, which automatically records all problems, roadblocks, bottlenecks, and bugs that prevent your team members from completing their tasks, so you can immediately solve them. Whenever a person changes task status to indicate they’re stuck, their superiors are notified, thanks to advanced automations, and can jump in to help.

Zoho Projects also offers native time tracking for both billable and non-billable hours. Integrating the tool with Zoho Invoicing allows you to convert the timesheets into invoices with a single click, greatly reducing the time spent on client invoicing and payroll runs.

10. Asana — Popular PM Software With Advanced Automations, Custom Rules, and Smart Notifications

Asana project management software lets you automate workflows, facilitate collaboration, streamline reporting, and prioritize revenue-driving work.

The Asana desktop app offers list, board, and timeline views that help you break down complex work into easily digestible tasks with clear owners, due dates, and priority levels. In addition to improving visibility across the organization, Asana makes it easy for cross-functional teams to collaborate on projects by adding comments and file attachments to specific tasks.

With Asana, you can also assign goals and sub-goals across the entire company, for particular projects, or specific departments. Apart from ensuring everyone in the organization is aligned and working towards the same outcome, goals help keep your team motivated and productive, propelling you to reach desired business outcomes.

Another reason for choosing Asana over other project management tools is its rule-based automation functionality. By setting up custom rules for assigning tasks, adding followers, and changing priorities, you eliminate manual work, leaving more time to focus on other business-critical tasks. Automations also help remove bottlenecks and eliminate the risk of tasks being forgotten or dropped, thanks to smart alerts and notifications.

Top 10 Project Managing Software Compared

Here’s a reference table to see how the top 10 free project management software solutions compare head-to-head:

Why You Need Project Management Software

As your company grows, your processes and workflows become increasingly complex. Trying to hold every aspect of your projects in your head is a fool’s errand, and you’ll quickly find yourself not knowing who’s working on what and when they’re supposed to deliver it.

Project management software gives you a much-needed overview of all your ongoing projects, lets you organize work more efficiently and utilize your resources optimally, and facilitates planning, forecasting, and collaboration. Here are the key benefits of using project management software:

Project Planning and Scheduling

Project management software lets you visualize every project stage, from ideation and planning to execution. When you clearly define every task that needs to be completed in each stage, assign task owners, set priorities, and establish due dates, it becomes much easier to plan work.

An added benefit of project planning is that every team member will know exactly what they’ll be working on, and you’ll be able to easily monitor project progress and step in whenever a team member encounters a roadblock.

Goal Setting

You can set clear, measurable goals for your team using project management software. The project can be broken down into phases, sprints, and tasks with defined OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) that help motivate your team and allow them to measure progress.

Setting milestones also helps boost productivity and provides an additional incentive to your team, especially if you include bonuses or other benefits for reaching the established goals within the given timeframe.

Resource Management 

Planning a project is one thing, but executing it is a different story. You need to ensure that your employees, equipment, materials, and other resources are used optimally for the project to be profitable.

Project management software lets you easily see your team’s capacity and resource availability throughout the project. It also lets you account for vacations, sick days, unpaid leave, and equipment maintenance, so you don’t over-commit resources and have to pause or delay your project.

Increased Productivity

Project management software can be used for much more than simply assigning tasks. You can set different task priorities, have multiple people collaborate on a single task, leave instructions, attach documents, and set task dependencies. Some project management tools include real-time chat, further facilitating communication and file sharing.

You can also leverage automations to ensure the right people are notified whenever a task status changes. This way, managers can step in whenever a team member encounters an issue and promptly resolve it. They’ll also get notified whenever a task is complete, so they can step in and review the deliverable and provide feedback if necessary. All this results in much higher productivity across the organization.

Risk and Issue Identification

Successfully executing projects includes more than planning and resource management. More often than not, you must adapt to changes on the fly, prioritize certain tasks, and reallocate your resources accordingly.

Project management software lets you monitor the progress of all projects and tasks in real-time, allowing you to proactively identify risks and potential issues before they escalate into serious problems. This helps your organization stay agile and allows you to course-correct and ensure the project is executed on time despite the road bumps.

Factors to Consider When Choosing the Best Free Project Management Software

Any project management software is better than no project management software, but not all of them will be a good fit for your organization. Some are better suited for smaller teams, while others offer a plethora of features that only large corporations will need.

That’s why it’s crucial to consider who in your company will use the project management software and what features and functionalities you need to streamline your workflows, maximize productivity, and boost profitability. Here are the key factors you should consider when choosing a project management app:

• Ease of use — If you want every team member to utilize the project management software in their day-to-day work, opting for a simple, intuitive solution is best. That said, you shouldn’t sacrifice functionality for ease of use, so consider what features you need and how much time you’d have to dedicate to personnel training before everyone can effectively use the tool.
• Customization — If you have unique processes and complex workflows, you want a flexible project management software solution that can be adapted to your organization’s needs. Most solutions on our list aren’t rigid, but they differ greatly in terms of the level of customization they allow.
• Pain points — Think about the biggest issues your organization faces and how the project management software can help resolve them. For example, if you’re finding it challenging to track billable vs. non-billable hours, you might want to consider PM software with native time tracking.
• Reporting capabilities — Reporting and analytics are crucial for identifying issues, roadblocks, and areas of improvement. Depending on the complexity of your workflows and your business needs, you might need software that provides dozens of different reports, lets you filter the key information, and automate report generation.
• Integrations — Simply adding another app to your existing software stack will make navigating everything more difficult. That’s why you need a PM software solution that integrates with the tools you’re already using, so you don’t have to go back and forth between a dozen different applications to find a single piece of relevant information.
• User reviews — If you’re having trouble choosing between multiple project management software solutions, the best course of action is to read user reviews for all of them and see what other business owners, project managers, and executives have to say after trying them in practice.

Free PM Software FAQs