10 Best Project Management Software for 2023 Reviewed

The best project management software tools will enable you to use your time more efficiently and more effectively, so you can do more with less. The best packages will allow you to plan and execute projects, streamline workflows and optimize workloads, and get valuable insights to assist with planning and forecasting. Every business is unique, of course, so you need a tool that’s adaptable enough to suit your existing processes and workflows.

In this complete guide, we’ve reviewed the 10 best project management software tools available today, looking at their functionality and suitability for different use cases. This should help you make an informed decision, so you can maximize your productivity and get to growing your business.

The Top 10 Project Management Software Ranked

Our experts have concluded that these are the 10 best project management software tools available on the market today. We’ve picked options for a range of budgets and use cases, so you should be able to find a solution that works for you, whatever your requirements. What’s the best project management solution for you?

1. Monday.com — Overall, the best project management software available, with over 200 templates for all your projects and workflows.
2. Wrike — A flexible platform built around custom dashboards that comes with enterprise-grade security.
3. Smartsheet — A simple project management application that merges the functionality of Airtable, Google Docs, and modern PM tools.
4. ClickUp — The most powerful free project management solution on the market, which allows you to have unlimited free members onboard.
5. Teamwork — Great for small teams who focus on client work, with in-depth task tracking and advanced reporting tools.
6. Resource Guru — Easy-to-use resource management software that facilitates planning and ensures optimal resource utilization.
7. WorkOtter — A simple drag-and-drop project portfolio and resource management tool that’s ideal for SaaS businesses.
8. ProWorkflow — An online tool that helps keep everyone in your remote team on the same page, with options for automation and customization.
9. Zoho Projects — Cloud-based software with custom rules to manage projects in real time and efficiently remove bottlenecks.
10. Asana — An accessible and popular tool for tracking tasks and projects in cross-functional teams using timelines and boards.

Best Project Management Tools Compared

Here’s a quick comparison table of the best project management software so you can easily see which use cases each platform is best suited to and how much money you’d have to set aside to get started in each case. So what is the best software for project management for your requirements?

What is Project Management Software?

Project management software does just what you would expect it to – helping you manage projects.

The software category spans applications, tools, and platforms that help you visualize and streamline your workflow, facilitate team communication and collaboration, and optimize resource allocation.

In simple terms, project management software provides a complete overview of your business, including all the projects, tasks, and processes. This lets you see exactly what everyone in your team is working on, monitor the status of each task, and see how much time and manpower you’re spending to complete specific projects.

Project management software also ensures that everyone in the organization knows exactly what’s going on at any given moment with complete transparency, saving a lot of time you’d otherwise waste on meetings, lengthy email threads, and sorting out misunderstandings regarding task priorities and due dates.

Top 10 Project Planning & Management Software Reviewed 

Now that you know the shortlist of the most popular project management tools on the market, let’s look at what each one offers. In our full reviews, we’ll go into much more detail about the most popular project management tools and discuss their features, functionality, pros and cons, and the pricing of each of these options. Time to get organized…

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

Monday.com is a project management tool that lets you centralize all your processes, tools, and files into one workspace, helping you streamline your workflows and acting as one source of truth across your organization.

The key selling point of Monday.com is its flexibility. You can fully customize the project management software according to your organization’s needs and easily manage complex workflow, processes, and tasks from one dashboard.

Monday.com provides 200+ pre-built templates for virtually every aspect of your business, from the recruitment pipeline and organization-wide task management to campaign dashboards and visual boards for every project.

The visual boards ensure that everyone in your organization is on the same page regarding the status of each project and individual task. At a glance, you can see exactly what everyone is working on, the due dates, and the progress of each task.

Additionally, team members can leave comments on individual tasks, attach files, tag other coworkers whose work depends on the completion of the tasks, and even leave likes and praise for a job well done.

This provides much-needed context and helps your managers or team leads step in and help remove bottlenecks when someone is stuck on a particular problem.

Another massive advantage of Monday.com is that it integrates with the tools you’re already using, such as Slack, Excel, Google Drive, and many more. The integration is as simple as clicking the button on the dashboard and selecting the tools you want to connect with Monday.com, so you don’t need an IT professional to fiddle around with APIs and spend a week setting everything up.

You’ll also have access to comprehensive analytics to clearly see the task breakdown, gauge your team’s productivity, and see monthly spending. In our view, it’s the best software for project management.

2. Wrike — Flexible Project Management Platform With Enterprise-Grade Security 

Wrike is a robust and flexible platform that lets you manage all your projects, streamline your workflows, and enhance team communication and collaboration to get things done faster and more efficiently.

Wrike is a robust project planner, you can create a personalized dashboard for every task and project, so you can easily keep tabs on what everyone in the organization is working on, keep a finger on the pulse of each project, and provide clarity across the organization.

The custom dashboards provide a detailed overview of everyone’s workload, let you set priorities, add custom fields, and pin important to-dos with a single click, and allow you to follow crucial tasks to keep an eye on their progress and get notified instantly as they’re completed.

The dashboard tools also enable you to visualize important project metrics and track all key performance indicators in one place. For many, this visual focus – and Wrike’s cross-compatibility across devices – makes it the best project management software for Mac.

You can also use the tool’s built-in time tracker to easily manage billable hours, monitor costs, manage budget allocation, and assess project risk based on accurate, real-time data.

Another incredibly useful feature of Wrike is the ability to import key performance data from over 50 different tools, so you don’t have to switch back and forth between a dozen different dashboards and spreadsheets.

With Wrike, you’ll have all your project and campaign data from all your different channels in one place, with valuable insights that let you easily assess the performance of your social media campaigns, email campaigns, content marketing strategy, and other marketing initiatives.

Another reason to opt for Wrike is its enterprise-grade security. All your data is protected by military-grade encryption, preventing unauthorized access and data leaks. Individual user authentication and role-based access control act as additional layers of security, giving you much-needed peace of mind.

3. Smartsheet — Simple Project Management Platform That Merges the Functionality of Modern PM Tools

Smartsheet is an excellent choice for smaller project teams who value simplicity but still want access to all their tasks, processes, and workflows in one place.

The tool merges the functionality of Airtable, Google Docs, and modern project management tools into a single platform, providing you with a clear overview of all projects, tasks, and conversations in your organization.

The dashboard is simple and intuitive, allowing you to manage every aspect of your business from a single tab.

You can create fully customized views for every project, add individual tasks, assign them to owners, set due dates, assign priority, and monitor the statuses of each task. Everything is color-coded, so you can find the exact information you need at a glance.

Additionally, you can add attachments to each task, start a conversation with the task owner in a new pop-up window, and set up notifications for specific tasks so you can easily track their progress.

You’ll also have the full formatting functionality at your disposal, so you can leverage filters, use different fonts, highlight specific tasks with different colors, and organize each view to your liking.

Beyond workflow optimization, Smartsheet facilitates resource management, provides key insights regarding your team’s activity and productivity, lets you analyze trends, and enables you to accurately assess the individual performance of each team member.

Smartsheet integrates with various popular tools, such as Slack, Dropbox, Salesforce, AWS, Microsoft Teams, DocuSign, and many more, ensuring you have all the key business data at your fingertips.

4. ClickUp — Best Free Project Management Software With Unlimited Free Members

ClickUp helps facilitate team collaboration and allows you to streamline planning, task tracking, and project management across your organization. You can use it to manage your resources, plan tasks, and have an overview of all the work in a fully customizable List, Box, Gantt, Board, or Calendar view.

In addition to helping you visualize all your workflows, ClickUp lets you ensure complete alignment on all your projects by adding comments to individual tasks or documents.

You can also assign action items straight from the comments, share attachments with team members, and set up notifications to get alerted when a task’s status is updated.

A major advantage of ClickUp over other project management tools is its built-in time-tracking capabilities. The global time tracker works on desktop, mobile, and Chrome, and you can use it to set deadlines for particular tasks and projects and compare the expectation with the actual time spent, thanks to in-depth reports.

This dramatically facilitates future project planning and management and gives you much-needed insights into your team’s productivity. With ClickUp, you’ll also be able to see all crucial project indicators at a glance through its visual dashboards.

This includes the work done by each team member, the status of different projects, each sprint, statuses, documents, and time-tracking data. You’ll also be able to:

• See task dependencies
• Set and change task priorities
• Create checklists for all the different subtasks
• Set project-based KPIs (key performance indicators)
• Manage your team’s workload

And develop mind maps to move from idea to execution as quickly as possible. Beyond this, ClickUp easily integrates with your existing software stack, so you can connect it to Slack, Zoom, Outlook, Calendly, Zapier, and all other tools you’re using.

5. Teamwork — Best Project Management Software for Small Teams that Focus on Client Work

Teamwork is a PM platform that offers an excellent balance of functionality, ease of use, and price, making it a great option for small and medium-sized businesses that offer services to various clients.

The tool was built to allow businesses to manage all their projects, teams, clients, and freelancers in one place. From Teamwork’s dashboard, you get an overview of all ongoing tasks, so you can gauge your business’ performance at a glance.

Teamwork also monitors every contributor’s time spent on tasks and automatically tracks billable hours, comparing them against your forecasted budget.

This feature is indispensable if you work with freelance marketers, writers, editors, and designers who charge hourly. It also helps you monitor business expenses and individual project profitability to see what clients bring in the most money.

You can also leverage automations to reduce the manual work and bring projects from start to completion more efficiently. Teamwork offers an extensive library of pre-built automations, such as event and time-based triggers, but it also allows you to set up fully custom automations with email notifications.

In addition to project management, Teamwork also helps facilitate communication with team members and freelancers through direct and group messages, project notebooks, file attachments, task tracking, and permission-based access.

This lets you easily pin a particular conversation to a specific task and ensures everyone is in the loop regarding task status, priorities, and dependencies.

Teamwork also offers advanced reporting, with seven different reports available — from capacity planning and time tracking to profitability and recurring reports automatically emailed to all stakeholders.

You can also leverage smart filters to quickly view the key information on the project or create custom report templates that you can reuse in the future.

6. Resource Guru — Easy-to-Use Resource Management Software 

Resource Guru is an easy-to-use resource management tool that lets you organize your team’s workload, efficiently utilize your company’s resources, and ensure you meet all project deadlines.

The tool provides you with a bird’s eye view of your team, so you can see exactly how busy everyone’s schedule is and plan your projects accordingly.

Resource Guru combines a board and calendar view, letting you drag and drop tasks to easily switch them between different team members. You can also create personalized filters to quickly see all available time slots across your entire team or a specific department, like design.

The view also gives you information regarding everyone’s time off and sick days, so you can easily adjust the project schedules and due dates or redistribute work to ensure everything gets done on time.

Beyond this, Resource Guru lets you generate accurate project forecasting reports, giving you all the key data regarding resource utilization to ensure you don’t overwork or underutilize team members.

It also lets you analyze individual projects and clients, so you can better prepare for the next project, sprint, or quarter and ensure optimal resource utilization.

7. WorkOtter — Project Portfolio and Resource Management Software for SaaS Businesses 

WorkOtter is specifically designed to facilitate SaaS (Software as a Service) project, resource, and portfolio management. It’s a remarkably simple PPM tool that allows you to visualize workflows, efficiently allocate resources, and develop what-if scenarios to minimize project risk.

The project portfolios management functionality allows you to easily juggle multiple projects and program groupings through a Gantt chart and a simple drag-and-drop interface.

WorkOtter captures all the pre-project and service request data, letting you confidently make decisions and prioritize projects based on urgency, profitability, and your team’s capacity.

What makes WorkOtter great for SaaS teams is its capacity and demand planning tools, which help you accurately forecast the workload and easily move assignments between team members to ensure optimal resource utilization.

You can also use WorkOtter for time and expense tracking, budget planning, financial reporting on estimates vs. actual costs, and data-backed project forecasting.

8. ProWorkflow — Online Project Management Tool To Help Align Teams

ProWorkflow is an online project management tool designed to facilitate remote collaboration and ensure everyone is in the loop regarding the status of all projects and tasks in an asynchronous work environment.

You can leverage ProWorkflow’s templates to create custom workflows and set up detailed project views with tasks, due dates, and team communications all in one place.

You’ll have an overview of all ongoing projects and tasks on your main board, so you can easily monitor the status of every task, add new projects, and gauge your team’s performance with precise time tracking.

You can also use ProWorkflow to automate invoicing and quotes for all your clients and generate custom reports to assess project profitability and facilitate future project forecasting.

ProWorkflow offers APIs that help you easily integrate it with the software you’re already using. You won’t have to tab back and forth between dozens of different apps and tools to get all the data you need to make smarter, informed business decisions.

9. Zoho Projects — Cloud-Based Project Management Software With Custom Rules  to Remove Bottlenecks

Zoho Projects is a cloud-based project management software that greatly facilitates project planning and task tracking with collaboration features for remote and hybrid teams.

The tool primarily relies on Gantt charts to provide a quick overview of your business, showing you all ongoing and upcoming projects and letting you easily track your team’s task schedule.

Zoho Projects automatically shows you the deviations between planned and actual progress, so you can identify delays and re-prioritize tasks to ensure you meet the agreed-upon deadlines.

Another great thing about Zoho Projects is that it allows you to create custom rules for issues, so your executives and managers get immediately notified whenever someone encounters a problem that prevents them from progressing with a task.

This helps your team efficiently document and remove bottlenecks, increasing overall productivity.

Other reasons to opt for Zoho Projects include expense tracking, in-depth reporting, and seamless integration with the tools you’re already using, such as Slack, Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, Dropbox, GitHub, and many more.

10. Asana — Popular PM Tool for Project Tracking and Project Control in Cross-Functional Teams

Asana is a popular project management tool primarily used by cross-functional teams to bring their data and apps together, improve efficiency, and deliver quality work faster.

With Asana’s project management tool set, you can visualize all your workflows, develop list views for all your projects, assign work to different team members, and monitor the status of each task from a single dashboard. You can set due dates and priorities, create custom task statuses, leave comments on individual tasks, and set up notifications for status changes.

You can even integrate it with Slack and create advanced triggers to receive message notifications in preferred Slack channels for accelerated project tracking. Team members with task dependencies instantly get notified when something gets done.

In addition to the List view, Asana also features Timelines and Boards, so you can see how work maps out over time, manage overlapping tasks more efficiently, and ensure your team members stay focused on the tasks at hand.

You can also generate real-time reports in Asana to get valuable insights regarding project progress, capacity, and resource utilization. Beyond this, you can manage risk and task dependencies and set up goal tracking to monitor your team’s performance and get accurate reports on estimates vs. actuals.

Why You Need Project Management Software – Key Benefits

Equally, you’ll only have very rough guesses of what people are working on and how long tasks take. This means your decision-making and business strategy may be based on a picture that is very far from the truth.

As a result, matters are very likely to quickly devolve into complete chaos — your team are failing to meet your deadlines, clients are starting to complain, and you spend a ton of time fixing mistakes that could’ve been easily prevented had proper planning been in place.

The best software for project management will efficiently solve all of these issues, saving you valuable time, helping you efficiently utilize your resources, and helping you to accurately forecast and plan future projects. In short, it should take a lot of the friction out of your business.

Here are the key benefits of project management software, so you can clearly see why it’s essential to have one if you want to grow and expand your business processes.

Better Project Planning and Execution

Robust project management software will help you closely track your projects, getting a big-picture overview and zooming in on the progress of individual tasks.

This will enable you to see how your team or teams are working towards their objectives in real time and identify where barriers and bottlenecks are emerging in your workflows.

During project execution, you can also monitor actual time spent and compare it to your estimates, giving you a better idea of the ETAs for specific tasks for future projects.

Additionally, PM tools with built-in time tracking let you see exactly how much you’re spending on specific tasks and the project as a whole, so you can see the project’s profitability.

With this information in hand, you can plan ahead with greater precision, allocate resources more effectively, and ensure you are delivering on budget and ahead of schedule.

Enhanced Team Communication and Collaboration

If your team relies on a chat app, spreadsheets, lengthy email threads, and virtual meetings to share information on tasks and project progress, it can become nearly impossible to ensure everyone’s on the same page when executing complex projects.

Information gets lost, people misremember things, it becomes unclear who owns what action item or the latest version of a document, and a ton of time gets spent trying to sync between all stakeholders.

With project management software, you have everything you need to execute the tasks in a single dashboard. Everyone can clearly see task owners, due dates, related documents, task dependencies, and comments left by managers and other team members.

This eliminates confusion and facilitates asynchronous work, since everyone has quick and easy access to all the information they need to progress on their tasks.

Simplified Remote Work

If you have a remote team, especially one spread across multiple time zones, ensuring everyone’s on the same page can be quite challenging. This is especially true when it comes to task dependencies because everyone will have to log all of their work and send countless emails with daily updates.

Project management software acts as a centralized data platform, where everyone can access and see the status and progress of each task in real-time.

This saves a ton of valuable time, eliminates the possibility of misinformation, and allows every team member to work more efficiently in an asynchronous work environment since their task progress isn’t dependent on other people being online at the specific time of day.

Improved Budget Management

To ensure your business stays profitable, it’s critical to effectively manage your project budget. With a project management tool, you can see resource allocation and utilization in real time, generate reports on estimated vs. actual cost and monitor your team’s productivity.

Instead of guessing and making rough estimates, you can leverage project management software to generate easy-to-understand reports and glean actionable insights.

You’ll also be able to clearly see where your budget is going, so you can confidently reorganize and prioritize work or make necessary budget cuts without compromising work quality.

Risk Identification and Mitigation

Project management tools allow you to clearly see how all your different processes, workflows, documents, and pieces of information come together to form the bigger picture.

With proper planning and efficient resource allocation, you can accurately identify opportunities and proactively mitigate the risks to ensure your projects transition smoothly from ideation to execution.

How to Choose the Best Project Management Software for You 

While every project management software solution on our list is great for optimizing workflows, streamlining team collaboration, and facilitating project planning and execution, some tools might be a better fit for your organization than others.

This largely depends on the field of work your company is in, the types of projects you’re running, the tools you’re already using, and the unique needs of your business. Here are the key factors to consider when choosing project management software for your business:

• Who will use the project management tool — Carefully consider which team members will use the project management software. Do you only need it for your Project Manager and executives, or will the PM tool be integral for all team members, including marketing, sales, design, HR, and others?
• What functionality you need — Depending on the complexity of your workflows and program management, you might value certain features more than others. Consider if you need workflow visualization, resource allocation, time tracking, budget forecasting, and other features, and find the tool that meets your organization’s needs.
• Ease of use — If you plan to implement the PM tool across your entire organization, ease of use might be one of the most important factors to consider. While complex tools offer more functionality, you’d have to spend months training everyone on the team to use them efficiently.
• Scalability — As your company grows, the tools you use should scale up with you and provide the features your growing organization needs. If you’re planning on expanding your team in the near future, as a minimum, it’s best to opt for a tool that can easily be scaled to add new members to your account and to do so without excessive additional costs.
• Integration capabilities — It’s crucial to integrate your new project management tool with the existing software stack, so you can have all the information you need in one place. Otherwise, having to tab back and forth between half a dozen applications kind of defeats the purpose of the PM tool.

Conclusion – What is the Best Project Management Software in 2023?

There are many excellent project management software solutions on the market, so choosing one tool over another can be difficult. Additionally, some tools are better suited for particular industries, so the best construction project management software might not be your best option if you’re running a SaaS company.

If you’re still on the fence after reading our reviews and need a recommendation, you can’t go wrong with Monday.com. It’s easy to use and flexible enough, so it can be fully customized according to your organization’s needs.

It also offers 200+ templates for every aspect of your business, so you don’t have to build everything from scratch.

It also integrates with all the popular chat apps, cloud storage, and project management tools, so you’ll have all the information you need in one place. When it comes to project management tools, Monday is front of the pack.

The best thing about Monday.com is that you can try it out in practice completely free of charge. So, don’t take our word for it — create your free Monday.com account and discover a smarter, easier, more efficient way to run your business.

Other Top Project Management Guides and Resources

In addition to this guide, we’ve put together a range of reviews and resources on the best project and task management tools available today, which include:

• Best Task Management Software
• Best Business Management Software
• Best Free Project Management Software
• Best Online Project Management Tools
• Best Remote Work Tools
• Best Gantt Chart Software
• Best Resource Management Software
• Best Workflow Management Software
• Best Online Collaboration Software
• Best Project Management Apps
• Best Enterprise Project Management Software
• Best Construction Project Management Software
• Monday.com Review – Is it the Best Project Management Software?
• A Full ClickUp Review – Everything You Need to Know
• Full Wrike Review – What You Need to Know

PM Software FAQs

Aleksandar Stevanovic

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Aleksandar Stevanovic

Alex is a Senior Software Content Writer at Techopedia. He focuses on creating reader-oriented comparison pages, reviews, research pieces, and editorials. With nearly a decade of experience, he’s written for numerous leading brands across various niches, such as The Tech Report, Bitcoincasinos.com, CEX.IO, Forbes, Business2Community, and many more. His expertise in cybersecurity has made him a popular authority on privacy tools such as VPNs, password managers, blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, and antivirus software. You'll find Alex working on cars, playing guitar, and cooking fantastic food in his spare time. You can reach Alex on Twitter: @stevanovic_alex

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