10 Best Project Management Software for 2023 Reviewed

The best project management software allows you to visualize and streamline your workflows, plan and execute projects more efficiently, track every task, optimize your team’s workload, and gain valuable insights to help with future planning and forecasting. That said, every business is unique, so you need a tool that’s flexible enough to be adapted to your existing workflows.

Ideally, you also want to integrate it with your current software stack. In this guide, we’ve reviewed the 10 best project management software tools, looking at their functionality, flexibility, and use cases to help you make an informed decision that’ll allow you to maximize productivity and grow your business.

The Top 10 Project Management Software Ranked

In our full reviews, we’ll go into much more detail about the most popular project management tools on the market and discuss the features, functionality, pros, cons, and pricing of each of these options.

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. Work Otter — 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.

Top 10 Project Planning & Management Software Reviewed 

Now that you know the most popular project management tools on the market, let’s look at what features and functionalities each offers.

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 the monthly spending.

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.

With Wrike, 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 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. 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 the 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 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 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. Work Otter — Project Portfolio and Resource Management Software for SaaS Businesses 

Work Otter 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 portfolio 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 Efficiently Remove Bottlenecks

Zoho Projects is a cloud-based project management software that greatly facilitates project planning, task tracking, and collaboration in 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, 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. 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.

Best Project Management Tools Compared

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

What is Project Management Software?

Project management software refers to applications, tools, and platforms that help you visualize and streamline your workflow, facilitate team collaboration and communication, 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 company knows exactly what’s going on at any given moment, saving a ton of time you’d otherwise waste on meetings, lengthy email threads, and sorting out misunderstandings regarding task priorities and due dates.

Why You Need Project Management Software – Key Benefits

Unless you have a very small business, running a company without dedicated project management software is extremely difficult. To keep up to date with what your team members are working on, you’ll need to regularly reach out to them – which is obviously time-consuming and inefficient. 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.

Project management software efficiently solves all of these issues, saves you valuable time, helps you efficiently utilize your resources, and helps 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:

Better Project Planning and Execution

Project management software lets you keep a close eye on each stage of your project and track every task. This gives you a clear overview of the project’s progress, lets you identify issues and bottlenecks in real time, efficiently allocate resources, and ensures you deliver quality work on time.

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.

Enhanced Team Communication and Collaboration

If your team relies on a chat app, spreadsheets, lengthy email threads, and virtual meetings to share information on task 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 would have to log all of their work and send countless emails with daily updates.

Project management software acts as a centralized data platform 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 functionalities you need — Depending on the complexity of your workflows, 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, so should the tools you use. If you’re planning on expanding your team in the near future, it’s best to opt for a tool that can easily be scaled by adding new members to your account without having to renegotiate the subscription price
• 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.

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