Project management is the secret sauce that permits companies to become great by effectively completing projects. No, this isn’t clickbait – I’ve witnessed two software companies (one of which I worked) dissolve within 1-2 years due to horrible project management. Others had their product debuts pushed back by many months. While I agree that, like most other disciplines, project management has its fair share of snake oil and charlatans, this does not minimize its value or influence. And what applies to project management tools as well – outstanding ones may help you boost managerial efficiency, cut completion time, minimize misunderstanding and irritation, and so on. So, here are some of the finest project management tools available for companies of different sizes and requirements.
10+ Best Project Management Software For SMB
Project Management Software for SMB you can try.
1. Monday
Monday can assist you when you want a project management platform for both simple projects and big portfolios. Take project management to the next level with customized features that enable you to execute plans, strategize them, and present your best work. In addition, Monday enables you to successfully collaborate with team members and bring them together on a single shared platform. This allows you to involve people more deeply, speed project development, and remove communication hurdles.
Inside an interactive and transparent dashboard, you may learn about the state of your project and readily obtain budget approvals, task status, progress updates, team productivity, and much more. Well, you can visualize, plan, monitor, and manage everything using powerful Gantt charts, allowing you to make educated choices based on accurate facts. In addition, you may change and adjust the dependencies, baseline, and project milestones at any time throughout the project’s lifespan.
You may monitor each team member’s workload using up-to-date and real-time data on their present capability and then determine how to allocate resources efficiently. This allows you to save time and put it toward more creative work while decreasing rework. It does not adhere to a single style; instead, you get multiple templates for different projects and choose them depending on your preferences.
These templates are only for program, portfolio, and project management. To achieve complete visibility, organize and prioritize your team’s tasks. For example, you may create timeframes, align everyone, and give deadlines to team members. There are several approaches to data visualization, including agile, waterfall, and hybrid. This project management software also enables you to involve your stakeholders with real-time data and live updates and benefit from automation to fuel your projects and save time.
They also maintain the strictest security requirements, with complete data ownership, comprehensive audit logs, and access controls to guarantee that the user experience is never jeopardized. It may be smoothly integrated with your current tools such as Excel, Google Calendar, Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc. Monday has four pricing levels for you to pick from based on your demands and team size. Start your free trial if you’re unsure.
2. Teamwork
True to its name, Teamwork enables teams to collaborate and work more effectively while allowing stakeholders to maintain a high-level view of the project at all times. Teamwork has Trello-style boards and time tracking, so if you want a clean, usable app with these features, Teamwork is for you. Well, it’s free for up to five users, and premium options start at $9 per user each month. Before I close, I’d want to point out that Teamwork is a suite of tools, with the project management app being one of them. They also provide a CRM, helpdesk, document management software, a chat app (similar to Slack), and other services.
3. Basecamp
Basecamp has been in the project management business for quite some time. It debuted in 2004 and has remained committed to its idea of simplicity and clarity ever since. These people created the wildly successful Ruby on Rails web framework, so I’d guess they know a thing or two about developing simple, useful stuff. Basecamp offers the expected teams, projects, and tasks, but there are a few extra unique features I’d like to highlight:
Real-time Chat: Using Basecamp eliminates switching between it and a chat tool to handle real-time communication. The group conversations also include all of the features we expect from chat apps, such as @mentions, media files, emoticons, and more.
Client Access: Basecamp allows you to integrate your clients directly into your projects (completely managing what they can and cannot view) and work with them. Existing customers’ communications may be sent to Basecamp, and deliverables can be seen, debated, and authorized straight from Basecamp.
To-do Lists: No matter how advanced project management tools get, to-do lists will always be useful. Often, the tasks are fully known by all parties involved, and all we need is a “fast and dirty” approach to store them someplace. To-do lists are particularly powerful in Basecamp since reminders and notifications are handled automatically, so you don’t have to nag anybody for status updates.
Message Boards: When ideas or announcements are made, incredibly beneficial discussions may be produced – and lost. Basecamp’s message boards enable you to convert such interactions into a message board where your team can talk, respond, and attach files.
Documents And Files: The Basecamp’s document and file management capabilities are strong. All project submissions are saved, and files that are modified are versioned. In addition, Google Docs may be shared and modified directly in Basecamp.
Basecamp, in my view, is a beautiful tool that makes sense for teams of all sizes with general and uncomplicated requirements. Yes, Basecamp is not a powerful tool for highly specialized tasks (such as Agile Software Development), and the company is open about this. The best part is perhaps the pricing: for a flat $99 per month (yes, a matter of team size!) Basecamp makes itself a no-brainer in its area.
4. Smartsheet
Smartsheet provides intelligent project management tools that approximately 90% of Fortune 100 companies are now utilizing. Well, With its grid, Gantt, card, and calendar view formats, this smart management platform is ideal for healthy cooperation and offers adaptability. Furthermore, equations may be applied to cells and columns, enabling quick computations inside and across sheets. Smartsheets supports strict user login restrictions and enables using a single credential across all users.
Furthermore, changes are immediately applied everywhere. Its forms use conditional logic, allowing input from the target audience. Furthermore, pre-built automation reduces repetitive work and ‘proving’ consolidates everything on a single screen for approvals and recommendations. Furthermore, it enables the publication of sheets and reports for all users, even those outside of Smartsheet, for greater reach. Finally, Smartsheet provides a 30 day risk-free trial period.
5. Asana
It is a general-purpose project management software that prioritizes speed and usability. Asana is a good example of a well-designed single-page app; thus, I say speed. When you click, everything occurs quickly, which is quite useful when you’re in a rush (under pressure). Here are some of Asana’s notable features:
Workload: Workloads are a visual representation of how much your team members have on their plates. You’ll know immediately if your marketing, design, and engineering teams will be able to collaborate on that critical product change expected next month.
Visual timelines: Asana’s project timelines are visually structured and very powerful. They make it simple to plan a project and know where it stands visually.
Calendar: The Asana calendar is stacked with all of your tasks and planning, and it can show you how the team’s schedule is organized. Here is the place to go if you want to ensure that the timetable is not out of sync or just broken.
Image proofing: This is merely a fancy title for a great function that enables reviewers to contribute comments to different parts of an image. This is useful for design teams since gathering input without clear visual references may be a headache.
Asana’s basic edition is free but limited to 15 team members. Pricing for additional members or access to advanced features such as the admin panel, picture proofing, and so on begins at $10 per user per month. There’s much more to say, but there’s not enough room here. The bottom line is that Asana has quickly gained popularity and is a fantastic alternative for project management for businesses of all sizes.
6. Jira
Unlike our prior project management software, Basecamp, Jira is a project management suite designed specifically for handling agile software projects. Consequently, its target market, pricing, complexity, capabilities, and so on vary. It’s unusual for software teams to start using Basecamp and “graduate” to Jira. Atlassian, the organization behind BitBucket, which for a long time was favored by closed source projects over GitHub because it allowed infinite private repositories, created Jira.
If your software teams have expanded to the point where previously simple project management tools no longer suffice, it’s time to switch to Jira. Jira offers everything, from project planning to reporting, monitoring issues, and delving into waste. Here are some amazing features that set Jira apart:
1 – A comprehensive set of APIs is accessible for anyone looking to create alternative interfaces for their workflows.
2 – Scrum and Kanban boards are two examples.
3 – Support for various development approaches. If you’re still not satisfied, you can create your own.
4 – Works with over 3,000 apps.
5 – Intelligent automation, such as automatically allocating tasks to people or tying problems to code, minimizes mental friction and allows you to swiftly design complex workflows.
6 – Extensive and powerful reporting.
Jira is more expensive than other popular yet lightweight project management tools. For big teams, its cost per user per month model ($7 for regular, $14 for premium) may cost thousands of dollars each month. However, the cost is compensated by the fact that teams of this size would drown without Jira.
7. Podio
Podio is next on our list, a heavyweight option for big teams and enterprises that need customization and CRM features. So, why should you utilize Podio? Here are a few examples:
Customizability: Unlike many of its rivals, Podio allows for substantial customization. This enables you to change how its components work and remove parts that are irrelevant to you.
CRM Built-in: The Podio CRM includes customer information management, customer journey tracking, lead tracking, and other CRM-complete features.
Employee Management: Podio provides first-rate employee management tools, allowing you to manage costs, holidays, activity streams, and more from a single location.
Project Management: includes collaborating with customers, assigning emails to tasks, granular access privileges, planning Scrum projects, and creating sprints.
Event management, email management, company management… the list goes on! Podio features a free plan, although it only provides rudimentary task management. The basic plan serves little use other than familiarizing yourself with the platform. The enticing features are enabled in the premium tiers, ranging from $9 to $24 per user each month.
8. Trello
Trello is a novel and simple approach to project management. It lacks the overpowering features that need extensive research and dedication. The number of important features may be counted on one hand’s fingers. Give it a try before you roll your eyes and discard it. Trello made the notion of the Kanban board from the Agile software approach. The concept is straightforward: tasks are created on cards stacked on one of the numerous boards you create.
These boards may represent your company’s functions/divisions, the status of a task, or even the months of a calendar year. Team members may leave comments on the cards, have discussions, attach photographs, and so on. When a task on a card is completed, it is transferred to the next one. As an example:
Trello’s free plan is rather fantastic, with limitations only on the number of boards and attachment size, not on the number of users! Most people will be satisfied, while premium plans begin at $10 per user each month. Trello is a fun and effective solution if you’re a small team (or even a single person!) whose projects don’t need detailed planning.
9. Microsoft Project
When Microsoft accomplishes anything, it may not be the most beautiful thing ever, but it performs the job brilliantly, and people can’t get it out of their heads. Examples include Windows, Office, Outlook, SharePoint, and Exchange. The same is true for Microsoft Project, a program intended primarily (and I mean precisely) for professional project managers working with big teams.
Microsoft Project provides a comprehensive tool for effectively capturing the complexity of project management, resource management, and portfolio management. As of this writing, Microsoft has implemented support for Agile project workflows, which will appeal to enterprises with certain teams or divisions that work in an Agile manner. There are two major reasons to select:
Installation on-site: While the tools we’ve discussed thus far are amazing, most enterprises are not permitted to store data outside of company assets for regulatory reasons. This is simple using Microsoft Project, which also has an on-premise version.
Long-term stability: Microsoft is a firm that has been around forever and will be around forever (kind of), so you can rest certain that your business activities will not come to a standstill one day because the company that designed the tool went bankrupt.
If planning, PMP, and enterprise are your thing, check out Microsoft Project!
10. Airtable
Airtable is the most interesting breakthrough in project management tools in pure innovation. You may think of Airtable as spreadsheets on steroids — and the company does, too — but this view, in my opinion, undersells the tool’s possibilities. Airtable does have spreadsheets, but it has so many features that you could start hating your favorite spreadsheets app! Just look at this: It’s as short as a spreadsheet but features a visual division of tasks, bright tags that stand out, the option to assign tasks to people, notifications, and so on.
Blocks, which are compact, complete, and specialized modules that you can add to your workflows to boost efficiency, are another awesome feature. I realize that seems abstract, but here are some specific examples: Gantt charts, bar/line/scatter plots, graphic page builder, 3D model explorer, time tracker, organization chart – I’m out of words! The point is that these Blocks work and can be included in any of your tasks or workflows.
When you combine this with the standard features like document management, Kanban boards, and calendars, you have something amazing on your hands. The best part is the pricing: the free plan allows for teams of any size, with the sole restriction that a single base (sheet) cannot include more than 1,200 items. It sounds enticing to me!
11. Zoho Projects
Zoho Projects is one of several services provided by Zoho, a company you may be acquainted with. Consider Zoho Projects a good amalgamation of all the features mentioned in this list. Gantt charts, milestones, issue tracking, timesheets, document management, finance, interaction with popular apps, forums, and more — as I said, it does a little bit of everything and does it extremely well. The basic plan is free for the first ten users, after which the app will cost between $20 and $35 per month (note: this is a set monthly cost, not per user). Zoho Projects is a good choice, but it’s much better if you already use the Zoho business suite of apps.
12. TeamGantt
Trello is to Kanban boards what TeamGantt is to Gantt charts, as the name implies. Gantt charts have been the company’s major (and sole) driver of planning and executive project workflows. While this significantly limits capability, it also makes TeamGantt exceedingly clean, simple to understand, and efficient. But don’t be fooled into believing that TeamGantt can just be used to create Gantt charts and follow up with the assignee. There are a lot of features focused on making cooperation simpler, such as:
1 – Conversations.
2 – Document management.
3 – Time tracking.
4 – Dependencies (mapping projects that rely on other projects).
The free plan only permits three members and one project, so it’s merely there to give you a taste of the app. Paid plans cost $10 and $15 per month. If you believe Gantt charts are the best alternative for you and want to design your workflows around them, TeamGantt is a wonderful and attractive solution.
Wrapping Up: Project Management Software
There is no doubt that project management tools are crucial to a team’s success. However, deciding what is best for you might be difficult with so many alternatives available. As a result, this list includes the top tools that I believe are the best and most distinct from one another. I hope this helps you find the appropriate one!
