Contents
- Top All Round Project Management Software: Picks
- What Makes Top Project Management Software?
- Our Top 3 Picks: Our Recommendations
- Tools Reviewed
- 1. monday.com
- 2. Basecamp
- 3. Wrike
- 4. Asana
- 5. Trello
- 6. ClickUp
- 7. SmartSuite
- 8. Coda
- 9. Smartsheet
- 10. Notion
- More Project Management Tools to Consider
- Picking Your Project Management Software
Best All-Round Project Management Software in 2024: Reviewed
Best Project Management Software
11th Apr, 2024
Your team wants to know the best project management software to use as we head into 2024. Project management software comes in many shapes and sizes, let's explore which one is the best project management software for your team in 2024.
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Project management software is something that can level up a team's day-to-day productivity aligning you all on goals and visions, and chances are you have tried some and keep trying to find the perfect fit for you.
Getting your team on the same page and same vision can be one of the big unlocks.
But sifting through, researching, and finding a tool to fit everyone's needs can be harder than it looks for those in the team hunting for one base to manage team projects. The politics, the features, and the pricing all come into play when exploring the best solutions.
Let's first determine what a solid project management software looks like.
Top All Round Project Management Software: Picks
Here's the list of the best recommended tools to go with:
- monday.com - one of the leading project management software for all-round use
- Basecamp - an outstanding a-sync and remote project management software
- Wrike - an all-round project management experience popular with marketing/sales
- Asana - the most traditional project management with great integrations & structure
- Trello - popular with visual project management users and built by Atlassian
- ClickUp - a wide array of views and abilities that can be designed for each user
- SmartSuite - a flexible way to manage projects with solution-based spaces
- Coda - a Notion alternative with fantastic power abilities with AI and automation
- Smartsheet - an enterprise-level software designed to handle projects
- Notion - a build-your-own workspace that is flexible for projects and knowledge
What Makes Top Project Management Software?
The best project management software helps your team organize themselves in one base. It provides a range of features and views, helps reduce context-switching, and gives your team much-needed insight into how much progress they are making at work.
- Features & Views - Providing you with a window into your work is key and views help you do that, a project management software with solid views is like allowing your team their best window into what work looks like for them. Favorite views are different for everyone, much like a menu at a restaurant, optionality gives teams choice.
- Context-Switching - One of the biggest issues in work is moving between applications. The best project management applications try to house integrations in one base so that you don't have to jump between them and get distracted.
- Progression - Seeking an instant way to see how your team is progressing is something a project management software should do. A quick glance should indicate where your team is, how they are progressing, and how you can help. Many tools are building better indicators to help teams move forward.
Let's get into the list of the best project management tools for 2024.
Our Top 3 Picks: Our Recommendations
Here are the ones that meet the requirements of most looking for PM tools.
Tools Reviewed
Explore before you jump in with our opinions, insights & in-depth reviews.
1. monday.com
Best All Round Project Software
Used by over 100,000 teams worldwide — Try it now for free / No credit card needed
Availability: iOS, Android, macOS, web & Windows
Quick glance of monday.com
- Pricing: Starts from free, with basic $9 to $19 per month
- Features: Dashboards, timeline view, charts & lots more.
- Best For: All-rounder use, with specialist tools for sales CRM, marketing & developers.
Why it belongs in the best project management software?
We've added monday.com because of the structured, yet flexible nature of the tool for project management. Over the years, it has become one of the most successful project management tools for all round use. When we say all round use, it works as a great base for projects for everyone in a range of departments meaning you won't get a sense of specialism unless you buy into monday.com's workOS offerings which are designed for Sales CRM pipelines (called monday.com Sales CRM), marketing teams and development teams.
What makes monday.com special?
There's a fair amount of features in monday.com which makes it an intermediate difficulty to learn, but not as difficult as tools like Notion or Smartsuite to adopt. Special features in monday.com are definitely the dashboard feature that allows your team to express data, team project progress or insights all in a flexible place to see real-time updates.
monday.com Workdocs is another layer to monday.com that allows your team to manage knowledge and ideas by capturing them in one documents hub. This is an upcoming trend for project management teams to get document experiences as you'll see throughout.
Finally, we love the experience automations feature (above) that allowed you to create recurring actions on tasks that you and your team do everyday that just waste time, like moving a status and nudging someone after each time, that could be automated.
Who monday.com best for?
monday.com is best all-rounder on our list. It provides most teams with 80-90% of what they need. Nothing specialist like a gantt chart software, but just a solid, reliable all-round experience that most teams will get on with.
Not massively hard to learn, but don't expect to learn it within a day, it presents a solid all-round project management software. If you're hunting for a development team project management application, then monday.com can serve this for you with monday.com dev, but the general "Work Management" experience is much more all-round.
There are actually more monday.com products in the line-up since our last review.
Helpful Comparisons to Other Project Management Software
2. Basecamp
Best Remote Project Management Tool
The project management platform that helps small teams move faster and make more progress
Quick glance of Basecamp
- Pricing: Starts from $15 per month for freelancers, $349 for teams
- Features: Check-ins, to-do lists and schedule management
- Best For: Those who are a-sync and remote, the best app for this scenario.
Why it belongs in the best project management software?
Basecamp is developed by 37Signals, a company littered with opinion but developers of fantastic applications, they are the folks behind Hey Email too.
Opinion oozes into Basecamp and you can tell from day one when you land on their site. They want to be the hub for your team that defies common work norms. No more office, no more micro-management and more constant meetings is screamed from their marketing efforts. Basecamp firmly belongs on our list for creating an opinionated, quality product.
What makes Basecamp special?
Basecamp isn't much like other project management applications. It doesn't offer real-time insights like monday.com, it presents you with a more fixed view to your work allowing your team to more on work, then on project management, if that makes sense. Let us explain how and what we mean by that in these features that make Basecamp special.
Message boards are a good example of this. Although Basecamp has real-time chat, boards for messaging wants to be the Facebook feed for announcements, updates and discussions. Joining discussions isn't like Slack, you won't get the barrage of messages, you can choose who you message and notify you per post, for the people who matter to it.
To-do lists in Basecamp are different too. They are much more static way to see a list of your tasks for what's ahead and associated to the project. You can go to the top of the page and see all "your tasks" which gives you a window into your workload across all projects you have inside of Basecamp and connect them to the schedule feature too.
And card table which is a fairly new edition to Basecamp but allows you a better way to view your upcoming work within a Kanban board and see the workflow play out together. Other features include the likes of Basecamp lineup for seeing a gantt like view for tasks.
Who is Basecamp best for?
This is a radical project management application. It defies the nature of project management software, but for teams serious about moving to a fully remote, a-sync world. This is going to be a serious contender to look at as Basecamp continues to break boundaries in this area and embrace the way of working that many teams are moving to.
Strangely, views are massively important when it comes to a-sync workload and Basecamp proves this but each project can have "apps" as part of it meaning you can build a project to your needs every single time, a similar interplay that ClickUp has with ClickApps.
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3. Wrike
Best Marketing & Sales Project Management Software
Every day, Wrike eliminates inefficiencies for 2.4 million people.
Wrike aims to be one platform to streamline all workflows
Quick glance of Wrike
- Pricing: Starts from free, with teams plans starting at $9.80 per user
- Features: Image & file proofing, timeline view & workload management.
- Best For: Fantastic for marketing teams and workload & resource optimisation
Why it belongs in the best project management software?
Wrike is a long-standing project management tool, which doesn't mean it just gets included for the age, but they have continued to produce a reliable and stable project management software that is super popular with marketing teams and managers. No, Wrike brings great ways for marketers to proof images, providing approvals and even file approvals, which makes it a gem for marketing agencies with client-facing workloads.
Another reason why we noted it in this list is their acquisition by larger company Citrix Systems, this could continue to stabilise Wrike and you can tell they are paying into their investment and helps to give those exploring it more peace of mind.
What makes Wrike special?
We're constantly coming back to such a small feature in the minds of many, but a fan-favourite amongst those who use Wrike for file management with projects everyday. That feature is file and image proofing.
File and image proofing allows your team to upload a file within a comment or discussion in Wrike and then begin breaking it down by clicking in and adding image-detailed comments, or even file comments in-line to help save huge amounts of time asking "wait, what area are you talking about" - which for marketing agencies providing each other with breakdowns of what the client needs, is a gamechanger. The approvals feature just enchances this providing the final piece of the puzzle.
A great visual planner, Wrike has a host of ways to express projects in a view that helps teams to plan ahead. The first is gantt view and it is not bad at all. It provides a detailed view including the likes of dependencies and filtering options - which is something some project management software tools just call "timeline" and don't deliver a quality gantt chart that works traditionally and provides a window into upcoming project work.
Workload management (above) is another hot one for managers who want to see where their employees are being overloaded. Being able to see what everyone's struggling on and how much each other have been scheduled is a super benefit for managing teams.
Who is this best for?
Wrike is a great tool for marketing teams, agencies and beyond. To be honest, calling it just a project management software for marketing agencies is sort of a lie. It expands beyond that and provides super views, grade-A management of comments and discussions and even a more traditional feel that you'll get with tools like monday.com and ClickUp.
Something to note too, Wrike offers "add-on" plans that bolt onto the experience that are worth considering too. For the marketing teams, there's something called "Marketing Insights" which give you better windows into the data you add to Wrike.
4. Asana
Best Product Project Management Software
Quick glance of Asana
- Pricing: Starts from free, with pricing starting from $10.99
- Features: Timeline, boards & integrations
- Best For: This totally can be for everyone, but it excels for product teams
Why it belongs in the best project management software?
Asana sits as one of the best tools out there for managing projects. They've been doing this for sometime and you can tell. Asana brings an aesthetic, beautiful experience that lures in the product management teams and design-based teams too. But it isn't just product management teams who will love Asana - it works for many different situations. For marketing teams with their timeline feature, for IT teams with their reports function, and for general teams too with their workflow builder feature.
With the long-standing history in project management, Asana is one of the best solutions for a wide range of use cases and presents a well put together all-round experience that doesn't take as much education to learn against other tools like Wrike, ClickUp & more.
What makes Asana special?
Asana has some very appealing features in this line-up.
Boards and timelines, despite being very basic in nature for project management software, Asana goes above and beyond with their development of these as they look and work brilliantly within a project in Asana. Another feature to shout about is the goals function that allows you to build a tab for goal in each project. Something that might replace the need for an OKR plugin or system so your team can reflect on objectives.
Workflow builder helps teams to just stop overloading their own processes by trying to remove complexity around move faster on their goals. You can take a workflow or set of processes that you do and connect it with Asana's list of over 270 apps they have in their integrations network to make rules, forms, templates, bundles and connecting reporting dashboards. So everything from small sized errands can be done and capture of information internally and externally can be done too.
Integrations as a feature are delivered very well in Asana. Asana are also well known for having over 270+ integrations that extend to popular tools like Microsoft Teams, Google Sheets & Zoom too. You can connect it with popular tools like Salesforce CRM too.
Who is Asana best for?
Asana is popular with teams in product management, IT and operations. The design of Asana is one of the best in the world and offers a clean feel to the application.
It would again be a crime to really say it is restricted to those industries because Asana is such an approachable application for those who want to have a simple, yet powerful project management software.
5. Trello
Best Kanban-Based Project Management
Quick glance of Trello
- Pricing: Starts from free, with basic $8 onwards
- Features: Power-ups, custom fields, visual nature.
- Best For: Fantastic kanban boards, but powerful power-ups per board you create.
Why it belongs in the best project management software?
Since Atlassian acquired Trello it has been on a war path to add more views, build better infrastructure and grow the project management software to new heights. Since the last major time a lot of people considered Trello, they've added timeline, dashboard and maps view which give you a much better expression of your projects and tasks alike.
Add to this the growing abilities of "power-ups" which are Trello plugins that can connect with tools like voting, repeating cards, integrations like Google Drive, InVision and Jira - and so much more - making the marketplace for Trello plugins to be a great place to extend your use of Trello for each of the workspaces you create.
What makes Trello special?
Plugins, let's speak about that first, the optionality to upgrade your Trello lists is huge. You can add anything from a utility like a "card snooze" function which allows your board card to be restored after a set period of snooze time, all the way to 3rd party extensions that can set a pomodoro timer per card you create.
The plugins have grown overtime making Trello accessible for many people thanks to the Trello developer platform building more plugins for each scenario.
Like monday.com and their automations marketplace, Trello offer something similar but it is called Butler, which is a service that you can use per board to setup automations. Butler is a little smarter here and recommends when you need to solve repetitive action - this will be a huge time saving when you're looking to use automations but don't know where to start.
Templates are another notable feature and thanks to the reach of Trello's community there's thousands that you can steal and copy into your workspace - ideal for small and large teams to embrace and use to help save time and build the perfect scenario.
Who is Trello best for?
Trello is great for a team between say 20-50 that want something practical, reliable and easy to teach, thanks to the nature of Trello it works like Asana where there isn't much education needed to get started with managing projects and tasks from day one.
Trello is great for visual planners and those who want something that is kanban-board led which is where a lot of Trello's initial success came from but since then, you can expand our your views to much more optionality. Now with maps, dashboard, timeline, Trello holds its own against other project management tools in the space in 2024.
6. ClickUp
Best Flexible Project Management Software
ClickUp is a project management software trying to replace all your apps into one platform
Availability: iOS, Android, macOS, web & Windows
Quick glance of ClickUp
- Pricing: Starts from free, with solo plan & pricing starting from $10 per month
- Features: Docs, AI and whiteboard planning
- Best For: The most flexible, traditional project management software on the market.
Why it belongs in the best project management software?
ClickUp is talked about so much and it is likely even before landing you know what it is and how it wants to be everything. This is very much true, ClickUp wants to be the everything project management software and it does this by providing users with hundreds of features and for many people that can be quite overwhelming but for others that makes ClickUp their powerhouse tool for managing everything without leaving ClickUp.
Rapidly growing in 2023, ClickUp 3.0 is set to be rolled out to all users by 2024 and bring some more powerful ways to better handle tasks, projects and documents all in one location. ClickUp also brings a lot to the table with whiteboards, goals and more.
What makes ClickUp special?
ClickUp brings a few gems to the table. Let's talk about the notable ones.
ClickUp Docs is yet again a good example of reducing context-switching. By having document management and collaboration together in ClickUp, you save the need for tools like Google Docs to manage project ideas, meeting notes and collaboration around each project. You can embed things like lists, tables and views within each of your Docs in ClickUp making them much more interactive and even backlink to other pages.
Whiteboards is something you don't expect to be in ClickUp but again shows a good example of how you can collaborate even further but without the need for tools like Miro that are more specialists in the whiteboard collaboration functions. This allows the teams to collaborate, leave notes, comment with post-it notes and interact by bringing in embeds of tasks all within whiteboard view for better real-time visual collaboration.
Chat wants to be a layer to ClickUp that allows you to cut out Slack or other such communication tools. So you can use it to begin real-time conversation with people in your team, share links and resources and even using their "slash" command to bring in things that you're collaborating on like tasks and documents for better referencing.
Who is ClickUp best for?
Think of ClickUp as the everything project management application. If you're in the hunt for something super flexible, willing to learn the tricks of the trade, ClickUp can offer you a enhanced experience above tools like monday.com by offering whiteboards and chat that adds less context-switching for your team as they use work across their days.
ClickUp is a great all-rounder, but will a lot to absorb for new team members getting used to the software - they still offer great templates to save time however.
7. SmartSuite
Best Records Project Management Software
Quick glance of SmartSuite
- Pricing: Starts from free, with basic $8 onwards
- Features: Dashboards, timeline view, charts & lots more.
- Best For: All-rounder use, with specialist tools for sales CRM, marketing & developers.
Why it belongs in the best project management software?
According to their website, SmartSuite is used by 5,000 businesses worldwide and are very much the most recent of the software on this list in terms of project management. They are making a name for themselves by offering a very flexible experience than resembles if Airtable and monday.com had a child, a combination between project management and record-management in which Airtable currently is the market leader in.
What makes SmartSuite special?
As a base for managing projects, tasks, schedules, milestones, timelines, reportings, forms and more - SmartSuite had packed in a lot of features into their core experience and name these areas you create solutions. Solutions provide you with a workspace for each focus.
So with each solution, you can use views like dashboards, grids, cards, kanban, calendars, timelines, maps, charts and forms in whatever plan you want, which makes SmartSuite perfect for those who don't want to be trapped by features in set plans. The real limitations to SmartSuite are focused around the use of records. Everything you add into a solution is called a record and in the plans, there are limits on how many records you can add per solution meaning you might hit the limits much faster than you expect.
SmartSuite also has documents and SmartSuite AI which allows for better document brainstorming, grammar improvements and better structure all within their document management much like you see in workdocs with monday.com and ClickUp docs.
Who is SmartSuite best for?
To be honest, SmartSuite is a strange breed. The range of views and features is amazing but the records can limit you. It is sort of like having an all-you-can-eat buffer with a range of cuisines, but there a limit to how many items you can have per cuisine.
If you're okay with limitations of records then it is well worth exploring this because SmartSuite pack so many fantastic features into one experience and from our own reviews, we found it to be a really powerful experience that once learnt does rival the likes of monday.com for power.
8. Coda
Best Document Based Project Management
Quick glance of Coda
- Pricing: Starts from free, with plans per doc maker starting at $12
- Features: AI for documents, formulas and packs
- Best For: Those who want to build your own project management from documents
Why it belongs in the best project management software?
Coda is one of the most underrated project management software options on the market. Collaborative documents don't seem like much but the powers inside of Coda are crazy and more recently being enhanced by AI technologies which can only mean one thing, more powerful information for you and your team.
Coda belongs in this list because it has shown year on year that the way that teams work is very much centred around documents and they want to make each document an application to use for work.
What makes Coda special?
Think of Coda as a live document that you and your team build documents into projects into task management lists into anything you want. The canvas is expansive and you choose what you do with that. Each document has a way to add micro applications within it to better visualise projects, items, records, tasks & more.
One of the most powerful of features in Coda is formulas and packs. Formulas are a great starting point, each little micro app you build within Coda workspaces, you can setup formulas to help enhance them - these are little automations that can do jobs for you or narrow down filtering too. You can then use packs to enhance them externally by connecting the wide array of integrations that Coda offers.
Coda wants to bring all your apps into one and infuse them with AI. The newer AI additions help to summarise pages and now connect with tables to better fill out information that teams could save a lot of time on. Coda has the nature of a document, structure of spreadsheets, power of apps (with formulas) and now a better framework with AI.
Who Coda this best for?
Coda is probably best for those who use Google Docs, spreadsheets or trying to hack a system together with several applications. The best way to think of Coda is "no-code document builder' allowing your team a wide range of possibilities to create the workspace of their dreams and with one of the best template galleries we've ever seen, that'll save.
9. Smartsheet
Great All-Round Project Management
Quick glance of Smartsheet
- Pricing: Starts from free, with basic $8 onwards
- Features: Resource management, admin center & work apps.
- Best For: Probably the more enterprise solution for project management.
Why it belongs in the best project management software?
Smartsheet, we didn't just include it because it is a McLaren F1 sponsor as of 2023. But it is used, according to their website, by 90% of the Fortune 100 companies.
Primarily because Smartsheet is a reliable and easy to use project management platform. It is sort of if Wrike and monday.com had a baby, a blend between the two in features and looks.
What makes Smartsheet special?
Resource management is something that Smartsheet thrives well on and allows the team to manage who is working on what and schedule them outside of this. Balancing how people are working inside of their schedule is a better way to approach task management so that team members are burnout or overloaded, or even underloaded.
Dashboards are a special feature as they allow to express reports and portfolios in a much more approachable, data-driven way so that teams can make decision in meetings.
WorkApps help you build experience custom-fit for each department for better collaboration. More scalable in use and better practice use for everyday departments using WorkApps in the wild and need mobile and quick access to the experience.
Who is Smartsheet best for?
Smartsheet is probably much more suitable as a scalable team that is growing beyond 100 people and are looking for much more in-depth functionality with their project view customisation. Smartsheet is like traditional Microsoft Excel but on fire.
10. Notion
Best No-Code Project Management Software
Quick glance of Notion
- Pricing: Starts from free, with plus starting at $10 and onwards
- Features: Notion projects, AI & databases
- Best For: Fans of Notion for solo use and prepared to build their own spaces
Why it belongs in the best project management software?
Notion has been growing as not only a solo tool but for teams to manage ideas, projects and databases in one place. It deserves status as a team project management tool now.
Notion Projects are pre-built templates with databases that can be applied to a range of situations like sprint management, tasks, projects and internal wiki and knowledge management. Notion has long been known for wiki based management along with management of databases but now they want to cater with these pre-made places.
Notion Projects and Notion as a whole is super for those who want a custom-build to their project management experience so those who are more hands on. But if you find that person in your team, Notion becomes a super weapon for customising it to how you and your team use the experience. Education with Notion is very helpful, so check out "Tiny Teams" by top Notion builder and team management expert Marie Poulin for unlocking Notion for your team.
What makes Notion special?
Databases is the most famed feature of Notion that allows users to not only create a list of records but anything. You can build a time tracker all the way to a full-scale project management timeline view in one database. Views helps to separate that and expand the everyday use of databases. The more time you spend with databases, the better you would get with them - including filters, sorting, properties, custom fields and much more.
Notion AI is one of the newer, leading features for creating AI based writing to improve documents, better explain documents and handle team knowledge too. Although Notion aren't investing as much in AI as software like Slite is, they still present good features for managing gen-AI and getting access to it.
Who is Notion best for?
Notion is the best for those who can handle learning the ways of Notion - things like databases and blocks are something that will take getting used to, but the general flexibility and open-canvas nature does appeal to many teams for handling internal documents alongside projects.
This is very different to more traditional tools like ClickUp and monday.com but presents and approachable, easy to use, and fun-to-learn tool that can be shaped to fit the needs of almost any workspace - as Coda and SmartSuite operate as too.
More Project Management Tools to Consider
If you're hunting for more project management tools, you can explore our YouTube that goes much deeper into the realm of project management and how to get started.
Picking Your Project Management Software
Here's our most precise project management software recommendations folks:
Best For All Round Use
All rounder, we'd have to say Asana. It presents a great traditional, modern design layout for your teams projects. If you're looking for more pack in your punch, ClickUp or monday.
Best For Marketing & Sales
Our biggest recommendation is between Wrike and Asana, but here Wrike gives the edge with the abilities tailoring more of those sales and marketing teams. These two are of most all-round project management tools on our list too.
Best For No Code
No code is relatively new, but if you're bold enough to jump in, we'd recommend Notion. It is approachable and you can also use it for personal use too. We'd also say that tools like SmartSuite also meet the requirement with less canvas focused feel too.
Best For Remote Teams
Finally, the one that is best designed for remote teams, Basecamp. Nice & easy.
What's Next for Project Management Software?
From our years of exploring project management software, there seems to be a new trend every 2-3 years that project management software tends to adopt.
In 2024, we wanted to give you a window into the world of project management trends as software adapts and evolves to meet the needs of the 21st century.
- AI Assistants - Run! Your jobs are being taken! Not quite yet. But AI is seeping into the software we use every single day in an effort to refine our systems, save time and produce a better workspace. One thing to look out for in 2024 is the rise of these AI assistants and how they'll impact small workload items. Anything administrative or repetitive adds constant weight to your team's focus. AI assistants will likely find was to help you research small errands, automate small tasks, refine wordings automatically and keep you more organized in your workspace when days go astray. Look out for AI updates that these project management softwares will introduce in 2024.
- Documents & Projects - The knowledge management trend is continuing where more project management software are gaining ways to capture and manage documents alongside your projects, tasks and work. This is looping back to the "context switching" dilemma where the more times you move between apps, the less productive you are. Project management software wants to solve this and keep you in their software. Maybe even forever as features becoming richer.
These are two trends for project management software to consider as you browse our list of project management software and make your decisions with any to all apps you choose.
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