Every now and then, I come across a web project management system. Some of those are free, while others cost a bit of money. In most cases, those website build tools look as if they were made with MS-Access. They make me wonder: what’s the point of having a project management software that is known for being outdated? You can learn about all this by checking out these top project management tools.
Have you ever wondered what project management system is right for your business? There are thousands of ways you can manage projects, but it’s not always easy to decide which software enables you to organize and deliver your goals. Do you want an ERP system for project management? Or what about a CRM solution that includes project management features?
Who is project manager?
As the name suggests, the project manager is a person whose main role is to MANAGE the project. More specifically, a project manager has certain responsibilities and success of a project depends on the project manager’s capability to perform his role well.
The main responsibilities of a project manager can include defining achievable project objectives, determining the necessary steps or milestones that must be accomplished to achieve the objectives, and defining the resources at hand. About the resource planning, we will discuss more in the next section. Lastly, the project manager is also responsible to verify proper execution of the work to make sure the deliverables or outputs have been finished on time and budget. A shocking factor is that only about 40% of total projects on average finish on-time and budget.
monday.com
This is the best project management software on the market right now. It is a simple and intuitive project management application that enables you to manage all projects and tasks. The platform comes with color-coded boards that provide visual timelines on all projects and tasks in one place. monday.com allows you to keep track of projects with ease, stay on top of projects’ schedules, and collaborate with team members to expedite processes. Besides, the solution keeps you on your toes, always guiding you on the next course of action, so you never miss a deadline.
Zoho Projects
A popular project management system that assists in making business projects more productive and finishing them in time. It is loaded with functions to improve team collaboration, making project monitoring easy, and enhancing productivity and output. The software features milestones, tasks, and tasklists to plan your work in advance, and divides large and complex projects into manageable units, scheduling recurring tasks, dependencies, and subtasks according to set deadlines.
Wrike
An award-winning online project management software built for speed and efficiency to help distributed and co-located teams. The platform enables multifunctional groups to collaborate and get things done effectively from a single location and allows users to schedule, prioritize, discuss, and keep track of both work and progress in real-time. Its user-friendly navigation lets teams do all their work with just one hub with access to data and information stored in an online database.
Trello
Based around the kanban card-based management system, Trello’s simple interface and generous free tier makes it the ideal place for individuals and small teams to get started with basic project management.
Rather than traditional tools designed for managing resources and tracking progress towards a specific end date, kanban-based apps like Trello are more free-form and flexible.
You can manage both individual projects and ongoing workflows equally well, and the board and card metaphors are easy to understand. There’s plenty of power under the hood, with cards able to include images and attached files, hyperlinks, custom dropdowns, due dates, and plenty more.
Once you’re finished with a particular card or an entire board, it can be archived to hide it from daily view while still being accessible if needed in the future.
The basic free tier includes unlimited users and cards, up to 10 boards, and just one “Power-Up” (i.e., integration with other services) per board. Its unlimited storage is restricted to 10 megabytes per file. Paid plans start at $10 per month, with fewer or no limitations.1
There’s very limited reporting built into Trello, and although third-party extensions add more options, you’ll likely still need to look elsewhere if detailed reports are a major requirement. For everyone else, however, Trello is a great place to start with project management. It’s available on the web, mobile, and desktop.
Clarizen
An enterprise-grade solution that combines project management and high-quality social collaboration feature, all in an easy to use and fast to deploy platform. It provides companies with a well-defined work structure by connecting tasks, projects, and conversations, allowing for a faster way to manage their work, initiatives, and projects. It automatically prioritizes budgets, projects, resources, portfolios, and tasks, and makes sure that critical information and resources are always handled appropriately.
Basecamp
A veteran of the project management world, Basecamp was launched in 2004 and has built a customer base of 3.5 million users.34
The software makes much of its ability to replace several other paid monthly services, from Slack to Dropbox. While it’s not always a complete replacement, the software does take many of the features of those tools and rolls them all into one system. Scheduling and calendars, real-time chat, private messaging, file storage, and more are included.
An uncluttered interface and powerful search tools make it straightforward to find the task, image, or message you’re after, and a strong reporting suite lets you go as wide or deep as required.
Working with clients is handled well, with e-mail integration and the ability to share individual tasks and messages with people outside the organization. Notifications can be customized to your requirements, including shutting them off outside office hours.
Basecamp’s fixed $99 per month pricing makes it an appealing option for larger organizations, but small teams may find better value elsewhere. There’s no free plan, but the length of the 30-day trial is more generous than most. Web, desktop, and mobile versions are available.
LiquidPlanner
LiquidPlanner is one of those pieces of software that tries to be many things to many people, and unlike most others with such grand ambitions, it generally succeeds.
In addition to being a powerful way of running traditional projects, with all the features you’d expect, LiquidPlanner performs equally well as a helpdesk-style issue tracker and general resource management tool.
Strong reporting is built in, along with integration with major cloud storage providers. There’s also Zapier support, so you can build your own automated connections with other business tools as needed.7
One-off pieces of work can be assigned to any user or group, and the impact of that extra work on the people performing it is automatically taken into account when estimating project deliverables.
With extra features comes extra complexity, of course, and while LiquidPlanner does a good job of explaining some of its trickier aspects and then getting out of the way, it still requires a greater time investment to set up, learn, and master than many of its competitors. For that reason—not to mention the cost—it’s better suited to larger teams and organizations than small, ad-hoc groups.
LiquidPlanner doesn’t offer a free tier, although you can trial various plans for two weeks. Plans start at $29 per month per user (with annual billing) for a maximum of 50 projects, and go up from there.
Conclusion:
Project management is a very broad topic. You could write several tomes about it. Fortunately, there are tons of free resources out there that can help you start learning about it. Whether you want to know which project management software is the best for your projects or how you can organize your projects in project management system, these are the top project management examples list that should give you lots of ideas.