Welcome to the best job tracking software for small businesses. This list is the result of our research with small business owners, managers and freelancers. We wanted to know what software they are using for keeping their jobs organized. We hope these reviews will be helpful for your search for the best job tracking software for your small business.
I’ve taken the time to find some of the best free and low cost project management software systems on the market today. If you’re interested in the best small business project management software, or just want to find out what other options are available, read this guide.
Asana (Web, iOS, Android)
In a cluttered world of modern project management software, Asana stands out as a profoundly effective tool that supports multiple project management styles, giving you full control over how you want to visualize and organize your work.
Its interface is intuitive and well-designed, with an easy hierarchy of elements. On the far left is the navigation sidebar, where you can access the various projects, stats, message inbox, and your personal task list. The main area displays a list of tasks, their due dates, and who each task is assigned to. Each task can be assigned to multiple projects in case of overlap and can have an infinite number of subtasks.
Where Asana shines most is in its flexibility: there’s no right or wrong way to create your project, project sections, or tasks. The default view is the list format, which is clean and easy to scan for due dates and assignees. But you can also switch to a board, timeline, calendar, or dashboard layout.
Asana allows you to create task and project templates, but its default setup is completely open-ended: the only required part of any task is a title. After that, you’re free to add a description, organizational tags, custom fields (available with paid plans), due dates, assignees, and more. Still, with all the possibilities for adding information to your tasks, Asana’s interface is relatively clean. This helps to keep the focus off the project management tool and on the work itself.
Asana Price: Free for up to 15 team members and basic features; from $10.99/user/month (billed annually) for the Premium plan that includes additional features like the admin console, advanced reporting, custom fields, and more.
Airtable (Web, macOS, iOS, Windows, Android)
If you love the clean, ordered appearance of a spreadsheet but wish it had a little more power, try Airtable. It’s a versatile spreadsheet-style database app that can help you manage any project, from editorial calendars to Scrum sprints for your product development projects.
Airtable projects are managed in bases. To create a base, you can choose from dozens of premade templates, import an existing spreadsheet, or start from scratch. The premade templates are well organized by project type, and are pre-filled with sample content so you can easily visualize how to run your project. Each row in a base constitutes a record, which can include any kind of customized field you can dream up.
Airtable offers all the things you love about spreadsheets (filters, equations, and pulling in data from other sources, to name a few) but in a format that’s much easier to navigate. Each column has a specific designation, whether that’s short or long text, file attachments, multi-selection tags, or checkboxes.
The best part for project management is that you can add multiple views, so you can toggle between the spreadsheet and other formats like a Kanban board or calendar. That means you can put all your detailed project data in the records and still view that information in several easy-to-scan formats.
With Airtable’s Zapier integrations, you can connect Airtable with your favorite apps, so you can do things like automatically send form responses to a project management table. Try one of the automations below, or read about 3 workflows that will help you be an Airtable expert.
Airtable Price: Free for unlimited users and up to 1,200 records per base; from $10/user/month for the Plus plan with up to 5,000 records per base and 5GB attachments.
monday.com
More details about monday.com:
- Pricing: Free, or $10 per user per month for the Standard plan
- Website: monday.com
Pros:
- Many useful features
- Easy to use
- Decent pricing
Cons:
- Free plan isn’t very good
We kick off our list with our favorite overall project management tool, monday.com. We’ve praised it in many articles, not least of which is our monday.com review, for its great feature set and colorful, easy-to-use interface. This combination, together with its pricing, make it a great pick for any small business.
Monday.com has its list as the center of all planning. You enter tasks there, assign different qualities to them using color-coded tags — important for filtering them later — and then use different views to determine what is being done when and by whom. It’s a very elegant system, and we recommend you check out our monday.com tutorial for more details on how it all works.
Monday.com also scales well: while small teams can get by with just a list and a board, complex projects can be accommodated as well, as can the needs of companies that run multiple projects. It also offers some great time-tracking abilities and collaboration features, like chat.
Monday.com Business Pricing
If you’re running a small business, the Standard plan, which runs $120 per user per year, is probably your best bet. While it’s a sizable investment, it offers decent value when compared to most competitors, though nTask — our number four entry — is the best budget option. We offer an in-depth comparison of the different plans in our article on monday.com’s pricing.
One important thing to note in regard to pricing, though, is that monday.com’s free and Basic plan tiers aren’t very good: if you want a free solution or one tailored to tight budgets, you may want to look elsewhere. For anybody else, we definitely recommend you give the Standard plan a spin using the 14-day free trial.
Wrike
A Dull but Effective Project Management Solution
More details about Wrike:
- Pricing: Free, or $9.80 per user per month on the Professional plan
- Website: wrike.com
Pros:
- Solid free plan
- Old-school feel
- Great reporting features
Cons:
- Not the belle of the ball
- Tutorials are a bit short
- Big jump in prices
Our third place is reserved for Wrike. At first, we were going to give the post to nTask for its budget plans, but then we figured Wrike’s great reporting features may be more useful for smaller businesses. If you like to quickly gather detailed information about what’s going on in your company, then Wrike may be the program for you; check out our full Wrike review.
Besides reporting, Wrike also offers a full suite of project management features, like a list, board and even a pretty decent Gantt chart, though nothing that would blow away a dedicated tool like our honorable mention, TeamGantt. It also comes with a spreadsheet view, which is great for old-school project managers but will likely puzzle people new to the job.
The downside to using Wrike are its looks, or rather lack of them. Even after you change up the main template and tweak some other settings, it’s still a bit drab to look at. Though it shouldn’t be a reason not to use it, we always feel a faint torpor descend when using it for any extended period of time. Your mileage may vary, but we prefer the pretty colors of monday.com.
Wrike’s Free & Professional Plans
That aside, Wrike is a solid pick, made even more solid by its free plan, which offers basic functionality for up to five users. Check out our article on Wrike pricing for the details.
If you decide to go the paid route, the basic Professional plan is good value at just under $120 per user per year, but the Business plan is quite the leap at almost $300 per user per year. You can judge for yourself whether that’s worth it using the 14-day free trial.
ConnectWise Manage
Process automation software ConnectWise Manage is tailored for technology solution companies, such as cloud service providers, software developers, professional services, IT service companies, telecom, and security. Project teams that belong in this industry benefit from its targeted solutions, especially when it comes to coordination and collaboration.
It centralizes documentation for everyone to get full visibility into various aspects that empower strategic decision making. Managing project resources and budgets, reporting individual tasks, and tracking progress towards deadlines are only some examples of its functions. As for ConnectWise Manage pricing, it is by-quote only to tailor the features to your requirements.
You can use all the features for free for a period of time to see if the software matches your needs.
Try out ConnectWise Manage with their free trial
Pros
- Gantt Views provide a graphical view of your projects and resources.
- Dispatch Portal schedules resources and gives a single view of all schedules.
- Work Plan is created from scratch or with a custom template.
- Sales to project conversion helps commence work immediately.
- Drag-and-drop functionality for quick schedule dispatching.
Cons
- Limited customization of reporting tools
- GUI (graphical user interface) can get crowded
- Steep learning curve at first usage
ProntoForms
ProntoForms is a forms automation solution that allows for the easy collection of data on mobile devices, especially by remote workers. The system streamlines mobile workflows as it provides field agents with access to the company data they need straight from their devices. After that, the results will be shared automatically to personnel back at the office or to the cloud/in-house services that collate and process the data.
ProntoForms assists businesses in tracking and measuring the effects of their field operations to provide them with actionable numbers for optimizing their performance.
You can sign up for a free trial to check the solution closely.
Try out ProntoForms with their free trial
The vendor offers four pricing plans for the app, including a free trial. Pricing starts at $15/user/month.
Pros
- Automates core business tasks
- Allows for the creation and management of mobile forms
- Asset management
- Advanced analytics and reporting
- Offline work mode
Cons
- Custom forms are hard to create.
- Hard to access raw data files after 45 days
Conclusion:
Here are some free project management software tools for small business. Many small businesses and freelancers alike use these tools to help keep better track of their long term plans, and short term tasks. This can be extremely valuable on a daily basis to keep you abreast of your tasks, emails, progress towards goals, and much more.