Agile project management tools online. Free online agile project management tools. Are these just fancy terms for the same thing? Are agile project management tools online and free online agile project management tools two different things? What does it matter? There’s one thing that I know for sure is that all of us seem to using lean and agile project management techniques more often than we did before. Whether we use them with Scrum practices, Kanban ideas, enterprise agility frameworks, or our own personal methods — we’re moving toward a leaner and more efficient approach with our work and I think it’s a good (if not great) thing.
Here are the top agile project management tools, free online agile project management tools, and paid online agile project management tools. All of these tools meet the criteria I learned from many Agile books and education materials. Some of my favorites also regularly make it to the lists of top Project Management tools as well as Agile software development practices.
Sprints
Description
Sprints by Zoho sticks to agile philosophy as it is a user-friendly agile tool that makes changes and delivers quality products on schedule. Everything can be done from one place: appoint meetings, create user stories, personalized scrum boards, and add points of estimation. Sprint offers apps for both Android and iOS which provide you the freedom of collaboration as you go!
Main features
- Customize a scrum board according to your requirements (fields, priorities, labels). When the work is completed just drag the related items across the board.
- Use scrum backlog to assign priority to the tasks and stay calm knowing that all planning jobs have been done thoroughly.
- Style up the information you want to share into burndown and velocity charts, and cumulative flow diagrams provided by the tool.
- No collaboration is possible without communication. Use Sprints Meetings module to benefit from friendly cheer as well as critical assessment.
- View every aspect of your projects visually presented in the form of pie charts and graphs. Know who is busy with what task, where, and how much time it takes.
- Log time by tracking paid and unpaid hours. This is required to get your salary.
Pricing
Starting from €12 per month. Free trial available.
Smartsheet
Smartsheet is an entire online project management suite, but in the suite, they also offer some customizable features for agile teams. You start by setting up a pre-built Kanban sheet template, to which you can import any existing kanban board data from Trello, Microsoft Excel, or Microsoft Project.
Smartsheet helps you organize projects, grids, calendars, dashboards, portals, forms, and more all from a unified control center. They have pre-built Gantt chart templates with customizable fonts and colors, “% Complete” and “Assigned To” columns, and more.
A useful feature of Smartsheet’s Kanban tool is that you can switch between traditional, grid, Gantt, and calendar views, helping you to see tasks in different ways. It offers all the Kanban essentials like attachments, custom fields, and searching for or filtering cards based on different criteria.
Smartsheet offers most of the integrations you’d need in a Kanban tool: integrations include Microsoft and Google apps, as well as development essentials like Jira, and useful business apps like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Box, and Tableau. The platform is extensible through a REST API and webhooks.
Smartsheet costs from $7/user/month, with a minimum of 3 users and a maximum of 25 users. They also offer a 30-day free trial.
Pros
- Easy to pull data from multiple sources
- Great alternative to Excel spreadsheets
- Well-communicated prepared-by-client (PBC) requests
Cons
- Advanced training recommended
- Could use more formatting options for data columns
- Max. number of lines may be insufficient for complex projects
Github Project Management
Your development team is most likely already using Github to host and collaborate on source code. With Github project management, your team can manage, track, and fix issues too.
By linking issues with pull requests and code commits, your team members can track updates in your project without complicating your workflow. And if you associate an issue with a pull request, it will automatically close when the pull request is merged.
Agile features in Github Project Management:
- Board
- Labels
- Issue linking to pull requests
- Setup a custom workflow in minutes
Pricing: Free to $25 per month for 5 users
Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal Tracker is a project planning tool for software development teams. It is built to keep your agile team on track to hit their sprint goals. It’s sprint planning guides you with breaking down and prioritizing projects into manageable, actionable chunks for your team to keep the momentum going.
With a view of your team’s work, Pivotal Tracker ensures everyone in your team has a real-time, single source of truth.
Agile features in Pivotal Tracker:
- Stories
- Estimation
- Backlog
- Iterations
- Velocity chart
Pricing: Free to $250 per month
Wrike
Effective project management is all about making instant changes where needed in order to save up on costs and increase the revenues. Wrike is ideal for centralizing and connecting multiple projects and spiking up your team’s efficiency. It gets a lot of bad rep for its utilitarian interface, but just like with teamweek’s tool, setting up your project tasks will be a walk in the park. Although Wrike is up to date with their releases and enhancements, their mobile versions get a bit of a lag in the process. This might frustrate if you expect to see changes on your mobile devices at the same time as they happen on your desktop.
Forecast.app
Forecast is perfect for agile teams, as it ensures optimal project deliveries through an adaptive work process and workflow automation to save project managers time and maintain visibility on projects, tasks, and milestones.
The platform uses AI to help make estimates, so you can effectively plan for a more accurate view of your sprint capacity and monitor velocity. Everything is in one place so you can reduce the amount of rework and improve efficiency while grooming the backlog, planning the sprint, tracking progress and velocity, and discerning where processes can be improved.
Forecast also integrates with the tools your developers love, such as Azure DevOps, GitHub, GitLab, as well as two-way sync with Jira, so you can collaborate with ease and deliver value faster.
Forecast is currently used in 40+ countries worldwide, by agencies, consulting companies, and enterprises. Paid plans start at $29/user/month. Forecast has a 14-day free trial.
Pros
- Predictive tasks for spreadsheets
- Great UI
- Includes resource management
- Good for RFP processes
Cons
- Additional fee for onboarding/training
- Higher learning curve than some other tools
- Caters more to agencies
Kintone
Kintone is an all-in-one project management platform that allows managers to track, prioritize, and review their team’s tasks for any given project workflow, no matter how complex. This highly-customizable platform gives you the power to create a tailored project management solution using its drag-and-drop interface built for non-coders. Quickly design the workflows you want, then review tasks that move through it in seconds.
Kintone’s customization features include the ability to create automated reminders, filter tasks or project phases by data field or team member to generate custom reports or dashboard views, and automate handoffs between team members for multi-step workflows. You can also view, edit, and update workflows from the platform’s mobile or desktop applications, so oversight doesn’t stop when you leave your desk.
One of the Kintone’s most valuable features is its built-in communication channels. These chat tools allow you to discuss projects with your team directly in the database, meaning your conversations and data stay connected. Open the record, see what was discussed. You can also create “spaces” for conversation organized by topic, team, project, or department. The best part is these spaces stay visible to everyone, so teammates who miss a discussion can come back later and catch up on what’s been said.
Kintone’s project management tool also features integrations including: Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, Tableau, Dropbox, Salesforce, Hubspot, and many more through Zapier.
Kintone costs from $24/user/month with a minimum requirement of 5 users. They offer a 30-day free trial and discounted prices for NGOs and educators.
Conclusion:
Agile project management is a powerful way of making all the work from everyone on your team count. So, the next time you’re looking for tools to help build and manage projects, consider looking at free online agile project management tools.