There are plenty of good task management apps out there, but not all of them are free. Microsoft Teams is getting better at project management; however, it can be time consuming to find the best app for you. The following article describes the best free task management app for Microsoft Teams, including team chat integration and unlimited history storage.
Microsoft Teams is a chat-centered workspace where you and your colleagues get to work on the things that matter most. If you are looking for free task management app for Microsoft Teams, then it can be challenging for you to find the one that is right for you.
Trello (Web, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android)
Trello is a simple way to organize your projects with Kanban boards. And with a free plan that allows for unlimited boards and users, it’s a tool that anyone can use. Freelancers can use Trello to plan their assignments on a personal board, and teams can use Trello to build a complete project workflow with visibility at every stage.
Start by creating a new board from scratch or choosing a template from dozens of options across marketing, sales, design, team management, and more. Add a handful of lists for your tasks (each list is a column), and customize those lists with the steps in your workflow (e.g., to-do, doing, and done) or as separate parts of your project (e.g., development, design, and distribution). Next, add your tasks as visual cards in each column—with labels, due dates, members, checklists, images, attachments, and comments to keep everything in one place.
As you start completing tasks, simply drag the cards to the appropriate list. You can keep track of all comments and tasks that mention you—or that you’re watching—from the activity menu.
For more features, Trello’s Power-Up options (now unlimited even on the free plan) let you view tasks on a calendar, add voting options on tasks, fade away old tasks automatically, and much more. And you can make Trello boards for everything—personal and work tasks alike—to get your work done in a way that best fits your needs.
For even more flexibility, use Trello’s Zapier integrations to connect Trello with your favorite apps, like Gmail and Slack. Or check out these 6 ways to automate Trello.
Trello Price: The free plan includes unlimited cards and members, 10 team boards, unlimited Power-Ups, and 250 automated commands each month; upgrade for $5/user/month (billed annually) to the Standard plan that includes unlimited team boards and Power-Ups, custom fields, up to 1,000 automated commands per month, and more.
SalesTim – Microsoft Teams App
Of course, we couldn’t help but mention SalesTim 😉 . SalesTim – is a collaborative processes management app for Microsoft Teams. With SalesTim you’re able to structure your Teams’ environment, automate team creations and build strong governance policies without additional charge on IT.
With SalesTim Automation you can create your own Teams Templates Catalog. In this case, you can build Project Management Template with standard, private and shared channels, tabs with apps, uploaded files and folders, and more. In this way, you, as a project manager, can quickly create fully provisioned teams from Project Management Template with all the content included.
Thus, you will be able to quickly create a fully-provisioned team from Project Management Template with:
- Copied Standard, Private, and Shared Channels to collaborate on projects and share content
- Cloned files and folders with key documents, such as guidelines, codes of practicies, reports templates, and so on
- Pre-built Planner with boards, tasks, notes, and attachments
- Tabs with other Apps, such as Yammer to communicate with projects experts or Sharepoint to have an access to your access library or your internal Hub Sites
Thus, you will be able to quickly create a fully-provisioned team from Project Management Template with:
- Copied Standard, Private, and Shared Channels to collaborate on projects and share content
- Cloned files and folders with key documents, such as guidelines, codes of practicies, reports templates, and so on
- Pre-built Planner with boards, tasks, notes, and attachments
- Tabs with other Apps, such as Yammer to communicate with projects experts or Sharepoint to have an access to your access library or your internal Hub Sites
ClickUp (Web, iOS, Android)
Most project management apps let you choose from only a handful of task views, like a list, calendar, or Kanban view. Additional views, especially Gantt charts, are usually a premium feature. ClickUp is different.
It’s a simple and free project management app that lets you choose from 11 different task views, including Gantt charts and mind maps. There are also four different page views: Chat (which displays conversations alongside your tasks), Doc (which lets you create docs, wikis, and knowledge bases), Embed (to add apps and websites next to your tasks), and Form (to add a form next to your tasks to gather, organize, and collect data).
ClickUp’s dashboards are just as customizable, letting you choose from more than 20 different widgets so you can only highlight the most important project information.
There’s a lot to parse when you’re first getting started with ClickUp. The onboarding process won’t be as simple as Trello, for example, but the extra customization is worth it—especially when it’s completely free. Plus, the company has done a great job with guided in-app onboarding to get you started.
With ClickUp’s Zapier integrations, you can connect ClickUp with your favorite apps. Try one of the automations below, or read about why ClickUp users love Zapier.
ClickUp Price: The free plan includes unlimited tasks and users, up to 100MB of storage, and up to 100 uses of Gantt charts, mind maps, dashboards, and timeline views. Upgrade to the Unlimited plan for $5/user/month for unlimited list, board, and calendar views, unlimited dashboards, and guests and permissions.
Jira
Jira is another great tool to perform effective project management. It has many products, such as Jira Software, Jira Align, Jira Service Management, and others. Let’s discuss some of them.
With Jira Software you can plan, track, and release your own software. You’re able to create user stories and issues and distribute tasks among your software team. In addition, you can use a template workflow or create your own to manage your processes.
Next, with Jira Align you can aggregate team-level data to make all work visible across your enterprise in real-time. Get everyone on the same page to determine scope, roadmaps, and dependencies across teams and portfolios.
Jira Cloud and Jira Server with Microsoft Teams
This integration brings your Jira experience into your collaboration environment, letting your team stay focused and communicate on different topics. You may also interact with the Jira Cloud bot to create, assign, and edit issues. In addition, with the messaging extension, you can instantly search for a specific issue and send it to a channel or conversation.
Wrike (Web, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)
If it were up to you, would you manage your projects in a spreadsheet? If so, you might like Wrike. Wrike offers the same flexibility of a spreadsheet—with columns for every bit of info you want to track about tasks. (If you like spreadsheets but need even more customization, head down to our review of Airtable.)
Wrike lets your team update the status of tasks at various intervals—in-progress, on hold, canceled, or completed. Additionally, you can set the status of projects to green, yellow, red, on hold, or canceled, making it easy to create your weekly project status reports.
While you can do a lot with Wrike’s free plan, its best features—including time tracking, Gantt charts, and custom dashboards—do require a premium plan. If you’re running a small operation now but planning to scale in the future, Wrike grows alongside you, giving you all of the tools you need to run both a single small project and many concurrent large ones.
If you’re interested in the free plan, Wrike’s Zapier integrations can help you do more with the project management app, like automatically creating tasks in Wrike from other tools.
Wrike Price: The free plan includes unlimited projects for unlimited users; upgrade for $9.80/user/month (billed annually) to the Professional plan that includes Gantt charts, shareable dashboards, and more.
Monday.com
Monday.com is the visual platform that allows you to plan, organize, and track all your team’s activity. To streamline processes, you can create your own workflow or choose from more than 200 ready-to-use templates. Create a board with groups, items, and updates that are synchronized in real-time. Notify teammates, add files, and link boards together so it’s easy to keep track and run progress.
Monday.com App with Microsoft Teams
By integrating Monday.com with Teams you can structure and streamline your projects and processes in one place. Thus, you can create new boards and collaborate on existing ones directly from Microsoft Teams tabs. Moreover, by using the Monday bot you can receive notifications from your boards and create new items. Finally, you can customize your personal space tab to stay on top of your weekly project.
GoodDay (Web)
GoodDay is flexible enough to satisfy a team with diverse project management needs. The app supports a number of methodologies and views, including Gantt, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and waterfall. All are available to use on the free plan, making it the most generous and flexible free plan we tested.
Every project you create can take a different approach, and you can add additional views of the project at any time. Beyond those views, each project has a Summary tab with an overview of tasks, events, users, and burn down. We also love the My Work view, which rolls up work, tasks, calendar, and individual projects assigned to you.
When you first set up your GoodDay account, you can choose from a number of different modules, like time tracking, client portals, and billing to make the app do even more for you. For example, the Clients & Customer Portal module includes an extra project type called client projects, while the HR module includes a custom Vacations calendar view.
Take GoodDay.work’s free plan to another level with its Zapier integration.
GoodDay Price: The free plan includes unlimited projects and tasks, custom workflows, and up to 15 users; upgrade to the Professional plan for $4/user/month for advanced views (like Gantt), up to 250 users, and more.
Beesapps
Beesy – is an AI-powered collaborative solution to plan, organize, collaborate, and track your work. Let’s list some of its capabilities:
- Reduce the time spent on emails with email tracking and up-to-date mailbox
- Run meetings with note taking and action plan follow-up
- Manage your team members and drive action plan progress
- Simplify tasks management with custom reporting, and much more
Beesapps with Microsoft Teams
Bessy combines all action plans, meeting notes, projects, and goals. Integration of Bessy and Teams will save you the time spent on managing your goals and collaborative work. Collect essential information from your team chat and meeting action items, turn important emails into tasks, and much more. Pin your custom dashboards and views as new tabs and collaborate on projects with your teammates.
Asana
Asana brings your team’s work to one shared place. You’re able to run projects effectively with customized visuals, such as a list view to organize and assign tasks. With a board view, you can easily manage dependent, overlapping, and unscheduled tasks. Moreover, you can automate routine tasks. For instance, with a project overview, you’re able to share goals and key resources to keep your team aligned.
Asana with Teams
One more feature is the ability to integrate Asana with many other apps, such as Outlook, SharePoint, Power BI, and of course Microsoft Teams. By connecting Asana with Teams, you can collaborate on Asana tasks and keep work connected without leaving your Teams environment. Maximize visibility and see Asan tasks, projects, status updates, and portfolios right in Microsoft Teams.
Asana with Teams
One more feature is the ability to integrate Asana with many other apps, such as Outlook, SharePoint, Power BI, and of course Microsoft Teams. By connecting Asana with Teams, you can collaborate on Asana tasks and keep work connected without leaving your Teams environment. Maximize visibility and see Asan tasks, projects, status updates, and portfolios right in Microsoft Teams.
Smartsheet
Smartsheet is a cloud-based platform that empowers teams and organizations to plan and manage automation and reporting. With this tool, you can create different dashboards and views to track your progress with useful visuals. You’re able to share your work results with stakeholders inside and outside of your organization. Moreover, you can streamline processes with automated workflows including reminders and updates.
Smartsheet with Microsoft Teams
By connecting Smartsheet into your Teams environment, you can send Smartsheet notifications right to Teams’ channels. Then, you’re able to add any sheet, dashboard, or report as a new tab in Teams’ channels. This can bring conversations together even if members of your project team do not have access to the Smartsheet platform.
Conclusion
We selected tools that offer web apps (though many offer synchronized web, mobile, and desktop apps). If it’s not important to you that your project management app is accessible online, you may also want to consider ProjectLibre and GanttProject in addition to the apps listed below. Both of these tools are powerful desktop-only apps that are designed to be alternatives to Microsoft Project.