Project management is essentially about communication. Whether it’s an ad campaign, a new product, or a global expansion effort, communication is key to its success. I use project management tools to make sure communication happens. It’s the only way to keep things on track and make sure deadlines are met. I find project management tools easy to use and they give me the freedom to work anywhere.
There’s no need for communication hiccups that can occur when you’re using email or phone. I also love how most allow audio, video, and screen sharing capabilities for collaborating with team members in real time.
nTask Manager – Best free project management software with unlimited users
Get a holistic view of your nTask workflow with List, Grid, Calendar, and Report views.
Used in 155 countries all over the world, nTask Manager takes on the bigger task of resource management and resource allocation. With the tool’s ability to manage projects with a larger scope, budgeting, organizing finances, and setting project milestones become easier to manage.
nTask Manager offers a unique plan structure. The tool offers a basic plan suited to freelancers and individual teams that allows for up to 5 users and provides unlimited work areas. If the basic plan doesn’t cover enough, they currently offer an awesome premium plan for $1/user/month.Visit Website
Workzone
Workzone is built by a highly dedicated team to help individuals and organizations gain better control and visibility in work management. It gives them a central place to manage and share work, so everyone stays on the same page.
Features:
- Get top-level reports so everyone knows what’s next on the list
- Makes way for faster communication
- Features like creating tasks, to-do lists, sharing files easily improves collaboration
- Set permission for different users including clients
Pricing: Starts from $200 per month
Filestage
Filestage is an enterprise-ready marketing project management software that helps teams to get their project deliverables reviewed and approved faster. Filestage streamlines, organizes, and automates feedback on deliverables throughout the proofing process while reducing errors and ensuring compliance guides are met. Enable colleagues and clients to view and annotate project deliverables (such as documents, images, or videos) in real-time for marketing projects, video production, website design, product catalogs, or anything else – and to approve files when they are complete.
Features:
- Build consistent review and approval processes
- Comment on videos, documents, images, and audio files in real-time
- Clear deliverable version management
- Project dashboard to keep an overview of all deliverables
Pricing: Starts from 89 € per month
Proprofs
ProProfs Project is one of the simple and feature-packed project management tools designed to help businesses of all sizes manage, track, and execute projects with ease. It brings all your projects under one roof allowing your teams to work on them collaboratively. They can share files on the go, discuss roadblocks, give feedback via task comments, and get real-time notifications on project developments.
From assigning and prioritizing tasks to tracking and executing them, the tool helps you do it all. You can even create timesheets for each team member, manage billable and non-billable hours and generate invoices.
Features:
- Gantt charts
- Shared Calendar
- Kanban Board
- Custom Workflow
- Timesheets
- Insightful reports
- Invoice generation
- Drag and drop functionality
Pricing:
Essentials – $2/user/month
Premium – $4/user/month
Scoro
Scoro is known as one of the most comprehensive business management software for professional and creative services. For those who wish to bring structure to your work, Scoro is the right pm tool for you.
Features:
- A single place for projects, clients, and teams
- Be organized in every aspect of your business with seamless workflow
- Get a real-time overview and automated reports
- Can be integrated with tools like DropBox, Mailchimp, Outlook, and more
Pricing: Premium plan starts at $33/user/month
Bitrix24 – Best for small teams
The hand color-coded calendar view is just one of the many useful items in this tool.
Bitrix24 software manages all your projects, optimizes your sales funnel, and acts as an e-commerce store. The tool offers curated features, and best encompasses marketing, human resources (HR), project management, and customer service sectors. Their software aids each part individually by putting a strong focus on customers, task creation for managers, keeping track of marketing budget and efforts, storing timecards, and creating announcement boards.
Startups and small businesses will be able to quickly adapt and grow with their starter business suite package. The plan provides an unlimited number of users with online storage, a CRM, task and project management, sales, and marketing intelligence.Visit Website
- freemium version
- 30 days free trial for paid plans
- From $6.50/user/month
Asana
Asana is a very well-known project management software tool that’s used by a lot of teams.
Users generally like Asana because it’s a visually appealing tool that utilizes projects and sections to keep work organized and gives the team clarity about who’s in charge of what in your project planning.
This project management software is simple to use compared to most other project management software solutions. You can quickly move your task and assign work with their drag-and-drop feature.
What bothers us is Asana’s reliability with its rapid growth. And all we want for Christmas is less downtime!
Unsure whether you should commit to Asana for the long-term? Check out why ClickUp beats Asana and these Asana alternatives.
Here’s what you get in the free version of Asana:
- Unlimited tasks, projects, and conversations
- Basic dashboards
- Basic search
What people think about managing projects with Asana:
“Asana’s feature set and complexity require a relatively steep learning curve for the uninitiated. That hampered roll-out efforts in my organization, along with the fact there is no desktop app for Asana. After nearly a year, I’m still figuring out all the features and best uses, so it would be nice to have a variety of case studies/examples from which to glean best practices.” – Capterra
Take a look at our Asana and ClickUp comparison!
PivotalTracker – Best free project management software with unlimited storage
Navigate up to 3 users and 2 projects with the free PivotalTracker PM software.
PivotalTracker prides itself on providing organization and collaboration with its project management software. PivotalTracker makes priorities clearer with backlogging for easy viewing, focusing, and managing hiccups along the way. The software breaks projects into smaller chunks so teams won’t get overwhelmed and can move faster without any surprises along the way.
Their free plan is best for smaller teams, as it allows for unlimited use of the core features, up to 5 projects, and 1-5 collaborators.Visit Website
Basecamp
Basecamp is a popular project management and team communication software for easy team collaboration.
If you’re looking for a simple task manager with real-time communication features for your team members, then Basecamp can be a great pick.
But for a free tool, it’s quite…stingy when it comes to other features.
Take a look:
Here’s what you get in the free version of Basecamp:
- 20 users
- Three projects
- Storage space of 1GB
- That’s it
- Really
- That’s it
Need more details? Check out our comprehensive Basecamp review.
What people think about managing projects with Basecamp:
“When it was used for a small team to collaborate, it was great. When I started using it for client communication and deliverables, it frustrated both me and my team.” — Capterra
Paymo
Paymo is a great option for single users and team managers looking at resource management. It also offers Kanban boards and time tracking that allows freelancers to keep track of time tracked for every client easily.
What’s the biggest downside?
Paymo’s free plan can only cope with a single user.
What happens when your team grows?
You either need to start paying or migrate to an entirely new platform.
Here’s what you get in the free version of Paymo:
- One user
- 1GB of space
- Reporting
- Time tracking
- API
What people think about Paymo:
“Absolutely love the granular control on the reports and ability to manage users, projects, tasks and more.” —Capterra
Podio
Podio is almost like a cocktail of project management and messaging software. It offers conversations in the app, and you get an overview of all your tasks.
It supports numerous integrations with popular software like ZenDesk, Evernote, and Google Drive.
What it doesn’t support is workflow automations in the free plan.
No automation in the world of tech.
How do we feel about that 😯?
Here’s what you get in the free version of Podio:
- Five users
- Integrations
- Unlimited workspaces
- Chat capabilities
What people think about managing projects with Podio:
“Reliable communication with the team through the chat function. Good personal task management and also knowledge management. Even though we stored our files in a cloud service, we ‘indexed’ and sorted our knowledge through Podio.” — Capterra
Hitask
If your team isn’t large and don’t want to pay for project management, take a look at Hitask. This simple project management software is free for up to five users and gives you unlimited tasks and projects.
You’ll also get half a gigabyte of space.
Any downsides?
Hitask’s free plan doesn’t allow any sharing.
Clearly, sharing is caring isn’t one of their mottos!
Here’s what you get in the free version of Hitask:
- Up to five users
- Unlimited tasks and projects
- Shared task lists, projects, and calendars
- 0.5 GB of space
What people think about Hitask:
“This product is very easy to use, but the user interface is not very intuitive. The pricing is fair, considering what you will get in return. If you plan to use this for a personal reason, then this tool may be sufficient.” – Capterra
Conclusion
While there are many ways to manage projects, from using a wall chart to creating a software to organizing a meeting, the tools on the internet offer a level of freedom and flexibility that makes them a must-try for anyone running a project.