Being a remote team means working with people you don’t see every day and who live in a different city or even in a different country. This brings ups new challenges for managers and team members when it comes to communication and project management. The good news is that there are many project management tools available for remote teams. The bad news is that they all require some effort in order to be set up, and using them well might take some time.
To help you make the most of your remote team I decided to compile a list of recommendations for best practices, collaboration tools and tools we use in our business to work with people we don’t see every day.
Easy Project
Easy Project comes with a host of professional project management tools for you, your team, and the whole company. Trusted by top-notch companies like Toyota, Lenovo, Bosch, it is a perfect fit for numerous industries be it IT or educational.
Features:
- Visual project maps and plans
- Compatible with modules for Resources, Finances, Help Desk, and CRM
- Integrated with Outlook, Project, Excel, Redmine
Pricing: $21/month per user Pro plan (60 portfolios, and 100 custom fields)
Crocagile
Crocagile is a simple agile project workspace designed to streamline communication and is focused on software development teams. Its powerful pm tools and simple design is uniquely engineered for agile developers. It has all good stuff including collaboration and gamification features giving a much-needed boost to agile practices with cutting-edge technology.
Features:
- Activity Streams, Smart Alerts, and Group Chat to eliminate email
- Team member updates are visible in one place, automatically
- File-Sharing – Store and Share files with commenting
Pricing: Starting from $2.50 per user, per month with the 30-day free trial.
Be a project champion with 8 project management tools in 1 App! Try ProofHub
Producteev
Producteev has been a task management solution for small and medium-sized teams. Project managers can easily access all their projects, tasks, and other collaborators. With this pm tool, you can easily plan any projects, map your route, organize files, delegate tasks, and various elements. Users can easily track the progress of each task.
Features:
- Organize on your fingertips
- Powerful collaboration
- Seamless tracking
- Interface customization
- Personalized support
Pricing: The Premium plan is available at $99 per month
Teamdeck
Teamdeck offers a complete solution for companies to deliver projects faster. It is an essential pm software for managing resources and monitoring time spent on tasks and projects. With Teamdeck you can book your employees on different projects and create accurate timesheets with one-click time tracking.
Features:
- Resource scheduling
- Timesheets and time tracking
- Leave management
- Measure billable time
Pricing: Free startup plan limited to 6 team members. Business plan starts from $3.99 / team member / month, $1 / basic resource / month
Smartsheet
Smartsheet is a portable project management software to help teams collaborate, time-tracking, reporting, resource management, and planning tasks. The cloud-based software has some amazing features that bring it to the list of best project management tools.
Features:
- Leverage team collaboration
- Automatic update requests
- File attachment from Google Drive, Onedrive, Dropbox, and more
- Gain visibility into who’s busy and who’s not
- Secure permission control
Pricing: Individual plan starts at $14 and business plan at $25 per user per month when billed annually.
Read more: Best Smartsheet Alternatives & Competitors for Work Management
Freedcamp
This is an extremely simple and intuitive tool for large organizations including architecture, interior design, IT services, retail, telecommunication, and many more. Freedcamp offers functionality to unlimited users making organizing details and tasks quick and super easy.
Features:
- Gantt chart to keep a bird’s eye view on tasks
- Split large tasks into smaller subtasks
- 3rd party integrations
- Password manager
- Shared file management
Pricing: Available at $3.99 for the owner and $0.99 for each additional user per month ( billed yearly )
Hive
Hive’s powerful project management and collaboration software put the needs of a team in a single place. The system lets you track project status, provide a Kanban-style status view, Gantt charts for project progress, and everything that a project team needs on a single page.
Features:
- Provides a central platform for everything
- Plan and repeat tasks using action templates
- Move seamlessly between projects, messages, and files
- Access anywhere from a desktop or mobile apps
- 1000+ integrations
Price: Professional plan at $12/user/month
Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a pm software with a comprehensive set of tools to help businesses support the need of customers. It’s simple to set up and offers the best value for money.
Features:
- Integrated Live Chat, Phone Support, and Game Mechanics
- High customizability
- Multi-channel, multi-product, and multi-lingual support
- Great email messaging and self-service portals
- Keep track of conversations
- Resolve issues together through collaboration
Pricing: Freshdesk offers four price points for various business sizes. You can sign up for Freshdesk’s free trial.
MeisterTask
MeisterTask is a project management tool that allows you to create Kanban boards, set recurring tasks, track project times, and create custom fields. You can automatically import data from other tools such as Trello and Asana, allowing you to get immediately to work without losing time.
Features include:
- Up to 3 projects on the free version
- File attachments for projects
- Custom project icons to make tasks stand out
- Time tracking so that no deadlines fall through the cracks
Pricing: Free; $8.25/user/month (Pro); $20.75/user/month (Business); Custom (Enterprise)
Bitrix24
Britrix24’s project management software includes Kanban boards, Gantt charts, task counters for easy prioritization, and reports for analyzing the time intensiveness of different tasks. You can also create to-do lists within tasks.
Features include:
- Recurring tasks for easy task creation and automation
- Integration with Billable Hours, which is especially useful if you work with freelancers
- Task statuses to easily keep track of progress
- Monthly reports on time spent on tasks
16. Airtable
Airtable is a customizable spreadsheet and database app that can be used to create a project management tool for your team. Its project tracker template allows you to easily manage projects in a familiar spreadsheet-like environment, making it ideal for Excel and Google Sheets enthusiasts.
Features include:
- Subtask creation within tasks
- Ability to assign tasks and establish time estimates
- Additional templates for keeping remote teams aligned, such as a team hub and asset tracker
- Highly customizable for different teams
- Integration with popular tools such as HubSpot, Asana, Dropbox, Google Workspace, and Slack
Pricing: Free; $10/user/month (Plus); $20/user/month (Pro); Custom (Enterprise)
Teamwork Projects
Teamwork Projects is a great project management software for the project management power user. Teamwork Projects includes all the tools you’ll need to track the development of a project. The app is quite flexible and includes various intuitive features such as Task Management, Milestones (e.g. you can link task lists to Milestones), Messaging, File Storage, Time Tracking tools, and more. Teamwork also helps project teams visualise the project using a marked calendar, gantt chart and set-up reporting. File management support is accessible with DropBox, Google Drive and Box.com.
Pricing: Pricing can range anywhere between $69/month (Small office) to $269/month (Business). They also offer an enterprise package (pricing available upon request).
Website: www.teamwork.com
5. ProofHub
ProofHub is an online project management app that places an emphasis on simplicity. This project management software is intended mainly for small and growing businesses. Projects are assigned to groups and clients, who are able to discuss, share and edit. Proofhub also offers to create custom roles for users to create Gantt charts. The following are some of the subcomponents of ProofHub: Custom Roles, Task management, Workflows and Boards, Gantt Charts, Reports, Time tracking, Discussions, Chat, Calendar, File management, Notes, and in-app notifications.
Pricing: ProofHub pricing ranges from $45/month to $99/month depending on the number of projects and storage needed.
Website: www.proofhub.com
Zoho Projects
Zoho projects is an extensive project management software with a clean and straightforward interface. This software covers the following areas everything from Project Planning (breaking down projects into manageable units) and Gantt Charts (to visual the progress of tasks) to Reporting Tools, Collaboration Software (to ease contact between consultants, vendors, employees and clients) and Document Management. It can also be integrated with tools such as Google Apps and DropBox. Here’s a more in-depth look at Zoho.
Pricing: Zoho offers a free plan that includes 1 project and 10 MB storage, an express plan (€25/month), premium (€50/month) and enterprise (€80/month). These last plans all depend on the number of project and storage space.
Website: www.zoho.eu
Trello
Trello is unlike these other project management softwares in that it is an online kanban tool. This means that it visualises an entire project in just one single view. Trello makes it possible to make cards and move them around on the ‘board’. These cards can display – for example, conversations or to-do lists, which can be placed on a board, making them accessible for any of the designated tool users.
Pricing: Trello offers a free package (with unlimited boards, lists, cards and members). It also has a business class package that costs $9.99/month, which includes unlimited ‘power-ups’, which are different features and integrations, and an enterprise package that costs $20.83/month.
Website: www.trello.com
JIRA
JIRA is a popular project management software that caters mostly to agile, software development teams. Within the software, these teams can create customisable scrum boards, kanban boards, and make use of agile reporting (in real-time). Users can also track bugs, view any outstanding issues and monitor time spent per task. JIRA comes with a robust set of APIs that enable users to connect it with many third party softwares.
Pricing: Pricing ranges from $10/month to $1500/month depending on how many users you have. There is also an option to deploy JIRA on your own server for a one-time payment.
Website: www.atlassian.com
Asana
In order to keep work organised, the Asana project management software offers Tasks, projects, conversations and dashboards. Many satisfied users say that the catchiest feature this tool has to offer is the ability to add customer fields and track only what is important to you. The software also offers Team Pages where ideas and conversations are shared for all to see as well as a ‘Smart Box’ where team members receive only important project updates rather than all messages back and forth. It can be integrated with a large number of other systems including Google Drive, DropBox, Github, MailChimp and more.
Pricing: Asana offers a basic version which is free, however business can also sign up for premium ($9.99/month) or an enterprise package which offers more control and support (pricing upon request).
Website: www.asana.com
Monday.com
Start with Monday.com by creating your personal workflow. With this workflow you can visualize and highlight elements like time management, text or locations. You can share and work with this tool with your whole team and save time by only recording the important documents and conversations.
Pricing: Monday.com offers different paid plans, depending on the size of the company and the number of users. Starting from Basic €17 (2 users/month) to Pro €39 (2 users/month). They also offer an Enterprise package (pricing available upon request).
Website: www.monday.com
Conclusion
Remote project management brings a lot of challenges, including organisation and communication. It is specifically hard if you have people across multiple time zones and different locations. When managing a team of remote workers you need to make sure work is distributed in an effective manner and issues are managed with proper communication.