These remote project management tools are designed to help virtual teams with everything from communication tools to team management.
Remote project management tools are becoming more essential these days. You and your team members may find yourself struggling with the new “remote workforce” standards. Whether working from home is new or old to you and your team, it can be a challenge to ensure regular check-ins with remote workers. Distributed teams may need extra resources for things like video conferencing or messaging, for example, which can help replace the face to face collaboration of in-person workplaces.
I’ve designed a trustworthy list of remote workforce tools to empower your staff, even across different time zones. I’ve also highlighted what the best project management tools can do specifically for remote and WFH teams, as opposed to when they are used in-office.
Best Remote Project Management Tools List
Here’s a shortlist of the best remote project management tools:
Below you’ll find an overview of each of the 10 best remote project management tools, with screenshots, feature overviews, and pricing.
Remote Project Management Tools Comparison Criteria
What do I look for? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- User Interface (UI): Remote teams need a UI that is attractive and easy to use for everyone, from the highest tech individual to the lowest. Is the user interface easy to navigate, good for screen sharing, and attractive to look at for 8 hours a day? Is the UI optimized for mobile apps, which are often used in remote work?
- Usability: Remote teams often don’t have the in-house support of an IT professional or PM so any software introduced should have ample customer support resources, video tutorials, webinars, live chat, Q&A forums, whitepapers, and other easily accessible documentation.
- Integrations: Remote work requires that all your tools communicate as much as possible, from collaboration tools to time tracking to task management. Does the remote project software integrate with other popular apps in these categories and beyond, including but not limited to Slack, Jira, Zoom or Skype, DropBox, Google Drive, Microsoft apps, Proofhub, and other popular remote work tools? Does it connect with your CRM systems?
- Value for $: How appropriate is the price for the features, capabilities, and use case? Is pricing clear, transparent, and flexible?
Remote Project Management Tools Key Features
- Can be accessed remotely with minimal stipulations (not everyone has access to a hard-wired internet connection—the more accessible, the better)
- Secure cloud storage for file sharing on-the-go
- Automating business processes to unify separate work environments
- Simplifying communication channels
- Engagement and productivity tools
Overviews Of The 10 Best Remote Project Management Tools
Here’s a brief description of each of the remote project management tools on my list showing what it does best, plus screenshots to showcase some of the features.
1. monday.com – Best remote PM tool for 3rd-party integrations
monday.com works well with a robust library of other popular PM apps.
monday.com is a colorful, user-friendly, jack-of-all-trades remote workspace tool for modern teams. Plan, track, and deliver projects using hundreds of visual and customizable templates. View data on a map, calendar, timeline, kanban board, and more. Automate repetitive administrative tasks, like creating new lead entries according to incoming emails.
monday.com costs from $14/user/month and offers a free version with 1 board per dashboard.
Pros
- Very easy to invite others, share timelines, and assign tasks
- Simple organization by dragging and dropping tasks
- Excellent collaborative features
Cons
- No bottleneck identification or assistance
- Automations are not fully customizable
- Best features locked to Standard or Pro versions
2. Teamwork – Best for large companies and enterprises
Enterprises will appreciate the comprehensive and succinct list of all projects.
Teamwork contains all the project management essentials that you need in a collaborative remote team: the ability to create tasks and projects, upload and share files, and add comments to tasks. Use Gantt charts, board views, portfolio management tools, time tracking, reporting dashboards, and workload management tools. Access readily available project health status updates for all remote employees.
Teamwork costs from $10/user/month and offers a free version for up to 5 users.
Pros
- Excellent time tracking feature
- Easy and comprehensive report building
- Easily track comments and feedback from clients
Cons
- More integrations with popular CRMs would be welcome
- Doesn’t sync with QuickBooks
- Can be difficult to move/adjust milestones
3. Wrike – Best for remote collaboration across departments
Access activities and assignments with collaboration and communication features.
Wrike is a cloud-based work management platform with robust remote workflow functionality, and it’s a popular choice among enterprise and agency teams. PMs will appreciate being able to build custom dashboards and workflows as well as implement team-specific workflow automation. Progress reporting is easily shareable across clients, stakeholders, and team members no matter where they are located.
Wrike costs from $9.80/user/month and offers a free version for up to 5 users.
Pros
- Ease of use and setup
- Holistic, comprehensive task modeling
- Variety of project views meet different user needs
Cons
- Best features limited to Business plan
- The commenting system needs to be more prominent
4. ProjectManager – Best software for remote teams using hybrid project methodologies
Gantt charts align with lists and spreadsheets for robust data collection.
ProjectManager blends Agile and Waterfall methodologies to bring teams a collaborative solution that can adapt to hybrid methods or changes in your methodology from project to project. Gantt chart tools can help you and your team plan and schedule; build simple task lists with powerful features, and manage full agile sprints with drag-and-drop Kanban cards.
ProjectManager costs from $15/user/month and offers a 30-day free trial.
Pros
- Good for costing and construction work monitoring
- Easy to use project scheduling
- Fits well into an Agile framework
Cons
- No way to track and update partially complete tasks
- No way to sort Agile Boards by project, only by task
- Most reports require a manual clean-up
5. Mavenlink – Best remote project management software for service businesses
Assign service-essential tasks according to team member role and skill.
Mavenlink is a modern collaborative remote work platform with award-winning project and resource management features. Mavenlink resource management provides greater visibility into your resource pool using insightful dashboards, reports, and profiles. They also provide 60+ thoughtfully-crafted, services-centric BI reports out of the box.
Mavenlink costs from $19/user/month and offers a 10-day free trial as well as a free demo.
Pros
- Good for resource planning and project accounting
- Ability to search all client communication within a single space
- Easy to track time, develop timelines, and break projects down into tasks
Cons
- Can’t automatically repeat budgets or resource allocations
- Some data syncing lag
- Task and Gantt data columns aren’t fully customizable
6. Smartsheet – Best remote project management tool for sales reps
Dashboards and spreadsheets track resources anywhere, via PC or mobile.
Smartsheet is the best project management software for template galleries and template sets. These starter solutions are packed with pre-built sheets, reports, forms, and dashboards that your users can modify as needed. They have team collaboration tools for building estimates, inventory management, Gantt timelines, and a lot more.
Smartsheet costs from $18/month and offers a 30-day free trial.
Pros
- Customizable sheets and dashboards for different departments
- Reminders and update requests are great collaborative tools
- Quick Gantt charts with easy entry of tasks
Cons
- Power users may hit row and cell link limitations
- Changes do not autosave instantly when editing
- May be over-engineered for simple projects
7. ClickUp – Best remote project management tool for screen recording
Easily screen record, create screenshots, and share data with in-browser tools.
ClickUp is a flexible project planning tool that can accomodate small or large teams who need to do lists, project management, docs and wikis, spreadsheets, email and chat, events, reminders, goal tracking, time tracking, and resource management. Something great about this tool is that it includes screenshots and recording features right in the tool. Users can import data from other productivity apps easily.
ClickUp costs from $5/user/month and offers a free version with limited features.
Pros
- Easy to switch between unrelated project plans
- Impressive organization: create folders, sub-groups, and sub-tasks
Cons
- Steep learning curve due to the number of features
- Tricky to email with attachments, files sometimes unopenable
- More third-party integrations would be welcome
8. Paymo – Best remote project management tool for freelancers
Timesheet and milestone tools that freelancers and small teams will appreciate.
Paymo serves remote workforces across creative and marketing agencies, law firms, business consultants, architecture firms, and freelancers. Remote teams can take advantage of easy time tracking, resource planning, Gantt charts, reports, Kanban boards, expenses, and invoicing tools. You can schedule and monitor activity in real-time and easily make adjustments using flexible Gantt Charts and other types of project views.
Paymo costs from $9.95/user/month and offers a 15-day free trial.
Pros
- Time tracking easily runs in the background with little interference
- Organizes jobs intuitively and can easily archive jobs
- Easy to share content with external stakeholders
Cons
- Large learning curve compared to others
- Project table layout categories challenging to edit
- Budgets from projects to tasks can be difficult to calculate
9. Hive – Best tool for project templates
Choose from dozens of project templates for quick-start capabilities.
Hive lets your team manage projects in the way they work best and lets you easily switch between views like Kanban and Gantt charts. Monitor and report on projects in real-time to spot risks and opportunities proactively. Plus, utilize over 1,000 integrations through Zapier to bring information into one centralized dashboard.
Hive costs from $12/user/month and offers a 14-day free trial.
Pros
- Infinite sub-tasks available
- Task owners can turn sub-tasks into separate projects
- Add external users without paying for a seat
Cons
- Mobile app notifications are unreliable
- Comments could be made more prominent
- Have to delete all sub-actions manually after deleting a phase
Summary Of The Best Remote Project Management Tools
Other Remote Project Management Tools
Here’s a few more that didn’t make the top list.
- Basecamp – Best for IT teams
- Scoro – Best for customizable dashboards
- Zoho Projects – Best for CRM
- Asana – Best free remote project management
- Trello – Best for Kanban-style organization
- Keyedin – Best for PMO analytics
- Workzone – Best for file management
- Proworkflow – Best for remote collaboration
- EasyProjects – Best for product lifecycle
- Sciforma – Best for scalability
What Remote Project Management Tools Do You Use?
How do you navigate different projects and teams remotely? Have you tried any of these remote project management solutions in your day-to-day? Are there any remote project management tools that you would add to this list? Sound off in the comments.
For updates on our latest articles and podcasts from project management experts, sign up for the DPM newsletter.
You can also share tool recommendations and best practices with other digital PMs in our online community—get involved with our community in DPM Membership.
