10 Best Online Agile Tools List For Project Management In 2024
10 Best Agile Tools List
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 40 tools reviewed.
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With so many different agile tools available, figuring out which is right for you is tough. You know you want to plan, schedule, and execute your sprints effectively so your team can stay on track but you need the right tool. I've got you! In this post I'll help make your choice easy, sharing my personal experiences using dozens of different agile tools with a variety of teams and projects, with my picks of the best agile tools.
What Are Agile Tools?
Agile tools are software that support agile project management methods. They provide features like task boards, backlog management, sprint planning, and progress tracking. These tools cater to teams adopting agile practices, such as Scrum or Kanban, focusing on iterative development, collaboration, and adaptability.
The benefits of agile tools lie in their ability to enhance team collaboration, offer clear project visibility, and support quick adaptation to changes. They help teams organize work efficiently, track progress in real time, and respond rapidly to project needs. This leads to improved productivity, better product quality, and alignment with customer requirements. Agile tools are essential for teams striving for continuous improvement and flexibility in their project management approach.
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Wrike
Visit WebsiteThis is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.4.2 -
Hub Planner
Visit WebsiteThis is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.4.2 -
Miro
Visit WebsiteThis is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.4.8
The Best Agile Tools Overviews
Although there are dozens of great agile PM tools out there, here’s a detailed review of each agile project management tool that made it onto our list:
monday dev is a product management software designed to centralize the entire product lifecycle by integrating all development and collaboration tools in real time. It offers highly customizable agile workflows, enabling teams to tailor their product development processes to fit their unique strategies and requirements.
One of the platform's standout features is its burndown chart, which provides a clear visual representation of project progress and helps teams stay on track with their sprint goals. This feature is essential for monitoring the rate of work and adjusting workflows accordingly. Additionally, monday dev’s intuitive interface and flexibility in customizing boards and workflows make it ideal for agile teams needing to adapt quickly to changes and maintain transparency across projects.
The tool also includes robust sprint planning capabilities, allowing teams to organize and prioritize tasks. Its integrations with popular development tools such as GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket aid the development process by synchronizing code repositories directly with project boards.
Some other notable features include the automation of repetitive tasks and collaboration capabilities to communicate on projects and manage collective knowledge.
Other integrations include Outlook, Slack, Google Drive, Trello, Jira, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, and more.
monday.com offers a 14-day free trial with paid-tiered plans available.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Spring management and planning capabilities
- Predefined or custom automations available
- Various visual views for project management
Cons:
- Git integrations limited to higher tier plans
- Per seat pricing model may be costly for growing teams
Uncertainty is one of the few certainties in business. Zoho recognized the need for a tool that helps teams embrace change. Zoho Sprints is a product management tool that empowers agile teams to plan, track, and ship the best products to their customers. Whether you are a seasoned agile practitioner or just starting out, Zoho Sprints can fit your needs.
Zoho Sprints helps product teams maintain an organized product backlog and simplifies sprint planning. The drag and drop planning interface allows scrum teams to move work items from the product backlog to the sprint backlog with ease. In keeping with the pioneering spirit of agile, their Scrum Board is highly customizable.
With Zoho Sprints, teams can stay release-ready at all times. From planning to deployment, the tool helps teams navigate the interdependencies of their release cycles. Product managers can track the progress of their epics, sprints, and releases through customizable reports and dashboards. Actionable insights from velocity charts, burnup and burndown reports, and cumulative flow diagrams help teams iterate sprint planning.
Communication and collaboration are crucial in every aspect of life, and they're especially critical when you're working with cross-functional teams. With Zoho Sprints, product teams can collaborate within the context of their work through features like built-in chat, virtual meetings, and an interactive project feed.
Zoho Sprints integrates well with popular code repository management tools like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket. DevOps teams can also automate their CI/CD pipelines by integrating with developer tools like Jenkins and Azure DevOps. Teams can leverage webhooks and APIs to build their integrations or browse through a growing library of apps listed on Zoho's marketplace.
The pricing for Zoho Sprints starts at $6 per user (billed monthly). They also offer a free trial and a free forever plan for up to 3 users.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Easily turn feed messages into a work item
- Easily schedule meetings for sprint reviews and daily stand-ups
- Robust customization options
Cons:
- WIP settings in Premier plan only
- Doesn’t integrate well with other Zoho apps
- No cumulative by-project timesheets for a user
Shortcut is an online project management tool designed with software teams in mind. It helps you manage tasks, track progress, and collaborate more effectively. With its roots in agile methodologies, Shortcut focuses on flexibility and efficiency, making it easier for your team to manage projects, sprints, and releases.
One of the key features of Shortcut is its support for agile workflows through its stories, epics, and milestones features. Stories allow your team to break down tasks into manageable pieces, while epics help group related stories together for bigger goals. Milestones give you an easy way to track project phases and major deadlines. This structure gives your team clear visibility into progress and priorities at every level of the project.
Shortcut also provides burndown charts and iteration planning tools, which are vital for teams working in sprints. With burndown charts, you can monitor how much work remains in your sprint and make adjustments as needed. The iteration planning tools let you organize and adjust work on the go, ensuring your team is always ready for the next sprint.
Integrations include Slack, GitHub, GitLab, Figma, Codestream, Bitbucket, Notion, Loom, Dailybot, Plecto, LinearB, Lambda Test, Testlodge, Google Calendar, Sentry, FireHydrant, and Vanta.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Automates and manages workflows
- Provides clear visualization of project progress
- Supports real-time collaboration
Cons:
- Fewer options for teams not using Agile, Scrum, or Kanban methodologies
- May be too feature-rich for less complex projects
Miro offers a flexible visual collaboration environment, ideally suited for teams managing agile projects. This platform acts as a comprehensive online whiteboard for a range of activities including brainstorming, mind mapping, and documenting workflows, facilitating the clear depiction of projects, strategies, and roadmaps. Its versatility is especially evident in its support for Kanban and Scrum boards.
Whiteboards can be used to create Kanban and Scrum boards for tracking project process through to completion. A large bank of templates is available in the software, including many specifically designed for agile workflows. Unlike more traditional project management solutions, Miro is a flexible and highly customizable option because it essentially provides a blank canvas that can be used for all kinds of purposes.
What's particularly useful about Miro as an agile project management tool is that it can also be used for ideation purposes as well as strategizing and roadmapping. Teams can keep their overall strategy outlines in the same place as their project brainstorming documentation and their quarterly prioritization plans.
Miro's key functionalities also include task visualization by sprint, status, epic, and team, which enhance project organization. The tool's dependencies app enables teams to track inter-task dependencies across sprints, helping to prevent delays. Additionally, Miro's integration with Jira ensures task and priority alignment across platforms.
The software integrates with other workplace tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Confluence, Google Workspace, Asana, monday.com, Jira, Dropbox, OneDrive, Notion, Airtable, ClickUp, and Unito, among others. A free plan is available and paid plans start from $10 per user per month.
MeisterTask is a beautifully designed and incredibly intuitive Kanban tool. Its Kanban boards can be customized to fit any workflow, from software sprints to sales funnels, and from editorial calendars to your company’s onboarding process. Teams can collaborate on one simple platform, where they can communicate, work together on tasks, and easily track the time they spend on them.
With MeisterTask, you can not only visualize processes but also automate them in various ways. Creating recurring tasks, adding predefined checklists, notifying stakeholders when a task is completed, or ensuring that tasks are assigned and tagged correctly when they are moved to a specific section — all of this can be done automatically. Larger teams will find MeisterTask’s sophisticated roles and permissions management as well as the insights gained through various statistics and reports particularly useful.
MeisterTask offers an extensive online help center, free webinars for new users, and fast email support in case you need to talk to a real person. However, thanks to MeisterTask’s focus on simplicity, even companies who are just getting started on their journey to digital organization are usually able to get productive within minutes after signing up.
MeisterTask integrates with the mind mapping app MindMeister where you can brainstorm and plan with a mind map and then export it onto a Kanban board. MeisterTask comes readily integrated with popular tools such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, GitHub, Zendesk, Harvest, and various email apps. In addition to these native integrations, you can use Zapier or IFTTT to connect your projects with hundreds of other tools.
MeisterTask costs from $8.25/user/month. They also offer a free plan with limited functionality.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Easy to create and assign tasks
- Useful, user-friendly dashboard
- Great mobile app
Cons:
- Does not interface with Gmail
- Lack of internal calendar
Kintone is an agile project management tool used by teams at Volvo, Japan Airlines, Shiseido, LiveWell Colorado, and over 23,000 organizations worldwide. Their unique approach to project and task management lets you build a wide variety of customizable “apps” using a flexible drag-and-drop interface that lets you easily make changes and improvements to your apps as you go.
Apps can be built either from scratch, using templates, or from existing spreadsheets for data management, business processes, and workflow purposes. Kintone apps can be customized for project management, sales CRM, customer databases, expense reports, shared to-do lists, equipment management, product feedback, and much more.
Kintone lets you build agile project management apps by dragging and dropping elements that you want to see onto the page: rich text fields, date fields, drop-down menus, number fields with built-in calculations, spaces for attachments, user or group selection menus, related data from other apps, tables, and more. Your agile project management solution can look and work however you want it to.
What makes Kintone particularly great for agile project management is that it empowers project managers to track all facets of their project, from individual tasks and project data to workflows and communication—and then use their findings to rapidly improve their processes as they go. Because the end-users are also the app designers, feedback loops are instant, continuous, and actionable.
Kintone lets you expand its capabilities with both free native plugins built by the Kintone team as well as integrations with other tools like Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, Tableau, Dropbox, Salesforce, HubSpot, Eventbrite, WordPress, QuickBooks, MailChimp, and many more through a paid plan with Zapier or via API integrations.
Kintone costs $24/user/month with a minimum requirement of 5 users. They offer a 30-day free trial (no credit card required) and discounted prices for nonprofits and educators. Kintone’s team also offers a free custom app build as part of the free trial process.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Data is easy to pull and manipulate into good looking reports
- Admin accounts have access to tons of customization tools
- Flexible pricing that includes special deals for schools and NPOs
Cons:
- No native templates for common project types or documents
- Limited to 5GB/user storage on every pricing tier
- No single-user plan available (minimum 5 users)
Trello is a simple but powerful agile Kanban tool. If you’re looking for an easy entry into the world of agile tools, Trello is a great option as it’s one of the easiest agile tools to learn and it’s free (or at least it’s freemium!) and has to be considered one of the best free agile tools because it’s so intuitive and simple to use.
Being simple also means that it’s also limited in features and functionality. Out of the box, with the free version, Trello has task management and team collaboration, but it’s pretty limited.
For richer functionality you have to start paying for it – The Business class version gives you app integrations or “Power-Ups' which enable you to bolt on additional functionality such as Github integration, SalesForce, Slack, Gantt charts, timesheets, reporting, and analytics.
Trello is a free agile tool but paid versions cost $9.99/user/month.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Color coding of cards according to priority
- Vast capability to customize each card
- Excellent communication and collaboration tracking
Cons:
- No native support for calendar integrations
- Not well suited for large or overly complicated projects
- Board management customization could be improved
Hubstaff Tasks is a visual project management tool designed to help agile teams finish projects efficiently. It offers multiple project views that allow greater planning flexibility and smoother collaboration between teams.
The tool's Sprints view lets users see all the tasks assigned to them in one location, organized by sprint — current, future, or backlog. This feature helps in prioritizing the right tasks and avoiding missed deadlines. If you’re a fan of Gantt charts, Hubstaff Tasks also has a Roadmaps feature that serves this purpose.
The app has a Kanban interface that allows you to organize your tasks in different columns. Users can create a card for each task and move them to different project stages with a drag-and-drop mechanism. Team members who are assigned to or are following the task will receive notifications, allowing them to stay up to date.
It also offers several task management elements such as checklists, labels, estimates, deadlines, and file attachments.
Hubstaff Tasks has a custom workflows feature that lets you automatically move tasks to various project stages while assigning them to different team members with one click. You can create different workflows on different project boards.
The tool's main disadvantage is its integrations — it only integrates with Hubstaff, which tracks time to tasks and projects.
Pricing for Hubstaff Tasks starts at $7 per user per month. There is also a freemium version available.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Customizable workflows and multiple project views
- Users can communicate with notifications and comments
- Easy prioritizing with the Sprints feature
Cons:
- Web app only
- The free plan only allows up to 5 users
- Only one integration
Taiga has a rich and complete feature set with extensive customization options, at the same time it is very simple to start with through its intuitive user interface.
Whether your team uses Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban or just wants to track issues, Taiga is an ideal agile project management tool. Its features include an intuitive backlog and sprint planning, a sprint board with swim-lanes per user story and a sprint dashboard with a burndown chart, fully customizable Kanban boards with WIP limits, Epics, subtasks, issue tracking, and a Wiki function.
Furthermore, you can specify different team roles, estimate story points per role and move unfinished user stories to other sprints.
The project timeline and projects dashboard provide an easy overview of activities while the sprint and team performance dashboards are focused on closed tasks, points from completed user stories and specific elements like issues reported and Wiki pages edited. There is also a unique estimation game to determine the (relative) size of different user stories.
What makes it stand out is the intuitive user interface. This makes Taiga particularly useful for multi-functional teams and/or client teams. The zoom function for the Kanban and Sprint boards allows you to easily move from overview to detail view and back and the tool is available in over 30 languages.
Integrations with Slack, Hipchat, GitHub, Gitlab, Mattermost are pre-configured. A lot more integrations are possible through easy to configure webhooks and an extensive API set. If you are currently working with Trello, Asana, Jira 7 or Github, you can seamlessly import your project data.
Taiga costs from $7/user/month for unlimited private projects. They offer a 30-day free trial (no credit card required).
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Saves time by easily replicating past workflows
- Options for adding custom user inputs
- Easily create cards and track progress
Cons:
- Strongly oriented towards ticket processing
- Can’t see history of item with documented changes
- Can be challenging to categorize and link items
Clarizen is an enterprise-grade professional service automation software solution, designed to speed up the way you do business – integrating work, content, and process tightly together to enable more efficient working. Clarizen’s real focus is making projects happen faster with timesaving workflows. Clarizen is a great project management tool if you have lots of repeatable projects that require repeatable processes as workflow automation is pretty flexible and powerful.
It covers off the PPM basics of task lists, schedules, docs and files, communications and reporting without breaking a sweat. Clarizen’s project planning tools are a powerful mix of functionality across the planning, executing and controlling of a project. Within planning are project workflows, a full-featured resource, schedule, and task planning tools, with project and portfolio optimization so that you can easily and quickly align projects to business objectives.
For project execution, Clarizen enables everyone on the team to be aligned with a dashboard that enables teams to work better together and see how their contribution fits into the bigger picture – from the project timeline and milestones to budget, project discussions, and sharing documents.
Instead of being obligated to make educated guesses, project managers can make accurate data-based decisions that align project selection and investment with big picture priorities. Changing tasks and schedules takes a few clicks, and project managers can run hypothetical scenarios to proactively see the impact of resource changes before they go live, and alert end users via their personal dashboard of any changes to their workload. Because resource scheduling is built-in, Clarizen delivers real-time insights into all available resources, schedules, and tasks.
Clarizen has some really powerful integration options out the box that is worth considering if you have other business-critical systems already in place. You can combine the power of Clarizen with other enterprise tools including Jira, SharePoint, Tableau, Salesforce, and Intaact, among others with a subscription to an App integration so you don’t have to play around with the API’s yourself. As well as the enterprise tool integrations possible, Clarizen has an App marketplace to add additional functionality into the system including helpful add-ons like active directory sync, Excel reporting integration, and priority automation – many of which are free.
Clarizen offers a free trial and costs from $60/user/month.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Variety of ways to customise PM workflows
- Strong focus on collaboration
- Completely customizable fields and panels
- Great graphical workflow editor
Cons:
- Only has 3 support mailboxes
- Could use better issue tracking
- Higher learning curve
The Best Agile Tools Comparison Chart
Here is a table that you can use to compare all the tools we just covered in the overviews.
| Tools | Price | |
|---|---|---|
| monday dev | From $8/user/month | Website |
| Zoho Sprints | From $3 /user/month for up to 100 users | Website |
| Shortcut | From $8.50/user/month | Website |
| Miro | From $8/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
| MeisterTask | From $8.25/user/month (billed annually) + free plan available | Website |
| Kintone | From $24/user/month | Website |
| Trello | From $5/user/month (billed annually) + free plan available | Website |
| Hubstaff | From $4.99/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
| Taiga.io | From $7/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
| Planview Clarizen | Pricing upon request | Website |
Compare Software Specs Side by Side
Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.
Compare SoftwareOther Options
Here are some other tools that did not make it to the top but are still worth your consideration.
Check out our agile PM tools video!
How I Picked The Best Agile Tools
The best agile management tools supply the following most important elements for agile project management. I look at elements outside of their feature set, such as their user interface, and their usability (how easy it is to learn). I also evaluate how much value the tool offers for the price—how its price stacks up against other tools with similar features and functionality.
I looked for the following features when evaluating the best agile software tools in this review:
Task management
Kanban or Scrum boards with projects, task lists and everything else that goes with it – from files and discussions to time records and expenses.
Backlog management tools
Features to vote on, label, prioritize, and re-prioritize user stories and bugs.
User story tools
Basic tools consist of cards on boards, which all online project management software offer. However, more comprehensive agile platforms include more user story tools such as dedicated boards for user story mapping and dedicated features for estimating user stories.
Team collaboration
Communicate updates with local and distributed teams, and share task lists, feedback, and assignments
Agile reporting & analytics
Tools should, at the very least, offer an agile dashboard displaying common agile charts like burndown and velocity. More advanced agile reporting features include progress reports for stakeholders, team performance evaluation features, and financial reporting tools.
And finally, I check for integrations. I want to make sure the tool plays well with the right tools. In the case of agile software tools, which are often used for developing software, I treat integrations with software development and issue management tools with higher priority. For example, IT departments often select a project management solution integrated with Jira to ensure seamless communication.
However, keep in mind teams in non-development environments won’t need this type of integration and would benefit more from integrations with other work apps like Slack, Google Apps, Adobe, and others.
Agile Tools FAQs
Find answers to common questions other people ask about this topic.
Is agile better than waterfall?
You wouldn’t be the first person to ask this question, as this is one of those big debates among the project management community. And rather than saying if one is better than the other, both have types of project that they are best suited for.
A waterfall methodology will need you to define requirements at the beginning of the project and then run the project from beginning to end. An agile methodology focuses more on smaller chunks of work and iteration that is constantly being fed with feedback from the client.
Therefore, you need to analyze the type of project that you are running and decide which methodology is best suited for it. If you are managing a development project, you’ll probably lean on agile. A social media marketing campaign will probably benefit from a waterfall approach.
Read more about these two methodologies in our agile vs waterfall article.
What is an agile methodology?
Agile isn’t actually a methodology at all, but a set of principles for developing software. The principles of agile are:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
Examples of agile methodologies are scrum, Kanban, scrumban, and lean. While all of them follow these principles, they offer a unique twist on how to approach the work. You can read more on each of these methodologies in our guide to success with agile.
What is scrum methodology?
Scrum is a methodology with a set of principles and a process to improve delivery. In software development, Scrum is one of the most popular frameworks applying the principles of agile. It includes a set of Scrum ceremonies and roles to support the process. The goal is to improve communication, teamwork and speed of development. Sprints, Scrums (or stand-up meetings), Retrospectives, backlogs, and burndowns are all parts of Scrum.
Read more about Scrum in our post on project management methodologies.
What is the SAFe framework?
Formally introduced in 2007, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a system for implementing Agile, Lean, and DevOps practices at scale. It can be used by organizations that are using agile frameworks such as Scrum or Lean, or for organizations that are looking for a way to scale their DevOps processes to support the organization.
Dive deep into this Gen Z framework in our SAFe for project managers article.
What are the tools used in agile methodologies?
Tools for agile methodologies can be used in various ways depending on how you’re carrying out your agile-oriented approach. Your tools might include:
- Backlogs: Prioritize and re-prioritize user stories and bugs with drag-and-drop backlog cards.
- Kanban or Scrum boards: Visualize all the user stories with cards displaying the tasks, assignees, and statuses in a sprint.
- Task swim lanes or columns: Separate epics, assignees, projects, and more by moving drag-and-drop cards across lanes.
- Workflows: Create custom workflows that update issues automatically based on specific events. See workflow diagram software.
- Sprints: Use the backlog to estimate stories and set sprint tasks and priorities for sprints.
- Daily Scrums or Standups: Use the dashboard to get a snapshot of progress in order to prepare for Scrums or Standups.
- Burndown chart: Manage project progress by tracking the total work remaining in the sprint or epic.
- Velocity chart: Track your team’s velocity and make accurate forecasts by tracking the amount of work completed in each sprint.
- Agile software development tools: Development platforms like Jira, GitHub, and Linx.
Is Jira the best agile tool?
No. I believe Jira (Part of Atlassian) is the most popular, but not the best. Mainly because the tool was not designed for agile. It was originally meant as an issue tracking tool for software developers that later became a project management tool.
Unfortunately, there is no definitive answer to this question since everyone’s needs are different. Therefore, the best agile tool will be the one that has the features you need.
What's Next?
Now that you are in an agile mood, read how to gather project requirements easily and go through our list of 41 agile approaches, frameworks, and methods. It definitely opens your eyes to the impact of agile but, if you scroll to the bottom, you'll find the 16 that project managers should be aware of.
Related tool lists:
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