10 Best Kanban Software To Reduce Lead Times In 2024

Every Smartsheet subscription tier has access to hundreds of project templates sorted by industry or type. Here you’ll have access to Gantt charts, construction estimators, legal contract management, customer lifetime value (CLV), team productivity documents, performance evaluation sheets, and anything else you can think of. Anyone who uses Kanban schedules as well as other common calendar views like Gantt will appreciate the ability to flip back and forth between them.

Smartsheet is super customizable and you can work with their customer support team to build the platform out any way you need it. This makes it a great option for professional services or niche industry services. There's a bit of a learning curve involved but that's just because it comes with so much to work with.

Smartsheet integrations include Microsoft and Google apps, as well as development essentials like Jira, and useful business apps like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Box, and Tableau. The platform is extensible through a REST API and webhooks.

Smartsheet costs $7/user/month, with a minimum of 3 users and a maximum of 25 users. They also offer a 30-day free trial.

ClickUp's flexible project management app offers over 100 proprietary features to choose from, letting power users highlight what they want and hide what they do not use. Choose simple task lists or more advanced workflows (called 'Statuses') to track updates and progress remotely. Their Kanban boards benefit from this vast feature set, allowing users to customize their boards and workflows according to the unique needs of each project, task, and subtask.

ClickUp has a unique approach to a 'free plan' whereby they allow unlimited users and tasks. Where they hold back, then, is that you only get 100 uses of certain features like custom fields and mind maps. Still, this could work really well for larger teams looking for a free Kanban solution but who don't intend to be on the platform indefinitely.

ClickUp offers native integrations with Slack, G Suite, Dropbox, and many more tools, as well as over 1,000+ integrations through Zapier.

ClickUp is free to use for unlimited users with a 100MB storage maximum. Their paid plan starts at $5/user/month and offers a free trial.

Zoho Projects is a web-based project management software that offers various features for project planning, execution, monitoring, and collaboration, making it a well-rounded tool for managing projects effectively. Kanban is a project management methodology that emphasizes visualizing work, limiting work-in-progress, and optimizing the workflow. Zoho Projects allow teams to track their work visually, providing a clear overview of the status of each task and the progress of the project as a whole.

Zoho Projects’ Kanban boards are fully customizable, enabling teams to create them based on their workflow and preferences. Teams can create multiple boards for different projects or stages of the same project. Each panel consists of columns representing different stages of the workflow, such as 'To Do,' 'In Progress,' and 'Done.' Teams can also create custom columns to represent specific stages of their workflow.

Using Zoho Projects you can add tasks, assign them to team members, set due dates, and add descriptions and attachments. Each task on the board is represented by a card containing all the relevant job information. Teams can also add labels to tasks to classify them based on their priority, status, or any other category pertinent to their workflow.

You can move tasks between columns by simply dragging and dropping them. This feature enables users to update the status of jobs and track their progress quickly. You can use the filter and search functionality to find specific tasks, making it easy to focus on what matters most.

Zoho Projects provides several features to help teams collaborate effectively. Teams can add comments to tasks, mention other team members, and discuss specific tasks. They can also use the @mention feature to tag team members and notify them of updates or changes to the task.

Zoho Projects integrates with other Zoho apps, commonly used apps by Google (Google Calendar, Drive, Spreadsheets, etc.), and Microsoft (Calendar, Excel, Office 365, OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint), and other third-party apps such as Basecamp, Jira, Slack, Zendesk, and Zapier.

Zoho Projects costs from $5/user/month for tracking unlimited projects. A freemium plan with limited features, as well as a 10-day free trial, are also available.

Miro is a collaborative online whiteboard with over 1,000 templates including mind maps, Kanban boards, Gantt charts, product wireframes, research boards, and flowcharts. It’s trusted by 99% of the Fortune 100, and used by teams at TransUnion, HP, Upwork, Cisco, Qlik, and Atkins. Miro’s visual platform is built for hybrid work, and has robust resources for continuous learning like Miro Academy, online events, and a community forum.

Miro has an intuitive Kanban template with collaboration features that are built for brainstorming, diagramming, and seamless communication. Your team can leave comments, make collaborative edits in real-time, update task progress, or even launch video calls with its built-in add-on.

At The Digital Project Manager, we use Miro to map out content clusters and to visualize content workflows from the start (brainstorming ideas) to finish (publishing the content on our site).

Miro has integrations with a whole suite of tools, including Zoom, Figma, Asana, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Slack, Google Drive, Box, Airtable, Notion, Azure, and Webex. Some integrations are limited to paid plans only.

Miro is free to use for unlimited members with up to 3 editable boards. Paid plans start at $8/user/month (billed annually).

Airtable is a flexible, scalable project management tool used by the likes of forward-thinking companies like Netflix, Expedia, Buzzfeed, Time, and Medium. Their Kanban board is an intuitive, no-fluff solution that will engage the whole team regardless of tech savviness. Along with that, enterprises will appreciate unlimited workspaces federated to a single company account as well as their training and change management plans for onboarding.

Airtable is free for up to 1,200 records per base and a 2-week history log. Paid plans start at $10/user/month and they offer a free 14-day trial.

ProjectManager is an award-winning Kanban software and project management system that boasts an impressive suite of project portfolio management (PPM) tools. Real-time dashboards, all-in-one roadmaps, and multiple project views are just a few of the features available to users to organize their portfolio, so this goes way beyond Kanban boards. The PPM reporting system is useful, too, giving you a birds-eye-view of data.

ProjectManager is praised by customers for its intuitive and easy to learn design; the robust nature of its project reporting suite; its list of advanced features compared to its competitors; and its ability to scale up and down to accommodate projects and teams of all sizes.

ProjectManager integrates with MS Project, Excel, Office 365, Salesforce CRM, QuickBooks, Xero, Dropbox, Desk.com, JIRA, Hubspot, Slack, Zendesk, Evernote, OneLogin, OneDrive, and the complete Google Suite. They also have a powerful REST API to help you build against internal or external tools.

ProjectManager costs from $15/user/month and offers a free 30-day trial.

Hubstaff Tasks is a project management tool with multiple task tracking and collaboration features. Its interface is based on the Kanban methodology; it lets you organize tasks in different project stages, which are represented by columns. Each task can be categorized using color-coded labels. One of its notable features is custom workflows. These let you automate assigning tasks to team members at different project stages and moving them forward with one click.

You can create checklists within each task and track them from the project view using progress bars. Files can also be attached to task cards, but the free plan only allows up to 100 MB of storage per user. Switching to the sprints view displays all your assigned tasks, organized by sprint. You can move tasks to current or future sprints or to the backlog with a drag-and-drop mechanism similar to Kanban.

Hubstaff Tasks integrates with Active Collab, Asana, Breeze, ClickUp, GitHub, GitLab, Insightly, JIRA, LiquidPlanner, Mavenlink, Paymo, PivotalTracker, Podio, Redbooth, Redmine, Teamwork Projects, Trello, Unfuddle, Wrike, Zoho Projects, Slack, Zendesk, Salesforce, QuickBooks, and other apps. You can boost your integration options with a paid plan through Zapier, unlocking hundreds of other possible connections.

Hubstaff Tasks is free for up to 5 users and 10 projects. The premium plan starts at $7/user/month, and includes a 14-day free trial.

Kanban Zone is designed to allow teams to visualize their entire agency and organization by connecting teams and processes. The tool offers a highly flexible Kanban board editor that does not constrain users to perfect grids and instead allows them to truly map their ideal flow of work.

The tool also includes a timeline view for increased planning capabilities, as well as templates and a Portfolio Kanban for traceability across projects. Also available are project and Kanban metrics, collaboration features such as comments and notifications, and workflow management capabilities.

Kanban Zone has a simple interface that helps teams focus on the work at hand, and a team of support experts to help with onboarding and ongoing questions. They have plenty of learning resources on their site for those who want to learn more about kanban methodology.

Kanban Zone can integrate with other project management tools using a (paid) plan through Zapier.

Kanban Zone pricing starts at $5 per month for a personal plan and $8 per month for professional plans. A free 30 day trial is also available.

Kanbanize offers flexible, web-based Kanban boards and built-in business rules so that you can automate all your team's existing processes, dependencies, and interactions. PMs will especially enjoy the ability to forecast the end dates of any initiatives based on the flow of child cards anywhere in the Kanban card hierarchy. Software development teams will appreciate their focus on user stories and epics with transparent cross-team dependencies.

Kanbanize tracks, updates, and automatically reports the status of all projects and their related work items. This way, you can glean status updates at a glance and spend less time building reports and dashboards. They also provide extensive flow analytics through cumulative flow diagrams, cycle time scatter plots, WIP aging charts, Monte Carlo simulations, and cycle time heat maps.

Kanbanize integrates with Google Drive, Dropbox, GitHub, Jira, and other tools (and you can also connect through Zapier)

Kanbanize costs from $149/month for up to 15 users and offers a free 7-day trial.

SwiftKanban from Digite is a powerful enterprise and portfolio Kanban tool for both co-located and distributed teams. It combines the best of visual management, Kanban, and Scrum to give you a powerful tool for lean/agile software development, visual project management, and business collaboration improvement.

SwiftKanban makes collaboration between multiple teams easier through better visualization of work. Teams working remotely can see the tasks that their colleagues are working on in real-time. SwiftKanban has a number of cool features built-in for defining work-in-progress (WIP) limits, card coloring, and highlighting bottlenecks. It allows product owners to define their backlog flexibly using a varied set of features. SwiftKanban is a great alternative to Trello since it offers way more features and customization options.

SwiftKanban also lets users automate actions within their Kanban board based on any criteria they set using rules. From simple IFTTT rules to automating repetitive tasks to complex configuration of cards and boards, SwiftKanban has it all. Plus, SwiftKanban comes with AI-capabilities built-in where users will be able to get suggestions for Similar cards when creating new cards, using historical data, saving time and eliminating duplication of work.

SwiftKanban can be integrated with a wide variety of enterprise-class tools such as TFS, JIRA, CA Agile Central and many others using its SwiftSync integration platform. It provides native integration with Slack and MS Teams. Using Zapier, you can also integrate SwiftKanban with a wide range of productivity apps like Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, and GitHub. You can also use SwiftKanban REST APIs as service endpoints to interact with your boards remotely and perform various card functions.

SwiftKanban costs between $0-15/user/month for annual subscriptions and comes with a 30-day free trial of its enterprise plan. It's available in both SaaS and On-Premise versions.