15 Best Project Management Software You Need In 2023

monday.com is an award-winning project management platform used across diverse industries by companies like Hulu, BBC Studios, Coca-Cola, L'Oréal Paris, Adobe, and Deezer.

Why I picked monday.com: monday.com features for managing projects include resource and project management, time tracking, collaboration, and reporting features. For example, users can upload and attach files to cards, make comments, mention teammates, and more. It also offers a great project reporting dashboard that can collect data from multiple boards, allowing better tracking abilities of progress. And while monday.com doesn’t offer a complete set of tools for project accounting and invoicing solution as other tools, you can use monday.com to track hours, timelines, and invoices.

Overall, it’s a highly customizable tool that lets you work in whatever methodology—Kanban or otherwise—that fits your project and team. You’ll also find some useful workflow tools for automating parts of your process. Read our in-depth monday.com review for a complete overview of the tool, as well as a short video tutorial of basic features.

monday.com Standout Features & Integrations

Features include resource and project management, time tracking, collaboration, file management, collaborative docs and reporting dashboards.

Integrations include project management apps like Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Jira, GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Typeform and many more, accessible via Zapier.

monday.com Plans & Pricing

monday.com costs from $8/user/month and comes with a free 14-day trial. They offer a free plan for up to 2 users.

ClickUp is a project management app with powerful features for managing and completing all your team's projects in one platform. Users can plan projects, schedule tasks, and manage resources in a centralized workspace, as well as communicate and collaborate with team members and guests.

Why I picked ClickUp: ClickUp has features for creating, sharing, and collaborative editing for Wikis and documents. Users can comment on documents and tasks, assign comments, and chat with other team members for increased communication and collaboration. Reporting features include the ability to create custom dashboards, as well as six built-in report types for team reporting.

Task management features include task checklists, subtasks, and task templates, as well as the ability to filter, sort, search for, easily reorder, and view tasks in the manner most convenient for the team. You can also create Gantt charts, calendars, and timelines to visualize tasks.

ClickUp Standout Features & Integrations

Features include real-time reporting, whiteboards and shared documents for collaboration, task management with different views, goal tracking, and templates.

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

ClickUp Plans & Pricing

ClickUp's free plan is robust and includes all primary features. The unlimited plan starts at $9/user/month and offers additional functionality.

Wrike is an award-winning project management software suitable for teams of five or more, as the software allows for an unlimited number of users. The tool is highly configurable and allows users to customize workflows, dashboards, reports, and request forms.

Why I picked Wrike: Wrike’s simple interface enables users to switch between Kanban boards, interactive drag-and-drop Gantt charts, and traditional workload views, allowing them to choose how to visualize their priorities. Wrike also features task lists, subtasks, schedules, shared workflows, file sharing, and real-time communication and collaboration. Users can get advanced insights on their project with performance reporting tools, resource management and allocation, and more.

Wrike has an easy-to-use, intuitive interface and navigation with distinct spaces, folders, and tasks. You can switch between the home screen and timesheets, dashboards, calendars, reports, and stream (for notifications and messages). Wrike also has a dedicated help center with interactive training, videos, a 'Getting Started’ guide, and a thriving community.

Wrike Standout Features & Integrations

Features include pre-built templates, custom request forms, interactive Gantt charts, visual proofing, workflow automations, time tracking, project portfolio management, and dashboards.

Integrations in Wrike include 400+ pre-built native integrations, like the most popular file management software from Microsoft, Google, and Dropbox, along with sales and marketing software from Salesforce and Marketo.

Wrike Plans & Pricing

Pricing starts at $9.80/user/month. There are four different price points, including a free version and plans which offer the ability to invite free external collaborators to a paid account.

Smartsheet is a spreadsheet-like project management platform. It’s a nice platform if you’re comfortable working in Excel but want a break from complicated formulas, as Smartsheet performs all the calculations for you across multiple sheets.

Why I picked Smartsheet: Smartsheet has useful project management features such as workflow automation and visualization of tasks in Gantt, calendar and card views. Team members get notified of critical changes in real-time, and the tool provides shared views, detail history, activity logs, automated alerts, reminders, and status reports to keep everyone aligned and informed.

Further, the Critical Path feature highlights all the tasks which directly impact your project completion date to keep an eye on important milestones. If you are the type that wants everything personalized, including your tools, you can also add customized brand logos and set color themes for individual projects.

Smartsheet Standout Features & Integrations

Features include dashboards, reports that consolidate multiple sheets, workflow automation, resource management, multiple views, forms to collect information, and digital asset management using Brandfolder.

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 Plans & Pricing

Smartsheet has three plans and starts at $9/user/month, with a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 25 users. They offer a 30-day free trial.

Confluence, an Atlassian product, lets users tailor a collaborative digital workspace to their needs using drag-and-drop functionality. Features include creating a knowledge database, generating actionable meeting notes, sharing announcements, and dashboard pages for products and teams.

Confluence’s fast, flexible templates are a stand out feature for project managers. The tool offers project templates for product requirements, marketing campaigns, recruiting initiatives, executive reports, resource scheduling, and more.

Integrations include Jira, Trello, Slack, Microsoft Office, inVision, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, Draw.io, Productiv, Bitbucket, Hipchat, Bamboo, and 3000+ more through their app marketplace.

A con to be wary of with this tool is the permissions concepts can be a bit tricky to navigate and even trickier to teach/train to team members who need to be aware of them. They lost a few marks in the Usability evaluation because of this.

Confluence starts at $5/user/month and has a freemium version of the tool for us to 10 users, plus a 7-day free trial for any paid plan.

Kintone is a customizable project tracking platform used by teams at Volvo Trucks North America, Japan Airlines, Shiseido, and over 23,000 organizations worldwide.

Why I picked Kintone: Their unique approach to project and task management lets you build a wide variety of customizable “apps” either from scratch, using templates or from your existing spreadsheets. 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.

Build your no-code project tracking 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, and more. Once you’ve built the app you want, you can use it to track whatever data and tasks you and your team need. Finally, custom notifications and reminders will keep you up to date.

What makes Kintone particularly great for project tracking are the features to filter and prioritize tasks by data field or team member to generate custom reports or dashboard views, as well as the ability to automate reminders and handoffs between team members for multi-step workflows.

Kintone’s built-in communication features also allow teams to discuss projects directly in the app and in topic or project-based threads. Dedicated “spaces” organize everything your team needs for your project, including task-tracking apps and searchable conversation threads.

Kintone Standout Features & Integrations

Features include a pre-built application library, enhanced process management, private messaging, real-time custom graphs and charts, and granular permission controls.

Integrations. 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 Plans & Pricing

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.

Celoxis is a comprehensive and web-based project management software. It comes with powerful analytical capabilities, and its rich and interactive charts will breathe new life into your project data.

Why I picked Celoxis: First, project schedules and powerful interactive Gantt charts pack all of the team and work dynamicity, including geographically distributed project teams, part-time resources, unavoidable absences, interim resource swaps, and even inter-project dependencies.

Further, task management within Celoxis is strong and unique. The platform lets you see your tasks and to-dos, report bugs, manage tickets, or log time from a single tool. You can also get relevant notifications to your inbox and send updates to someone, even without logging in.

Collaboration is also available through project discussions, @mention comments, file sharing, document version control, and activity stream. Additionally, 80% of your team's typical actions, such as starting a timer, attaching a file or updating status, can be done straight from the dashboards.

Celoxis Standout Features & Integrations

Features include a real-time project tracker, task management, resource availabilities and utilization, timesheets, project finances, risks, issues and to-dos.

Integrations include pre-built connections with Google Drive, Outlook, Microsoft Project, Excel, Salesforce and hundreds of other tools like JIRA, Slack & Trello.

Celoxis Plans & Pricing

Celoxis is one of the few project manager software programs to be available in both SaaS and on-premise. SaaS costs $25/user/month, and on-premise pricing is available upon request. Both require a minimum 5-user sign-up and come with a 30-day free trial.

Zoho Projects is a project management application that can handle projects of all sizes and levels of complexity. The tool comes with features that imitate social networking sites such as feeds, forums, and discussions, and is available on mobile for iOS, Android, and other systems.

Why I picked Zoho Projects: For project planning and monitoring, Zoho Projects' Gantt chart features let you break large projects down into manageable sections and actionable tasks, plan and visualize different tasks and milestones, and create tasks lists to help you plan in better detail. Zoho Projects' Gantt charts can also be used for resource allocation, so you can visualize your project schedule and the team's workload. The resource usage table tells you who is available, who is busy, and who is overloaded.

With Zoho Projects, you can define dependencies between tasks and assign them to the right people, schedule events in your calendar, and monitor the percentage of work that's been completed once the work has begun. Automate routine tasks at regular intervals by setting up a recurring task, and set reminder emails for tasks.

You can also create or download project documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, as well as upload and share files for team collaboration. Record the hours spent on tasks and compare them with what you had originally planned. This can be done manually or with the help of an integrated timer. Entries are automatically recorded in your timesheet, and generating invoices from this information requires only a few clicks.

Zoho Projects Standout Features & Integrations

Features include task management, task automation, blueprints, time and issue tracking, reporting, and forums for detailed discussions with your team.

Integrations. Being part of the Zoho ecosystem allows you to connect to several of Zoho’s other services such as Zoho Books and Zoho’s finance suite. The new Zoho marketplace allows 3rd party integrations as well, like Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, Zapier, Zendesk, and ServiceNow. Integrations via Zapier and Zoho Flow are also supported.

Zoho Projects Plans & Pricing

Zoho Projects costs from $5/user/month and comes with a 10-day free trial. They have a freemium version for up to 3 users and 2 projects.

Height is the all-in-one project management tool that can be customized to accommodate workflows on a team-by-team basis and includes visualizations like Spreadsheet (table), Kanban, Calendar, and Gantt.

Why I picked Height: Besides the multiple views, the platform offers real-time chat per task. This effortlessly ensures that all conversation about work happens in context, is searchable, and only notifies the people for whom the information is relevant.

Its robust offering includes a command center where you can customize keyboard shortcuts for almost anything you can think of, macOS and Windows apps, and SOC 2 Type II compliance for data protection.

Height Standout Features & Integrations

Features include customizable workflows, task forms to collect user data, multiple task views, real-time chat, and smart lists with dynamically pulled filters.

Integrations include Notion, Slack, Discord, GitHub, GitLab, Sentry, Zendesk, Figma, Slab, Fivetran, and many more through Zapier.

Height Plans & Pricing

Height's pricing starts at $8.50/user/month and comes with a free 30-day trial. One last thing, guest accounts are free in all paid plans.

Airtable is a project management solution that lets users add attachments, long text notes, checkboxes, links, barcodes, and more to records in other tables. Powerful filtering, sorting, and grouping give you the freedom to arrange your work in whatever way works best for your team.

The user interface is sleek, modern, colorful, and attractive, making Airtable a pleasure to use and navigate. This software scored well in the UX consideration for the evaluation criteria listed earlier in this article.

Airtable has built-in support for many popular apps and a robust API. Use Zapier, Workato, Integromat, or Automate.io to connect Airtable with over 1000 websites and apps like Asana, Basecamp, Box, Evernote, Facebook, Github, MailChimp, Slack, and more.

The learning curve for Airtable is made troublesome by a general lack of tutorials and training on their site. Certain features, like posting assignments, might be tricky to teach or learn.

Airtable starts at $10/user/month and has a freemium version of the software.

Forecast is an all-in-one platform for resource and project management, that is equipped with tools to manage everything from quote to invoice, plus it offers intelligent automation to predict project delivery dates, forecast capacity needs, and become more efficient. Their AI uses cumulative learnings from hundreds of thousands of projects and creates rules based on that user data.

Why I picked Forecast: Let’s talk about features. The Auto-Schedule feature is great for project scheduling, providing estimates, automatically assigning resources to tasks. It’s got a drag-and-drop module that lets you adjust plans and resources in an instant. Another cool feature is that the tool automatically builds a budget for every project with key financial metrics to track planned vs. actuals. It also supports various billing types (fixed price, time & materials) side-by-side and in real-time. It has advanced up-to-the-minute reports you can customize.

Forecast also introduced a one-of-its-kind feature to manage projects in a retainer setup. A dashboard with retainer periods and totals lets you track the financials of ongoing projects without losing sight of staff workloads and time spent on delivery.

Forecast Standout Features & Integrations

Features include resource management, project accounting, business intelligence, retainer budget-type projects, auto-schedule, and AI-based recommendations.

Integrations include several turnkey integrations with mainstream project management tools and two-way sync with Jira on the market. It also complements accounting systems like Quickbooks and Xero with PM capabilities.

Forecast Plans & Pricing

Forecast costs from $29/user/month with a 10-seat minimum in an annual plan. They offer a 14-day free trial.

MS Projects is Microsoft’s answer to project management. This tool lets users manage agile projects using simple, visual task boards that support Scrum, Kanban, or custom workflows and choose whatever methodology makes sense for the project: agile, waterfall, or hybrid.

Why I picked Microsoft Project: This PM software is particularly easy to use and learn if you are at all familiar with the Microsoft family of products, which most offices are these days. Online tutorials and forums can fill in any gaps, making the learning curve small. Thus, it evaluated well in Usability.

Side note: This is a standard and industry-accepted tool, but it’s not perfect. One major downside is that it’s not easy to run on iOS. If you like MS Projects but are looking for similar options that run on a Mac, check out my post on MS Project options for Mac.

Microsoft Project Standout Features & Integrations

Features include kanban boards, timelines with milestones, Power BI dashboards, resource requests, visual heatmaps to identify over-allocation, built-in templates, reporting, task management, and portfolio management.

Integrations include other Microsoft software, like Outlook, Excel, Skype, and more.

Paymo is the best project management software to use if you're working in consultancy and the creative/marketing industry. Paymo suits freelancers, small and medium teams, or businesses as it helps creatives navigate projects and tasks, keep track of their time, and bill clients from the same platform.

Paymo lets you streamline your workflow as you manage a creative project. With Paymo, you get a good grasp of task details and status (task management) using multiple views, task lists, Kanban, and Gantt charts. You’ll see how many hours you’ve put in (time tracking)—and how that fares with your initial estimates. You’ll be able to then send invoices to your clients and be paid through online payment gateways like Square, Stripe, PayPal, and others. On top of all that, you can manage everything on the go using the mobile app.

Paymo lets you assign users, collaborate in real-time, file proof, and be updated via notifications or oversee the stream of recent activities. Paymo alos comes with a resource scheduling module and resource management to help manage leave days and set up bookings for clients.

Paymo integrates with Zapier, Google, and Slack for an extra ping.

Paymo’s free plan is available for freelancers and teams of up to 10 users. Paid plans start at $9.95/user/month. Paymo comes with a 15-day free trial.

MeisterTask is a web-based task and project management tool that is perfect for managing agile projects on simple, Kanban-style boards. The tool offers user-friendly interfaces, intuitive functionality, and seamless integrations with other software in the project ecosystem.

The tool includes colorful, customizable project boards, as well as other features designed to make projects more streamlined, productive, and effective. Workload management is enabled through the timeline feature: a Gantt-style overview of tasks that allows users to pinpoint bottlenecks and keep work flowing smoothly. Automations can also be established to speed up manual work and to complete recurring tasks automatically.

Other task management features include due dates, time tracking, assignees, watchers, checklists, tags, and more. MeisterTask also enables communication with comments, @mentions, notifications, and inline file attachments (including integrations with external cloud storages). MeisterTask is simple to use and doesn’t require any formal onboarding or training.

MeisterTask’s integrations include Slack, Microsoft Teams, G Suite, Zapier, IFTTT, MindMeister, and more.

MeisterTask costs from $8.25/month and offers a freemium plan for up to 3 projects. Their paid plans come with a 30-day free trial.

Backlog is a cloud-based project management tool perfect for developers and the teams they collaborate with. Backlog provides a range of useful collaboration features including task management software (including subtasks, checklists, and custom fields), milestones, file management, wikis, and more. But Backlog is more than a project management app, it’s also a bug tracker and version control system in one.

For collaborating on code, Backlog provides SVN and Git repositories, a different viewer and inline comments, plus pull requests, merge requests, and branches. Visually, the app provides burndown charts, Git graphs, Kanban boards, and Gantt charts, so project managers and users alike can quickly assess projects at a glance.

Backlog works for a range of team sizes. They have a free account available to teams of up to 10, while also offering a self-hosted Enterprise option for larger companies. They also provide a mobile app on both iOS and Android for collaborating on-the-go. It integrates with Nulab’s other apps and provides both Redmine and Jira importers.

Backlog allows you to assign, track, and release work, right in one app while ensuring transparency and accountability across teams. If you’re looking for a tool to help manage development projects or working closely with a team of developers, this is the app for you.

Backlog is free for up to 10 users with some feature limitations or $35/month for up to 30 users. For $100/month, your team gets unlimited users, i.e. their Standard Plan.