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.

LiquidPlanner is a project management solution with built-in Planning Intelligence to assist your planning, scheduling, and managing uncertainty.

Predictive scheduling dynamically adapts to change and manages uncertainty. The platform runs Monte Carlo simulations across your portfolio which analyzes the probability of your project outcomes based on variable factors. Therefore, you always know in real-time when work will be done.

With LiquidPlanner, you can also experience automatic resource leveling and priority-based planning across multiple projects and dependencies.

Tip: Setting a target start and finish to a project will assist predictive scheduling in calculating within a given timeframe. Add them from the edit project screen.

LiquidPlanner's plans start at $15/user/month and offer a 14-day free trial.

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.

GanttPRO is a project management software based on Gantt charts and useful for managing all kinds of projects and teams from different spheres. It stands out for its intuitive interface and powerful features.

Why I picked GanttPRO: The software includes features for breaking down projects in an efficient manner into subtasks, sibling tasks, and subprojects, as well as set dependencies and milestones. To get more visibility, users can choose between the Gantt chart, Board views, and task dashboards. GanttPRO also offers handy task management features such as statuses, priorities, duration & estimation, progress, dates and deadlines, assignees, and more.

The Gantt chart maker allows teams to collaborate in real-time using comments, mentions, and attachments. Resource management and workload features for monitoring team members' workload and tasks are also included.

GanttPRO Standout Features & Integrations

Features include task management, resource management, time management, budget tracking, different data views, and templates to get you quickly started on a project.

Integrations include Jira, Google Drive, Slack, and other applications. GanttPRO is widely used in software development, construction, healthcare, finances, events, and education.

GanttPRO Plans & Pricing

Basic plans for one user start at $7.99/month if billed annually and offer a fully featured 14-day free trial.

Nifty is a project management tool that reduces project development cycles and improves team productivity by measuring progress by milestones and ensuring organizational goals remain on schedule. Nifty allows you to manage tasks through Kanban or list views, has a built-in calendar that can be integrated with Google, and includes features for file and document sharing. Nifty also has some great collaboration features, such as individual discussion threads that are project-specific.

Nifty is flexible to your team's project workflow, and the cross-organizational project overview tab provides insights into high-level timelines, as well as task-level deep-dive analyses for projects. Nifty's help center assists with ensuring maximum team efforts on the platform.

Nifty allows you to import data from Asana, Basecamp, ClickUp, and Trello, and has native integrations with Slack, Zoom, GitHub, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Google Calendar, while its Zapier integration connects Nifty with over 1000 additional apps.

Paid plans starting at just $5/user/month.

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.

VOGSY offers a comprehensive approach to the project management process, fully integrating key aspects of sales, finance, as well as billing with the core marketing project management. When marketing and sales teams begin planning their marketing campaigns, for example, the software will automatically allocate the budget to the appropriate team members to optimize the process and ensure that everyone involved is focused on their assigned tasks instead of the budget.

Why I Picked VOGSY: VOGSY is a fully integrated professional services automation software with a robust and feature-rich project management solution. It has a smart alert system built into the notifications feature that users can easily set up on their actions feed. This is a feature that can be utilized alongside the automated budget allocation to ensure that team members remain within the project’s budget range since they will be alerted by the system the moment they deviate from the allocated budget.

A Gantt chart view is also available, allowing project managers and teams to keep track of all existing projects and deliverables, which includes task dependencies. Its Google Workspace integrations are tailored to help keep relevant marketing data in a secure and easily accessible location, including internal team communications, client quotes, and emails. Users can set up the notifications feature to ensure that team members will be alerted through email whenever project approvals are required or critical actions have to be taken.

VOGSY Standout Features & Integrations

Features include resource and project management, collaboration, reporting dashboards, budgeting, professional services automation, Gantt charts, notifications & alerts. 

Integrations include Google Workspace, Jira, Microsoft Excel, Xero, Intuit Quickbooks Online, Copper, Hubspot, Salesforce, and Zoho.

VOGSY Plans & Pricing

VOGSY has a free version that is accessible through a personal Gmail account. It comes with all the features and is limited to a single user. Paid plans cost from $12/user/month, billed annually. All paid plans require a minimum of 10 users and include a free trial.

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.