15 Best Project Management Software You Need in 2023

monday.com is an award-winning project management platform that can help you build custom workflows for your projects.

Why I picked monday.com: This tool is customizable in almost every way. Besides all the different task views, custom fields, and collaboration features, monday.com is great at helping you create automated workflows. The automation center is a view where you can select from pre-defined templates and simply click to select the information that is most relevant to you from dropdown menus.

Additionally, you can find template actions built for integrations like Slack, and custom cards that you can start from scratch. If you go down this route, you will be taken to a drag-and-drop builder. 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 workload and allocation that will give you information on what your team is doing and how busy they are. Another standout is the collaborative docs that help everyone co-author documentation and link to other files within the software. Finally, its customizable dashboards make it possible for you to build views that display the data that is relevant to your operation.

Integrations include pre-built connections to apps like Slack, Google Drive, DocuSign, Gmail, Google Calendar, Jira, GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Typeform and many more. Additionally, you can connect to thousands of additional apps via Zapier.

Wrike is an award-winning project management software that qualifies as a suitable companion for any organization looking to scale.

Why I picked Wrike: The tool offers flexible plans that can support any team size, starting with a free plan that is perfect to manage tasks in small teams. In addition, the features that Wrike offers go anywhere from lists and simple status fields to approvals, proofing, resource management and budgeting.

Wrike also has robust Enterprise features for teams with additional security and granular permission needs. They even have a special tier for complex organizations that have specific requirements.

Wrike Standout Features & Integrations

Features include visual proofing that will help your team receive multi-tier approvals from the client and workflow automations to make those repetitive tasks go away. You can also access project portfolio management features that will let you know if your project initiatives are contributing to the company's strategy and goals, and cross-tagging for projects that require input from other initiatives in the business.

Integrations in Wrike include 400+ pre-built native integrations that include Asana, Airtable, BambooHR, Chargify, Clearbit, HubSpot, Jenkins, Mailchimp, Replicon, Salesforce, and Slack. Additionally, you can build custom automations using its API.

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: The platform makes it easy for you to automate workflows and create work applications. On the one hand you have all the workflow automation capabilities that are available for all users. This module within the software lets you automate almost any activity you can think of in a visual drag-and-drop environment. A few examples include alerts for change of status, automated approval requests, and responding to update requests from your email or Slack.

On the other hand, you have the work applications. These are intuitive web and mobile apps that you can build to work with Smartsheet's WorkApps. WorkApps is a no-code platform where you can build apps from a template or directly from sheets, forms, reports, and even external content. These are so powerful that they even include role permissions you can configure for your team.

Smartsheet Standout Features & Integrations

Features include Bridge - a business process automation builder that can help you build workflows in a no-code interface and dashboards that can give you a real-time view of your KPIs, critical trends, and summary reports. Additionally, the document builder integrates directly with DocuSign and lets you send docs for e-signatures while tracking the status of each one.

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.

ClickUp is a project management productivity app with powerful features the allow you to plan projects, schedule tasks, and manage resources in a centralized workspace, regardless of your physical location.

Why I picked ClickUp: I selected ClickUp because of how well they approach the idea of making an app that replaces all others. The features included in this software make it an option for remote teams since they mainly encourage collaboration. From the ability to tag people in conversations to collaborative documents and whiteboards that help users co-create, you won't need to leave this platform unless it is to bill the client.

ClickUp Standout Features & Integrations

Features include the whiteboards that let you brainstorm with your team to come up with a bulletproof plan and the collaborative docs that work as a Wiki where everyone can join and add to the conversation. You can also access an in-app chat and proofing features that can help you streamline approvals on marketing collateral with the client.

Integrations include native ones with Slack, HubSpot, TogglTrack, Figma, Loom, Sentry, G Suite, Dropbox, Clockify, and Calendly. Additionally, you can connect to another 1,000+ apps using a paid membership with Zapier. Finally, if making custom integrations is within your reach, there is a public API you can use for it.

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 unlimited members, guests, and tasks in the free plan, which is great for startups and small businesses.

However, Height gets even better as you move to the other plans. 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 a time-tracking feature they recently released where your team can track their time per task and it automatically syncs to third-party software, like Harvest. You will also find automation features that help you build workflows in a drag-and-drop environment, automatically generate tasks in Height from code editors, and quickly access shortcuts using a single keystroke.

Integrations include Notion, Slack, Discord, Harvest, GitHub, GitLab, Sentry, Zendesk, Figma, Slab, and Fivetran. You can also access thousands of additional apps through Zapier (requires paid account).

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.

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.

Why I picked Nifty: It 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 Standout Features & Integrations

Features include discussions, task management, time tracking, collaborative docs that can be centrally stored, and reporting.

Integrations include importing 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.

Confluence, an Atlassian product, lets users tailor a collaborative digital workspace to their needs using drag-and-drop functionality.

Why I picked Confluence: 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.

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 Standout Features & Integrations

Features include creating a knowledge database, generating actionable meeting notes, sharing announcements, and dashboard pages for products and teams.

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.

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.

Basecamp is a project management software with tools for scheduling, planning, and getting work done collaboratively.

Why I picked Basecamp: The platform features a progress board, to-do lists, a message board, project-specific chats, and document and file management capabilities. Each project has its own board where tasks, collaborators, and documents can be managed. The project boards have schedules and messaging to keep team members up-to-date on progress.

This software prides itself on being simple and straightforward, without unnecessary features or a complex interface. The homepage dashboard has cards with all projects, which can be pinned to the top for easy access. Users can order projects however they prefer, and their custom view will be saved for their usage.

Basecamp Standout Features & Integrations

Features include project dashboards, calendar views, to-do-lists, scheduling, per-project dashboards, project-specific message boards, file and document management, and live chat.

Integrations include Automate.io, CData Clockify, Field Trip, Ganttify, Mr.ToDo, Pleexy, Project Buddy, RSSBus, Retool, TaskClone, Toggl, To-Do Helpers, Unito.io, Zoho, and others. Users with a paid Zapier account can access additional integrations.

Ravetree is a work management software platform that empowers teams to deliver work faster, be more informed, and spend less time searching for information. Project-driven organizations around the world use Ravetree to manage their projects, resources, and client information—all in one place.

Why I picked Ravetree: Companies love Ravetree’s elegant and clean user interface, which makes it easy to communicate and collaborate with colleagues and clients. Ravetree eliminates the pain of moving between different applications, relying on cumbersome spreadsheets, and entering the same data in multiple places. Other tools are geared towards either project managers or team members, but not both. Ravetree has solved this problem by providing the powerful features needed by project managers while offering the usability and intuitiveness needed by team members who just want to get work done.

Ultimately, companies benefit from having a single source of truth from which they can optimize their operations and easily see the big picture. Ravetree has a 5-star customer support rating and takes pride in being a customer-focused company. Training, setup, and customer support are 100% free.

Standout Features & Integrations

Features include resource management, client portals, request forms, file management, CRM, time tracking, and billing.

Integrations include native integrations with Box, GitHub, Google Drive, Stripe, QuickBooks, Facebook, Exchange, Gmail, HubSpot, and Xero.

Airtable is a project management solution that lets users add attachments, long text notes, checkboxes, links, barcodes, and more to records in other tables.

Why I picked Airtable: 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.

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 Standout Features & Integrations

Features include rich field types, desktop and mobile apps, Gantt, timeline and list views, automations, and in-record commenting features.

Integrations. 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.

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.

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.