10 Best Design Project Management Software In 2023

monday.com is a feature-rich tool that will allow you to handle almost any project that comes your way. Their creative request workflow template allows you to centralize all the design work in one place, standardize request intakes, organize and manage assets.

Want to start simple? Build a ‘creatives board’. It will give you some structure on the main table view, like a status and file column. Add a kanban view to your board, start changing the status to the stages of your design project cycle and voila! You have your first attempt at a design project board.

Once you upload files, anyone added to the board can click on it, add comments, and download files. Great to keep your client and team feedback in one place.

Designers rejoice! monday.com has developed a plugin for you to use with your Adobe Creative Cloud software. You can review the tasks assigned to you, read briefs, and upload designs directly to your monday.com account once you are done.

monday.com is free for up to 2 users and paid plans start at $8/user/month and offers a 14-day free trial.

Wrike is a powerful project management software that enables design teams to create their own customized workflows based on their unique needs. Streamline work intake, simplify proofing, configure creative workflows, and increase delivery in a single collaborative platform. Spend less time on repetitive administrative tasks and more time producing high-quality design projects. 

Pre-built templates will help you create design workflows and launch design projects quickly and efficiently. Wrike features customizable briefs and request forms, visual and customizable workload management, space for team members to provide feedback, and reporting and analytics. Customize workflows, dashboards, reports, and request forms with highly configurable software that’s designed to eliminate time-consuming admin, so your team can spend more time creating high-value assets.

Wrike has an easy-to-use interface with distinct Spaces, folders, and tasks. You can switch between Kanban boards, interactive drag-and-drop Gantt charts, and traditional workload views to visualize priorities. Or navigate between the home screen and timesheets, dashboards, calendars, reports, and a stream for notifications and messages. Users also have access to a variety of pre-built templates for common organizational processes that allow teams to launch projects faster.

Wrike has over 400 integrations, including with Adobe Creative Cloud, giving you the visibility and efficiency you need without disrupting your team’s creativity. The Wrike extension for Adobe is free for all Wrike subscribers and is available for Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, InDesign CC, and Premiere Pro CC.

Wrike costs $9.80 per user per month and offers four different price points, including a free version and plans which allow users to invite free external collaborators to a paid account. It’s suitable for teams of five or more.

Celoxis is a comprehensive Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software with project management, accounting, and resource management tools. It can help you manage your portfolio of design projects in terms of the resources you allocate, timelines for completion, task tracking, and financial planning and management. It's well-suited to the needs of design agencies or companies managing multiple products or large-scale projects.

In addition to traditional project management tools like Gantt charts and task assignments, the platform also has forms to help you take on new projects. You can use the intake tools to automate how you capture project requests from web-forms and emails. Once requests are captured, you can also rank them automatically based on custom fields and logic.

The platform's resource management capabilities allow you to schedule staff based on their location, capacity, and schedule. You can also track employee time and project expenses to inform your broader budgeting and accounting. Custom policies can even be implemented to help ensure spending is in alignment with company expectations.

The software integrates with over 400 other tools, including Google Drive, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, Jira, Slack, Salesforce, Google Calendar, Outlook, Evernote, and QuickBooks Online. You can also access additional integrations with a paid Zapier account.

Paid plans for Celoxis start from $25 per user, per month. A 30-day free trial is also available.

Miro is a visual collaboration platform that allows teams to create and collaborate on project planning, brainstorming and ideation, and workflow processes virtually. It's a virtual whiteboard where team members can add shapes, flowcharts, sticky notes, and more to share their ideas and exchange feedback with one another. Voting, clustering, and timers are also included to facilitate meetings and decision-making.

Unlike more traditional project management platforms, Miro is truly a blank canvas that can be configured in a ton of different ways. It also comes with a large bank of templates for agile workflows, roadmaps and strategy planning, brainstorm sessions, and various other use cases. It's a highly flexible solution that's well suited to the needs of design teams who may work differently and require less rigid structures for their planning.

The software integrates with other workplace tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, 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 task management tool with user-friendly visuals and intuitive navigation. Although it has no proofing integrated just yet, it has other features that can help you and your team stay on top of projects.

One of my personal favorites is their agenda. This is a section where your team will be able to see all the tasks assigned to them and arrange them in custom status columns. Perfect so they can prioritize their work across different projects.

MeisterTask has integrations with Google Workspace, Office 365, and thousands of other apps through Zapier.

MeisterTask is free for single use. Paid plans start at $8.25/user/month and offer a 30-day free trial.

Intelligencebank is a marketing operations platform designed for agency projects. Centralizing your digital assets, collaborating with team members, and approving content are only some of the features this tool has to offer.

What I really like about this tool is that when you look at a design you can access other versions of that work in a couple of clicks. Go to the pane on the right and click on the revision tab. Want to compare two versions? Simply select the two and the tool will display them side by side.

Intelligencebank integrates with Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and other tools from Adobe’s creative suite.

Intelligencebank pricing is given upon request and grouped into 5 tiers.

Trello is a kanban-specialized software that has robust features and lovely visuals. Although I would not recommend it if you need a view like Timeline (since it’s relatively new), it’s a software that has been around since 2011 and has millions of dollars invested in its development.

The thing I enjoy the most and think is useful for design projects is the checklists. Inside each card we can create checklists with items that could be considered subtasks. Since the client is always trying to change the scope of projects, this helps it be flexible enough to support it.

Trello has over 150 power-ups that can help you connect to tools like Zeplin, InVision, Miro, and Figma.

Trello has a free version of the software and paid plans start at $5/user/month with a 14-day free trial.

Filestage is a review and approval platform used by agencies and in-house creative teams around the world. From sharing files to collecting feedback, it speeds up every step of your creative review process.

Filestage centralizes your approval workflow into a single dashboard. From there, you can see every review step, file format, version, and reviewer in your project, with status indicators to show who’s approved what. So at any stage in your creative review process, you can see exactly where things are at a glance.

However, feedback management is where Filestage really shines. You can invite reviewers to add comments and discuss ideas right alongside your content and create review steps to group feedback from different types of stakeholders, like your internal team and external stakeholders. Add in version comparisons, annotations, and attachments, and Filestage is a great feedback platform

Filestage features native integrations with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Asana – plus thousands more apps through their integration partners, like Pabbly.

Pricing starts at $24/user/month with a 7-day free trial. You can also invite an unlimited number of reviewers and external uploaders to your account for free.

Asana is a task management tool that is trusted by the likes of Amazon and Discovery. Their strengths have always lied around organizing your to-do lists, and preparing colorful kanban boards that let you visually manage your tasks.

When you have content uploaded in Asana you can click on the image and go to the ‘add feedback’ button. This will open a proofing feature for you to leave comments and open a subtask after you save so you can assign it to the one responsible for acting on it.

Asana integrates with tools like Adobe Creative Cloud and Lucidchart, and lets you access over a thousand integrations through Zapier.

Asana is free for up to 15 users and paid plans start at $10.99/user/month with a 30-day free trial period.

Gain is a collaboration and client approval tool that intends to assist with marketing content production. If you have been struggling with stakeholder approvals and input in your projects, this might be your solution.

After trying the tool, my favorite part is in the content detail view. When you are looking at a design, there is an option on the right panel to view the activity. This is a window that allows for your team to leave comments and will display, highlighted, approval comments to avoid confusion.

If you just want to follow up on your approvals and remove the other noise, you can click on an approval section to focus your conversation and see the stages in the approval workflow.

Gain lets you upload content from products like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and importing content from file sharing sites like Dropbox or Google Drive.

Gain is priced at $99/month for the first 10 users. $10 per user after that, and offers a 14-day free trial