Monday.com is a Mac-friendly Microsoft Project alternative that offers unlimited boards (for projects, data, clients, et cetera) even if you are only using the freemium account offer. Monday.com provides many of the features spotlighted on MS Project, like task lists, Gantt charts and timelines, communication features like comments and tagging, the ability for different stakeholders to coauthor items in real-time, reporting and analysis functions, and time tracking.

One thing users will appreciate is monday.com’s flexibility, as everything is customizable, adjustable, and editable. Flexible Kanban boards and columns accommodate different data types: status, text, people, timeline, dates, tags, numbers, and more. The text column, for example, can be renamed to encapsulate whatever data is housed there, be it general notes, addresses or names, or keywords.

Monday.com excels with their Standard pricing plan (and above), specifically, which opens up Gantt charts, workflow automations, and multi-project dashboards. This isn’t necessarily a huge downside to such a versatile and intuitive tool but it’s definitely something to consider before diving in.

Monday.com integrates with hundreds of third-party apps, like Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Dropbox, Slack, Zoom, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Gmail, LinkedIn, OneDrive, Adobe Creative Cloud, and more with a paid account through Zapier.

monday.com costs from $6/user/month and comes with a free 14-day trial. They offer a free plan for up to 2 users.

Zoho Projects is an award-winning project management software and collaboration tool from Zoho. It offers flexibility and customization options to suit the needs of traditional project managers as well as agile teams. Zoho Projects supports multiple platforms including Mac. Some of the core features include a Gantt chart maker, kanban board, inbuilt chat, and a highly collaborative social feed.

Zoho Projects also packs features that help managers such as resource utilization charts, task automation features, customizable dashboards, baseline, critical path and budgeting features. It integrates with other first-party Zoho software for sales, CRM, HR, marketing, and IT (to name a few). This makes them great for scalability because you can add additional service packages as you grow.

Users can generate and share Gantt charts as PDFs. The tasks in Projects can be exported to XLS or CSV. Zoho Projects also supports importing Microsoft Project MPP files.

The interface and modules are highly customizable. All aspects of the UI from theme colors to arrangement and visibility of the various modules can be changed to suit a user’s preferences. Zoho projects also offer free onboarding for its customers and a comprehensive online help guide for all users.

Being part of the Zoho’s ecosystem allows Projects to connect to several of Zoho’s own services such as Zoho CRM, Zoho Desk and Zoho’s finance suite. The new Zoho marketplace allows for several 3rd party integrations as well including iCal sync, Google integrations and much more.

Pricing starts from $4/user/month billed annually. Also has a freemium version upto 3 users for 2 projects No credit card information required.

MindGenius is a mind mapping tool that has project management features like project timeline, kanban boards, and reporting. Their platform intends to give you an all-encompassing experience. First, by having you do your mind maps and generate ideas with your team. Then, by making the results of that mind mapping exercise available to you as you build your project plan.

The platform is designed to support small to medium size projects. It has the basic features of any other project management platform, including collaboration. The way collaboration works is through an integrated online chat where you can mention teammates on the tasks you want them to chime into.

MindGenius integrates with Microsoft Office 365, Google Drive, and Dropbox through their MindGenius 20 product.

MindGenius has both an online subscription model and a perpetual license plan. Pricing starts at $16/month and offers a free trial.

ProjectManager combines Gantt chart functionality with many other project views—kanban boards, spreadsheets, task lists, and more—to support the needs of hybrid teams. While the project manager may prefer the Gantt view to create a detailed work breakdown structure, others team members can work in the same project through a simple task list.

Offering key project management features such as collaboration tools, reporting capabilities, and to-do lists, ProjectManager is simple enough for anyone to use, yet powerful enough for managers to make data-driven decisions and for businesses to manage projects of all levels of complexity. The tool integrates with Office 365, Jira, Slack, and Google Drive, with even more connections available through Zapier.

Gantt charts allow users to drag-and-drop to adjust deadlines, add and visualize dependencies, and set specific milestones. Users can import Gantt charts to and from other tools (including .mpp files from MS Project) to get projects up and running quickly. The tool also allows users to create reports in one click, view progress bars for quick project health checks, and create PDF versions and shareable links.

ProjectManager offers users a 30-day free trial with no credit card required. After the trial, plans cost from $14/user/month or $11.50/user/month when billed annually. The tool also has a freemium plan for up to 3 users.

Hive is a robust tool for project management, collaboration, and flexible task coordination that works with MacOS and iOS. It lets users organize projects in a Gantt chart, Kanban board, table, or calendar, and also easily switch between each layout, depending on the communication style they prefer. Updates are reflected across all project views so the whole team is informed no matter what option they use.

Hive enables users to easily collaborate by sending messages directly to individuals or groups. Need to share a document? Upload it directly to a task, project, or message. Hive’s Forms feature eliminates constant emails and collects all necessary information through simple fill-in-the-blanks.

It’s worth noting that if you’re switching to Hive from another tool, you can import tasks from tools including Asana, Trello, Basecamp, Smartsheet, and a few others.

Hive integrates with Google Drive, Salesforce, Jira, Dropbox, Slack, Zoom, One Drive, Box, and more than one thousand other tools through Zapier.

Hive costs from $12/user/month.

Instagantt is an online Gantt chart software for project management. Among the features that make it a good tool is a timeline, kanban boards, task management, and resource workload. A standout user experience element is the ability to drag and drop elements in the timeline to build your project schedule.

Instagantt's ability to give you information about your team's workload made it stand out for me. The way they present the information makes it easy for you to see what your team is assigned to. Their interface is full of colors that visually separate the different projects your team is handling. This, in turn, allows you to make decisions on allocation and hiring.

The platform has a plugin that integrates with Asana. Further, it will allow you to import projects from that tool into Instagantt with minimum editing required. Besides import, the integration will handle two-way sync. This way, your team will have the latest information always, independently from the platform and software they are using to access it.

Instagantt paying plans start at $5/user/month and offer a 7-day trial.

Project Plan 365 is a project management tool made for Apple devices (macOS and iOS) that can open, edit and save in .mpp (Microsoft's native file format for MS Project plans). The tool is compatible with the latest version of the MPP file format, as well as several previous versions.

Project Plan 365 looks and feels like MS Project and supports all standard views including Gantt Chart, Task Sheet, Network Diagram, Project Calendar, Task Usage, Resource Usage, Team Planner, and more. Project Plan 365 supports 12 different languages and over 100 different currencies.

Another great feature is the virtual project management assistant Erix AI. Erix is an AI chatbot that simultaneously provides in-app assistance for troubleshooting, a wiki database of project management definitions and knowledge, and Q&A assistance on your current projects. For example, you could ask it what the total cost of a project is or when a current project is expected to finish.

Project Plan 365 offers a Free Viewer for Microsoft Project MPP files and is integrated with all major cloud providers such as Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, and SharePoint Online.

Project Plan 365 costs from $9.99/month and offers a 30-day free trial.

GanttPRO is a web-based project management tool for Mac users who need the same features that MS Project offers. It features a Gantt chart-based approach with a minimalist interface that gives users a similar experience to actually working in MS Project but with a more modern interface.

GanttPRO lets you create projects with drag and drop features for adding new tasks, creating dependencies, assigning resources, tracking progress, managing dates, and, if needed, changing data in real time.

Beyond the Gantt charts, GanttPRO offers a board view and enables team communication and collaboration through comments, attachments, real-time notifications, and mentions. In terms of resource management, users can track the performance of team members, as well as a color-coded way to see whether someone is overloaded or available for more work.

GanttPRO offers support information such as a learning center, video tutorials, easy-to-follow onboarding, and a dedicated customer service manager. Access to these features is unlimited and is included in every plan, even the free trial.

GanttPRO integrates with JIRA Cloud but does not list any other native third-party connections.

Basic plans for 1 user start at $7.99/month if billed annually.

ClickUp can handle all of the project management basics that you would expect from MS Project and Microsoft Project Server, like task dependencies, an Agile board view, workload stats, drag-and-drop organization, bulk rescheduling, and dynamic tables. ClickUp is one of the more affordable MS project alternatives, with the freemium plan being quite generous (no user limit) and the paid plan starting at just $5 per user per month.

ClickUp is special in that its freemium plan doesn’t limit the number of users you can include on your account, which makes it the best free plan for project management software that works on Mac. Additionally, ClickUp stands out as a very media-friendly option for project management teams, allowing integration with video and streaming services, free-form mind map creation, built-in screen recording, and an interactive map to track work being done globally.

ClickUp’s feature list is expansive and, at times, a bit unfocused—trying to do too much, a jack-of-all-trades. Mastering everything ClickUp has to offer would be a huge time commitment and teams who don’t need all of the bells and whistles might find navigation and training quite tiresome. Is “too many features” really a con? I’ll leave that up to you to decide.

ClickUp integrates with thousands of third-party apps through a paid plan with Zapier and includes free native connections with plenty of tools, as well. Native integrations include Slack, Github, Gitlab, Toggl, Harvest, Google Drive, Dropbox, Outlook, Google Calendar, YouTube, Zoom, Zendesk, Microsoft Teams, Box, Clockify, and many more.

ClickUp costs from $5/user/month and offers a freemium account for up to 5 spaces and 100 custom fields. They also offer a 30-day refund policy if you upgrade to a paid plan and are unsatisfied. They also have an iPhone app.

Smartsheet is a spreadsheet-like project management tool that is also available for Apple users. It has won a few awards for quickly becoming a favorite business app. It’s a nice project management software for mac if you’re comfortable working in Excel but wants a break from complicated formulas—Smartsheet performs all the calculations for you across multiple sheets. You can also add customized brand logos and set color themes for individual projects.

If you’re looking for an application that can open Projects, and don’t need to work within the software, then I’d recommend Smartsheets. Users can import MS Project files and work on them within the software. This is an excellent option for users who want to stay on Mac, need to send and receive MS Project files for their professional work, and don’t care whether or not they work within MS Project. You can export the file as an MS Project when you’re done working. Nobody will ever know you used Smartsheet. It can also be a great planner for Mac, too.

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. The Critical Path feature highlights all the tasks which directly impact your project completion date to keep an eye on important milestones. Reporting is a strong feature of this tool, with editable summary reports that you can easily export to Excel.

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.

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