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10 Best Online Project Management Tools Of 2023

Best Online Project Management Tools Shortlist

  1. 1. monday.com — Best for its capacity to be customized for almost any workflow.
  2. 2. Wrike — Best agile project management tool
  3. 3. ClickUp — Best project management tool for its comprehensive free plan to test features.
  4. 4. Smartsheet — Best for flexibility & customizability
  5. 5. Height — Best project management tool with advanced, calendar-based productivity features
  6. 6. Ravetree — Best with resource and client management tools
  7. 7. Kintone — Best management platform for its 100+ workflow templates to help you start faster.
  8. 8. Project.co — Best for its free collaborator accounts
  9. 9. Basecamp — Best for a simple, straightforward user interface
  10. 10. Hub Planner — Best for team scheduling, capacity planning, & requesting work

In a world where automation and artificial intelligence are taking over simple tasks, project management tools follow suit. Project management software already represents 35% of the sales in the business process management market and is expected to grow as more companies look to automate the project management function.

Project management tools live at the center of your project team operations. Therefore, choosing the right tool is crucial to support the execution of your project plan. You want to pick a tool that promotes team collaboration, helps you assign tasks, tracks progress in a project dashboard, and automates repetitive tasks.

Overview Of The 10 Best Project Management Tools

Go through each tool and its detailed overview and learn what they do best. Feel free to check out how I picked the software on this list.

1

monday.com

Best for its capacity to be customized for almost any workflow.

monday.com work management is one of the top project management platforms on the market.

Why I picked monday.com: Their tool is hyper-customizable, has loads of features, and offers colorful boards that will make your project plans easier to read. Although it is a visually complex tool, it has tons of videos and training tutorials to help you master its different features. Additionally, if you are looking for a more focused product, monday.com offers different options. These include a product for marketers, development teams, sales teams (CRM), and project teams. You can look at all of them by going to the products menu option on their website.

Finally, it's important to mention that the wide range of features and customization might make it challenging for you to set up the product and train your team at first. However, once you get over that hump, I promise you'll see the benefits of having this product and how efficient it can make you and your team.

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, Asana, Jira, GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Typeform, and thousands more, accessible via Zapier.

You can use monday.com regardless of the size of your team. There's a free version that you can try for as long as you want.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.7 8065

14-day free trial + freemium plan available

From $8/user/month (billed annually, min 3 seats)

2

Wrike

Best agile project management tool

Wrike’s software features award-winning, easy-to-use project management tools that are suitable for teams of five or more. It’s a collection of the most configurable project management tools, so users can customize workflows, dashboards, reports, request forms, and more.

Why I picked Wrike: The tool enables you to switch between Kanban boards, interactive drag-and-drop Gantt charts, and traditional workload views to visualize priorities in the way that works best for you. For advanced insights, users can access performance reporting tools, resource management and allocation, and more.

Wrike has an easy-to-use, intuitive navigation with distinct spaces, folders, and tasks. You can toggle between the home screen and timesheets, dashboards, calendars, reports, and an activity stream for notifications and messages. It also offers access to a variety of templates for common organizational processes.

Wrike Standout Features & Integrations

Features include task lists, subtasks, schedules, shared workflows, file sharing, proofing, cross-tagging, approvals, and real-time communication and collaboration.

Integrations. Wrike has over 400 pre-built integrations, including integrations with most popular file management software from Microsoft, Google, and Dropbox, as well as with sales and marketing software from Salesforce and Marketo.

Consider Wrike if you are interested in having control over resources and budget, as well as agile supporting features.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.2 2544

Free plan available

From $9.80/user/month

3

ClickUp

Best project management tool for its comprehensive free plan to test features.

ClickUp is a project management tool with powerful features for managing and completing all your team's projects on one platform.

Why I picked ClickUp: You can plan projects, schedule tasks, and manage resources in a centralized workspace, as well as communicate and collaborate with team members and guests. The platform is visually easy on the eye despite the elevated number of features. However, I'll make it even easier for you to learn.

The content hierarchy for this platform is Workspace > Spaces > Folders > Lists > Tasks > Subtasks. Now, you can focus on learning about tasks and how to filter, sort, search for, easily reorder, and view tasks in the manner most convenient for the team.

ClickUp has close to a dozen different task views, including timeline, table, box, and board. In addition, their collaboration features focus on interactive chats, wiki-type collaborative documents, and whiteboards. Your project team can comment on documents and tasks, assign comments, and chat with other team members easily.

Finally, its reporting features allow you to create custom dashboards, as well as six built-in report types for team reporting.

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 connections to Slack, G Suite, Jira software, Dropbox, and many more tools, as well as over 1,000+ integrations through Zapier.

Check out ClickUps free plan, which lets you use all features for a limited time and really know if it's the best solution for you and your team.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.7 4135

Freemium plan available

From $9/user/month

4

Smartsheet

Best for flexibility & customizability

Smartsheet is a spreadsheet-like project management tool that is a nice project management software if you’re comfortable working in Excel but want a break from complicated formulas.

Why I picked Smartsheet: It offers a white-label product where you can add customized brand logos and set color themes for individual projects. 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 performs all the calculations for you across multiple sheets. 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 Standout Features & Integrations

Features include detailed history logs, activity logs, automated alerts, reminders, status reports, 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.

Check out our in-depth Smartsheet review if you want a deep dive into the tool or to watch our short tutorial video of some basic features.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.4 7399

Freemium version available

From $7/user/month

5

Height

Best project management tool with advanced, calendar-based productivity features

Height is an online project management tool that allows teams to manage their projects in a collaborative environment. It provides a single platform where everyone can stay on top of their tasks, track progress and ensure their goals are met.

Why I picked Height: It makes collaboration amongst team members much simpler by assigning task labels and tags to categorize tasks under specific categories. Using their task attributes feature, you can create custom, repeatable tasks and easily track progress. You can also break down complex projects into smaller tasks, set deadlines, and assign them to different team members.

Additionally, Height's built-in calendar is an all-in-one productivity assistant. You can create calendars for specific projects and events, and add to-dos, notes, reminders, and contacts for quick referencing and improved organization. It also includes various filtering options that help users obtain a more accurate bird’s eye view of their workflow to see where they’re overbooked or running behind schedule.

Height Standout Features & Integrations

Features include task tracking, resource management, communication tools, analytics, and reporting.

Integrations include Discord, Figma, Fivetran, Git Hub & Git Lab, Notion, Sentry, Slab, Slack, and Zendesk. It uses industry-standard encryption protocols, ensuring that all user data and communications are protected.

Height has Windows and macOS apps to help you access the software from any device through native-built software. If you want to try it out, it has a free version with unlimited members and tasks.

30-day free trial available

From $8.50/user/month

6

Ravetree

Best with resource and client management tools

Ravetree is a comprehensive work management platform that combines project management with resource planning and client management tools.

Why I picked Ravetree: Teams can use the software to develop project plans, which can then be saved to use again for future initiatives. Work is broken down into tasks with detailed action item checklists, and assigned to individual contributors. Every team member will be notified about their upcoming tasks, deadlines, and projects, helping keep everyone on-task and accountable.

In addition to project management, the software offers resource planning features like custom working hours, time off requests, and utilization timeline views. Users can break down their estimates vs time spent on specific projects and tasks, and use time tracking data to inform their future planning. The software also has a built-in CRM to store contact data for clients, and client portals can be configured, reducing the need to switch between systems to update customers on project progress.

Ravetree Standout Features & Integrations

Features include Kanban boards, timeline and calendar views, repeating tasks, dependencies, request forms, client portals, CRM, resource planning, billing and invoicing, budget management, and file management.

Integrations include Box, Dropbox, Facebook, HubSpot, Instagram, Github, Google Drive, Gmail, OneDrive, Outlook, QuickBooks, and Stripe.

You can give Ravetree a try for 7 days free of charge. If you like it, paid plans start from $29/user/month.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.1 23

7-day free trial

From $29/user/month

7

Kintone

Best management platform for its 100+ workflow templates to help you start faster.

Kintone is a customizable project planning platform used by teams at Volvo Trucks North America, Japan Airlines, Whole Foods, 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 for data management, business processes, and workflows.

Kintone lets you build agile project management apps by dragging and dropping elements that you want to see onto the page: rich text fields, date fields, drop-down menus, and more. Your agile project management solution can look and work however you want it to. Moreover, what makes Kintone particularly great for agile project management is that it empowers project managers to track all facets of their project, from individual tasks and project data to workflows and communication—and then use their findings to rapidly improve their processes as they go.

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.

There are so many ways to customize Kintone that it can be hard to know where to start. Read the starter blog “What Can You Build with Kintone?” or watch Creating an App from Scratch for a quick look at how the drag-and-drop builder works.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.6 197

30-day free trial

From $24/user/month

8

Project.co

Best for its free collaborator accounts

Project.co is a user-friendly, all-in-one project management solution tailored for team collaboration and communication.

Why I picked Project.co: You can create and work on different projects simultaneously, create task lists and timelines, create schedules, as well as assign role-based permissions. With this online project management solution, active projects can be viewed in a variety of ways, including in calendar view, list view, scheduler view, and via Kanban board.

Project.co also comes with a project overview function that allows your team to collaborate and communicate efficiently with clients. This will help ensure that all stakeholders are always involved with every aspect of project development, from the planning stage to execution and delivery. Additionally, it features a discussion page, which stores all communications between team members and clients. This will help secure a historical record of project development data, which can be useful for future reference.

Project.co Standout Features & Integrations

Features include four different views (list, calendar, Kanban, and scheduler), in-app chat, notes, recurring tasks, time management, and payment capabilities supporting multiple currencies.

Integrations only include those you can make through Zapier, which is over 1000 apps. However, it will require you to have a paid account on Zapier.

In addition, the software enables you to set role-specific access to help with upholding quality standards, confidentiality, and data protection. You can test it out using its free forever version.

Free forever, for up to five users and 10 active projects.

Plans start at $8/user/month (billed annually)

9

Basecamp

Best for a simple, straightforward user interface

Basecamp is an online project management tool that can be used to plan and manage multiple projects, assign tasks, track progress, and facilitate team collaboration.

Why I picked Basecamp: What stands out most about this solution is its simplicity. It has many features of more complex systems, but the interface is friendly and easy to navigate. Users can manage their documents and files in the platform, keep up with project information from a shared message board, and tick off to-do lists to work towards their bigger objectives.

A card-style board keeps all projects visible and organized. Communication and collaboration can happen at the project level to keep team members aligned and to keep work consolidated. Deadlines can be set for tasks and projects, and managed with the software's schedule feature.

Basecamp Standout Features & Integrations

Features include per-project messaging and chat, announcements, progress board, to-do lists, document management, deadlines and scheduling, and reports.

Integrations include Clockify, Field Trip, Ganttify, Mr.ToDo, Project Buddy, Retool, TaskClone, Toggl, Unito.io, and Zoho. A paid Zapier account can unlock additional integrations.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.1 5034

30-day free trial

From $15/user/month (billed annually)

10

Hub Planner

Best for team scheduling, capacity planning, & requesting work

Hub Planner is an online project management and scheduling software that helps businesses manage their teams and projects with easy-to-use timelines and workflows. 

Why I Picked Hub Planner: Hub Planner stands out as an excellent online project management tool thanks to its comprehensive resource management system, advanced scheduling capabilities, time tracking feature, collaboration tools, and customizability. Resource management in Hub Planner allows businesses to efficiently allocate resources, track availability, and schedule across multiple teams and projects.

Hub Planner's Gantt chart feature provides a visual representation of project tasks, dependencies, and milestones, making it easy to monitor progress and adjust schedules accordingly. Time tracking enables teams to record their hours and track progress more accurately, while collaboration features like team calendars, project messaging, and file sharing facilitate real-time collaboration and help teams stay up-to-date. Additionally, Hub Planner is highly customizable, allowing businesses to tailor the tool to their specific needs with custom fields, templates, and reports, among other features. 

Hub Planner Standout Features & Integrations

Features include resource management, PTO planning, timesheets, reporting, skills matching, task management, templates, drag and drop scheduler, project budgets, approval flow, smart scheduler, and third-party integrations/add-ons.

Integrations include DIY options via their Hub Planner API and webhook. Or, open an account with Zapier for more options (may incur an additional cost). 

Overall, Hub Planner's robust features and flexibility make it a great choice for businesses looking for an online project management tool that can handle complex projects and teams.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.2 16

30-day free trial

From $7/user/month (billed annually)

Need expert help selecting the right Project Management Software?

We’ve joined up with Crozdesk.com to give all our readers (yes, you!) access to Crozdesk’s software advisors. Just use the form below to share your needs, and they will contact you at no cost or commitment. You will then be matched and connected to a shortlist of vendors that best fit your company and you can access exclusive software discounts!

The Best Project Management Tools Comparison Chart

Nothing like a nice table with summarized information on what we just discussed.

Tool Free Option Price
1
monday.com

Best for its capacity to be customized for almost any workflow.

14-day free trial + freemium plan available

From $8/user/month (billed annually, min 3 seats) Visit Website
2
Wrike

Best agile project management tool

Free plan available

From $9.80/user/month Visit Website
3
ClickUp

Best project management tool for its comprehensive free plan to test features.

Freemium plan available

From $9/user/month Visit Website
4
Smartsheet

Best for flexibility & customizability

Freemium version available

From $7/user/month Visit Website
5
Height

Best project management tool with advanced, calendar-based productivity features

30-day free trial available

From $8.50/user/month Visit Website
6
Ravetree

Best with resource and client management tools

7-day free trial

From $29/user/month Visit Website
7
Kintone

Best management platform for its 100+ workflow templates to help you start faster.

30-day free trial

From $24/user/month Visit Website
8
Project.co

Best for its free collaborator accounts

Free forever, for up to five users and 10 active projects.

Plans start at $8/user/month (billed annually) Visit Website
9
Basecamp

Best for a simple, straightforward user interface

30-day free trial

From $15/user/month (billed annually) Visit Website
10
Hub Planner

Best for team scheduling, capacity planning, & requesting work

30-day free trial

From $7/user/month (billed annually) Visit Website

Other Options

This list includes other tools I considered in my final selection, but did not make it to the top 10. Great to look into if you are looking for more options.

  1. Forecast

    Best for managing your projects, resources, and finances in one

  2. Paymo

    Best project management tool for small & medium teams

  3. MeisterTask

    Best project management tool for agile teams

  4. Hubstaff

    Best free online project management tool

  5. Hive

    Best project management tool for team communication and collaboration

  6. KeepSolid Goals

    Best project tracking tool with roadmap and goal map functionality.

  7. FunctionFox

    Best project management tool for creative teams and agencies

  8. ProWorkflow

    Project planning and workflow platform that helps you assign staff, track time or reschedule projects, quote and invoice your clients.

  9. nutcache

    Project management tool with mobile time tracking functionality and capable of processing invoices.

  10. GoodDay

    Best for detailed task and action tracking

How I Picked The Best Project Management Tools

I’ve researched, reviewed and selected some of the most popular project management tools. To decide which tools to feature in this list, I weighed a variety of key factors, including the following criteria.

User Interface (UI)

I look at the tool's interface design and if it's easy on the eye. Some interfaces can become crowded as they increase the number of features. However, you need a tool that can help you quickly see relevant information, like project dependencies or overdue tasks.

Usability

I analyze how easy it is to learn and navigate the app. Does the company offer good tech support, user support, tutorials, and training? Your team needs a tool that can help them do many things intuitively, like track time and update task status. This criterion includes the online version of the app, both for desktop and mobile app (if available).

Integrations

This one I use to look at all the ways in which a tool can expand its capabilities. Is it easy to connect with other tools that can fill any gaps in the software, such as time tracking software, Gantt chart software, workflow management tools, and more? I also look at the different types of integrations, including pre-built, through third-party software, and custom integrations using an API.

Pricing

I look at the pricing details, features it includes, and tiers (if any). In addition, I research the free trials or free versions of the software you can use to further support your decision-making.

Project Management Tool FAQs

Find answers to common questions other people ask about this topic.

What's Next?

If you are just getting started in project management, I recommend you read our article on how to become a digital PM. Otherwise, why not refresh your memory by reading the common types of project constraints and how to manage them?

Related tool lists:

Stay updated with the latest tricks, tips, project management tools, and techniques that leading project managers are using today—subscribe to the DPM newsletter to get ongoing training, templates, and mentorship to grow your career.

By Ben Aston

I’m Ben Aston, a digital project manager and founder of thedpm.com. I've been in the industry for more than 20 years working in the UK at London’s top digital agencies including Dare, Wunderman, Lowe and DDB. I’ve delivered everything from film to CMS', games to advertising and eCRM to eCommerce sites. I’ve been fortunate enough to work across a wide range of great clients; automotive brands including Land Rover, Volkswagen and Honda; Utility brands including BT, British Gas and Exxon, FMCG brands such as Unilever, and consumer electronics brands including Sony. Ben's a Certified Scrum Master, PRINCE2 Practitioner and productivity nut.

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1 Comment

  • I used to use Asana and was about to use monday, before i went over to ClickUp. One of the deal breakers with Asana and monday, was the lack of a "native" desktop client. For an application that advanced and which I use all the time, it's just not acceptable having to open up a browse tab each time when using it. It has to be just one click away, like having it in the dock/taskbar. monday was also expensive. I was very happy when I started using ClickUp. It is one of the most feature rich alternatives out there, and they add new features all the time. I belive they will be the clear number 1 project manager in a few years. Thank you for this Article

    Reply