10 Best Project Planning Software Of 2023

monday.com is a colorful, user-friendly, jack-of-all-trades project planning tool for modern teams. You’ll be able to plan, track, and deliver projects using hundreds of visual and customizable templates that make data more digestible. View data as a map, calendar, timeline, or kanban. I also love the ability to automate repetitive administrative tasks, like creating new lead entries according to incoming emails.

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.

Wrike is a project planning tool and is ideal for teams of five members to an unlimited number of members. Wrike offers tools for predicting and preventing delays, visualizing deadlines, and monitoring project progress. The tool is highly configurable, and allows users to customize workflows, dashboards, reports, and request forms.

Wrike’s interface is highly visual, and allows users to switch between Kanban boards, interactive drag-and-drop Gantt charts, and traditional workload views to understand priorities. Project planning capabilities include task lists, subtasks, schedules, file sharing, and real-time communication and collaboration.

Wrike includes a robust mobile application that allows users to update team members or upload files and photos. Users can switch between calendars, dashboards, and task lists, and keep an eye on notifications and messages. Wrike also has a dedicated help center with interactive training, videos, a ‘Getting Started’ guide, and a thriving community.

Wrike offers a host of pre-built templates, including a phased project template, which can help break a complex project into manageable chunks, as well as a simple project scheduling template. Real-time reporting helps project managers allocate resources and adjust workloads, and requests keep repetitive admin to a minimum.

Wrike includes over 400 pre-built native integrations, including integrations with the most popular file management software from Microsoft, Google, and Dropbox.

Wrike starts at $9.80/user/month and has a free version for up to five users. There is also a 14-day free trial for paid plans.

Height is a project planning software that provides a user-friendly platform for managing projects, tracking progress, and collaborating with team members. It offers an intuitive and responsive interface that allows users to create and manage unlimited projects, tasks, and subtasks.

Height is ideal for companies that handle multiple projects and need an organized way to track work progress. Users can also generate visual reports that showcase team performance, task completion rates, and an overview of all projects, giving essential insights that help decision-making. And pre-built project templates provide users with ready-to-use project outlines, eliminating the need for manual task creation. 

You can create SMART goals using the intuitive goal-setting feature. The software enables teams to set dependencies between tasks to complete each step correctly. Team members can communicate about project updates and discuss assignments in real time. This feature promotes team communication transparency and eliminates communication silos between organizational functions.

Height starts at $8.50/user/month and offers a 30-day free trial and a free plan with unlimited users.

Zoho Projects is a project planning and management solution that can support multiple projects of any scale or complexity. The platform has tools like Gantt charts, Kanban boards, portfolio dashboards, a built-in issue tracker, and a task automation system with blueprint functionality. The task automation with blueprint feature enables project managers and admins to map out their entire workflow, creating a visual flowchart representation.

Tasks and notifications can be automated, and approval criteria can be set for projects and tasks. The software also has collaboration tools like discussion boards, community forums, and real-time activity feeds. In addition to project planning , users can also benefit from in-depth reporting. The cloud-based software’s reporting tools allow project managers to generate detailed reports to keep track of various aspects of project performance and progress.

Pricing for Zoho Projects starts at $5 per user/month with a 10-day free trial included. A free plan is available for teams of no more than three users.

ProjectManager is a cloud-based project planning software that runs on both Windows and Mac computers with no downloads or complex installation needed. Gantt chart tools help users and your team plan, schedule, and update your projects in real-time. You can plan simple workflows or full Agile sprints with powerful Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and task lists.

ProjectManagement costs from $15/user/month and offers a 30-day free trial.

Hubstaff Tasks is a project management tool built to simplify project planning and team collaboration. With its Kanban interface, you can create multiple project stages, add tasks to them, and move tasks to different stages by dragging and dropping.

Aside from Kanban, the app has a Sprints feature that lets users organize their assigned tasks by the sprint in which they need to be done. Tasks can be moved to current or future sprints — or to the backlog for non-urgent to-dos.

Hubstaff Tasks includes a Roadmaps feature that allows you to view projects in Gantt chart form. Users can see all projects on a calendar, giving an overview of the team’s timeline.

The app also has daily stand-ups that your team can use to report progress updates and what they will be working on next. Project managers will receive a notification if team members report any task roadblocks.

Pricing for Hubstaff Tasks starts at $7 per user per month.

FunctionFox is a pretty great project planning tool, but it's an especially good fit for creative teams. It provides easy, visually intuitive project management tools like a simple online timesheet feature that helps you figure out if your billable and nonbillable hours on a project are within your estimates. You can also schedule project milestones, meetings, and actions—everything you'd need to plan out and then carry out projects.

FunctionFox costs from $5/user/month and offers a free demo.

LiquidPlanner is a cloud-based project management software that enables users to plan, collaborate on, and deliver projects of all sizes. The software uses a unique 'liquid planning' approach that considers the complexities and uncertainties of real-world projects to create more accurate plans and predictions.

Its forecasting engine helps users predict how long a project will take. This engine considers all project tasks and their dependencies and uses statistical analysis to generate a range of possible completion dates. The forecast can be refined by adjusting the input parameters, such as the estimated effort for each task or the project's expected duration.

Liquid Planner offers integrated time-tracking, which can be used to generate reports, helping users optimize their workflow and productivity. The resource leveling feature automatically schedules and reschedules tasks based on each team member's availability and workload, and ensures that no team member is overburdened with work.

Finally, the data customization feature allows users to choose which data points to display and create custom fields to track additional information. A user can track the number of hours worked on a project or the amount of money spent on materials.

Liquid Planner makes their API documentation available for teams who want to build custom integrations with their current digital ecosystem.

Pricing starts at $15 per user monthly.

Birdview PSA is a project management software that also provides resource and finance management tools. It helps you plan, track, and manage multiple projects and portfolios, making it a well-suited option for professional service companies. You can create project templates to speed up your planning process and set milestones to mark your progress. Both Gantt charts and Kanban boards are available for progress tracking.

The software has built-in resource planning tools, which you can use to assign team members to projects based on their availability, skills, and workload. Its resource forecasting feature helps you predict upcoming demand and identify potential bottlenecks in advance.

As for financial tracking, you can create budgets, monitor expenses, and generate financial reports to understand how money is allocated across projects. Time tracking and billing are also included, so you can track billable hours and invoice clients accordingly.

The software integrates with other tools including Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Project, Jira, Adobe Creative Cloud, MS Excel, Outlook, Hubspot, Salesforce, Oracle NetSuite, Gmail, Slack, Zoom, Github, Gitlab, HelpScout, HelpDocs, Olark, and other options for time tracking, design, ERP, and accounting software. You can also use their RESTful API to build additional integrations.

Paid plans start from $27 per user per month, when billed annually. A 12-day free trial is also available.

Easy Projects is an award-winning enterprise and portfolio project management platform. It is well suited for medium to large enterprise companies that require a highly scalable and configurable solution yet easy to adopt.

The software is built to plan and deliver on projects that have varying complexity levels, anywhere from simple tasks to more in-depth projects that involve multiple departments. With this in mind, Easy Projects promotes real-time collaboration between executives, project managers, stakeholders, and all other team members.

Their advanced reporting and business intelligence features help project managers and executives present and analyze large amounts of data in beautifully designed interactive reports and dashboards. In addition, resource loading reports provide a quick and easy way to visualize current and expected resource use, so bottlenecks can be avoided. Advanced capabilities include enterprise-grade security, flexible deployment options, and machine learning project forecasting.

Easy Projects integrates with over 2,000 business apps, including MS Outlook, Jira, Salesforce, Hubspot, and Adobe Creative Cloud.

Easy Projects offers pricing details upon request and a free 14-day trial.