10 Best Project Planning Tools & Software In 2023

monday.com is a popular project management software that can easily handle basic and complicated projects. Users will find it easy to collaborate, keep track of progress, customize workflows, and analyze information within the platform.

With an emphasis on transparency and collaboration, monday.com is packed with features that let you do your tasks and work with others using the tools you love. View your data in various highly visual dashboard options, communicate easily within monday.com, and manage all your resources efficiently.

monday.com integrates with popular productivity tools such as Slack, Dropbox, Outlook, and so much more with the option to integrate without any code required.

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.

Mavenlink is a robust resource management software with advanced project planning tools for execution, project accounting, and project analysis. For those going all out, you can leverage their business intelligence and team collaboration modules for a complete project management experience in a single operating environment.

On top of this, it offers a system of dashboards, live time and expense tracking features, and a great documenting system. Drilling down into its key features, the BI suite module supplies built-in reports, custom reporting, trend analysis, data visualization, as well as data integration with other systems.

The software also provides more accounting tools than many others, with project costing, project and task budget management, real-time utilization and margin tracking, invoicing, rate cards, and robust integrations into back-end financial systems. It also has some good contextual collaboration features to communicate in both provide and public discussions around tasks, projects, and many other project objects.

Mavenlink operates its own integration platform (called M-Bridge) that lets you connect to other business apps like CRM, HCM, and financial software. On top of the M-Bridge platform, Mavelink provides several pre-built integrations with these tools: Expensify, G Suite, Xero, Salesforce, Netsuite, Jira, Hubspot, Slack, Concur, Dynamics 365, Qualtrics, Quickbooks, and Sage Intacct.

Mavenlink costs from $39/user/month and offers a free trial and demo.

Kintone is a customizable project planning platform used by teams at Volvo Trucks North America, Japan Airlines, Shiseido, and over 23,000 organizations worldwide. 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 apps can be customized for project management, sales CRM, customer databases, expense reports, shared to-do lists, equipment management, product feedback, and much more.

Apps can be built either from scratch, using templates, or from existing spreadsheets for data management, business processes, and workflow purposes. 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.

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, number fields with built-in calculations, spaces for attachments, user or group selection menus, related data from other apps, tables, and more. Your agile project management solution can look and work however you want it to.

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. Because the end-users are also the app designers, feedback loops are instant, continuous, and actionable.

There are so many ways to customize Kintone 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.

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.

Kintone costs $24/user/month with a minimum requirement of 5 users. They offer a 30-day free trial (no credit card required) and discounted prices for nonprofits and educators. Kintone’s team also offers a free custom app build as part of the free trial process.

Zoho Projects is an online project management solution that focuses on easy and effective planning, tracking, and collaboration. You can manage both simple and complex projects by splitting work items into milestones, tasklists, tasks and subtasks and viewing them as Kanban boards.

Zoho Projects lets you plan and schedule work with Gantt charts that have a drag and drop interface. You can set up baselines, compare multiple baselines, identify critical tasks, and create dependencies right from the Gantt chart. Zoho Projects comes with a workload allocation feature that lets you manage tasks and resources as well.

Your team can track project progress closely with numerous dashboards, charts and reports, communication tools, and collaborative documents. Zoho Projects also provides numerous features such as time tracking, budgeting, issue tracking, portfolio management, and automation capabilities.

Zoho Projects is great for scalability. You can start with their free plan and easily expand as you grow and need additional user spots or more advanced features. Even the uppermost plan is super affordable comparatively. You can also scale by integrating their other first-party platforms into your plan for sales, CRM, customer service, and so on.

Zoho Projects integrates with tools such as Google Drive, Google Calendar, Slack, Github, Bitbucket, and Dropbox. Access even more integrations through Zapier.

Zoho Projects costs from $4/user/month (billed annually) and offers a 10-day free trial. They have a free plan for up to 3 users.

Height is a project management tool that helps businesses of all sizes track and monitor the progress of their projects in real-time. It allows users to create and assign tasks, set deadlines, and track the progress of their team members, and includes additional tools for collaboration, document management, and reporting.

Height creates a custom URL for each project that you can easily share with other team members or stakeholders. Its task attributes feature lets you easily customize tasks to fit your team's needs and workflow better. Users can categorize tasks and select the applicable attributes that accurately represent the work done, including its priority level.

Height allows users to create customizable calendars and add regular tasks, events, deadlines, and reminders quickly and easily. With the intuitive drag-and-drop interface, users can easily view their entire schedule on one page and adjust recurring activities. Other features such as automated message warnings, user tagging, and message threads allow users to quickly find the conversations they need, even in large, busy channels. Advanced search functions let users comb through past messages they need, while custom pins allow users to pin essential topics or questions for further reference.

Height allows users to share screenshots and files with other chatroom members, create polls and surveys, and even create private rooms for confidential or sensitive conversations. Height’s powerful charting capabilities enable users to visualize data more effectively. Its Kanban view enables project participants to visualize and plan ongoing work while tracking progress in a manageable and comprehensible manner. Leveraging this tool allows team members in different parts of the world to have a central view of progress with minimal effort or technical knowledge.

Height integrates with popular platforms like Discord, Figma, Fivetran, Git Hub & Git Lab, Notion, Sentry, Slab, Slack, and Zendesk.

Pricing for Height starts at $8.50/user/month and includes a 30-day free trial. They also offer a freemium plan with limited features as well.

Forecast is a project planning tool that unites your task lists, resources, and financials in one AI-powered platform. Project managers can leverage Forecast’s workflow automation capabilities to create smart schedules, estimate timeframes and budgets, and populate timesheets instantly. Forecast is currently used in over 40 countries by an assortment of agencies, consulting companies, SMBs, and enterprises.

PMs can control the workflow by building out detailed task lists and flagging clear priorities. Task cards allow every team member to easily comment, share files, and register time spent. Everything related to the specific task appears in one place, including dependencies and subtasks. You can put together projects for any type of work: fixed price, time and material, or retainer.

Forecast’s AI learns from previous work and suggests the number of hours you normally register on similar tasks to help you log time faster. You can monitor time registrations from a team perspective and notify each member if they forget to enter something in. Time tracking utilization on a company-wide level is calculated for you for easy alerts, estimates, and reporting.

Forecast integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, iCloud Calendar, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Outlook, Harvest, Trello, Asana, GitLab, Github, and dozens more using a paid plan through Zapier. Higher-tier subscriptions include native integrations with Timelog, Xero, QuickBooks Online, JIRA, Azure DevOps, Salesforce, Okta, OneLogin, and Azure Active Directory.

Forecast costs from $29/user/month with a minimum of 10 users and offers a 14-day free trial.

Paymo is a project planning software for freelancers, small and medium teams, and businesses. It helps you plan projects and tasks, track your work time, and bill clients from the same platform and conveniently comes with a mobile app.

In Paymo, you can manage different workspaces and workflows, set recurring tasks, assign multiple users, and set deadlines and priorities. View all your tasks across all projects grouped by priority, progress, or due date. Even better, use the meta Kanban board to overview your team’s tasks grouped by workflow and user. Set task hours budget and get notifications for due dates or exceeded budgets.

Paymo’s Gantt chart schedules tasks automatically on the project timeline. Simply drag and drop tasks to create dependencies and make adjustments to lead & lag time while visualizing the critical path. It’s a great way to set milestones and monitor the progress of your project. If you’re instead focused on your team and HR, the resource scheduling and planning tools allow you to manage your resource allocation, view your resource capacity, create bookings, and schedule paid or unpaid leaves.

Paymo integrates with Google, Slack, Zapier, and more.

Free for freelancers and teams of up to 10 users. Paid plans start at $9.95/user/month. Paymo comes with a 15-day free trial.

Hive is a project management software built with an emphasis on workplace collaboration and it shows in its range of communication features. Within Hive users can collaborate with Hive Chat, comments, Hive Mail, multiple and shared inboxes, and project access.

Hive makes it easy to collaborate with team members in ways that work best for every person. Choose between the many ways to get your teammates' eyes on what you’re working on by sending them messages, tagging them in comments, alerting them about urgent tasks with card priority levels, and determining who gets to see your information.

Hive integrates with over a thousand third-party apps but requires a paid plan through Zapier to do so.

Hive costs from $12 per user per month and they offer free use of Hive for small teams with limited features. Enterprise pricing details are available upon request.

ProWorkflow makes it easy to work on the go, from anywhere, using any device. It’s a cloud-based project management software that serves as a platform for task tracking, time tracking, collaboration, and is a central source of information. It also comes with invoicing and performance and financial reporting features.

Because ProWorkflow is accessible on any device, making your teams more productive, allowing management to gain more insight, and everyone can communicate with teammates, clients, and contractors within one platform.

ProWorkflow integrates with tools such as Xero, Dropbox, Quickbooks Online, Quickbooks Desktop, and so much more through Zapier.

ProWorkflow costs from $20 per user per month with no user limit. ProWorkflow offers a free trial and more specific pricing details upon request.

Nutcache offers users an all-in-one solution for project management where users can organize their data the way they want, stay within budget with the help of alerts, approve time and expenses as well as bill and invoice within the platform, to increase productivity, gain visibility, and maintain control.

Keep your projects on budget with Nutcache. Organize your workspace by viewing your data in Gantt charts, stay on track by automating reminders and alerts, and track all of your team members’ time no matter where they’re working from.

Nutcache integrates with PayPal, Stripe, QuickBooks, Dynacom Accounting, 2Checkout, Authorized.Net, Gmail, Google Drive, Github, Slack, and hundreds more using a paid plan through Zapier.

Nutcache costs $6 per user per month and they offer a free plan with limited features for a maximum of 20 users. Their Enterprise plan starts at $12 per user per month.