Best Project Management Software 2021

Read our in-depth product reviews to discover the best project management software for your business.

Highest Rated Project Management Software

Project management software helps project managers and employees organize, schedule, and budget their projects more efficiently. Features found in project management software include customizable Scrum & Kanban boards, resource planning tools, and reporting.

Asana
Rating: 95
Starting Price: $9.99 per month

Asana is a cloud-based project management software system that helps companies assign, prioritize, and manage tasks across teams. Used by organizations like Pinterest, NASA, Spotify, and Airbnb, Asana offers a wide range of customizable options and features—more functionality than most teams will need—but enables users to pick and choose which features they prefer to utilize in order to increase productivity and create the most effective workflow for their needs.

Pros:
  • Excels at breaking down complex projects into actionable tasks and subtasks
  • Dashboards help users visualize progress and prioritize tasks that matter most
  • Organizes projects into Kanban-style boards or linear lists
  • Provides quick-start templates as well as the option to create your own templates
Cons:
  • Offline access only available on mobile apps; no desktop app or installed version available
  • Currently there is no way to convert a list into a board, or a board into a list, though this may be developed in the future
  • User interface could use some improvements. For example, pressing "Enter" creates a new task even if you didn't mean to do so
Deputy
Rating: 95
Starting Price: $2 per month

Deputy is a sophisticated shift scheduling and attendance tracking software with a comprehensive range of features. The software helps simplify employee management and staff communication through dedicated desktop and mobile applications. Officially launched in 2008, over 70,000 businesses currently use the company across the globe including Nike, McDonald's, and Amazon.

Pros:
  • Very popular workforce management system, used by over 90,000 businesses globally
  • Provides flexibility in managing schedules, timesheets, and communications through its mobile app
  • Stress Management capabilities enable you to identify employees who are at risk of burnout
Cons:
  • Can come with a bit of a learning curve, for both admins and employees
  • Task management capabilities are somewhat limited and have the potential to be improved
Trello
Rating: 92
Starting Price: Free

Trello is a popular project management tool that enables teams to organize projects, break them down into manageable tasks, assign deadlines, and track projects in a visually appealing, easy-to-use drag-and-drop user interface. Since Trello connects to other apps in your workflow, such as Slack, Google Drive, and Jira, you can effectively communicate and collaborate throughout every stage of your projects, from start to finish.

Pros:
  • Create unlimited number of boards to track individual and team-wide projects
  • Attach files to cards to track progress of projects
  • Easy drag-and-drop functionality makes it easy to update the status of projects in real time
  • Cloud-based boards are accessible anywhere you have an Internet connection
Cons:
  • No built-in time tracking, though it is available through third-party tools and power-ups
  • Boards with a large number of cards may load slowly
  • Deleted cards cannot be recovered if you accidentally delete them
Jira
Rating: 86
Starting Price: $10 per month

Jira Software is a powerful project management tool designed for Agile software development teams. Launched in 2003, Jira Software is primarily used by software development teams, and it's one of the most popular project management systems in technology companies. Incorporating customizable Scrum and Kanban boards, users can plan and organize tasks at a project level, set priorities for each task, and collaborate with team members. Teams can also establish processes by building custom workflow maps, which helps to standardize workflows across projects.

Pros:
  • Popular tool for tech teams to manage and prioritize their backlogs
  • Makes it easy to set due dates and priorities for tasks, and identify upcoming tasks that need to be completed
  • Dashboards can be standardized across teams to provide a high level overview of project statuses
Cons:
  • Can get expensive if you have many users
  • Steep learning curve for new users, and even experienced users may not be familiar with all of the nuances to the system, which may be needed in order to fully leverage its rich capabilities
ProofHub
Rating: 77
Starting Price: $89 per month

Founded in 2011, ProofHub is an online project management and collaboration tool used by over 85,000 teams globally including Disney, Netflix, and Nike. The software is an all-in-one project management system that provides a centralized tool for teams to manage the entire lifecycle of a project. In addition, the software includes unique functionality called "Proofing", which enables teams to collaboratively edit various types of content, such as images, which is helpful functionality for both design and marketing teams.

Pros:
  • Centralized workspace where teams and clients can collaborate and manage projects
  • "Proofing" tool helps streamline the review process and facilitate collaboration for various content types
  • Includes time tracking and resource planning capabilities
Cons:
  • The software can be slow when many users are uploading and managing files
  • Gantt chart functionality can be cumbersome to use
  • Lacks budgeting tools

Other Top Project Management Software

There are several other software solutions that help improve your project management. Below are two solutions used for internal communication and note taking.

Slack
Rating: 96
Starting Price: Free

Though Slack isn't a project management system on its own, it can be a powerful tool to help teams collaborate more closely on projects, and can serve as an excellent supplement to your project management system. By facilitating more collaboration within the team, team members will be able to quickly tackle any roadblocks that may prevent them from delivering their work on time. In addition, Slack integrates with most major project management systems, which makes it a powerful collaboration tool that every team should consider using.

Pros:
  • Chat channels help compartmentalize topics of discussion and make communications more efficient, particularly in organizations that have many teams
  • Powerful integrations with more than 1,000 applications, including Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Trello, and Jira
  • Built-in phone calls, video chat, and screen sharing features
Cons:
  • Occasionally has availability issues that prevent users from accessing the app
  • Slack is priced per active team member, so it can get expensive if you have a large team
Evernote
Rating: 78
Starting Price: $7.99 per month

Evernote is a powerful cloud-based note-taking tool designed for organizing information. The software allows you to create notes with different formats (text, images, web pages, audio, etc.), organize this information using notebooks or tags, and easily find any piece of content again through the search field. Evernote can be used to manage aspects of your personal and professional life. For example, you can add meeting agendas, set reminders, and collaborate with team members or simply store your daily shopping lists and recipes. All information is stored in the cloud, so you can utilize a range of native apps (desktop, iOS, Android) to upload and access notes from any location.

Pros:
  • Provides flexibility to create notes with different formats (text, images, PDFs, audio)
  • Excellent web clipping tool
  • Robust search functionality enables you to find text within images
  • Syncs across multiple devices (desktop, mobile, tablet)
Cons:
  • Free plan has limited functionality
  • No ability to password protect notes or notebooks

Project Management Software FAQs

Project management software helps businesses grow by improving productivity, fostering team collaboration, and increasing production transparency. Project management tools have time tracking and organizational capabilities to keep teams goal-oriented, accountable, and efficient.

Project management software typically costs $5 to $90 per month depending on the number of users & projects, and storage capacity. Time tracking software costs $1.50 to $9 per month depending on the number of users.

The best project management software for you will depend on your feature preferences. If your main goal is to monitor employee productivity, time tracking solutions like TimeCamp are useful. If project organization and task management is paramount, Trello and Asana are ideal options. If you require an all-in-one system to manage the entire life cycle of your project, consider testing a solution like ProofHub.

Trello is the most popular project management software used by over 3.5 million users. Toggl is the most popular time tracking solution used by over 1.5 million users.

Here's the most popular types of features in project management software:

  • Customizable Kanban and Scrum boards
  • Attendance tracking
  • Task management tools
  • Activity tracking
  • Client invoicing
  • Interactive dashboards
  • Payroll management
  • Reporting and analytics
  • Bug and issue tracking
  • Resource planning tools
  • Third-party software integration
  • Note-taking tool
  • Cloud-based platform

Project Management Research & Advice