Key Features & Benefits:

ClickUp happens to be one of the most powerful and versatile project management tools which can be used by engineering, marketing, design and any other type of team.

It has all the usual features anyone needs in a good project management software such as list and kanban views, subtasks, priorities, recurring tasks, granular due dates, reporting, chrome extension, mobile app, drag and drop functionality, time tracking and multiple integrations.

Additionally, it has quite a few advanced as well as proprietary features that you won’t find in the best known tools.

One of the most useful ClickUp features is the ability to visualize the same task dashboard in a board view, list view or calendar view with just a single click. This allows you to visualize your tasks from a different perspective and different team members can choose whichever view they prefer.

ClickUp allows you to have conversations tied to each task. It even allows you to convert a comment into a task and assign it so that to-dos don’t slip through the cracks.

You can also assign a single task to more than one person and set task dependencies for tasks where one person can begin only when another has wrapped up.

It has excellent reporting features that allow you to see the status of projects, specific tasks and how individual team members are performing.

ClickUp keeps releasing a new feature nearly every week and you can check them out here.

Free Version: Available
Free Trial: No
Pricing: $5/user per month for more than 100MB of file uploads and a few advanced reports

Key Features & Benefits:

Although it’s much more than a project management tool, Cyfe can be used to help you keep track of all your team’s tasks, project milestones and sprints via dashboards that visualize your task lists, calendars, Gantt charts, goal setting, progress tracking, reports, discussion threads and more.

As an all-in-one, versatile online business dashboard that can be made to show “at a glance” whatever users want across several parts of your company like sales, marketing, finance and support, Cyfe offers more than 50 customizable widgets.

So it’s easy to aggregate information and metrics from tools like Basecamp, Google Calendar, Google Sheets, Google Analytics, Salesforce, Quickbooks, Google Adwords, Zendesk, Eventbrite, LinkedIn and whatever else is relevant for your projects. You can also create your own custom widgets, and there’s a Zapier integration too.

Cyfe allows you to see data and action items scattered across all these tools and platforms in one single place. Being able to see it all in one central location is extremely convenient, and it also helps to add context and clarity to every task that your team does.

You don’t have to open up a new browser tab or application while working on your everyday tasks. You can directly jump from your task list to the dashboard that needs your attention, making you far more productive.

Cyfe even has a TV mode that allows you to display a custom dashboard on a large screen in your office – an excellent tool to keep your team motivated and in sync with targets.

If you’re not in the office, with the big screen in front of you, you can get mobile push notifications and SMS alerts whenever your metrics surpass the thresholds of your choosing.

Free Version: Available
Free Trial: No
Price: $19/month per user (Cyfe premium) for access to all features including unlimited dashboards and widgets.

Key Features & Benefits:

One of the most important things in any team is to be able to manage time efficiently.

To make sure that your targets will be met on time, you need to ensure that your team members are working on the right tasks and using their time productively. This is even more vital in a remote team where managers can’t keep supervising their employees without being intrusive.

That’s where a time tracking tool such as Time Doctor comes in.

Time Doctor is a desktop-based application that can be used to track the amount of time employees are spending on specific tasks and projects.

In addition to using Time Doctor as a standalone tool, you can also integrate it with several other project management tools such as Asana, Todoist, Trello, Jira, Basecamp, etc. That will allow you to track the amount of time spent on specific tasks within other tools.

Time Doctor has several reports such as timesheets, time-use reports, time spent on each project/task, etc. which can be customized for different parameters such as date ranges, a particular employee/ group of employees and so on.

This tool has several additional features that are useful for managing productivity, monitoring employees as well as keeping track of billable hours in businesses such as digital marketing agencies, design firms and so on.

Free Version: Not available
Free Trial: Available for 14 days without a credit card.
Pricing: Time Doctor costs $9.99/ user per month. Volume discounts are also available.

Key Features & Benefits:

Zoho Projects is a simple project management tool suited for solopreneurs as well as large and small teams.

Use this tool to plan your projects using task lists, subtasks and recurring tasks. Tasks can be created and assigned to individual users with details and due dates.

Map out project milestones with Gantt charts, coordinate with your team using feeds, view detailed reports on progress, manage and allocate resources (to dedicate hours more efficiently) and track employee work time with in-built time timesheets.

Collaborate effectively with your team members by using shared calendars, wiki pages for sharing resources, discussion forums and chat rooms.

Zoho Projects integrates with many other tools including Slack, GitHub, Zapier, and Dropbox. Integrations with Zoho Invoice and Zoho CRM make it easier for you to plan and execute your tasks across multiple platforms.

However, Zoho has a moderately steep learning curve compared to other tools.

Free Version: Available – for up to 2 projects and 5 users.
Free Trial: No.
Price: Tiered monthly pricing with unlimited projects and 25 users for Express ($40), Premium ($85), and Enterprise ($120) plans.

Key Features & Benefits:

Slack is one of the most commonly used internal communication tools. If you are currently using email, Skype, Google chat, Whatsapp or anything similar, you should certainly move to Slack.

The defining feature in Slack is that it allows you to have different channels for different topics/ projects.

Channels are intended for group discussions and you can invite specific team members to a particular channel. In addition, team members can also have one-to-one conversations with each other.

Slack can be integrated with multiple project management tools like Asana, Trello, Jira, ClickUp and so on.

For instance, the ClickUp integration allows you to create tasks in Slack. You can assign tasks and change task statuses from directly inside Slack.

Additionally, Slack can be integrated with dozens of tools such as Dropbox, Google Calendar, Salesforce, Zendesk, Skype, etc.

Slack has a ‘limited’ free version which is good enough for 90% of teams.

The paid versions have advanced features like unlimited message history, far more storage space, guest access with external partners, better search features, compliance features for enterprise accounts and more.

Free Version: Yes, with limited features.
Free Trial: For premium plans available on request.
Pricing: The Standard plan costs $6.67/user per month (paid annually) and $8 (paid monthly). The Plus plan costs $12.50/user per month (paid annually) and $15 (paid monthly).

Key Features & Benefits:

This is one of the best project management tools for enterprise teams like marketing and IT that require extensive collaboration.

It can help teams conquer the chaos of excessive email, redundant status meetings, and disconnected tools.

You can use Workfront to tap the right talent for each task, to automate tedious processes, and to streamline workflow.

The tool provides full project visibility, along with reporting features for project managers, stakeholders, and executives.

The application also enables you to execute work using effective methodologies like Waterfall and Agile, and a combination of the two.

Its project automation feature enables you to eliminate time-intensive project planning.

You can use its AI-enabled resource management feature to distribute work to teams, groups, or individuals based on priority, availability, and skill requirements.

Another good feature is the proofing tool that tracks comments, changes, and version updates in the same place, so your team can turn feedback into action items and deliver quality work on time.

Free Version: Not Available.
Free Trial: Only demo.
Pricing: Price available on request. Depends on user size.

Key Features & Benefits:

When you are looking to replace your conventional email communication while integrating multiple project management features under one roof, ProofHub is your go-to tool.

Its top features include assigned user roles, online team discussions and chats,
task delegation and assignments, reporting and tracking project history, and secure file storage.

You can use ProofHub to create projects, assign tasks, collaborate, meet deadlines, generate insights, and more.

The tool has a wide range of integrations, and supports white labeling, languages, and the ever-popular “Me-view.”

It has apps for both Android and iOS devices.

However, there is limited customization support for Gantt charts and notifications.

Free Version: Not Available.
Free Trial: 30 days.
Pricing: Starts at $45/month (40 projects and unlimited number of users) for the Essential package.

Key Features & Benefits:

This is a good tool for small to enterprise-scale organizations that need to manage multiple projects and are seeking higher productivity.

ActiveCollab brings all your work in one place. Each project has task lists and everything else that goes with tasks – files and discussions to time records and expenses.

Some of its top features include email/inbox integrations, Kaban cards, project cost estimates, and themes.

When it comes to collaboration, ActiveCollab is especially great with functions like collaborative text editing and @mentions for communication.

You can use the tool to manage tasks easily, juggle between projects, tag shared calendar, collaborate on writing/note-taking, tracking time, and managing financial transactions such as invoices and payments.

Free Version: Not Available
Free Trial: 30 days
Pricing: Basic plan starts at $25/month for a five-member team

Key Features & Benefits:

Asana is one of the most commonly-used tools that makes it simple for teams to plan, manage and execute projects and tasks.

It combines elements of project management, file storage, and collaboration and helps to manage projects across a team without having to resort to lengthy emails.

It has an easy-to-use layout. Moreover, there are several different views (like tasks and calendar) that allow people to look at their to-do lists in different visual ways.

You can break down tasks into subtasks that convert complex projects into simple tasks that can be assigned to team members in seconds.

Some of its top features include organizing tasks into projects for roadmaps and timelines, checking on your team’s progress, notifications about projects updates, dashboards to get a quick overview.

It is relatively less expensive compared to other project management tools, especially if your team size does not exceed 15 members.

However, with large teams, the calendar mode may be too overwhelming given the number of to-dos. Moreover, some parts of Asana may also feel counterintuitive at first.

Free Version: Basic version available for up to 15 users.
Free Trial: 30 days.
Pricing: $9.99/user per month after 15 users.

Key Features & Benefits:

Teams love Podio because it is a flexible and highly customizable online hub for work communication.

With this tool, it is easy to set up task management and workspaces and communicate with your internal team. Moreover, you can integrate custom add-ons, like a CRM widget.

Using the workflows feature, you can add if-this-then-that logic to the Podio apps. For instance, you can instruct your app to create a comment when a particular update is made to an item.

You can use Podio to assign tasks, attach files and discuss details within the solution, share encrypted and large files, track project budget, automate sales pipelines and your workflows.

While its features are optimized for your team to share information, it does not have the most aesthetically pleasing interface and is not a very intuitive tool.

Free Version: Available for up to 5 users.
Free Trial: No.
Pricing: Basic plan for $9/user per month; Premium plan from $24 month/user for full suite of features.

Key Features & Benefits:

Trello is one of the oldest project management tools. It uses a Kanban-approach which is usually the preferred way for project teams to visualize their entire workflow.

Its dashboard is great for managing short and quick everyday assignments. It comes with loads of pre-made templates and integrates with tons of other apps.

Trello’s design is meant to be fully customizable. You can use the “cards” feature to save client contact information, build larger project tasks or anything else.

Some of the top features include creating unlimited task lists, commenting and collaboration, and organizing lists by dates or priority.

While Trello is easy to learn and use, it can get messy quickly if you and your team don’t have a method.

Free Version: Available – allows unlimited boards, lists, cards, members, checklists, and attachments.
Free Trial: No.
Pricing: $9.99 user/month for businesses.

Key Features & Benefits:

With more than 10 million users, ToDoist is one of the most popular productivity tools available. Todoist Business is a premium tool, which is super-easy to use and extremely robust.

One of the most appealing aspects of ToDoist is that it’s incredibly user friendly. It’s extremely easy to type in new tasks on desktop, web or mobile.

ToDoist recognizes text and automatically converts them to due dates. Just type in ‘tomorrow,’ ‘next week’ and so on and the tool automatically adds due dates.

It’s also super easy to add tasks to projects, add tags, priorities, assign tasks to team members and so on.

The interface is extremely clean and intuitive. You can move tasks and projects around with a robust drag and drop functionality.

ToDoist’s project and task hierarchy is simple and customizable. You can create several levels of projects, sub-projects, tasks and sub-tasks.

The benefit of all these features is that your team members will actually use the tool far more often.

Companies often struggle to convince their employees to adopt a tool, but you shouldn’t face this problem with ToDoist Business.

It has granular privacy settings which make it extremely simple for you to share specific projects, tasks or even sub tasks with specific employees, freelancers or clients.

Commenting, voice recording, file uploading and location-based reminders are a few other features you should explore.

If you are into David Allen’s GTD approach to productivity, there is probably no better tool. However, there are no Kanban board views.

But, the activity log tells you what people are working on, and you can use filters to see view tasks according to due dates, stage of completion, priorities, projects as well as use multiple categories for complex visualizations.

Free Version: ToDoist Business doesn’t have a free plan, but it’s regular version does.
Free Trial: 30 days
Pricing: $29/user per year

Key Features & Benefits:

This is a to-do, task, project and time management application that helps busy people and effective teams get tasks and projects done.

With Nozbe you can stop using email for managing teamwork.

Use it to share projects with people on your team, delegate tasks with just one click, attach comments to tasks or files to projects, and even edit several projects at one go.

Everyone you work with does not even need to set up a Nozbe account.

The tool integrates seamlessly with Evernote, Google or Microsoft Office documents, Dropbox and others, so you can continue to access your information stored on these tools.

Free Version: Available – with 5 active projects limit.
Free Trial: 30 days.
Pricing: Starts at $8 per month for 1-2 users.

Key Features & Benefits:

This is a fully automatic time tracking tool for all types of teams.

With Timely, you can see how each member of your team spends time working on a project. This ensures that you never spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to track time manually.

The tool tracks activity across all your devices while you work and creates fully-representative timesheets for you.

The tool also captures hidden billable hours like travel, client calls, daily digital communication and overrunning meetings.

Its best feature is probably that you can work wherever you want with real-time sync on every platform including iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Android, Mac and Windows.

A large drawback of this tool is that fully automated time tracking tools require a substantial amount of time to define parameters so that the time tracking is done accurately. If you don’t define those parameters correctly or in sufficient detail, you will have inaccurate records.

Free Version: Not Available
Free Trial: 14 days
Pricing: Starts at $7/month for individual use.

Key Features & Benefits:

Wrike is a real-time work management software which is great for product development and engineering teams as well as marketing and creative teams.

The tool lets you organize everything you need to complete your project in one spot.

You can break big goals into manageable tasks, attach files, and set due dates. Use Wrike to add any task into multiple folders or projects and create any combination of folder structures.

Use the Dynamic Request Forms to accelerate delivery and scale your project volume. The tool lets you collect all necessary information from requesters up front and automatically assign it to the right team.

The Live editing feature lets you work collaboratively and see everyone’s changes in real-time. Wrike allows you to upload and edit documents without taking the trouble of saving attachments to your computer.

The Gantt Chart and Resource Management features allow engineering teams to deliver more reliable results and utilize resources more effectively.

Gantt Charts provide a visual timeline which can be used to view your project schedule as well as set task dependencies to keep your team members abreast of the different moving parts of a project.

An open view of team workloads in the resource management makes it easy to recalibrate when necessary. The Time & Budget Tracking feature can be used for accurate planning and budget management.

Moreover, with the duplicating feature, teams can duplicate recurring tasks or project templates to work faster.

Free Version: Available for up to 5 users
Free Trial: Yes
Pricing: Starts at $9.80/user per month after 5 users

Key Features & Benefits:

Deltek Vision software is well suited for professional services firms such as management consulting, market research, and engineering companies.

The tool provides real-time critical business data through customizable reports role-based graphical dashboards, and alerts.

With Deltek, your company can manage all aspects of financials including AP, AR, budgeting and revenue recognition with support for multi-currency and multi-company.

The tool also helps firms select the right people for the right projects and allows firms to monitor pipeline, track opportunities and manage client touches.

Use the tool to get a complete view of the client and the project from initial contract through project delivery and collection. This enables companies to consistently delivering on time and within budget thereby improving customer satisfaction.

Free Version: Not Available.
Free Trial: Not Available.
Pricing: Starts at $30/user per month.

Key Features & Benefits:

Basecamp is the perfect tool to begin this section for designers and creatives teams because as it says on its website, the tool is built for client-service businesses.

Basecamp’s modern social media-like interface and carefree team collaboration features are its major plus points. You can use it to organize projects, teams, and talent.

Moreover, it can help you achieve your milestones by having full visibility and control of everything that’s happening in your organization.

Its top features include projects to manage multiple users’ work, a separate dashboard for showing to clients, message boards for discussing new projects or ideas, in-app collaboration with the team, and email and desktop notifications

While it is easy to learn and use, the price is steep if you are a solopreneur or small business.

Free Version: Available only for teachers and students.
Free Trial: 30 days.
Pricing: $99 per month for businesses of any size.

Key Features & Benefits:

This tool is great for creative teams like website designers or marketing agencies to organize their work and tasks.

The tool allows you to create tasks, priority levels on tasks, and set deadlines. Multiple users can collaborate on the planning of a project with ease.

The project chart features gives a ‘Gantt’ style view of your projects highlighting any milestones on the project date line.

Moreover, you can record the progress of your projects with Gantt charts. With the privacy feature you can even keep some details of the project private from rest of the team.

The time tracking feature enables you to categorize time logs into billable and non-billable time spent on a task.

You can also keep all files, comments, and attachments in one secure place so that there is never any time wasted looking for information.

Free Version: Not Available.
Free Trial: 30 days.
Pricing: Pro version costs $9 per user/month (up to 50 users); higher prices for larger teams.

Key Features and Benefits:

This is a one-stop solution for creative consulting businesses, media companies, Ad agencies, PR firms, and digital marketing companies.

The tool comes with reporting and revenue forecasting features. It has a clean user interface with a beautiful dashboard which makes it appealing to designers.

The Job Jacket feature centralizes project-specific activities. You can make your own job jacket templates and use it to open and track different projects based on specific kinds of work being done.

You can then store multiple versions and revisions and access all project-related information from a single location.

With the Employee Finder feature, you can intelligently recommend assignments based on role, availability, existing workload and seniority.

Using Risk Analysis Summary, Burn Rate Charts and Graphs, you can analyze risks and find out where projects are ‘before’ they go over budget.

Advantage also has project management, collaboration, customer relationship management (CRM), corporate accounting, and media handling capabilities.

Free Version: Only demo
Free Trial: No
Pricing: On request

Key Features & Benefits:

Notion is great for agile teams that do creative or technical work. It allows you to assemble workflows that work best for your team and is as easy as using a text editor.

Its Notes and Docs feature can help you replace Google Docs and Evernote. You can organize tasks, notes and wikis in one place.

Use Notion to keep a personal weekly checklist, build a task board with flexible drag and drop editor, share files, or build an infinite knowledge base by nesting pages inside each other.

It works very well with Slack and has a clean and interesting UI.

Free Version: Available – allows 1000 block storage and 5MB file upload limit
Free Trial: No
Pricing: Full-featured versions start at $8/user per month.

Key Features & Benefits:

This is a good tool for designing, advertising and creative teams who want a simple and easy-to-use platform for time tracking and project management.

Use the tool to create a centralized place where you can manage clients, projects, budgets, talent, and time.

The classic version allows you to stay on top of projects and prevent scope creep, generate instant reports on clients, projects and personnel and review previous projects when you are developing new quotes for greater efficiency and accuracy.

However, if you want to assign and schedule tasks for teams or allows teams to communicate and receive requests from many different departments using customized request forms, you would have to upgrade to higher priced plans.

Free Version: Not available.
Free Trial: Demo only.
Pricing: Classic plan starts at $35 for first user plus $5/month per additional user; Premier plan starts at $50 for first user plus $10/month per additional user; In-House plan starts at $100 for first user plus $15/month per additional user

Key Features & Benefits:

MeisterTask is a highly intuitive task management tool that allows you to create projects, assign tasks, add team members and follow each other’s progress.

The task relationship feature lets you mark tasks as related to, duplicated or blocked by other tasks. You also get notified when a blockage is resolved.

Its flexible project boards feature adapts to your workflow and makes sure everyone is always on the same page.

Moreover, with smart automations and integrations, the tool ensures that you work more efficiently and consistently.

Another cool feature is that it integrates with MindMeister, an online mind mapping tool. The online collaboration features let your team members brainstorm with their colleagues in real-time and then create project plans in a visual format.

Once you finish mapping and have defined your tasks in the mind mapping app, you can drag and drop them the information into a connected kanban board in MeisterTask. So you have the layout in a more structured fashion and can work on the project with your teammates.

Free Version: Available.
Free Trial: No.
Pricing: $9.99/month Pro plan for unlimited integrations; $24.99/month per person for Business plan.

Key Features & Benefits:

Airtable is different from other project management tools. It’s actually a highly advanced spreadsheet cum database, that can be used to track projects and tasks.

It has a beautiful and intuitive UI, so don’t just write it off if you don’t like spreadsheets. It’s nothing like MS Excel!

Airtable gives ready-to-use templates that can be used by creative teams, marketing teams, product teams and so on.

For instance, marketing or PR teams can use it to create a database of journalists as well as manage all the tasks of a PR campaign such as content creation, finding the right publications to target and reaching out to the right journalists.

The tool employs spreadsheets to organize and visualize data. It can link data points across various spreadsheets thereby connecting tasks and deliverables across different departments in one single place.

Airtable integrates with other project management tools such as Asana, Basecamp, Trello as well as Dropbox, Box, Evernote, Slack and many more.

Tables are shareable, and users can track changes being made to documents. Airtable also includes a chat feature, which allows users to collaborate while working on tables.

Free Version: Available.
Free Trial: No.
Pricing: Starts at $10 per month/user.

Key Features & Benefits:

If you want a tool for managing your content marketing activities, this is the software for you.

You might have already heard about CoSchedule’s free Headline Analyzer feature that scores headlines based on different parameters and helps you craft something more eye catching.

CoSchedule is also an editorial calendar software that helps you organize your tasks, writing projects, social media scheduling, content curation and many more. You can easily manage and publish all your blog content and social promotion from one place.

You can view your entire schedule at a glance with the simple drag and drop calendar. The calendar also integrates with many popular tools like WordPress, Chrome, Google Analytics, and all social platforms.

Use the Best Time Scheduling feature that sends your messages at the best time possible – according to research and best practices – for increased traffic, engagement, and followers.

Keep your team in the loop and the conversation in context with CoSchedule’s integrated discussion threads and browser notifications.

Free Version: No.
Free Trial: 14 days.
Pricing: Essential plan starts at $40/month for solopreneurs; For businesses they have 3 plans – Growth, Professional, Enterprise.

Key Features & Benefits:

Content writing teams and bloggers need to collaborate extensively to create content and Confluence provides one of the best platforms to do that.

Use its inline, page and file commenting feature to leave your feedback on the work itself on any Confluence page. This enables teams to stop wasting time trying to dig out feedback from email or chat threads.

Confluence allows you to add multimedia and dynamic content to your meeting notes and project plans. Moreover, you have the added benefits of automatic versioning, advanced text search, and instant previews.

While you can share PDFs, Office docs, images, and more in Confluence, you also have the ability to keep your site and your content secure with granular permissions.

Since this tool has been developed by the same company that launched Jira – Atlassian, you can connect seamlessly with Jira to get insight into your development work with automatic linking, quick issue creation and reports in Confluence.

Free Version: Not Available.
Free Trial: 7 days.
Pricing: $10/month for up to 10 users; $5/user per month for bigger teams