Introduction:
So, there are a wide variety of project management apps out there, and it’s normally quite difficult for your team to pick the right one because there don’t seem to be many variances between all of them. So, in this article, we’re going to help you pick the best project management app that we believe will help you to excel with your team and scale as you can imagine.
So hello everyone my name is Shahid and I have been a web developer and a blogger for the past 10 years and During that time I have been using multiple project Management apps for me and also for my team as well. So if you are also looking for the best project Management apps then read our full article and without wasting time let’s start today’s article
10 Best Project Management Apps That You Want
Monday
The first one on our list is called Monday. Now for those who don’t know Monday is probably one of the longer-standing productivity applications for project management and it has been in the market for some time. Now as you can imagine what it does quite well is it’s quite a flexible tool but what they’ve done recently is begin splitting their product out a little bit more so in this article.
I’m referencing something called Monday Work Management but there are also two other versions of Monday now and it seems to be growing the other one’s called Dev and the other one’s called Sales CRM and they’re more specific experiences for developers and for those who work in sales and maybe marketing who want to capture the CRM process and system and they essentially really fine-tune solutions for Monday but this version is much more open plan in terms of getting you started with all the features to get you moving in terms of General project management.
So Monday work management system is really like many of the project management systems it’s got a wide range of views that are really flexible and a bunch of templates to get you started it really is I guess a more generalized project management system and you may have seen the ads maybe even before this article because it’s widely popular in terms of their marketing and their efforts.
Well, largely the application has expanded much more since I last checked it out with automation and Integrations being part of the experience allowing you to save time doing small things that you typically do every day and Monday with automation and a bunch of Integrations over 200 apps and Integrations live on their Marketplace which mean you can connect it with a wide range of apps and it’s seemingly like they’re growing this experience out even further. Largely if you’re looking at Monday it’s because you’re looking for an all-rounder and that’s what I probably say out of all this list this is one of the most or best all-rounders for project management.
Basecamp
So number two is Basecamp and for those who don’t know Basecamp is developed by a company called 37signals and it has been again on the market even much longer than Monday and what I would say is it’s a stellar application if you work remotely and asynchronously as a team. And the reason why I recommend it is because it really does endorse those more asynchronous communication aspects like leaving threads for people to follow up on in their time and it promotes states of deep work.
So it doesn’t necessarily always have you real-time communication a bit like Slack or some of the other list options in these ones because what it does is it wants you to be a little bit more respectful of other people’s time. This works really well for remote teams even hybrid teams that want to be able to communicate in a slower fashion but in a much more robust fashion so that employees can have that Focus time on actual work with fewer meetings.
So Basecamp has a bunch of features that are very impressive they’ve got for example campfire so you can have real-time communication, messages, boards, and to-do list schedules and it also helps you to organize your own schedule ahead and it has some project management elements maybe not as much as some of the other options on this list.
But largely there are abilities to manage things like card tables and also some newer abilities that allow you to manage and triage but also see a timeline of your projects coming up. So Basecamp’s quite an expansive tool but I would probably recommend it it’s the best one for async and remote teams out there.
Wrike
So the third option on our list is really popular with marketing and sales, in particular, and it’s called Wrike. Now, Wrike is not going to look as snazzy in my opinion as the Monday and Basecamp, but it does look and work functionally well. It’s actually owned by a much bigger company now, which purchased it for over 2 billion a couple of years ago, and that company is called Citrix Systems.
Now largely, this application is really popular with marketing and sales teams because those who may work in creative agencies or client-facing teams can essentially organize all their work but even be a lot closer to the image proofing and feedback process that typically goes on with those client-based activities.
So if you have something like an image that you want to prove for social media, you can post in the comments and get a real granular detailed breakdown of what the issues that you need to fix in on those images are. And that’s not just good for images, it’s good for files, and a lot of teams really, really like that for the file management aspect.
And there are a bunch of typical things that you would see inside of a project management app, but one Gantt chart is very traditional in terms of its setup and on par in terms of its function with apps like TeamGantt and GanttPro. So if you’re somebody who wants an all-around project management tool that does have some advanced Gantt abilities, then this is going to be a neat tool for you. There are also functions inside of the more pricey options for managers that allow you to do workload management, and this is great for scheduling people’s time and making sure they’re not overwhelmed by the jobs they have at hand.
This is great for managers, and as you can imagine, in agencies, that’s perfect for time-based allocation. So I would say Wrike, again, is a great all-rounder. They also have some additional abilities like add-ons for marketing insights as well that marketing teams will really like too. So, again, much more of an all-rounder but popular with marketing and sales teams.
Asana
Asana next up is s s has been on the market for some time and it was actually created by one of the Facebook co-founders and, naturally, it has been growing for over 10 years, maybe even 15 years now. It’s really popular with product teams, creative teams, and IT teams that manage operations, and that’s because it’s a great all-around experience.
In terms of what I would say is a little bit like Trello, which we’ll discuss next, it’s an all-around experience but one that you don’t need as much education to get started in, in my opinion. For example, with the Monday and the clickUp, I would say there’s a little bit more education needed for these types of applications, but with Asana, it’s much more approachable in terms of getting your team on board.
So, at the same time, you have boards and timelines where you can manage your own productivity inside of Asana, and there is a wide range of features that keep it quite clutter-free for organizing your work. There’s also, on the free plan, to get you started, over 100 integrations to get you going, which is decent, and the workflow builder will give you loads more abilities when you upgrade to premium for your team.
So, it’s well worth looking at if you want an all-around experience that is much more approachable and popular with those product operations and IT teams that just want something that is probably approachable and easy to get on with.
Trello
Next up is Trello, and Trello has been acquired by Atlassian, which happened a fair few years ago, but at the same time, it is probably one of the best kanban-based experiences on the market. It has some more powerful features recently with features like Power-Ups and Butler inside of the Pro account, which gives you more abilities to add things like custom fields and get actions done with them.
Which is nice for setting up automation and processes. The plugin store is also quite widely available now, which means you can get a wide range of plugins that are either Trello-built or people externally built too. Things like Card Snooze, Readme, Pom Morell for using Pomodoro timers, and Trello have extended beyond the kanban experience to likes of timeline, calendar view, and table view as well, which means that they have much more opportunity in the future. I typically always recommend Trello for probably around 20 to 50 people because it’s really approachable and quite easy to use, to be honest.
ClickUp
Number six is ClickUp, and ClickUp is very similar to the Monday. It’s quite expansive for those who want to use it, meaning there’s quite a lot of flexibility and setup time. But it’s one of those ones that has almost every feature you can think of inside of it, and I would say even slightly more than like the Monday when you compare the two. You look at ClickUp, and it has more abilities inside of it.
So, for example, they have documents, and whiteboards, which is a function that is separate in the Monday called Work Canvas. It’s a separate application that you can combine with the Monday, but just slightly separate, whereas ClickUp has whiteboards, and it also has a range of other abilities like chat, which means you can set up real-time chat in the different projects and spaces that you create, which is perfect for aligning the team on a particular type of topic.
So, I would say that ClickUp is great for those who are willing to set things up and go with sort of a really flexible all-around application, and they’re willing to learn from it because I think once you learn it and adopt it, it’s actually very, very powerful. ClickUp has also got a 3.0 version, which in 2023, but it’s been growing quite rapidly, and a lot of people are finding that they want to replace a lot of different parts of their tech stack inside ClickUp, which is becoming much more common in the productivity space, that’s for sure.
Smartsuite
Number seven is SmartSuite. Now, this one is a fairly new one to the list, and um, it reminds me a lot of if sort of like ClickUp and the likes of Airtable had a baby. It’s sort of a combination, and it’s a records-based project management system. So, for example, you get all of the features as part of your uh, sort of getting started experience, which is great.
So, you get the wide range of views that they have, including dashboards, which are typically unlockable. You can unlock them in the more premium pricing options of some of the other apps that we’ve talked about like I believe the Monday locks them under certain pricing. So, you get that, and you get a lot of other views as part of the free plan, which is good. But the pricing begins when you hit a certain record amount, so if you add like 500 records for a CRM you’re building, then it’s going to move over to a paid quite quickly.
So, it’s important to be able to evaluate whether the application is better for you because you’ve got lots of records or you got less records or you’re inputting stuff, and it basically means just items that you add to the system. Now, I really liked it when I checked out SmartSuite because it’s collaborative in terms of the way that you can set things up.
There are loads of different solutions that you can build. That’s how they sort of define how you create things inside of SmartSuite, and it’s really powerful. Like, the customization is really, really good, a little bit like Airtable, and it has that slight structure like ClickUp, which a lot of people will find beneficial. There are features in this app, like, for example, guides, so that when you join a new solution, there’s a guide for your team to follow and understand what it’s about.
And also, I found that it was quite fast on all of the devices that I tested it on, which I wasn’t sure whether would be the case because it’s quite record-based, and obviously loading lots of records might mean speed is compromised, but I was very impressed with it at the least. So, SmartSuite blends between Airtable and ClickUp.
Coda
So, next up is Coda. Now, Coda is a really powerful document-based project management software, and what I mean by that is it sort of looks like Google Docs on steroids. You can create a document, and inside those documents, you can add in page templates which you can create whatever you want. You can manage a project in there; you can connect things up between pages, so it can be anything from your roadmap to all of your sales CRM.
It really is up to you, but Coda has done a really good job with AI in helping you set pages up really fast, and there are also formulas and packs that are going to save you a bunch of time connecting popular integrations. Now, this is really very similar to the likes of Notion. It’s a build-your-own productivity setup, but I think that it’s slightly better in terms of the formula and functions than you would get on something like Notion because I feel like the optionality and the power behind it there is a lot more once you learn it.
Coda is impressive for those formulas and packs, and if you’re willing to give it a go and build your own setup, then I would probably recommend Coda because it is really nice and it’s approachable like documents as well. So, it’s great for team Wiki management and knowledge there too.
Smartsheet
So, next up is Smartsheet, and again, a great all-around project management software. If you follow Formula 1, it is uh McLaren F1’s sponsor, well at least of 2023, so you may have seen it on the side of the car and be like, ‘I’ve seen that somewhere.’
Essentially, Smartsheet wants to be an all-around project management software, sort of very similar to Wrike in a sense. It allows you to build a great structure in terms of all of the different lovely views like grid view, Gantt view, card view, and calendar view, and basically, there are a few abilities when it comes to dashboards as well.
There’s also something called Work Apps which essentially help you build custom experiences for each department. So, instead of getting software for each department, you could build one that’s better suited and more scalable for those types of teams. And I think I’ve been reading a lot of reviews about it, a lot of people saying that this has been really helpful in saving time at setting up with their team.
Notion
And finally, on our list is Notion. The notion has been on the market for some time and it is growing in popularity. It’s also got a new Notion Projects area which allows you to set up a combination of tasks, combination of projects, and weave them all in between each other.
Now, Notion does have some great templates that are going to save you time in terms of building the perfect workspace for you and your team, but to be honest, it’s going to take a little bit of time to get used to because it just needs some education to get started. It’s not as approachable as some of the other traditional project management software tools like the Monday, which are already pre-built. There are some pre-built elements like the templates, but it’s not necessarily going to educate you on how to utilize all of those and how they all connect.
The notion is made up of databases and also naturally pages, so you have to sort of build them and customize them to yourself a little bit more. But to be honest, the Projects database and the one they hook up with tasks is actually going to save you a lot of time because it’s already pretty well built. But you’re going to have to customize it a little bit further if you want those detailed granular customizations for your team.
What’s nice about Notion as well is they’re investing a lot in the AI side of stuff. There’s a feature called Q&A that allows you, once activated, to scan the entirety of your Notion account and get answers. A lot of people have been using Notion as a team Wiki, but largely this is very similar to Coda to build your own productivity environment.
But it’s also great for individuals who are looking to organize their own productivity alongside their work and have them fairly close to each other. Not a traditional project management software, but one that is growing in the market.
Conclusion:
So, hopefully, this was useful. If you’re on the hunt for more traditional options, I would probably go with the likes of Monday, Asana, Wrike, Trello, and even ClickUp. But I would say the other options that are slightly stranger or slightly more different in this list are the likes of Basecamp, Smart Suite, Coda, and Notion. And all of these options are very interesting.
Ending Note: So guys these are the 10 best project managing apps out there. We have tried our best to give you an honest review as possible and hope you will like it. You can download all of the Project Management apps from the Google Play Store. So this is it for today’s article and we will catch you in our next article. Bye!