Project management can be difficult when your team is working from the same office, and it’s even more challenging when everyone is working remotely. If you and your coworkers are sick of managing projects entirely through emails, conference calls, and personal calendars, one of these project management tools can help make everyone’s work life easier.
These project management tools have many similar features. For example, they offer integrations with tools your team already loves, as well as ISO and Android apps, to help keep your team connected from anywhere. Let’s take a look at what makes each tool unique, so you can decide which one is best for your team.
Freedcamp
Freedcamp is a highly intuitive and customizable project management tool. Its clean design, customizable dashboard widgets, and informative tutorials make planning your first project, tasks, and subtasks easy. In addition to assigning tasks to teammates and setting due dates, you can also set task priorities and dependencies, so the importance of a job and order of completion is never something your team needs to question.
Freedcamp’s notable features include:
- All Freedcamp plans come with unlimited file storage, but there are limits to the maximum file size you can upload that decrease with each plan tier.
- A handy bookmark tool for pages and custom views that you check most often.
- A marketplace where you can access both free and paid apps to expand Freedcamps’ functionality.
- The Issue Tracker tool lets your team manage problem-solving outside of regular task activities.
- Freedcamp wikis are a convenient place to store multiple versions of important documents that can easily be made private, public, or accessible to project participants.
- Edit your files directly in Freedcamp with their desktop app that uploads each update for your team to see.
- Built-in time tracking tools help you manage work and bill clients.
- An invoicing feature allows you to store client information and quickly prepare estimates and invoices.
Freedcamp is one of the most affordable project management tools out there. The Minimalist and Business plans cost $1.49 and $7.49 per user per month (respectively) after a 14-day free trial. Freedcamp’s Enterprise plan also has the cheapest price tag at $16.99 per user per month, which means you can access all of Freedcamps premium features for roughly the cost of other tools’ Business plans.
Basecamp
Designed to eliminate the need for your team to switch between messaging, meetings, and cloud storage tools during your workday, Basecamp provides all of the tools you need to manage projects and teams in one place. You can organize your entire company’s workload by projects and teams, while the Basecamp HQ feature allows everyone within your organization to communicate and share information in one place.
Basecamp’s notable features include:
- Centralized document sharing for everyone involved in a project.
- Message boards allow your team to keep track of conversations in one place without having to resort to confusing email threads.
- Assign tasks and due dates to your coworkers with To-dos Lists. Basecamp will let you know when tasks are completed and alert team members if their work is overdue.
- A schedule that allows your team to see every event and task due date related to a project.
- Group chatrooms called Campfires, let you use Basecamp for all of your real-time communication needs.
- Automatic Check-Ins let leaders ask automated questions so everyone can quickly gauge how each team member is handling their work.
- Customize your notifications settings, so you’re only notified about work during your work hours. Basecamp can even send you updates about what you missed when you start work for the day.
- The “My stuff” menu lets users see everything they’re working on in one place.
- The activity view allows managers to quickly review upcoming and overdue tasks in addition to each team member’s workload.
Basecamp Personal offers paired-down access to its features for free. Their Business plan costs $99 a month and comes with a 30-day free trial. Basecamp charges a flat fee for it’s paid features, which allows you to onboard new team members without any additional cost. This pay-structure is one of the tool’s key differentiators and can make it a more affordable option. If you have a fairly large team, using Basecamp is likely cheaper than many other project management tools.
Asana
Asana takes longer to set-up and customize than the other tools on this list, but you also have more flexibility to design a custom workflow management system that suits your needs. Similar to the other tools we’re reviewing, Asana lets you organize and track work based on teams, projects, and tasks that you can break into subtasks. Assigning tasks leaders and followers, as well as tags, comments, and file attachments within each task environment, allows your team to easily understand their role within each project and have everything they need to complete tasks at their fingertips.
Asana’s notable features include:
- Asana timelines let you easily plan and visualize your project’s progress.
- Team leaders can use Asana’s Admin Console to track team member’s activity and find out who has contributed the most to the completion of projects.
- Integrate Asana with other powerful tools like Slack, Gmail, Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce and Adobe Creative Cloud.
- Automate Typically manual tasks like handing off work to teammates, setting due dates, and setting task visibility at the right time.
- Organize your projects in portfolios, so you have a high-level view of all the work your team is managing.
- The workload tool allows managers to track each team member’s workload, so nobody is over or underworked.
- Plan your team’s work efficiently with templates designed for popular project types like web design and IT requests.
- Create custom field types, names, and values to tailor your task descriptions for the information your team needs.
- Add your custom fields to the main project view so that you can review the most critical information about your projects at a glance.
Asana’s Basic plan is free for up to 15 teammates. The Premium and Business plans are also available for a free trial and cost $10.99 and $24.99 month per user. If you want additional features like custom branding and the ability to export and delete your data, your company will need to contact Asana to get a quote for the Enterprise plan.
Monday.com
Monday.com is another powerful tool for managing your team’s work. Add multiple custom boards to track your team’s progress and get reminders about a workflow’s next steps in a one-page view. You can add rules to boards so that specific team members receive notifications when Monday.com detects an action like the arrival of a due date, or when the status of a task changes. Monday.com gives you the ability to automate a large number of actions. Taks can be programmed to automatically move to a new board once they’re marked complete and you can set the creation of a predefined task at the same time every day, week, month, etc.
Monday.com’s notable features include:
- Add different view types to your boards, including calendar, map, chart, and timeline views.
- Manage who can see your boards, whether you want them to be private, public among your team, or viewable by clients.
- Build custom dashboards to visualize key performance indicators.
- Use the Product Feedback board to give feedback about products, request new features, and chat with the Monday team about the progress of your requests.
- The workload view lets managers track how much work each team member has on their plate.
- Monday encourages developers to create apps that integrate with the platform, so users can access new useful tools like a collaborative digital whiteboard space for brainstorming ideas with your team.
Monday.com also offers a free plan and an Enterprise plan, which varies in price by organization. The Standard plan costs $67 a month, and the Pro plan has a monthly cost of $108. Monday’s pricing plan is slightly more complicated than other platforms, though, as the above numbers only reflect the price for 5 users. If you have a team made up of 31-40 people, your organization will have to pay up to $536 per month for the standard plan, or $858 for the Pro plan. If you want to use Monday.com for 50 or more team members, you’ll need to contact their sales team. Monday is also the only tool on this list founded outside of the United States, and lists their prices in Canadian dollars.
The unique features and pricing structures offered by each of these project management tools will help you decide what’s best for your team. If you’re still unsure about which product is best suited for the type of work you need to manage, starting a free trial will help you be more confident in your choice. Even if you stick to a free version of one of these products, you’ll gain access to a whole new world of effortlessly managed and tracked project efficiency.