Best Project Management Tools in 2024
Pick the right project management software for your team.
What is the best project management tool? The short answer is "it depends".
There are hundreds of various project management tools out there, with new ones launched nearly every month. There is a reason for that. Depending on the size of your team, the industry you work in, and your overall company culture, your project management process may look entirely different. A tool that works well for one team or project, may be a bad fit for another.
To select the project management tool that's right for you and your team, it's important to know what your options are and how to evaluate them.
Top project management tools
While there may not be a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to project management tools, there are many great options to choose from. Some of them are fairly simple, while others are packed with complex features and customization options. Some are designed for smaller teams, while others are best suited for large enterprises. Some are dedicated project management tools, while others cover many additional use cases.
The best choice ultimately depends on your team's unique workflow and requirements. To make your evaluation process easier, we've put together a list of the best project management tools, based on real reviews.
Nuclino – ultra-lightweight and intuitive
ProofHub – flexible and feature-rich
Trello – tried-and-true Kanban board
nTask – powerful yet affordable
Jira – built by developers, for developers
Asana – powerful yet elegant
Taiga – open-source and designed for Agile teams
Monday – feature-packed and colorful
Basecamp – made for remote work
Wrike – mature and geared towards enterprises
Zoho Projects – great value for money
Redmine – free and open-source
WeKan – open-source Trello alternative
1. Nuclino
Pricing: Free, advanced features starting from $6/user/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.7/5
Nuclino stands out among other project management tools thanks to its exceptionally lightweight design. Its interface is clean and intuitive, lowering the learning curve and making it easy to get started with the tool and bring your entire team on board.
Yet despite its simplicity, Nuclino offers a range of powerful features. You can organize your projects in many different ways, including a Kanban board, a nested list, a table, or a mindmap-style graph. Custom fields allow you to track additional information about every project, such as its due date, assignee, priority, and more.
Another distinctive feature of Nuclino is how it brings together structured projects and long-form project documentation – it's essentially a project management and document collaboration tool in one. Every card on your board is its own collaborative document. This allows you to always keep your work in context, documenting the goals for every task, creating to-do lists, setting due dates and reminders, embedding files, and more.
You can also exchange asynchronous feedback directly in Nuclino using comments and mentions and preserve the context of every decision related to the project.
While Nuclino can be used exclusively as a project management tool, it can be much more than that. You can use it to onboard new employees, take meeting minutes, create employee handbooks, build your internal wiki or company intranet, and more. This balance between simplicity and versatility is one of the key selling points of Nuclino.
What users say about Nuclino:
"The way Nuclino is built makes the platform very flexible towards the way you work. I use Nuclino to document the projects I work on. It serves as a wiki for the project which helps anyone joining the project at later stages understand what was done during the design process, and why certain decisions were made."
2. ProofHub
Pricing: Starting from $45/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.5/5
ProofHub is a project management software that helps teams and individuals to manage their workload. It is an online task management platform that has been designed for remote teams, freelancers, and entrepreneurs.
ProofHub has everything your team may need to be productive. Its feature set includes Gantt charts, time tracking, budgeting, invoicing, and so on. It provides tools for document sharing, time tracking, creating tasks and assigning them to users, setting deadlines and reminders, and creating reports, which can be immensely helpful for keeping any project or business organized. These features make ProofHub one of the best project management tools available today.
Looking for more tools similar to ProofHub? Check out this list of ProofHub alternatives.
What users say about ProofHub:
"We used ProofHub to manage our mid-sized projects that involved coordinating tasks and project activities with multiple institutional partners. And ProofHub's collaborative features came in very handy for engaging each other on tasks and tracking progress being made by each party. It also provided all the safety features we needed to collaborate effectively without compromising our proprietary project files."
3. Trello
Pricing: Free, advanced features starting from $10/user/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.5/5
Trello has been around for a long time and is still one of the most popular project management tools. It is seen as one of the tools that originally popularized the Kanban approach to workflow management many years ago.
Trello's main appeal is its simplicity. It's not as feature-packed as many other tools on this list, but it makes up for it by being exceptionally user-friendly. It takes no more than a few minutes to get started with Trello, and even non-technical users can easily get the hang of it.
Overall, Trello is a great Kanban tool and doesn't strive to be too many things at once. It stayed true to this principle over the years and earned itself many loyal fans.
Looking for more tools similar to Trello? Check out this list of Trello alternatives.
What users say about Trello:
"Working with Trello can't be easier and is the natural first step for every idea and project. While you might outgrow Trello one day, there is no easier way than Trello to get started."
4. nTask
Pricing: Free, advanced features starting from $4/user/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.2/5
nTask is another great task and project management tool that helps you ensure that all of the tasks related to your project development process are well-tracked and managed.
The feature set of nTask includes such notable functionality as risk management and issue tracking, allowing you to make sure that your projects are free of any scope creeps and risks that may affect them.
What users say about nTask:
"Overall, my experience was delightful and positive. nTask had just enough to meet our needs and expectations. It's suitable for beginners or smaller businesses as well. It is affordable and still up to par on quality. nTask helped us improve our overall business and particularly helped our office run smoother and stay organized. It is an effective task management software."
5. Jira
Pricing: Free, advanced features starting from $7.50/user/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.4/5
Trello may not be enough to cover the needs of some teams working on more complex projects. If that sounds like you, you might find Jira to be a better fit. While both of these project management tools are owned by the same company (Atlassian), they are built with very different workflows in mind.
Jira is primarily designed to manage Agile software development projects and track issues. It's packed with specialized features not found in many other project management tools – burn down charts, sprint reports, velocity graphs, and more.
The feature set of Jira exceeds that of most of its competitors, but it's also what makes this tool so complex and challenging to adopt. While it can be a great fit for large, experienced developer teams, others may find the learning curve of Jira to be too steep. If you are considering it for your team, make sure to allocate enough time to thoroughly evaluate it together.
Looking for more tools similar to Jira? Check out this list of Jira alternatives.
What users say about Jira:
"We use Jira as a Kanban/Agile project management tool in software development. t's designed from the ground up for tracking user stories, tasks, epics, sprints, etc. in large organizations. It is overkill for smaller teams or products that are very early in their life. When projects and teams are very dynamic, Jira projects become bloated, cumbersome, and fragmented. This product really is suited for larger, mature organizations that already have strong procedural discipline and rather monolithic approval/decision making."
6. Asana
Pricing: Free, advanced features starting from $10.99/user/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.5/5
Asana is nearly as flexible as Jira but comes with a much more elegant and user-friendly interface. It's a fairly general-purpose project management tool and can work reasonably well for teams and projects of all sizes.
The most notable features of Asana include advanced visualization options, task automation, work requests, workload tracking, and more.
Asana charges a higher monthly fee than most other project management tools on this list, and can be prohibitively expensive for some organizations. Nonetheless, many teams find that it's more than worth the investment.
Looking for more tools similar to Asana? Check out this list of Asana alternatives.
What users say about Asana:
"Overall, we've been very pleased with Asana for our agency. While working remotely during the pandemic, it's been an invaluable resource to make sure our team is all on the same page across clients and projects. Custom fields, statuses, and comments have kept us all connected and allowed us to continue to work just as if we were in the office together."
7. Taiga
Pricing: Free, advanced features starting from $5/user/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.4/5
Taiga is an open-source project management tool that is tailored to Agile software development teams. It's available in both cloud-based and self-hosted versions and offers a wide range of specialized features such as customizable Kanban boards, performance dashboards, WIP limits, and burn down charts.
Despite its extensive feature set, Taiga is designed to be fairly simple. Its clean and intuitive interface makes it easy to use for developers, however, note that it may be challenging for some non-technical users to navigate.
What users say about Taiga:
"Taiga is a good IT project management software. Open source and works nicely! Perfect for personal or small projects, if you don't have a very big budget. Includes all of the expected features like team management, support for epics, issues, sprints, and a backlog. You can define custom ticket/issue statuses. Also includes a built-in Kaban board."
8. Monday
Pricing: Starting from $8/user/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.6/5
Monday, formerly known as Dapulse, is another robust project and task management software. Its colorful interface, various visualization options, and task automation features have earned it the trust of over 100,000 teams and individuals.
Note that Monday offers a tiered pricing model, as opposed to the per-user fees charged by most other project management tools. This means that, depending on your team size, Monday can be considerably more expensive than its competitors.
Looking for more tools similar to Monday? Check out this list of Monday alternatives.
What users say about Monday:
"Monday.com is almost too good to be true. It's flexible, it comes with a ton of customizations and automations, and it lets you manage any type of project in whatever way you please. It's not cheap, and they charge by sets of seats instead of individual seats. So if you're a team of 6 – you have to pay for 10 seats, which can be pretty annoying."
9. Basecamp
Pricing: $15/user/month or $299/month for unlimited users
Rating on Capterra: 4.3/5
A self-described "all-in-one toolkit for working remotely", Basecamp is a remote work platform that brings together to-do lists, calendars, instant messaging, document and file management, and more.
Basecamp may not look like a project management tool in the traditional sense. It doesn't have some of the popular features most of other tools on this list have, such as a Kanban board. It takes a different, simpler approach to project management, without trying to overengineer your workflow – and its popularity speaks for itself.
It's also worth noting that Basecamp is one of the rare tools that charge a flat monthly fee rather than making you pay per user. That makes it a much more scalable option for large and growing teams.
Looking for more tools similar to Basecamp? Check out this list of Basecamp competitors.
What users say about Basecamp:
"I signed up for Basecamp to work within a client's Basecamp processes, and now I use it to manage almost everything that I work on in collaboration with others. It makes a lot of sense and is intuitive once you accustom to how the projects and to-do lists work."
10. Wrike
Pricing: Free, advanced features starting from $9.80/user/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.3/5
Wrike is a powerful project management tool best suited for large companies and enterprises. Its interface is dense and packed with a variety of features, menus, and dashboards. Nearly everything can be customized and tailored to your team's unique workflow.
The capabilities of Wrike surpass many tools on this list and include advanced analytics, time-tracking, work requests, task dependencies, and more. All that inevitably comes with a steep learning curve. The app is not very user-friendly, especially for beginners, so be prepared to invest enough time in training your team to use it.
Looking for more tools similar to Wrike? Check out this list of Wrike alternatives.
What users say about Wrike:
"Overall Wrike has made us much more organized as a company. Those of us who are process-oriented and organized love Wrike as a project management tool. However, there is a significant amount of learning and coaching required to get up and running properly in Wrike. You WILL need multiple sessions with a Wrike representative to understand all of the functionality and get your groundwork set up correctly to ensure success."
11. Zoho Projects
Pricing: Free, advanced features starting from $5/user/month
Rating on Capterra: 4.2/5
Zoho Projects is a part of the Zoho suite and is a great project management tool for small teams operating on a budget. It's not the most feature-rich tool on the market but it covers all the basics, from tasks and milestones, to Gantt charts and time-tracking. It integrates well with other products in the Zoho ecosystem, such as Zoho CRM. It also makes it easy to collaborate on projects with clients and external stakeholders.
While the free version of Zoho Projects is very limited, the paid full-featured plans are more affordable than most other project management tools.
What users say about Zoho Projects:
"Zoho Projects is a rare project management software that does all of the things our marketing agency needs it to do at a great price, which is why we've kept it for as long as we have. We just wish it was considerably more user-friendly."
12. Redmine
Pricing: Free
Rating on Capterra: 4.1/5
Redmine is an open-source free project management tool. It may not be as visually appealing and intuitive as some of the other proprietary tools in this article, but it has all the functionality a team might need to manage projects and track issues. It's modular, extendable, and versatile, with a wide variety of plugins and themes to choose from.
Note that the initial installation process can be highly challenging for anyone with no technical background.
What users say about Redmine:
"We've been using Redmine for over a decade now and have tried several other project management tools that look nicer, load faster, and are easier to set up. However, Redmine is a solid product that allows you to fully describe project tasks, assign to team members, and keep up with project progress."
13. WeKan
Pricing: Free
Rating on Capterra: No rating yet
If you're looking for a no-bells-and-whistles project management tool, WeKan may be an option worth considering. Like Taiga and Redmine, WeKan is a free and open-source Kanban tool. It may not look as slick and modern as some of the other solutions on this list, but it makes up for it in other areas.
WeKan was largely inspired by Trello and shares many of its features and design decisions. It has everything you may need for Kanban-style project management, including boards, WIP limits, labels, checklists, swimlanes, and more.
As is the case with most self-hosted tools, installing and maintaining WeKan on your own server requires some technical skills. Wekan also doesn't have a mobile app, so if you need a project management tool that can be easily accessed on the go, you may be better off with one of the other solutions on this list.
What users say about WeKan:
"Project management has been much easier. Our whole team is on WeKan using a handful of boards. There's not much more communication outside of the application, everyone knows where certain tasks are in their life cycle. The only downsides I have are basic aesthetics of the UI. I feel like things could easily be spruced up to look more grand. It's a little too utilitarian right now".
Other great project management tools
There are many other great project management tools that deserve an honorable mention, including Ora, Notion, Linear, Teamwork, Paymo, and more.
This list is by no means exhaustive – the market for project management tools is remarkably crowded and competitive. Any attempt to rank them from best to worst would certainly be subjective. At the end of the day, the only way to know for sure if a project management tool is a good fit for you and your team would be to test it out yourself.
Ready to get started?
