Project management software free review

From all the tools out there, Trello solidly wins as an easy and simple tool to help you proactively manage, create, and execute an ongoing flow of content. You can add members, labels, checklists, and attachments to each card along with custom fields to personalize the process.

To sweeten the deal, Trello lets you see the progress of your content strategy with its useful calendar view. Its Butler feature also lets you set up automations and commands across your entire process.

So no detail or project falls through the cracks. You can add or remove members to teams and integrate apps like Slack to keep communication intact. Best of all, there is no limit to the number of teams you can create. Its free forever plan is great for small teams that are just starting out.

With the free version you also get unlimited cards, unlimited lists, and 1 MB per file attachment. The Business Class plan lets you set unlimited boards, cards, and lists per team as well as a MB per file attachment limit, advanced checklists, priority support, and team board templates. To get a comprehensive look at the exact features each tier offers, I recommend you visit their pricing page to look through their long list of features.

You can get started working on a better content management strategy with Trello here. A simple project management system you can count on is crucial for startups that need to execute and manage projects quickly. This is where an easy-to-use and simple project management tool like Notion comes in. Notion bills itself as the project tool specifically for startups, and has designed its features with the needs of startups clearly in mind.

With Notion you have access to tools that enable you to organize and create wikis, meeting notes, roadmaps, and project attachments galore. What makes Notion such a simple tool for project management are its guides and tutorials, which offer a ton of breakdowns and how-tos for learning the project management process and implementing it quickly.

Collaboration across teams is made easier with its timeline views, the ability to leave comments and host discussions, and the ability to create linked databases along with reminders and mentions.

Notion breaks down their pricing tiers into two categories. The first two are great for personal use. For instance, Personal Pro lets you have unlimited guests and unlimited file uploads along with the ability to sync your account across devices as you create unlimited pages and blocks. And the Enterprise tier is great for larger teams with increasingly complex project management systems that need added security, dedicated management, and a custom contract.

Try Notion for free here. We focused on software that was truly user-friendly, without a steep learning curve, that was accessible to seasoned professionals and starters alike. Besides simplicity, here are a few additional criteria we looked at to make our picks, that you should take into consideration as well.

You could say project management frameworks are the bread and butter of any project management tool. They are crucial in ensuring your team is equipped to plan, create, and deliver projects with ease, quickly, and at scale.

While some project management tools like ClickUp offer what seems like an endless list of customizable frameworks and project views, others are more limited in what they can do, especially within cheaper monthly plans.

Without this, integrating a project management tool and keeping it simple might not go as smoothly. Especially if you manage a team with different experience levels and abilities. A useful feature that brings it all together as you successfully manage each project is a reporting or analytics tool.

While smaller teams might not need reporting and analytics capabilities from the start, it can be a great addition for growth as you get an overview of all the moving parts of your process.

The more you can measure, the more you can iterate and improve. Simple project management software that fits with your business goals and needs can help you easily turn chaos into an ordered plan you can follow. But project management can take on different shapes and sizes, which is why my top recommendation to manage just about any project successfully is without a doubt ClickUp , because of its versatility and ease of use.

We recommend you take advantage of some of their free trials and demos to really get a feel for each tool that interests you before committing to a paid plan.

Most project management apps let you choose from only a handful of task views, like a list, calendar, or Kanban view. Additional views, especially Gantt charts, are usually a premium feature. ClickUp is different. It's a simple and free project management app that lets you choose from 11 different task views, including Gantt charts and mind maps.

There are also four different page views: Chat which displays conversations alongside your tasks , Doc which lets you create docs, wikis, and knowledge bases , Embed to add apps and websites next to your tasks , and Form to add a form next to your tasks to gather, organize, and collect data. ClickUp's dashboards are just as customizable, letting you choose from more than 20 different widgets so you can only highlight the most important project information.

There's a lot to parse when you're first getting started with ClickUp. The onboarding process won't be as simple as Trello, for example, but the extra customization is worth it—especially when it's completely free.

Plus, the company has done a great job with guided in-app onboarding to get you started. Try one of the automations below, or read about why ClickUp users love Zapier. ClickUp Price: The free plan includes unlimited tasks and users, up to MB of storage, and up to uses of Gantt charts, mind maps, dashboards, and timeline views. Paymo is a project management app and time tracker with a free plan that makes it easy for freelancers to plan, prioritize, and keep track of their work for multiple clients and projects.

Work is bucketed into three categories: clients, projects, and tasks. For each task, you can assign due dates, set priorities, and add descriptions and attachments. You also have two options for how to view your tasks—as a list or in a Kanban board—or use Paymo's filter to sort all of your tasks for every client and project by status, due dates, priorities, and more.

When you're ready to start working on a specific task, just select that task in Paymo's time tracker and click the play button to start tracking your time. When you stop the timer, it adds the time to your timesheet and attributes it to the right task, client, and project. When it's time to bill your clients, use Paymo's time reports to pull the exact data you need.

You can even set work hours and hourly rates for your team to make billing a breeze. Export, print, or share the report with your clients in a detailed list view or as a pie graph or bar chart, or take the data and use it to create a branded invoice directly in Paymo. You can even set up your invoices to allow for online payments through Stripe, PayPal, and more.

You can also use Paymo's Zapier integration to connect your freelance projects with other workflows, connecting Paymo to other task management apps or your calendar. Looking for more apps to simplify your administrative tasks as a freelancer? Here are our recommendations for the best time tracking apps and the best accounting apps for freelancers. If it were up to you, would you manage your projects in a spreadsheet?

If so, you might like Wrike. Wrike offers the same flexibility of a spreadsheet—with columns for every bit of info you want to track about tasks. If you like spreadsheets but need even more customization, head down to our review of Airtable. Wrike lets your team update the status of tasks at various intervals—in-progress, on hold, canceled, or completed. Additionally, you can set the status of projects to green, yellow, red, on hold, or canceled, making it easy to create your weekly project status reports.

While you can do a lot with Wrike's free plan, its best features—including time tracking, Gantt charts, and custom dashboards—do require a premium plan. If you're running a small operation now but planning to scale in the future, Wrike grows alongside you, giving you all of the tools you need to run both a single small project and many concurrent large ones.

If you're interested in the free plan, Wrike's Zapier integrations can help you do more with the project management app, like automatically creating tasks in Wrike from other tools. Airtable Web, iOS, Android. If you've tried other project management software and haven't found the one , Airtable will let you build it.

The app is ready out-of-the-box with a default view similar to a spreadsheet, and it suggests a handful of templated projects based on your team within the company. You can start from one of the suggested templates, browse the rest, or build your own project called a "base" from scratch. But the real power of Airtable happens when you customize it.

It will take some upfront effort to tailor Airtable to be exactly what you need—but if you're willing to spend the time, the sky's the limit. You can customize everything from the methodology and view type to column headers, field types, data validation, and more.

Head over to the Marketplace to choose from over 80 apps that help you integrate, analyze, and enrich your projects, or build your own custom apps. Airtable also integrates with Zapier , so you can do things like automatically track important information in Airtable, get notifications for activity in your Airtable base, and more.

GoodDay Web. GoodDay is flexible enough to satisfy a team with diverse project management needs. The app supports a number of methodologies and views, including Gantt, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and waterfall. All are available to use on the free plan, making it the most generous and flexible free plan we tested. Every project you create can take a different approach, and you can add additional views of the project at any time. Beyond those views, each project has a Summary tab with an overview of tasks, events, users, and burn down.

We also love the My Work view, which rolls up work, tasks, calendar, and individual projects assigned to you. When you first set up your GoodDay account, you can choose from a number of different modules, like time tracking, client portals, and billing to make the app do even more for you. Take GoodDay. But that's where the similarities end, as Project is all about managing your team's efforts with Gantt charts, resource allocation, milestones, and a wealth of reporting options.

One of the most helpful features in Project has to be the auto-scheduling feature. Project expects you to define your projects in a certain way with summary tasks , followed by sub-tasks, as well as milestones.

Once you've entered the scope of your project and defined time frames for your tasks, auto-scheduling can automatically plan a calendar for all your tasks. You could enter your own dates manually, but auto-scheduling offers a more manageable flow on Project's timeline and Gantt chart views. You can also add new columns to suit your company's workflow, rename the default columns, or delete them altogether. Like other Kanban boards, this is a drag-and-drop interface.

You can also create tasks right from this interface, as well as add key information such as resources and notes. Like many other project management tools, you can add notes and attach files to your tasks in Project. But in true Microsoft fashion, it uses annoyingly uncommon terminology.

Double-clicking on the information cell on any task calls up a small Task Information window with six tabs. Under the Notes tab, users can jot down small rich text notes about the task. In this section there's also an Insert Object option, which is where you can attach a Word Document, Excel spreadsheet, PDF document, image file, and so on.

Forget about sub-tasks — Microsoft Project lets you embed projects within projects. This is a nice option for anyone who needs to create a master file to track multiple related projects. Once you've linked a sub-project to a master project, you can make changes to the former inside the latter. In addition, any changes you make inside the sub-project file will be reflected in the master project.

It's a handy feature for getting a high-level view of your projects. This third-party video offers an excellent overview of how Microsoft Project works, including creating new projects, adding tasks, and viewing reports.

Microsoft Project is not available as a free version, which isn't surprising given how very few Office applications are save for the most popular ones. This pricing tier supports team member collaboration and coauthoring, multiple project management views, the web app, and cloud saves.

This pricing tier adds roadmapping, a desktop client, the ability to submit timesheets, resource allocation optimization, and portfolio reports. This plan adds portfolio selection and optimisation, the ability to manage demand, and resource planning and management features. There's also Project Server, which doesn't publish a set price and adds advanced analytics, as well as the standardized capture and evaluation process mentioned with Project Online Premium.

There's no doubt that Microsoft Project is a very capable application with all the features required for project management. That said, this probably isn't the ideal choice for smaller, nimbler teams. First of all, it's very staid in its look and feel since it's a pure Office product. It is absolutely feature rich to the point of being overwhelming, but it hides all that dynamism behind the usual Office exterior.

Simply put, you can find far easier and more welcoming interfaces to manage projects for smaller and mid-sized teams. Secondly, Project doesn't have lower priced tiers, making this product out of reach for some — though to be fair, it probably should be compared to the upper tiers of other project management tools, which hide key features behind higher priced offerings.

If your company is already highly invested in Microsoft Office, then Project is a natural extension of that investment. But if you're not interested in Office, then Project is not an ideal choice for you — regardless of how feature rich it might be.

Unfortunately, Microsoft Project is not included in Office It needs to be purchased independently of any Microsoft products. Is Microsoft project difficult to learn? Project is like any other Microsoft product — easy to use but difficult to master, with a massive wealth of features and options.

There are plenty of tutorials online to help you get to grips, however. Is Microsoft Project any good? Microsoft Project is a great choice for medium-sized teams, especially if you're already using Microsoft Office.

While it can be overwhelming, the amount of quality features makes it a great choice. How much does Microsoft Project cost? Microsoft Project has three pricing tiers. Is Microsoft Project free? While there is a free trial of Microsoft Project, there is no permanently free tier.

Is Project Plan the same as Microsoft Project? These are two different products with varying features.