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Project management software is comprised of a specialized suite of task management software such as Agile, Kanban and Scrum, created to enhance the efficiency of a production team. Such software helps businesses implement and execute multiple projects within the required time frame.
You may be an exceptional project manager who aims to complete multi-level tasks with definite goals within a fixed time limit. However, if you aren’t using an online project management, or even a to-do list tool, chances are you will be unsuccessful in monitoring the progress and ensuring timely delivery of a complex project.
Types of Project Management Software
There are a number of different types of project management software which have different benefits and provide value for teams of varying sizes and types. In this article, we describe the most popular types of task management software available on the market. Software is delivered in one of two (or sometimes both) deployments:
- Cloud Service: Such project management tools are hosted on cloud servers, which provides users with the ultimate freedom to access their projects from any location. Individual online project management software is a lightweight solution for a task manager who manages a small to medium sized team. If you want to test the waters before diving in, this type of project management tool is easy to comprehend and implement. Based on the Kanban management style, this is a flexible and visually appealing management system.
- On-Premises: These project management tools are installed on a company’s servers. This ensures that access to the system is limited to devices connected to your local servers.
Top 10 Project Management Software Tools
Monday.com
Value proposition for potential buyers: Monday.com is a cloud project management service that’s growing in popularity. Its graphics and visual capabilities have been described as first-class by a number of users.Founded in 2012 and launched as an independent startup in February 2014, Monday.com describes itself as “a tool that transforms the way teams work together. Its mission is to help teams build a culture of transparency, empowering everyone to achieve more and be happier at work.” Monday.com says it is obsessed with building an excellent product, and its goal is to create a tool that people will love to use.
Key values/differentiators:
- Users say Monday.com works very well on both mobile and larger platforms. The integration between platforms is seamless.
- There is some room for growth with regard to difficult to use / missing features. Most noticeably, were the clunky sub-task assignments. However, overall interactions with Monday have been positive
- Powerful features and robust functionality
- Impressive, modern user interface
- Excellent support team and quick to respond
Who uses it: SMBs to large enterprises
How it works: subscription cloud service
eWEEK score: 4.8/5.0
RingCentral Glip
Value proposition for potential buyers: RingCentral’s cloud-based communication and collaboration platform offers a comprehensive set of capabilities that unify voice, business messaging, team collaboration, video conferencing, and online meetings. RingCentral uses the cloud to help companies across the globe work smarter, radically improving the way businesses partner with customers and co-workers. It offers nimble business communication solutions, used in more than 350,000 organizations worldwide, that rapidly scale as enterprises grow.
Key values/differentiators:
- This is a capable platform that offers more than VoIP phone service or cloud PBX. It delivers complete unified communications as a service (UCaaS)—the kind of solutions that integrate seamlessly within a copany’s current application and framework, without expensive on-premise hardware or hassles.
- Bridging the divide across multiple devices—including smartphones, tablets, computers, and desk phones—RingCentral solutions provide a mobile workforce with flexible communication tools.
- RingCentral helps small businesses manage mobile, fax and e-mail communications. Its core product offering includes RingCentral Office, RingCentral Professional and RingCentral Internet Fax, with services provided in the US, Canada and the UK.
- RingCentral Office is a comprehensive Voice over Internet Protocol phone service for small businesses and enterprise companies. This allows customers to connect teams in different locations. RingCentral Office combines a hosted multi-extension business phone system with voice and fax functionality, unlimited calling and pre-configured phones. This allows businesses to connect teams in different locations.
- RingCentral Glip provides a single, unified team workspace that empowers customers to work, communicate, and collaborate faster and more effectively than ever before. Emails, scattered discussions, and disjointed resources are drastically reduced as teams share conversations, files, tasks, and calendars. Teams, whether internal or external, can collaborate using their favorite devices anytime, anyplace—all within the Glip team workspace.
Who uses it: small businesses, midrange enterprises
How it works: subscription cloud service
eWEEK score: 4.7/5.0
Zoho Projects
Value proposition for potential buyers: Zoho Projects offers smart software to help users grow businesses. With more than 15 million users worldwide, Zoho’s 33-plus products aid sales and marketing, support and collaboration, finance and recruitment needs –letting users focus only on their businesses. It stands as a comprehensive solution to day-to-day problems in project management and adds value to businesses.
Key values/differentiators:
- Zoho Projects is quite a good platform for performing project management tasks and allotment to specific people with periodic follow-up facility. Easy to implement and setup creation of the new project is quite easy when it comes to Zoho Projects.
- Users can manage devices, apps, profiles and assets by performing mobile device management (MDM) operations to configure and secure mobile devices from a central location. It supports managing iOS, Android, Samsung SAFE & Samsung KNOX devices and Windows phones.
- Has a complete web-based, ITIL-driven Help Desk & Asset Management tool
- An all-in-one cloud monitoring service for DevOps and IT operations with broad monitoring capabilities covering applications, servers, networks, public and private clouds, websites and web apps.
- In-depth analytics and reporting
- Robust functionality and features
To Take Under Advisement: Project completion factor is something that’s missing. Users have to check manually while checking the status of the project.
Who uses it: midsize to large enterprises
How it works: subscription cloud service and on-premises options
eWEEK score: 4.6/5.0
Celoxis Technologies
Value proposition for potential buyers: Celoxis Technologies is a SaaS-based company that develops project management software for its clients. Celoxis Technologies develops Celoxis, a project management software that features scheduling, Gantt, project tracking, resource management, time and expense management, financial management, project portfolio management, risk management, reporting and analysis, collaboration, bug tracking, custom fields, integration, and security. Furthermore, it offers support, remote, and educational services to its users. The company was founded in 2001.
Key values/differentiators:
- Track projects, profits, and everything in between
- Many customizations and integrations
- Superb reporting and dashboards
- Gantt edition is at its top,calendar publication is reliable, ergonomy is good, and at the top, there is a present customer service.
- Before you invest here, review first all your needs to be sure what you are searching for. For many developers, the key is a good visual Gantt editor and an efficient Google calendar publication. One reviewer had a tryout for Gant Planner, for example, but it wasn’t meeting expectations, so we were really happy to find Celoxis.
- Most developers search for a solution to mix Project GANTT task management, as a small team online tool, allowing the team to publish these tasks and phases on Google Calendar.
Who uses it: midsize to larger enterprises
How it works: subscription cloud service
eWEEK score: 4.8/5.0
Wrike
Value proposition for potential buyers: Wrike is a San Francisco Bay Area based provider of social project management and collaboration software that helps co-located and distributed teams get things done together in real time. Wrike currently ranks as one of the top project management solutions and is used by renowned brands such as HTC, Adobe, and Google. Wrike guarantees a more efficient performance in distributed and co-located groups. It offers users great project tracking templates to help them get started. Wrike’s cloud-based solution combines task and project management functionality, friendly collaboration features and helpful integrations with popular tools, like email, document management tools, etc. Wrike allows users to manage an unlimited number of tasks and projects in one workspace.
Key values/differentiators:
- In-depth analytics and reporting
- Numerous integrations with popular apps
- Flexible pricing for most business sizes
- Wrike’s task management is among the most powerful in its class, featuring a dynamic timeline). You can associate a task with multiple projects, drag and drop tasks to re-prioritize, get an overview of project schedules in the Gantt timeline, watch the activity stream to see what your team is doing, and drive the entire task management process via email from any client by CC-ing wrike@wrike.com.
- In addition to Wrike’s Intelligent Email Engine ™, Wrike also provides the following tools to manage tasks through email: Gmail gadget (allows to create and edit Wrike tasks in Gmail interface), Outlook add-in (turns emails into interactive tasks right in the inbox), MacMail add-in (currently in alpha version).
- Integration with Google Drive allows for attaching a Google doc to a task or project easily, or create a new one on the fly.
- Project and task descriptions and task notes accept rich text. There are keyboard shortcuts for task management and updating the your status in the activity stream.
Who uses it: midsize to large enterprises
How it works: subscription cloud service
eWEEK score: 4.9/5.0
FreshBooks
Value proposition for potential buyers: FreshBooks claims to be the No. 1 accounting project management software in the cloud designed exclusively for service-based small business owners and independent professionals. The company has helped more than 10 million people worldwide process billions of dollars with its ridiculously easy-to-use invoicing, time tracking, expense management features. Recognized with eight Stevie awards for best customer service in the world, the company’s mantra is to “execute extraordinary experiences everyday.” Based in Toronto, Canada, FreshBooks serves paying customers in 160 countries.
Key values/differentiators:
- Track team projects &and expenses in one place
- Platform built with small businesses in mind
- Smooth collaboration with employees & clients
- Quickly and easily access all your files
Who uses it: small to midsize enterprises
How it works: subscription cloud service
eWEEK score: 4.6/5.0
Proggio
Value proposition for potential buyers: Proggio is a newcomer climbing the charts with a bullet, as they say in the music business. It’s a startup company aiming to revolutionize the project management world. Proggio developed a new application for project management, based on a new approach called “Projectmap.” The application introduces several first-ever features: amazing project plan visualization, team collaboration in one easy click, patented automatic analysis and process improvements. Founded in 2016 by Yaniv Shor (CEO) and Barak Schiby (CTO), the company is headquartered in Kfar Saba, HaMerkaz, Israel.
Key values/differentiators:
- Not much not to like: good content enabler and prints well
- Workstream structure is unique and comfortable
- Software is easy to use. Price is low and therefore easily accessible.
- Proggio is the new generation project management soloution with great user experience
- Accessibility and ease of use; multiple task owners can work simultaneously.
To Take Under Advisement:
- Needs more Google/Gmail integration in the future.
- Some features are missing compared to the heavier software, like MS Project.
- The main difficulty some users had was to migrate MS Project data into Proggio.
Who uses it: midsize to larger enterprises
How it works: subscription cloud service and on-premises options
eWEEK score: 4.8/5.0
Workfront
Value proposition for potential buyers: Workfront is a cloud service-deployed enterprise work management package that ranks among the most popular in the market. The company is known for its excellent personalized service to its customers. The service enables marketing groups, creative agencies and other enterprise teams to control their daily onslaught of email, the peril of redundant status meetings and the uselessness of disconnected tools. Workfront Enterprise Work Cloud is a centralized, easy-to-adopt solution for managing and collaborating on all types of work through the entire work lifecycle, which improves team productivity and executive visibility.
Key values/differentiators:
- Benefits: Assigning tasks, tracking progress and completion, and providing visibility of project status
- Captures all of the activities of a team in one application, helping managers track what everyone is doing. This is the only way that teams have to universally monitor all of their projects and be able to share with management.
- People often go around the system and don’t have a way to prevent this. Also, other users have a way to assign projects to teams that are not their projects. Sometimes due dates assigned to teams are incorrect –need to have a way to change this or it looks like we’re late in our deliverables.
- If you are going to adopt it, make sure all the folks in the organization do, also. If it’s only partially adopted, then it makes it hard to share with other departments.
- Get used to some funky UX choices. Some modal windows have the save/cancel buttons in the lower right, and some have them in the lower left (no idea why!). If you create a task that should have been a subtask, have fun converting it.
- Users like the way they can set a due date and calculate backward, instead of setting a start date and calculating forward. If you don’t use the hours tracking feature for billing/productivity purposes, you have to enter hours anyway in order to calculate project status percentage.
Who uses it: midsize to large enterprises
How it works: subscription cloud service only
eWEEK score: 4.6/5.0
Smartsheet
Value proposition for potential buyers: Smartsheet is a cloud-based work management platform that empowers collaboration, drives better decision making and accelerates innovation.
Key values/differentiators:
- Smartsheet is a great way to plan, track, automate, and report on work, enabling you to move from idea to impact – fast.
- Extremely flexible and intuitive on most levels. It encompasses everything needed from MS Project, Excel, workflow management software, etc. It allows you to link data from one smartsheet to another, send yourself backup copies of the data, see multiple views of the data (e.g., Gantt charts, calendar views, spreadsheet views) and export data to other apps like Excel. You can also import data from Excel to create your initial Smartsheet.
- It can also perform increasingly complex calculations, automate the sending of reports, requests for updates from other users and notify you of what has been changed. It would be easier to try to define what it does NOT do. One more note: they DO ask for customer feedback and they actually DO listen and incorporate these suggestions into future releases.
- This cloud-based work management platform empowers collaboration, drives better decision making, and accelerates innovation for over 70,000 brands in 190 countries, including more than 50% of the Fortune 500.
- Named by Forbes as one of the world’s top private cloud companies, Smartsheet complements existing enterprise investments by deeply integrating with applications from Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Atlassian and many others.
Who uses it: midsize to larger enterprises
How it works: subscription cloud service
eWEEK score: 4.7/5.0
Mavenlink
Value proposition for potential buyers: Mavenlink provides teams with a cloud-based solution for managing the entire project delivery lifecycle. Complete projects, track time, plan resources, and monitor financial performance — all in a single, user-friendly platform. Delivering projects on time and on budget now takes a lot more than just a status meeting. Your teams are distributed, and they need real-time visibility to navigate task dependencies, monitor project timelines, identify current roadblocks, and delight clients. With Mavenlink, a team finally gets the information it needs to deliver projects predictably and profitably.
Key values/differentiators:
- Mavenlink is a modern software platform for professional and marketing services organizations. It is the only solution that helps services firms establish an operational system of record that facilitates their business lifecycle, including key capabilities like resource management, project management, collaboration, project accounting, and BI. Services organizations in more than 100 countries are improving operational execution, increasing agility, and driving improved financial performance with Mavenlink.
- Mavenlink was recently named one of the fastest growing companies in North America by Deloitte, is the only solution to be listed as a Leader in both G2 Crowd’s Best Professional Services Automation and Best Project Management Software grids, and was recently named A Cool Vendor by Gartner, the world’s leading technology research and advisory firm.
Who uses it: midsize to large enterprises
How it works: subscription cloud service and on-premises options
eWEEK score: 4.8/5.0