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| Best For… | |
| Project Management |
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| Team Collaboration |
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| Cross-Platform Collaboration |
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| See All Categories | |
We compare the top 10 best tools to manage your projects and award winners in the categories of project and task management, virtual team communication, team and document collaboration, complex (large-scale) project, and task management, cross-platform collaboration, collaborative brainstorming, and more.
Since we reviewed 20 companies, we cover tools that didn’t make the top 10 on this page.
Remember that these companies provide unique offerings, so depending on your specific needs, you may find a tool here at a price point that’s an excellent fit for your team.
ClickUp | Glip | Jira Core | Kanban Tool | LiquidPlanner | Monday.com | ProofHub | Samepage | Sococo | Wrike
ClickUp Review
ClickUp is a surprisingly feature-rich project management platform for its competitive pricing. In addition to the essential task management features you’ll find in most tools, ClickUp also offers file sharing, time tracking, goals, calendars, and even an inbox. Some users say it can take a bit of a learning curve to figure out how to set up all the features for your team’s needs, but overall, user feedback is positive.
ClickUp launched in 2017 and has grown quickly in a very competitive space. It now boasts 100,000 teams as customers. The company is constantly refining its software to add new features and make existing ones work smarter and faster. With that said, some users say there are minor hiccups with the user experience.
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Pricing
The following prices are if you pay annually (a 45% savings over paying month-to-month). All plans, including the free version, have unlimited users and tasks.
- Free version: 100MB file storage
- Unlimited: $5/user/month (unlimited storage and advanced features)
- Business: $9/user/month (business class features and added security)
- Enterprise: must contact for pricing
- View all options
Glip Review
Owned by RingCentral, one of our top picks for best online fax companies, Glip offers many of the same features you’d expect from similar online tools, including instant messaging, file sharing, and task management, but nothing that stands out. For that reason, we didn’t see any compelling reason to include them in our top choices.
However, RingCentral is a reputable company that’s been around since 2003, so you can trust that they put out reliable products. We wish they had done something to differentiate Glip from the others in this space. We couldn’t find many things to say about it — good or bad. If your goal is to clean up your team members’ inbox clutter and you like to see things in a clean, visual way, Glip might be a good fit for your group.
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- Free for unlimited posts, storage, and users and 500 minutes of video chat
- Glip PRo+: $14.99/user/month up to 500 minutes per user per month
Jira Core Review
Jira Core by Atlassian is a project management tool for teams in various business fields, including marketing, legal, finance, HR, and more. It allows users to track projects, add attachments, assign responsibilities, measure performance, and more. It also supports statuses, comments, and notifications and has useful search features.
Atlassian also offers Jira Software, software development, and project management tools rolled into one robust package, and Jira Service Desk, a platform for customer support and IT professionals.
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Cloud
- Free 7-day trial
- Free Forever version: up to 10 users, 2GB file storage, community support
- Standard: Monthly flat rate of $5/user per month – includes 250GB file storage, standard 9-5 support
Self-Hosted
- $10 for up to 10 users (one-time payment)
- $2,200 starting price for 25 users (one-time payment)
Kanban Tool Review
Kanban Tool is a visual project management tool that helps teams become more efficient. Teams can use Kanban cards, colors, tags, due dates, and more to organize projects. Team members can collaborate in real-time by sharing tasks, information, and comments while seeing how a project is progressing. You can spot any problem areas and help your team’s efficiency by using Kanban’s analytics and metrics.
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- 14-day free trial (no credit card required)
- Free: 2 boards, 2 users, no file attachments
- Team: $5/month/user for unlimited boards and file attachments
- Enterprise: $9/month/user for time tracking and reporting and unlimited boards and file attachments
- Kanban Tool On-Site: starting at $600/year (Enterprise solution installed on your server, available for 10+ users)
LiquidPlanner Review
If you have a larger company or team with multiple layers and moving pieces, LiquidPlanner could be a decent tool for you. It specializes in “priority-based schedules,” which means your to-do list updates automatically based on the most time-sensitive priorities.
LiquidPlanner has a time tracker that records how long a task takes you to complete and logs your hours by project. You can also use reports and tracking tools to see how your team can improve its efficiency.
They also have an open API (application program interface) for developers, so if you’re a little more tech-savvy, you can integrate with other tools. Note that LiquidPlanner is more expensive due to the number of features offered, but it’s worth signing up for a free trial to check out this cool product.
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- 14-day free trial (no credit card required)
- Professional: $45/user/month based on an annual plan with 100GB storage (5 user minimum, up to 25 users)
- Enterprise: Must contact for pricing (500GB storage and up to 50 users)
Monday.com Review
Monday.com is a visually appealing and customizable project management tool. With ready-made but flexible templates and drag-and-drop building blocks, your team can set up a workflow system to best fit your needs. And you can display data in several ways: by your team’s workload, a timeline, Kanban boards, charts, dashboards, and much more.
Our main complaint with Monday is their pricing structure, which rises in increments of 5 users. Most other companies in this space give you pricing for the exact number of users you have. You also have to upgrade to higher-priced plans to get features you can find elsewhere for much less.
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Monday.com offers a 14-day free trial, and you can save 18% off pricing if you pay annually instead of monthly (below is monthly pricing). Pricing goes up in increments of 5 users up to 30 team members. Then it rises in increments of 10 users up to 200+. Features also vary pretty widely depending on the plan you choose.
- Basic: $49/month for 5 users, 5GB file storage
- Standard: $7.50/month per user for 1 TB file storage
- Pro: $9/month per user, 1 TB file storage
ProofHub Review
ProofHub has a simple interface and is well-organized to help keep your team on top of projects. ProofHub has all the basics to make your team more efficient, but some companies do it better.
They claim to do everything the other project management tools can do too, and there is one fixed monthly price regardless of the number of users (which can be a good or bad thing, depending on how many team members you have). Learn more about ProofHub in our interview with CEO And Founder Sandeep Kashyap.
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Pricing
You can save on the following pricing if you pay annually.
- Free 14-day trial
- Essential: $50/month for 40 projects, unlimited users, 15GB storage
- Ultimate Control: $99/month for unlimited projects and users, 100GB storage
Samepage Review
Samepage is most similar to two other instant messaging and team collaboration tools we’ve reviewed, Slack and Microsoft Teams. However, it has a wider variety of features than both. Samepage combines team chat, video conferencing, screen sharing, file sharing, task management, and real-time team document collaboration in a single platform. Even with all these features, we prefer Slack because it’s not as clunky to use as Samepage.
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Pricing
Samepage offers a free trial for its Pro version.
- Free version: unlimited users, 2GB file storage
- Standard: $7.50/user/month, 1TB file storage, folder access rights
- Pro: $9/user/month, 1TB file storage per user, advanced admin controls
Sococo Review
Sococo falls short in technical and privacy capabilities, but it does give your team the ability to be all in the same (virtual) office space together. Think of visual chat paired with virtual reality. Logging into its online workspace is like coming to work in the morning.
Because it has limits on certain features, like spell check, saved conversation history, and some technical glitches, it falls behind Slack. It’s also pricey, lacks security features, and has a less-than-ideal privacy policy.
Sococo is great for those of you with office withdrawal who need to feel like you’re working with another human in real-time and see them in their “office.” It creates a virtual workspace for teams to connect as if they were in an actual brick and mortar building.
Each team member gets their own “office,” which even has a door you can shut to have privacy. It’s a great way for teams to bond, have a spur of the moment meeting (or virtual happy hour) and see who’s “in the office” (or online and available).
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- $14.99 per seat per month (10 seat minimum) for 500 minutes
- Unlimited: $24.99 per seat per month (unlimited seats and minutes)E
- View all options
Wrike Review
Founded in 2007, Wrike boasts more than 20,000 paid users since its inception. It has a tutorial that walks you through how to use the tool upon logging in for the first time and requires no credit card to sign up. You can add multiple tasks and projects without having to assign a person or due date. Once things start to pile up, you can view the big picture via a timeline. You can also view tasks and projects by the due date or last modification.
The paid versions include more bells and whistles, like time tracking, branded workspace, analytics. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but it’s pretty straightforward once you get adjusted to everything. There are even keyboard shortcuts if you want to get more advanced.
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Pricing
Pricing is on an annual basis, and there’s a 14-day free trial available as well as a free plan.
- Free: 5 users and a few features
- Professional: starting at $9.80/user/month for 5, 10 or 15 users
- Business: starting at $24.80/user/month for 5 to 200 users
- Marketers: Contact for pricing
- Enterprise: Contact for pricing
Wrike also has add-on features to enhance the plan you choose.
- Proofing & Approval: $9.80/user/month
- Two-Way Sync with GitHub & JIRA: free
- Optimization: contact Wrike for pricing
Did You Find What You’re Looking For?
Don’t forget to check our main comparison for our top 10 and category winners. If we’re missing a company you’re interested in or didn’t answer a question you have, let us know in the comments.
Once you’ve got your project management software up and running, consider a time tracking solution to keep your employees on track and make sure you invest your dollars wisely.
Finally, if you’re using a productivity tool to communicate with team members, consider augmenting with dictation software so you can talk, not type. You’ll be amazed at the improved speed and efficiency with which you and your team get things done (not to mention your hands, arms, and shoulders will thank you!).
Which productivity tool are you leaning toward?
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I agree that project management software has become the key when you want to run a successful and efficient company, especially if your employees work remotely. I can’t imagine my work without using such programs anymore, I’d get lost immediately. My personal favorite software of this kind is Kanban Tool – it’s cheap, easy to use and very powerful. It provides analytics features, time tracker and other advanced tools, but the general layout is wonderfully simple – there’s no chance one could not understand how the thing works. I must admit I haven’t really tried the software you recommend in your article, but I have tried some other ones and so far Kanban Tool definitely wins.
In our agency we use Deskun, it’s integrated with Gmail and works good for small company like ours.