Project Management

The Top 10 Project Management Solutions

Project management solutions aid in planning, organizing, and managing projects, providing tools for collaboration, task management, and project tracking to ensure successful project delivery.

Last updated on Oct 07, 2024

Written by Mirren McDade

Technical review by Laura Iannini

The Top 10 Project Management Solutions include:

1. Airtable
2. Asana
3. Atlassian Jira
4. ClickUp
5. Microsoft Project
6. monday.com
7. Smartsheet
8. Teamwork.com
9. Trello
10. Wrike

Project management solutions enable teams and organizations to effectively plan, execute, and communicate on their projects, ensuring they are delivered on-time, within scope, and on-budget. These solutions offer a variety of features such as task management, team collaboration, time tracking, resource allocation, and communication tools. Project management software is essential for businesses and teams to stay organized, maintain consistent productivity, and provide transparency to all stakeholders involved in a project.

With an array of project management solutions available on the market, each offering distinct features and capabilities, it can be challenging for businesses to choose the most suitable solution that caters to their needs. This guide highlights the top project management solutions based on their features, integrations, scalability, user experience, and customer satisfaction.

Airtable

Airtable is a cloud-based collaboration service, based in San Francisco, designed to enable teams to build and connect powerful custom applications to drive outcomes, without any coding requirements. The platform offers a range of features that foster productivity and efficiency across various sectors, from product management to marketing.

The platform allows users to transform their workflows with integrated AI, create a ‘single source of truth’ with shared data, and seamlessly integrate with other essential tools like Jira, Salesforce, and Tableau. By providing a centralized space for information and resources such as product roadmaps, OKR progress, and marketing campaigns, Airtable ensures alignment between teams to drive business outcomes. With its scalability and security, Airtable aims to provide users with the ability to manage, grow, and expand their organizations confidently. Its customizable views and real-time tracking features enable stakeholders to maintain control over projects and meet objectives effectively.

Overall, Airtable serves as a flexible, adaptable, and user-friendly solution for businesses seeking a collaborative platform for improving communication and leveraging data to drive results.

Asana

Asana is a San Francisco-based software company that offers a web and mobile work management platform to help teams efficiently organize, track, and manage their work. With its flagship service, Asana enables teams to manage projects from start to finish, ensuring that everyone works in sync and meets their goals.

The platform serves as a single shared hub for organizing projects and tasks, providing visibility into individual responsibilities and the steps required to complete them. Through Asana’s diverse project views and custom task labels, managers can easily check and correct project performance, spotting potential blockers and reporting on progress to ensure smooth work operations. Asana automatically updates team members on new assignments and other essential information, allowing individuals to prioritize their daily work and track tasks in one place. To further enhance productivity, Asana integrates seamlessly with over 270 apps, facilitating better collaboration among teams using different tools. Asana’s capabilities extend beyond basic project and task management.

The platform empowers businesses to connect daily work to company-wide objectives, track progress in real time, and efficiently allocate resources to high-priority tasks. With built-in workflow automation, teams can streamline processes and save time, while robust admin and security features allow organizations to scale confidently and safeguard their data.

Atlassian Jira

Atlassian’s Jira is a proprietary issue tracking product that enables bug tracking and agile project management. With over 100,000 organizations using Jira, it is a well-established solution that offers customizable workflows and integrations while adapting to your team’s needs and practices.

Jira allows teams to break down big ideas into manageable, structured tasks with user stories, issues, and templates. As teams grow, Jira accommodates, providing security, privacy, and scalable features such as epics, work items, dependencies, and releases on interactive timelines. Scrum boards assist with organizing complex projects into smaller, focused tasks and sprints for faster delivery. Teams can also access real-time reports and dashboards for insights within the context of their work.

Jira’s adaptability is further demonstrated with the choice between team or company-managed projects, customizable workflows that map to various styles of work, and over 3,000 apps and integrations available through the Atlassian Marketplace. As a central source of truth for DevOps practices, Jira connects a diverse range of tools and languages, making it easier for teams to coordinate and focus on their tasks.

ClickUp

ClickUp is a comprehensive work management platform designed to improve team collaboration and increase productivity. It combines various project management features, such as tailored views for cross-functional projects, automation, and reporting tools, to standardize and scale best practices across an organization.

One key aspect of ClickUp is its AI capabilities, which help accelerate project planning and execution. The AI can automatically generate subtasks, summarize comment threads, and provide autonomous updates to streamline project management. In addition, ClickUp ensures visibility into project details and alignment with company objectives, making prioritization and planning easier for teams. ClickUp also fosters transparent communication among stakeholders, providing collaboration tools, such as Docs and Chat, to promote shared understanding and quicker consensus. The platform serves as a single source of truth for project progress, offering real-time insights into bottlenecks, risks, and resource allocation through interactive dashboards.

Lastly, ClickUp’s customization options with its task management features support efficient collaboration and organization on a wide range of company objectives. The platform also integrates natively with over 200 tools, such as Slack, Figma, and cloud storage apps, to further enhance productivity by connecting and automating work across an organization’s technology stack.

Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project is a project management software aimed at helping project managers with tasks such as scheduling, resource allocation, progress tracking, budget management, and workload analysis. As one of the first Microsoft Windows-based applications, it quickly gained dominance in the PC-based project management software market.

Microsoft Project offers users the ability to efficiently plan projects through its dynamic scheduling feature, which takes into account factors such as effort, duration, and team members. This software is suitable for managing projects of any size and caters to both project managers and non-managers. With Microsoft Project, users can make data-driven decisions thanks to its integration with Power BI, allowing the creation of interactive dashboards for an in-depth analysis of project statuses.

Additionally, the software promotes innovation through its flexibility in building custom desktop and mobile experiences, as well as its easy-to-use automated workflow creation. Built on the trusted Azure platform, Microsoft Project ensures a secure and reliable experience for users in various industries.

monday.com

Monday.com is a cloud-based platform that enables users to create tailored applications and project management software to enhance team alignment, efficiency, and productivity. By customizing workflows to fit specific needs, Monday.com helps centralize work, processes, tools, and files into one Work OS, connecting teams and maintaining a single source of truth across organizations.

This platform encourages effective collaboration organization-wide, providing a clear picture of all ongoing work. With user-friendly automations and real-time notifications, it keeps team members updated and informed. Monday.com also allows users to oversee their organization’s overall progress through customizable dashboards, enabling data-driven decision-making and easy scaling of workflows to meet evolving needs.

At its core, Monday.com features a visual board that acts as the foundation for its Work OS. Users can personalize this board to manage anything from projects to entire departments. Moreover, Monday.com’s support team is readily available, ensuring users get the most out of the platform and can focus on their work without any limitations.

Smartsheet

Smartsheet is a project management platform designed to empower teams with a more efficient and collaborative way to handle projects. By consolidating tools and eliminating siloed and legacy approaches, Smartsheet provides a single platform for all your work, including projects, people, and processes.

It also offers seamless integration with other platforms such as Slack, Google Workspace, Jira, and Microsoft Teams. The platform aims to simplify project management with a rich set of features that are flexible, easy to use, and promote real-time collaboration. In addition, Smartsheet supports hybrid work through improved communication and processes that scale while prioritizing individual and team empowerment. Key aspects include project planning, resource management, budget management, project tracking, and project delivery. Analytics and reporting are also available via real-time dashboards, while workflow automation helps eliminate repetitive, manual processes.

With Smartsheet, project management is accessible to everyone and allows diverse teams to work together on a unified platform. Its ability to standardize project structure and processes facilitates the scaling of projects to programs and portfolios.

Teamwork.com

Teamwork.com is an Irish software company based in Cork, specializing in task management and team collaboration software. They offer web-based tools designed to improve efficiency and grow profits through powerful project management and operational control.

The platform enables businesses to manage team capacity, preventing burnout and ensuring healthy utilization across projects. It serves as a comprehensive system of record, organizing client assets, communications, project timelines, and financial reporting. Additionally, the platform helps optimize recurring revenue from retainers by tracking time, rates, and expenses, while balancing budget fluctuations. Teamwork.com helps businesses eliminate chaos by prioritizing important tasks with robust project management, milestones, and detailed reporting on performance. The platform allows for better understanding of team’s time utilization, identifying underutilized team members and those who can take on more work. By monitoring project, client, and retainer performance, it enables data-driven decisions to grow profit margins.

Integrated time tracking and resource management features, pre-built templates, process automation, and third-party integrations work hand-in-hand, simplifying operations and allowing businesses to scale and customize processes to suit their team’s changing needs.

Trello

Trello is a web-based application developed by the subsidiary of Atlassian, Trello Enterprise, which utilizes a kanban-style, list-making approach to improve productivity. The platform is centered around boards, lists, and cards, offering users a clear view of the tasks at hand and their respective progress.

The core components of Trello include boards for organizing tasks, lists for defining the different stages of a task, and cards as a representation of tasks and ideas. Users can easily move cards across lists to track the status of tasks. Trello also offers a Timeline view to help manage weekly sprints and annual planning, providing a comprehensive outlook on upcoming tasks and identifying potential gaps. Other notable features of Trello include Calendar view for scheduling and monitoring to-dos, and various integrations that enable connectivity with other applications your team may already use.

Trello’s Butler Automation is a built-in, no-code automation feature that streamlines processes and boosts productivity. For larger-scale requirements and additional security features, Trello Enterprise offers a robust solution that aligns with team workflows.

Wrike

Wrike is an American project management application service provider that offers a platform designed to streamline workflows for various departments. This versatile application allows teams to manage projects, organize work, and integrate with their favorite tools. Through Wrike, teams collaborate effectively and improve efficiency, thereby increasing visibility and alignment within the organization.

By adapting workflows, changing views, and tailoring workspaces, Wrike appeals to different teams’ needs and preferences, while maintaining a complete visual overview. The platform helps eliminate wasted efforts through automation, reducing repetitive work, and minimizing the time spent on routine administrative tasks. This allows team members to focus on their most valuable work and deliver faster business outcomes. With Wrike, teams and departments are empowered to perform to the best of their abilities due to increased visibility, enhanced cross-functional collaboration, and powerful automation.

Additionally, Wrike’s intuitively customizable features assist in maximizing team performance, accelerating growth, and improving customer experience. Users can access the application on various devices including laptops, desktops, tablets, and smartphones, ensuring that they can stay connected and updated, even when on the go.

Everything You Need To Know About Project Management Solutions (FAQs)

What Are Project Management Solutions?

Project management software is designed to help teams to better organize, track, and execute their tasks. At its core, project management software is essentially an interactive workspace, one that allows users to coordinate their work, communicate, and collaborate effectively.

These solutions provide a centralized platform that works to streamline the entire project lifecycle. Project management solutions come in a range of forms that include simple tools to more complex enterprise-level platforms. Project management solutions also vary across industries and sectors, including information technology, marketing, construction. These tools play an important role in improving collaboration efforts across teams, ensuring that levels of productivity remain high, and that projects can be completed within budget and in a timely manner.

Which project management solution is best suited to your organization will depend on the organization’s needs, the required level of functionality, and the nature of the projects being undertaken.

Why Use A Project Management Solution?

Organizations tend to have multiple projects ongoing at any one time, often requiring input from various team members and departments. Without the right tools to manage these projects effectively, teams could end up using manual, ineffective methods like spreadsheets, which can actually impede cross-functional collaboration and do not show real-time updates.

Some benefits of utilizing project management software include:

Streamlined working. These tools significantly lower the risk of mistakes being made or work being repeated due to poor communication, and so can help teams to focus on getting through their tasks quickly and efficiently.
Create a system of record. Project management solutions act as a system of record for project and related tasks across the organization. As a result, relevant information is both safely stored and readily available at all times.
Boost cross-functional collaboration. At its core, project management solutions are collaboration tools. These solutions help to facilitate an interconnected, thriving, cross-functional organization.
Safely store work. Keeping all project related information in one place helps to remain organized, whilst reducing the likelihood of work being lost – all while maintaining security and privacy.

What Features Should You Look For In Project Management Solutions?

To find the best project management solution for your organization, it is important to consider each platform’s features and compare this against your requirements to manage your projects effectively. While feature sets may vary between vendors, some important aspects of a good project management solution that you should look for include the following:

Planning and scheduling. Project execution requires team members to be on top of their tasks and responsibilities, so a good project management solution should be capable of assigning tasks and setting deadlines and priorities to avoid misunderstandings and improve productivity. In enabling the creation of project plans, timelines, and schedules, these tools support teams in outlining project phases, dependencies, and milestones in order to establish a reasonable roadmap for project execution.
Collaboration and communication. A big project might require input from dozens or even hundreds of individuals, with each one possibly having different skills and knowledge sets. This could mean team members need to access each other’s work to complete their own, requiring quick and organized communication and collaboration. A good project management solution should include file sharing, discussion forums, and real-time communication features. This boosts team communication, fosters strong collaboration, and keeps everyone on the same page.
Documentation. It is valuable to have all project information accessible in one place so that it can be easily accessed and shared amongst team members. By centralizing project-related documents, resources, and files for easy access and version control, project management solutions facilitate safer and more efficient document sharing and collaboration, whilst helping to ensure that team members are kept up to date on the latest project information.
Reporting. To manage a project successfully, teams need to be aware of issues and shortcoming that require fixing as soon as possible. To gain a thorough overview of project progress, a good project management solution should allow you to generate detailed reports and provide analytics of a range of project metrics, performance, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This gives stakeholders vital insights into projects, thereby leading to more informed decision making and continuous improvement.
Resource management. It’s not just team members and their contributions that need to be managed, it’s also important to track the usage of other project resources like materials and space, such as meeting rooms. A good project management tool will include features for outlining the scheduled and planned resources, alongside the cost of their use, to optimize resource allocation, prevent overallocation, and ensure that the right resources are available when they are needed.

Mirren McDade

Senior Journalist & Content Writer

Mirren McDade is a senior writer and journalist at Expert Insights, spending each day researching, writing, editing and publishing content, covering a variety of topics and solutions, and interviewing industry experts. She is an experienced copywriter with a background in a range of industries, including cloud business technologies, cloud security, information security and cyber security, and has conducted interviews with several industry experts. Mirren holds a First Class Honors degree in English from Edinburgh Napier University.

Laura Iannini

Cybersecurity Analyst

Laura Iannini is an Information Security Engineer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida. Laura has experience with a variety of cybersecurity platforms and leads technical reviews of leading solutions. She conducts thorough product tests to ensure that Expert Insights’ reviews are definitive and insightful.