Cheap Project Management Software: Best Value for Money
Today’s busy world requires more efficiency and time-saving techniques. And finding a solution that is pocket-friendly and provides suitable options can be difficult. Worry not! This article compiles the best 8 cheap project management software for productive teams.
ClickUp
Monday
Asana
Trello
Wrike
As per a report by Project Management Institute, 12% of organizations waste their valuable resources due to the absence of the right project management tools. And that can be saved by using project management software.
However, project management tools can increase the initial investment of a business. And if your revenue systems aren’t well organized, it’s like shouldering a mantle of stones.
If that keeps you awake at night, we have the perfect solution. Dive deep into the list of our best and cheap project management software to manage your workload and teams efficiently.
Best Cheap Project Management Software
- ClickUp: Best all-in-one productivity tool
- Monday: Best for simplified workflows, automation, and regular work updates
- Asana: Best of streamlined tasks tracking, collaboration, and organization
- Trello: Cheapest and simplest project management system with Kanban-style boards
- Wrike: Best of comprehensive project planning and management with a smooth user-interface
- nTask: Intuitive projects and teams management tools with a budget-friendly premium plan
- Smartsheet: Best software with a unique blend of sheets and project management features
- Zoho Projects: Best free project management solution to streamline projects
1. ClickUp
Best All-in-one Productivity Tool
- Smooth use interface with a vast number of features.
- Easy collaboration with other software like Dropbox, Figma, Trello, Excel, etc.
- View options include Gantt, Calendar, Timeline, Board, box, and List.
- Customizable templates to start quickly.
- Strict security measures like two-factor authentication and data encryption protect customers' sensitive data.
- Feels a bit overwhelming with large features for people who want a simple and minimal user interface.
- Users can't share assignments or project overviews with clients without them creating a ClickUp profile.
Whether you are a solopreneur or a freelancer, ClickUp saves you time by helping you plan, organize, sort, track, and budget your projects. On the other hand, ClickUp has quite affordable plans for small and medium-sized businesses with tons of customization and collaboration. Overall, it's your all-in-one solution for optimizing productivity while addressing your unique needs.
Founded in 2017, ClickUp has begun with the motto to create a single destination for all productivity needs, which reflects on their slogan “one app to replace them all.” With a team migrating worldwide, it is progressing towards helping people save at least one day per week.
ClickUp has been helping 800,000+ teams function productively with its various features. These features include whiteboards, Gantt charts, Dashboards, Docs, Mind Maps, Native time Tracking, Automation, and more. You can also download the desktop app or access it through your phone.
ClickUp is the cheapest one-stop solution for businesses with top-notch support, security, and collaboration.
Key Features
ClickUp AI to Accelerate Execution
ClickUp AI has hundreds of AI prompts to accelerate project management tasks like creating project briefs and timelines. You can create status reports and meeting agendas and even give responses to the customers to improve your customer loyalty. Running marketing campaigns by prompting email writing, content brief creation, or even case study generation has never been easier. Furthermore, get summaries of comment threads in seconds, create tasks and action items from documents, communicate consistently, and brainstorm ideas, all with the AI assistant. Moreover, you can save tons of time and effort with ClickUp AI, available wherever you go.
Multiple Customizable Views and Smooth Customization With ClickApps
ClickUp has 15+ customizable views, including a list, Gantt chart, kanban boards, calendar, or more to visualize all your project activities together. You don't need to code or install multiple add-ons to get these features. 35+ ClickApps such as tags, priority, custom fields, email, threaded replies, due dates, time tracking, and more allow you to optimize your unique experience.
Effortless Collaboration
With the ClickUp project management tool, you can easily collaborate with other team members, collect feedback on your documents, add comments, send attachments, and perform real-time chats. Further, you receive a notification whenever an activity happens – a super effective feature for remote teams.
Dashboards to Track Progress
ClickUp allows users to track almost everything, from the time taken to complete projects, goal progress, no. of docs and embeds, and more. The best part, it shows you everything in interactive dashboards – super easy to see everything in one place and iterate the process.
Pricing
- 24/7 Support
- 100 Automations/Month
- Built-in Time Tracking
- Kanban & Calendar View
- 100 MB Storage
- Live Chat Support
- 1000 Automations/Month
- Guest Access Control
- Unlimited Map & Gantt Views
- Unlimited Storage
- Unlimited Dashboards
- 10000 Advanced Automations/Month
- Unlimited Teams
- Timesheets Integration
- Unlimited Timeline Uses
- Priority Customer Service
- 25000 Pro Automations/Mo
- Unlimited Subtasks in Multiple Lists
- API calls: 1000/Minute
- Custom Capacity for Workload
Read more about ClickUp pricing or ClickUp review
ClickUp provides multiple pricing plans for users, starting from a Free Forever plan to a custom Enterprise plan.
- The Free Forever plan is best for personal usage and allows users to use 100 MB storage, add unlimited tasks, unlimited free plan members, multiple views customization, and more, all for free.
- The Unlimited plan is best suited for small businesses allowing users to have everything on the Free Forever plan plus unlimited storage, dashboards, Gantt chart, integrations, custom fields, etc., for just $5 per monthly member.
- On the other hand, the Business plan is the most popular one for mid-sized teams. It comes with all features in an unlimited plan plus additional features like Google SSO, Unlimited teams, custom exporting, advanced public sharing, advanced automation, and more for $12 per monthly member.
- The Business Plus plan is best suited for multiple teams. It has additional advanced features like team sharing, subtasks in multiple lists, conditional logic in forms, custom role creation, custom permission, etc., all at $19 per monthly member.
- If you have several large teams, you can consider the custom Enterprise plan, customizable per your unique requirements.
2. Monday
Best for Simplified Workflows, Automation, and Regular Work Updates
- 200+ Ready-made templates from different categories to start planning and organizing your projects
- The work update option is handy for keeping track of your day-to-day tasks. You can add updates through emails, too.
- Multiple pre-made automation templates to automate recurring tasks.
- Work calendar logs to see all the updates by yourself and team members.
- Best project management app making daily updates easy.
- Clumsy interface, which makes it difficult to plan and organize your projects.
- The time-tracking option is hard to find. On free and basic plans, you need to add a third-party integration like Clockify to track your time taken per project.
Monday is one of the best project management software with handy features. These features include project updates, ready-made project and automation templates, multiple app integrations, 24/7 customer support, and more. It's a great option if you want custom features tailored to your unique project needs.
Monday is the easiest work management software based on users all around the globe. You can manage your clients, projects, tasks, time, portfolio, resources, requests and approval, and more from a single interface.
That's why about 180,000+ customers enjoy the work efficiency of utilizing Monday's features.
Customizable dashboards provide your progress towards the big goal. Views, integrations, automation, and apps help you stay flexible while not wasting time on repetitive administrative tasks.
Besides, Monday provides different tailored products for different teams, so you don't have to customize your workspace from scratch. It has helped teams optimize the recruitment process, allocate resources, and simplify OKR tracking.
If you want to increase your efficiency while staying on track with your team, try Monday today!
Key Features
Real-time Dashboards
Combined dashboards allow you to track data from various workflows. It helps make informed decisions and avoid mistakes that cost time and money.
Multiple Views
Monday provides multiple view options, including calendar, cards, table, Gantt, chart, Kanban, files gallery, forms, or timesheets. With Gantt and Chart options, you can visualize everything at a glance while organizing tasks and projects into different tags, milestones, or due dates. Add dependencies and baselines to review your progress on a time or resource basis.
Custom Workflows
Besides pre-made workflows for automating the cumbersome micro-tasks, you can also build your custom workflows and run a definite number of monthly actions based on your plan. The workflows are easy to create with a minimal interface without coding knowledge.
Centralized Communication
If you manage marketing projects, Monday's annotation features will be your best friend. Update your work reports, add work requests, share feedback with your stakeholders on your files, and minimize communication loops.
Pricing
- 3 Work Boards
- 2 Team Members
- Unlimited Docs
- 500 MB Storage
- 200+ Project Templates
- Unlimited Boards
- Unlimited Team Members
- Unlimited Viewers
- 5 GB Storage
- 1-Week Activity Log
- Calendar, Timeline, Map Views
- 250 Actions for Automations
- 250 Actions for Integrations
- 20 GB Storage
- 6-Month Activity Log
- Unlimited Guest Access
- 25000 Actions for Automations
- 25000 Actions for Integrations
- 100 GB Storage
- 1-Year Activity Log
- Dedicated Customer Agent
- 250000 Automations
- 250000 Actions for Integrations
- Enterprise Analytics
Read more about Monday pricing or Monday review
On Monday, you get a 14-day free trial for their premium features. Besides, they have 5 pricing packages.
- The Free version is best for you if you are just starting your business and don't want to make quick purchase decisions on a project management tool. It includes all the necessary features to run and track your projects.
- The Basic plan costs you $8 per seat per month, which includes unlimited viewers, unlimited items, unlimited boards, and more. It's best for small team management with minimum activities per week.
- The Standard plan costs you $10 per seat per month, which includes everything in the basic plan plus more view options (Gantt, Calendar, Timeline), Guest access, 250+ automation actions per month, and a combined dashboard option. The standard plan is best for small and medium-sized businesses with maximum operations.
- The Pro plan costs you $19 per seat per month and comes with private boards, chart view, time tracking, formula column, 25,000 automation actions per month, and more from the standard plan. It's best for medium-sized businesses that want to collaborate on everything in a single place.
- An Enterprise plan is best for large organizations with multiple departments that want to maximize productivity, flexibility, and growth. That's why it has a customization option you can set up by connecting with the sales team.
3. Asana
Best of Streamlined Tasks Tracking, Collaboration, and Organization
- Simple task creation process
- Effective collaboration with your team members or people outside the organization
- Email notifications if someone adds notes to your tasks and accessibility to respond through email without opening the app.
- The software makes data collection, surveys, and regular work documentation easy.
- Subtasks are included in the parent ones, and board visibility of subtasks would be easier to glance at from the outside.
- No option to import information from a different software
With Asana, team members can plan the steps to solve problems through effective collaboration features. You can break tasks or projects into chunks and visualize them as lists, boards, calendars, or timelines. Overall, Asana provides a Minimalist interface to tackle all your projects efficiently and smartly.
Asana claims to provide cross-functional operations between teams. And it's ranked no. 1 in project and program management tools. Some statistics prove the claims include 82% employee satisfaction improvement, 34% on-time project finish, 54% quick execution of tasks, and 35% reduced time utilization on administrative tasks.
Whether you want to manage the marketing, operation, IT, sales, or product teams, or you want to handle and connect all functions to reach the big company goals, Asana has specific features for you. With this software, connect all the functions across teams, scale the platform as the team expands, automate processes through workflows, or get real-time analytics.
Key Features
Workflow Builder and Automation
Asana provides a simple workflow builder which allows team members to collaborate and think strategically to build a system that can help with productive work. You can iterate the workflow in case some gaps are noticed along the way. Workflows can systemize data input, automate repetitive tasks, combine all your project tools in one place, and help teams become more efficient.
Visualize Real-time Insights
Do you copy-paste data across the team and analyze them manually to get the key insights? Asana will help you save that time by providing dashboards with real-time progress indicators. You can see charts, graphs, and tables to adjust the process and prevent issues.
Workload Management
On a single dashboard, you can see who is working across projects and who is, overwhelmed and underworked. It ensures tasks are divided equally and manages pressure over a few team members.
Manage Permissions and Settings
Asana offers you a centralized admin console for managing projects user settings. With this access control, you can allow or prevent members from seeing specific project data.
Pricing
- Unlimited Projects & Tasks
- Unlimited Storage & Logs
- 100+ Free Integrations
- Status Updates
- Calendar View
- Unlimited Dashboards
- Workflow Builder
- Task Dependencies
- Task Templates
- Timeline & Milestones
- Workload Management
- Advanced Reports
- Built-in Time Tracking
- Create Custom Rules
- Premium Integrations
Read more about Asana pricing
Asana is affordable for teams of any size, and it has three major pricing packages:
- The Basic plan is Free for everyone, and you can try it immediately without entering your credit card details. The free plan provides enough features if you're a solopreneur or have minimum projects to manage. These include unlimited projects, tasks, log files, file storage space, messages, collaboration with 15 team members, lists, board, calendar view, project overview and brief, and 100+ integration options.
- The Premium plan is $10.99 per user per month (on annual billing) and is best for small to medium size businesses who wish for an umbrella solution for their projects. You get all the features of a free plan, an unlimited dashboard, timeline and milestone view, workflow builder, advanced search, custom fields, and more.
- The Business plan costs you $24.99 per user per month on annual billing and is suitable for large teams that need to manage a portfolio for various initiatives. Time tracking, proofing, portfolio, custom rule builder, and advanced reporting are a few additional features included with this plan.
4. Trello
Cheapest and Simplest Project Management System with Kanban-style Boards
- Intuitive drag-and-drop boards make task management easy.
- Effective collaboration and group management.
- Fully customizable cards that make it efficient to manage multiple other things than tasks and projects.
- Automatic notifications whenever updates happen to a board.
- Limited privacy settings.
- Managing multiple teams can be challenging.
Trello is one of the top project management software with simple but seamless collaboration features. You can brainstorm your ideas, plan them, and organize them into different cards and boards with team information, attachments, and more. Overall, if you are looking for a system that fulfills your project management and collaborative needs, Trello serves the best job.
Atlassian subsidiary Trello was started in 2010 by Fog Creek Software Company. After four years of winning, its branding changed to Trello, Inc, and in 2017, it was sold to Atlassian.
Trello’s flexible, intuitive, and simple Kanban board views ease the process of project planning, management, and organizing information.
You can collaborate with your team and get a notification whenever there are changes to the boards. Trello offers unlimited power-ups to integrate a project tool of your choice into a single interface.
Furthermore, you can create workflows and automate your tasks to cut redundancy and increase efficiency.
Key Features
Multiple Views
Trello boards are the simplest yet most powerful tools to break down, organize, and manage tasks. With the higher plans, you can visualize the progress with a timeline view, check and fix project constraints with a dashboard view, and catch on the right time with the calendar view. Moreover, the table view lets you see all the fields and data like a list or spreadsheet.
Automation
Trello's automation system Butler is installed on each board that helps users create rules, set triggers, and build powerful workflows. It doesn't require coding skills and helps you stay ahead of projects and reduce unnecessary manual tasks from your to-do list. You can automate any tasks while integrating with all your favorite tools.
Pre-Built Templates
Trello provides tested, pre-built, and well-organized templates for teams of any category. Within the template library, you get thousands of templates with previews, instructions of use, and related templates if you are looking for something different. These templates are built by the Trello community and provide a simple blueprint for getting started.
Power-Up Plugins and Integration
Using multiple other tools or want more features? Trello brings unlimited power-up options to join additional functionality like card age badges, bookmarks, card grouping, voting, and more. Further, you can integrate with your favorite tools, including Google Drive, Gmail, Slack, Google Calendar, Microsoft Teams, and Jira.
Pricing
Trello allows users to start from zero. For that, it has four distinctive pricing plans:
- The Free plan is best for solo businesses like freelancers to organize their clients and projects together. You get 10 boards per workspace, unlimited cards and power-ups per board, a custom background, unlimited activity logs, and more.
- The Standard plan is $5 per user per month (on annual plans) and best serves small teams with limited budgets. This plan allows users to have custom fields, advanced checklists, unlimited boards, saved searches, and more other than the features in the Free plan.
- The Premium plan costs $10 per user per month yearly and is best for small and medium size teams who need multiple visualization options. Here you get additional workspace views, advanced security, and access control features to manage permission for different users.
- The Enterprise plan pricing starts from $17.50 per user per month when billed annually. It is best for large enterprises with 50+ users where you need to customize the features and pricing according to your need, and contacting the sales team is the best option for assistance.
Besides, there are discounts for non-profit businesses and educational institutes. And you can also try the 14-day free trial on the premium plan.
5. Wrike
Best of Comprehensive Project Planning and Management with a Smooth User-interface
- Quick to set up with a simple form, checklist after signup, and video tutorials for each step.
- Add projects with your preferable views (Gantt, table, Kanban boards, or calendar) with custom fields and statuses.
- Break down projects into unlimited tasks and subtasks, set dates, and assign tasks to people.
- Scalable across organizations, departments, or entire team.
- Multiple spaces for different team members with access control.
- Mac users sometimes face some incompatibility issues whenever there's an OS update.
- Customer support response could be improved.
Wrike is an intuitive, affordable, and beginner-friendly project management platform for solo businesses to large enterprises. What makes Wrike beginner friendly is its few-click dashboard setup process and the getting started checklist with video tutorials to add projects, tasks, and subtasks and plan them with timelines, assignments, and attachments needed. Moreover, planning, organizing, and working with teams has never been easier.
Wrike is the simplest and most versatile project management tool working with 20,000+ organizations from 140 countries.
With the experience of 16 years, it is serving customers with its vast team in 6 countries. Customers have reported 90% less time spent on emails and 50% increased productivity using Wrike.
You can book a demo, try a free trial or take a product tour, calculate your ROI, or start with templates directly. Overall, Wrike has many apps and integrations to manage your projects efficiently, workflow, resources, or tasks, no matter what type of business you run.
Key Features
Workflow Management
Wrike's workflow management system is meant to automate and accelerate tasks and projects. You can personalize your workspace with the required fields and customize the views from Gantt, Kanban boards, Table, Analytics, Attachments, or Resource-wise. Plan tasks and automate your requests quickly. In-app collaboration tools come in handy to assign tasks, defining deliverables, and setting deadlines. The built-in proofing system and your preferred apps combine to minimize the no. of revisions.
Process Automation
Automation helps you move forward smoothly without boring about the status changes. With the automation software, you can choose projects and add triggers for task automation. For example, if your project deadline passes, you can set a trigger for rescheduling, and you get a notification about the task status, assignee, and approvals. That's efficient when you have large numbers of recurring workflows.
Integrate with Multiple Apps from the App Directory
Whether you want to operate with the desktop version or merge all your favorite tools like Slack, Jira, Quickbooks, Zoom, or more, Wrike makes it easier. The app directory contains many apps from different categories to integrate with simple-to-use Wrike APIs. Some categories include analytics, IT, finance, customer relations, marketing, and productivity.
Wrike's Proofing Software
Proofing documents, images, or videos, giving feedback, and assigning iteration works is simple with Wrike's online proofing software. It lets users collaborate in real time and quickly get approvals on creative assets. A project manager can check and provide feedback on multiple file formats like PDFs, images, videos, documents, and web pages. Check previous versions and compare to know which one is better. Automate approvals to notify shareholders and avoid moving back and forth from email software. Furthermore, you can invite external team members to collaborate and help you decide.
Pricing
- Unlimited Users
- AI-Powered Processes
- Custom Work Views
- Different Project Templates
- Available in 8 Languages
- 2-25 Users*
- 2 GB Storage/User
- Custom Fields & Workflows
- Project Dashboards
- Calendar and Gantt Chart Views
- 5-200 Users*
- 5 GB Storage/User
- 200 Automations/User
- Enhanced Collaboration
- Resource Management Features
Read more about Wrike pricing
Wrike is an affordable project management tool with five distinctive pricing packages:
- The Free plan is Free forever and best for everyone who wants to try if the software serves best for their projects.
- The Team plan has a price of $9.80 per user per month that serves the best small but growing teams.
- The Business plan is the most popular among small and medium-sized teams, costing $24.80 per user per month. It serves best any industry for any use cases.
- The Enterprise plan is, as usual, the customizable option that can be tailored per your team size and business type. You can contact the sales team for that purpose. It's best for large enterprises that need high security and options for scalability.
- The Pinnacle plan, similar to the Enterprise plan, must be customized per your needs. It best serves large teams with complex workflows and comes with advanced analytics and tools.
6. nTask
Intuitive Projects and Teams Management Tools with a Budget-friendly Premium Plan
nTask is known best as one of the cheapest project management tools for SMBs.
It helps simplify project plans, makes a project schedule, gives you real-time project status, assists you in focusing on the priorities, tracks time used per project by each member, and allows users to collaborate in real time.
You can integrate with 1000+ apps with Zapier, reducing the burden of switching between different programs. Join nTask today and get your projects done 3X faster!
Key Features
Project Planning
nTask allows users to plan projects 5X faster. The process's efficient features include budgeting to determine the budget, setting currency for billing, resource allocation, and defining work capacity based on members' availability, deadlines, and workload.
Team Chat for Effortless Collaboration
You can virtually connect with your project members at any time with the synchronized team chat feature. You can chat privately with individual members, choose the reply-later option, share attachments with the group, or even share real-time updates with everyone.
Task Management
You can create unlimited subtasks for yourself or break complex projects into tasks that need to be done by other members. Plan, organize, and assign multiple subtasks under a big task or milestone; add required attachments to finish a task; set planned dates vs. actual dates; and list down repetitive tasks. All of it makes task management efficient and a team productive.
Visual Project Progress
Gantt chart view helps users visualize individual projects' progress with flexibility and transparency. The features include milestone setting, progress optimization, budget tracking, and planning task dependency.
Pricing
- Unlimited Projects
- Gantt & Kanban View
- Subtasks & Dependencies
- 5GB Storage
- Custom Fields
- Risk Tracking
- Priority Support
- 10GB Storage
nTask has four pricing plans which are quite affordable to choose from:
- The Basic plan is a free forever package best for small teams of up to 5 members, which anyone can use to try the usefulness of the software.
- The premium plan costs you $3 per month (billed annually) and is best suited for single-person businesses or small teams beginning with project management tools.
- The Business plan is best for businesses of small to medium size with a price of $8 per month on annual billing.
The Enterprise plan is a customizable plan for which you can contact the sales team and create a plan tailored to your team size and the features required.
Pros
- The chat feature is handy for communicating in real time with project members.
- It automates the to-do lists for team members based on tasks done and needed to be done.
- Specific task progress graphs help you find room for improvement.
- The timesheets option is robust to track projects time with the team time spent reporting option.
Cons
- User experience can be improved in terms of customization and team invitation.
- There is no advanced reporting feature, which can be an issue for teams with over 50 members.
7. Smartsheet
Best Software with a Unique Blend of Sheets and Project Management Features
Smartsheet is a simple project management tool trusted by 90% of Fortune 100 and 80% of Fortune 500 companies.
It’s simple to operate and has a familiar Google sheet or Microsoft Excel interface but with lots of additional features.
Smartsheet is agile, flexible, and secure and helps teams accomplish their projects with easy scalability, automate custom workflows, and align resources across the organization.
So, if you are looking for affordable project management software that is easy to use, unified, and collaborative, look no further than Smartsheet.
Key Features
Project Planning and Management
Smartsheet has a simple-to-use and flexible interface that promises to provide meaningful experiences to your customers with prompt project delivery. Roll-up reporting, score carding, and global planning help you work smarter and collaborate in real time. Similar to other project management software, Smartsheet allows you to break down large, cumbersome projects into manageable tasks and milestones. You can plan it with your team members and add tasks to the spreadsheets with all the required data and files in one place. Manage the worksheets into different view forms like Gantt charts, timelines, grids, cards, or Kanban boards.
Resource Management
Smartsheet's resource management features keep it apart from the crowd. You can see everyone with their availability status, role, and more in an organization and filter through your preference. Adding more people, setting roles, and managing projects hierarchy is a few clicks away in the people dashboard. Further, visualize who is overbooked and who has time for more project work and allocate work accordingly. The resource management panel helps you configure, plan, and align your time, budget, and people to stay on track with a project strategy.
Dashboards and Reports
Smartsheet allows compiling information from third-party resources like YouTube, Tableau, Power BI, or Excel and represents it into customizable dashboard views. It’s often handy to inform stakeholders and present essential information in front of an audience from time to time. The reports feature allows you to merge important sheet data into a broad view. Filter through data and summarize or take key notes to charts and dashboards. Export the data into PDF, sheets, or Excel and share information with team members to inform.
Workflow Automation
Multiple workflow templates help Smartsheet users to customize their workflow and automate time-consuming, repetitive tasks. Some manual tasks to automate through the no-code, pre-built templates include reminders and notifications, weekly or monthly status requests, automatic responses, etc. Get approval requests from any device of your choice and make quick decisions. Moreover, it helps users to run all the project management activities swiftly.
Pricing
- 1 User + 2 Editors
- 2 Project Sheets
- 500 MB File Storage
- Several Project Views
- 100 Automations per Month
- 10 Users + 10 Paid Editors
- Unlimited Project Sheets
- 20 GB File Storage
- Unlimited Reports
- 250 Automations per Month
- Unlimited Users & Free Editors
- Activity Log
- Proofing Support
- Easy-to-Use Document Builder
- Unlimited Automations
Read more about Smartsheet pricing
Smartsheet is a premium plus free project management software with one free and three paid plans:
- The free plan doesn't cost you anything but has the limitation of 1 user, 2 editors, and up to 2 sheets. It is best for single-person businesses and beginner project managers. The free plan allows 500 MB of attachment storage, 100 automation per month, Gantt charts, card and calendar views, and dashboards and reports.
- Pro Plan has a price of $7 per user per month if you bill annually. It’s best for small teams of up to 10 users but unlimited viewers. You get unlimited sheets, dashboards, reports, and forms. Besides, 20 GB attachment storage, 250 automation per month, and user management are allowed in the pro plan.
- Business Plan costs you $25 per user per month, where you must have 3 users minimum. It's best for small to medium-sized businesses that need multiple project managers and unlimited editors. The attachment storage is up to 1 TB, Unlimited automation, and multiple other features are available, including those in pro plans.
- Enterprise Plan allows you to customize your plan based on your unique business needs. It's best for large organizations and institutions that need scaling, security, and many controls. You can get unlimited attachment storage here.
Pros
- Easy to use user interface to navigate and use the features.
- Sheets and dashboards are customizable according to your needs for different departments.
- Pre-built customizable templates for easy assets and budget management, automation workflows, and more.
- Collaborate in real-time to brainstorm ideas and plan, resolve project issues, and receive and give feedback.
Cons
- Limited integration with third-party applications.
- Clunky, with too many users at the same time.
8. Zoho Projects
Best Free Project Management Solution to Streamline Projects
Zoho Projects is an effective solution for easy planning and collaboration, accelerated productivity, and seamless integration.
It includes outstanding features like a Gantt chart to visualize and plan long-term goals while tracking projects bit by bit. Timesheets allow you to track both your billable and non-billable hours, which is handy for generating auto-invoices quickly.
Furthermore, you can perform bug tracking, automate routine tasks with workflow planning and save enormous time and effort. Lastly, Zoho Projects offer you to integrate with numerous Zoho apps and third-party apps to add more features to your process with effective collaboration.
It has 50+ integrations and has helped 4.5 Million+ projects to accomplish. Overall, Zoho Projects provides an all-in-one project management solution for managing each stage of the project management life cycle.
Key Features
Effortless Task Automation
With Zoho project's end-to-end automation, you avoid work delays and accomplish tasks efficiently. The blueprint editor helps you design a workflow to set statuses, task fields, people, and email alerts. Set business and workflow rules to stay on track of your outcomes. Further, it allows you to set custom functions on triggered rules to automate notifications, reassignment, and updates to stakeholders.
Accurate Time Tracking and Project Timesheets
Timesheets and task timers count every minute spent on project work. The team members in each project can log the time taken for each task to visualize the progress toward task completion. Also, there are automated timers to start, finish, and take breaks automatically. The project manager can approve or reject times whenever it's necessary. It makes invoicing easier, and you get a detailed evaluation. The planned vs. actual time insights ensure you estimate your time properly for upcoming creative projects.
Communication Tools for Team Collaboration
Zoho Projects made team collaboration smooth with all types of real-time communication tools. Those tools include feed, chat, forums, pages, and documents. The feed option allows users to add the real-time progress of an ongoing project by adding new tasks, progress images, reporting issues, mentioning team members, or giving feedback through comments. You can make quick chat rooms for private or group messages for meetings. The forum facilitates the exchange of ideas to gain opinions on matters. Pages and documents serve similar purposes of making communication smooth and accessible to everyone.
Charts and Reports for Visual Tracking
Charts and reports often become our only resource to make informed decisions. And Zoho Projects, with their numerous features for visual tracking, help users tremendously. Get the big picture with Gantt charts to grasp if there are any major hurdles and strategize accordingly. Resource utilization charts help you stay on track with the available resources. Advance reports give you a complete overview of time taken per project, finished milestones, work-hour splits per team member, and more. You can further integrate with Zoho analytics for 50+ advanced analytics and visual timeline management.
Pricing
- Unlimited Projects
- Custom Views
- 100 GB Storage
- 20 Project Templates
- Worlflow Rules
- Custom Fields & Roles
- 10 Guests
- 30 Project Templates
Zoho Projects is a free project management tool which offers a 10-day free trial option (no credit card required) for their paid plans. You can save nearly $10 per user on annual plans.
Besides, Zoho Projects offer the following pricing plans:
- Free plan: Free plan is best for up to 3 members team and is best suited for solopreneurs, freelancers, or small teams. You can manage two projects and get 5 GB of storage space for managing projects and tasks. More features include custom status, project feeds, Gantt charts, calendars and forums, and basic issue reports.
- Premium plan: The premium plan is the most popular option at 280 INR or $3.40 per user per month on yearly plans and 350 INR or $4.25 per user monthly. It's best for small to medium size businesses that have multiple projects. You can manage unlimited projects with 100 GB storage space which comes with all the features in the free plan plus custom views, subtasks, reminders, timers, the project planned vs actual, project resource utilization, etc.
- Enterprise plan: The enterprise plan is best for large organizations for 700 INR or $8.51 per monthly user. You get unlimited projects, up to 30 project templates, 10 read-only users, and 120 GB of storage space here. Advanced features other than the Premium plan include a portfolio dashboard, global Gantt chart, global resource utilization, custom fields, global planned vs actual, and more.
Pros
- Cheapest project management solution with powerful features.
- Easy workflow automation to streamline routine processes.
- Quick and effective collaboration with outside vendors and team members through easy project-sharing options.
- Daily reminders and notifications to users.
- The forum is useful for sharing feedback, daily progress reporting, and real-time collaboration with the team.
- Multiple-level users and access control.
Cons
- Slightly complex to use without training due to its numerous features.
- Dashboards could be more interactive to sort and find the information you need.
What are the Cheapest Project Management Tools?
Finding a cheap and simple project management software can be challenging. But it's as easy as a breeze when you have an idea about your purpose, the collaboration issues with your team, or the budget.
Besides, work, tasks, team, and project management, other project management tools also help in sales pipeline tracking and remote project management.
For a quick recap, here are the top 5 cheapest project management tools:
ClickUp
Monday
Asana
Trello
Wrike
Want to explore more tools and software for project management? Dive deeper into our other guides:
- 22 project management software of 2023
- Best free project management software
- 13 Simple project management software
- Web-based project management software
- Top enterprise project management software
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Martin Luenendonk
Martin loves entrepreneurship and has helped dozens of entrepreneurs by validating the business idea, finding scalable customer acquisition channels, and building a data-driven organization. During his time working in investment banking, tech startups, and industry-leading companies he gained extensive knowledge in using different software tools to optimize business processes.
This insights and his love for researching SaaS products enables him to provide in-depth, fact-based software reviews to enable software buyers make better decisions.