18 Best Project Planning Software in 2024 (with Free Tools)
As a project manager, you know the importance of planning your projects before managing them. Whether it is your team collaboration or your budget, project planning is crucial to the success of your business.
You can use project planning software to plan your team’s workload, project budget, communication strategy, identify significant risks, resource allocation, and plot a detailed roadmap to plan your critical path strategy.
Finding the perfect planning tool for your business would make your task less labor-intensive, generating helpful insights for you to focus on.
Best Project Planning Software
If you are still planning your projects with a notebook, document, or spreadsheet, it might seem that planning is all you do, all day, every day. It is high time to switch to project planning software to automate your tasks and make your work more convenient and reliable.
We have compiled a list of some of the most efficient project planning tools to help you plan your projects based on data-driven decisions.
1. Monday.com
Best Project Planning Software with Visual and Customizable Templates
Monday.com helps you work on your projects without any limit. Trusted by more than 125,000 companies, you can use the platform to plan, build, and efficiently scale your workflows.
Main Features
Powerful Gantt Charts
Monday.com offers powerful Gantt chart software with a visual and flexible platform. It can be used for planning and scheduling your projects, along with assessing how long a project would take to complete. You can use Gantt charts to visualize significant dates and milestones, improving your team’s coordination.
Code-Free Automations
This project planning software helps you focus on tasks that matter the most. With hundreds of code-free automation options, you can instantly send emails to your clients and receive real-time updates when the tasks get completed. You can create the perfect workflow for multiple teams within minutes using automation.
Collaborative Docs
You can connect, collaborate, and execute your ideas with your team, all in one place. Monday.com allows you to harness the power of your team in real-time with live docs collaboration. You can co-edit with your team, drop instant comments, and embed videos or boards directly into work docs. With a weekly task checklist, you can keep a tab on your team’s tasks. The real-time engine allows hundreds of members to work together on a doc seamlessly.
Visual Dashboard
Monday.com offers a visual and interactive dashboard to plan your team’s timeline and project budget. You can quickly run reports to get an overall idea of the progress of the project. With the help of smart data tools, you can assign and prioritize different tasks. The customizable dashboard lets you plan as the project progresses, keeping everybody synced and on the same page.
Benefits
- Set up your dashboard and start planning in minutes, with hundreds of visual, customizable templates.
- Avoid human error and make your planning more reliable with automation.
- View your dashboards in a map, calendar, kanban, or timeline view.
- Integrate with hundreds of third-party applications to improve the platform’s functionality.
- Premium 24/7 customer support team
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
Find out more Monday pricing or Monday review
- The Individual Plan offers more than 200 templates to plan out your workflow and project roadmap. It also allows you to add up to 2 members to your team, giving you access to unlimited boards and docs.
- The Basic Plan allows you to add unlimited viewers to your platform, along with offering up to 5GB of cloud storage space.
- With the Standard Plan, you get access to a timeline, calendar, and Gantt charts. It also allows you to invite a guest from outside your team and collaborate with them on a project.
- The Pro Plan offers advanced integration options, an in-built time tracking tool, along 25,000 automation options.
- The Enterprise Plan gives you access to enterprise-grade security features, advanced reports, and multi-level organization permissions.
Try Monday.com free for 14 days and enjoy cross-team collaboration without sharing your credit card details.
2. ClickUp
Affordable Project Planning Platform with Instant Importing Features
ClickUp allows you to plan and organize all your work in a single place, including assigned tasks, shared docs, and team goals. With the help of this project management platform, you can plan, track, and manage any task that suits your team’s needs.
Main Features
Create Trackable Goals
With the help of clear timelines, measurable targets, and automatic progress tracking, you and your team can stay on track and achieve the set goals. Plan out your goals with the help of individual folders and track weekly employee scorecards, sprint cycles, project objectives, and other company goals. The platform allows you to set clear targets and measure the project success rate.
Automatic Imports
This project planning platform allows you to shift seamlessly from your outdated tool and adapt to the new advanced platform. You can automatically import your data from multiple software platforms, including Excel, Airtable, or Asana. With the 100% free import feature, you can bring all your existing data and files to ClickUp.
Trackable Tasks
ClickUp offers important task planning and management features, allowing you to organize and collaborate on different projects. These smart tasks can be customized depending on your needs and your client’s expectations. With more than 35 ClickApps, you can add custom fields to your tasks, assign sprint boards, and automate repetitive tasks. You can structure your complex project by dividing tasks into subtasks and visualizing them in multiple views.
Thousands of Tools Integration
ClickUp allows you to connect with more than 1000 applications. You can integrate the platform with a few native integrations, including ClickUp API, Everhour, and Webhooks. Third-party applications like Trello, Zoho Flow, Intercom, and Google Forms have also created integrations that easily connect with the varied features of this project planning tool.
Benefits
- Real-time chats allow you to collaborate with your team, assign tasks, tag individuals, and link tasks to get more work done.
- Create flexible timelines to plan out your marketing campaigns and track promotions.
- Visualize your schedule with calendars, view assignees and custom statuses of your team.
- Create highly visual dashboards to manage budgets and accounts, along with viewing all your reports in one place.
- 24/7 real-time support team.
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
Find out more ClickUp pricing or ClickUp review
ClickUp has five plans – Free Forever, Unlimited, Business, Business Plus, and Enterprise.
- The Free Forever Plan allows you to create collaborative tasks, add unlimited members, and organize tasks using Kanban boards.
- The Unlimited Plan offers unlimited storage to your customers, allowing you to connect thousands of integrations with the platform.
- With the Business Plan, you get access to multiple custom views, unlimited file storage, along advanced collaboration features.
- The Business Plus Plan offers increased automation features and allows you to set custom role permission for different team members.
- The Enterprise Plan offers advanced security features, including white labeling, advanced permissions, and single sign-on. It also assigns you a dedicated success manager.
With ClickUp’s Free Forever Plan, you get access to 24/7 support, image mockups, and in-app video recording features.
3. Wrike
Leading Project Planning Platform with Real-Time Collaboration Features
Wrike helps you transform the way you work with your teams. It gives you access to a 360° view, along with cross-departmental collaboration and powerful automation tools. The platform helps you mitigate the risks, making it easy for leaders to stay in the loop.
Main Features
Shareable Kanban Boards
With Wrike's online Kanban boards, you and your team can achieve better results while improving productivity. It offers organization-wide visibility, allowing you to check up on the status of your project instantly. With the platform, you can plan and build personalized workflows, reflecting the task completion stages of individual team members.
Visual Proofing
This project planning software allows you to approve tasks quickly with the help of its online visual proofing feature. With full-context collaboration, you can maximize the creative output of your team. The centralized feedback system keeps all the feedback, files, and app in a single, organized place. Along with collaborating on feedback, you can also set up automatic approvals.
Advanced Reporting Features
Get all the real-time updates about your team's tasks, along with a 360° view across your entire organization. These advanced reports allow you to collate and monitor tasks to plan your resources more effectively. The highly visual format keeps executives, clients, and stakeholders informed about major project statistics. The in-built management tool also lets you keep track of your budget, improving your allocation.
Seamless Resource Management
Wrike is one of the leading resource management platforms, helping you deliver high-quality work on time. These robust tools help improve the efficiency of your work by empowering next-level outcomes and assigning the correct work to the perfect person. The platform allows you to plan out your resources by streamlining processes and prioritizing crucial goals. You can easily manage your workloads and track progress through a visual roadmap.
Benefits
- Provide tools for the scalable growth of your business.
- Speed up your projects with Wrike's pre-built workflow templates.
- Gather details with custom request forms.
- Streamline your invoices with the in-built time tracking tool.
- More than 400 third-party integrations with leading software providers.
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
Find out more Wrike pricing
Wrike has four plans – Free, Professional, Business, and Enterprise.
- The Free Plan lets you add unlimited members to your team, create interactive boards, and set up account-wide work schedules for your team members.
- The Professional Plan offers 2GB of cloud storage space to every user, along with interactive Gantt charts and shareable dashboards.
- The Business Plan lets you create custom workflows, request forms, shareable calendars, and real-time access reports.
- The Enterprise Plan offers 10GB of cloud storage space to its users, audit reports, and advanced security features, including password policies and a single sign-on option.
With Wrike's Free 14-day trial, you can integrate your platform with hundreds of applications and experience the power of a modern, agile enterprise.
4. Teamwork
Top Project Planning Tool for Time-Tracking and Billing
Teamwork is an all-in-one project planning platform made for client work. The software allows you to track every billable minute, enabling you to deliver your project on time and within budget. Teamwork is trusted by more than 20,000 companies, including PayPal, Netflix, and Disney.
Main Features
Efficient Workload Planning
With Teamwork’s Workload, you can get a quick overview of your team’s capacity and manage your resources effectively, ensuring you deliver your projects on time. Plan out your resources effectively, avoid bottlenecks, and prioritize tasks based on budget and workload. The platform allows you to quickly reallocate work and add more resources to ensure your project does not go off track.
Dynamic Time-Tracking Tool
The project planning tool’s in-built time-tracker keeps you focussed on your task and helps you deliver your work on time. The tool offers a more transparent process for your clients, giving a precise breakdown of spending your time across different tasks and sections. It helps you provide your clients with a better estimate and bill them more accurately.
Track Profitability
Teamwork allows you to manage your expenses along with tracking your profitability. You can get access to a real-time view of your organization’s financial performance and sort it based on project type and customers. You can use this project planning software to create and customize your budget at the beginning of the project. It also allows you to track your active budget across different customers, allowing you to always keep a tab on your finance and profitability.
Project Management Templates
This leading project planning tool offers tens of pre-built templates helping you save time, deliver reports on time, and make better use of your entire project budget. Teamwork allows you to launch your advertising campaign, create a seamless content development plan, offer impactful PR campaigns, and collaborate with your entire team with a social media planner.
Benefits
- Easily spot roadblocks in your business project map with a 360° panoramic view.
- Set up user permissions for your team members.
- Use your team’s billable time logs to quickly and easily create invoices for your clients.
- Keep your stakeholders in the loop with project updates and health indicators.
Pricing
- 5 Users
- Different Project Views
- 2 Project Templates
- Time Tracking & Dashboards
- 2 Projects & 100 MB Storage
- Customer Support
- Gantt Filtering
- 10 Project Templates
- 500 Automations/Month
- 100 Projects & 50 GB Storage
- Unlimited Client Access
- 3 Custom Fields
- 20 Project Templates
- 1000 Automations/Month
- 300 Projects & 100 GB Storage
- Project Budgeting
- Unlimited Custom Fields
- 50 Project Templates
- 2000 Automations/Month
- Workdown Capacity
Find out more Teamwork pricing
Teamwork has four plans – Free Forever, Deliver, Grow, and Scale.
- The Free Forever Plan offers all the basic project and task management features, along with setting up milestones for your team members.
- The Deliver Plan allows you to manage multiple projects with purpose-built templates, agile views, and a collaborative document editor.
- The Grow Plan lets you add custom fields, create project portfolio workflows, resource scheduling, and advance utilization features.
- The Scale Plan allows businesses to scale confidently with unlimited financial budgets, profitability reports, and 500GB of storage.
Teamwork offers you a 30-day free trial, allowing you to set up your site and get a hands-on experience of how the platform works.
5. Runn
Most Suitable Project Planning Tool with Real-Time Resource Management
Runn is designed for a modern workforce, offering features to schedule both people and projects in real-time. The platform also lets you plan out your team’s capacity and distribute work effectively amongst them.
Main Features
Efficient Resourcing and Scheduling
Runn allows you to quickly schedule work for individual team members, offering you a visual representation of how it will affect your budget, revenue, and team capacity. You can quickly create assignments with a drag-and-drop feature and view your team’s accurate utilization. The platform allows you to view the strength of your organization by helping you schedule projects more efficiently.
Powerful Recruitment and Management Features
This project planning platform helps you manage your team’s time more efficiently, plan the perfect schedule for your team, and lets you decide when it’s time for new employment. You can quickly search for people based on their name, location, or role and get a deep insight into their capacity and utilization. You can create a detailed, customizable overview report for your staff and export them in .csv format.
Automated Timesheets
With Runn, you can schedule your work and tasks with automatic timesheets. These simple, quick, and informative timesheets offer fast, no-fuss data entry options. The in-built time tracker tool helps your team members record their hours, making your monthly billing easier. The variance charts help you visualize the difference between the planned resources and the resources utilized in reality.
Structured Roadmaps
The road mapping features of this project planning software help keep your team, stakeholders, and clients on the same page. It helps you set clear goals for your team members, set up project planners more efficiently, and budget your projects to analyze your company’s profit. With a structured roadmap, you can easily track your expenses and set project and people-level permissions.
Benefits
- Plan out your team’s efficiency by distributing work across your entire team.
- Predict your company’s future with confident forecasting and sustainable workloads.
- Keep your data in sync with external resources with the help of seamless third-party integrations.
- Always be in control of your data with advanced exporting and importing options.
Pricing
Runn has three plans – Startup, Pro, and Enterprise.
- The Startup Plan allows you to add up to 5 members to your team and manage unlimited projects at a time.
- With the Pro Plan, you access unlimited team members, advanced timesheet reports, and resourcing features.
- The Enterprise Plan offers advanced security arrangements, including a single sign-on. It also gives you access to a dedicated account management dashboard.
Runn offers a Free 14-day trial plan, giving you access to limitless resourcing and scheduling features without sharing your credit card information.
6. GanttPro
Leading Project Planning Solution Based upon Gantt Charts
GanttPro offers visual features to keep your team members engaged, your planning simple and efficient, along keeping your clients in the loop. The platform allows you to control and organize multiple projects at a time with its attractive interface.
Main Features
Multiple Plan Views
Plan and organize various projects and tasks by accessing multiple views, including grid, Gantt charts, board, and portfolio views. While the Gantt chart offers a visually appealing picture of your project, the grid view lets you sort out all the information for easy access. It also allows you to set priorities, estimate costs, and log in the billable hours. On the other hand, the portfolio view gives you real-time control of your tasks, allowing you to track project progress quickly.
Real-Time Collaboration
The project planning software allows you to track all the changes made to your project in real-time. It lets you and your team work with an updated version of the project every time. With efficient online collaboration tools, you can attach files to your workflow, add comments to completed or ongoing tasks, and enable smart alerts.
Budget Tracking
GanttPro gives you a clear picture of your project budget within seconds. It helps you provide an accurate estimate to your client by analyzing the cost based on tasks and resources utilized. The platform enables you to control your organization's finances by allowing you to work with the actual cost of your tasks rather than the estimated one.
Customized Branding
This highly visual software offers personalized branding features for industries of variable sizes. You can add your company's logo to the platform and customize it to make the platform more familiar for your team members. You can also customize individual projects by adding columns and differentiating tasks with color coding. With the help of a shared project calendar, you can set up working days, milestones, leaves, and deadlines to keep your employees updated.
Benefits
- Manage your team's workload and improve their efficiency by assigning and rescheduling tasks.
- Grant different levels of permissions to your team members based on their roles and responsibilities.
- Create efficient time-log reports for future budget analysis.
- Seamlessly integrate with multiple third-party applications, including Slack, Jira, and Google Drive.
- Get access to premium support features with a live chat, personal account manager, and tons of educational content like tutorials.
Pricing
GanttPro has three plans – Individual, Team, and Enterprise.
- The Individual Plan is best suited for personal use and offers efficient task management and project planning options.
- With the Team Plan, you can add a minimum of 5 members to your team, collaborate with them efficiently, and manage your team's resources.
- The Enterprise Plan offers advanced management and security features, including two-factor authentication and single sign-on. It also gives you access to enterprise onboarding assistance and premium customer service.
With GanttPro's Free 14-day trial, you can plan out multiple projects visually and collaborate with your team with a personalized interface.
7. Kissflow Project
Best Project Planning Software for Smart, Data-Driven Decisions
With the Kissflow project management software, you can plan out your team's work, know who is working on what, and deliver powerful results with minimal tracking. The multiple views offered by the platform help you gain key insights across all of your projects.
Main Features
Assigning Responsibilities
Kissflow offers task management features to improve the accountability of your team members. With task states, you can get accurate information about the tasks your members are working on. You can mark task states as hold, in-progress, or completed. The platform allows you to build customizable forms with re-build templates and a drag-and-drop tool. You can easily assign responsibilities to your members, create subtasks, and set milestones or deadlines.
Insightful Reporting
This project planning platform helps improve your team's efficiency by understanding the time taken to complete each task. The tool offers powerful flow efficiency charts that let you visualize your team's effort, identify bottlenecks in the project roadmap, and calculate lead time.
Visual Kanban Boards
Kissflow allows you to view your projects in multiple forms, including matrix view, list, and kanban boards. These visual Kanban boards offer one of the best views of multiple projects and tasks to enable better collaboration. It eliminates the need for status meetings by conveying necessary information through visual cards. Improve the overall efficiency of your team by organizing your tasks into columns and visualizing the flow of work.
Advanced Security Options
Secure your organization's and client data with Kissflow's advanced security features. The platform allows you to set user-level permissions and control who has access to what information. With activity logs, you can track the history of different tasks and avoid missing any deadline or milestone.
Benefits
- Sort your tasks quickly with due dates, assigned persons, and priorities.
- Automate your notifications to get instant reminders when projects are near their due date or get completed.
- Attach all important images and files to your cards to centralize communication among team members, stakeholders, and clients.
- Create your to-do list and keep a tab on all the tasks assigned to you.
Pricing
Kissflow Project has three plans – Free, Basic, and Advanced.
- The Free Plan allows you to assign tasks to individual team members, set deadlines, create custom task statuses, and access efficiency reports.
- The Basic Plan offers unlimited custom views and cloud storage space for all your team members.
- With the Advanced Plan, you get access to advanced security features, including IP whitelisting, single sign-on, and detailed activity history of your team's tasks.
Get access to Kissflow's Free 14-day trial and get an insight into how the platform works without any restrictions.
8. Nutcache
Cheapest Project Planning Application for Budgeting Your Projects
Nutcache is an all-in-one management platform that helps you plan, track, and organize your projects. Trusted by thousands of businesses all across the globe, you can use this application to visualize your tasks more productively.
Main Features
Powerful Gantt Charts
Nutcache allows you to manage your projects visually and more effectively with the help of powerful Gantt charts. It enables you to stay aligned with your deadlines and helps you break down each phase of your project into subtasks. These charts let you visualize the progress of your projects, helping you prioritize multiple tasks. Gantt charts offer a simple drag-and-drop interface to make minor adjustments and reschedule your tasks accordingly.
Efficient Project Budgeting
The project planning software offers advanced financial tools to stay in control of your budget and expenses. You can proactively track and manage your costs, set budget tracking by the hour or days, and define specific budget alerts. By using key performance indicators, you can stay ahead of your budget and avoid any overruns.
Customized Workflows
Increase the productivity and efficiency of your team with easy collaboration features. You can help them prioritize and focus on tasks that matter the most. You can divide your work into manageable tasks, prioritize them, and save time by automating repetitive procedures with customized workflows. The platform also allows you to assign a single, complicated task to multiple employees.
Smart Invoicing
The smart time-tracking feature records your employees' billable and non-billable hours to improve your team's overall productivity. Whether you are working in your office or brainstorming ideas on the go, Nutcache allows you to add time quickly and easily for efficient and smart invoicing. By keeping your expenses under control, you can make your projects profitable. The platform allows you to customize and manage unlimited invoices, track overdue, and get paid faster.
Benefits
- Align your tasks efficiently with the project deadline.
- Manage the entire lifestyle of your project with agile tools and features.
- Plan out your projects flexibly, create workloads and roadmaps with visual Kanban boards.
- Organize your expenses by adding them to a predefined category or making subcategories of your own.
Pricing
Nutcache has three plans – Free, Pro, and Enterprise.
- The Free Plan allows you to add up to 20 members to your team, create unlimited projects, and offer simple, efficient time tracking features.
- With the Pro Plan, you can add unlimited members to your team, create visual Gantt charts, budget your projects efficiently, and create advanced invoice reports.
- The Enterprise Plan offers custom security profiles to their customers, along with easy time and expense approvals. With the advanced budget management features, you also get access to 100GB of document storage.
Nutcache offers a full-featured Free Forever plan allowing you to manage unlimited projects at a time, organize tasks with boards or lists, and integrate with third-party applications.
9. TeamGantt
Free Project Planning Platform for Building Online Gantt Charts
TeamGantt is refreshing and a visual way to plan out your projects with the free Gantt chart creator. It allows you to schedule your tasks, along with inviting clients and teams to collaborate on projects. Trusted by influential companies such as Amazon, Nike, and Netflix, TeamGantt is one of the top-rated project planning platforms.
Main Features
Drag-and-Drop Scheduling
TeamGantt allows you to create online Gantt charts to schedule and organize your projects efficiently. Its drag-and-drop scheduling feature can be used to change start and end dates, create milestones, reorder multiple tasks, and adjust your timelines, all with a single click. You can use this free builder without any technical knowledge or training.
Efficient Resource Management
This project planning platform lets you manage your workloads efficiently and improve your team's productivity. The in-built resource management tool enables you to check the availability of your team members before scheduling and assigning tasks to them. This easy-to-access availability tab would help you stay on budget, manage resources, and avoid overloading with multiple tasks.
Project Health Reports
With time-tracking and reporting features, TeamGantt makes sure to give you a real-time view of the progress of multiple projects. You can see the status of all your projects in a single click with the help of portfolios. The project health reports help you spot which one of your projects is falling behind. This planning software lets you compare your initially planned timeline to the actual timeline to identify issues and roadblocks.
Easy Collaboration
Keep your remote teams, clients, and stakeholders in sync with TeamGantt's efficient collaboration features. Team members can easily view the entire project and their assigned tasks from multiple locations and update their progress with a single click. You can track every project update on your dashboard on a single page and later share it with clients or shareholders.
Benefits
- View and organize your tasks in a calendar or a list viewing format.
- Create and customize plan templates for your team, and save them from being reused for other projects.
- Track project dependencies and set the order the way you like.
- Update your projects and manage tasks from both web and mobile-based applications.
- Highlight important updates by using a sticky note on projects and tasks.
Pricing
- 5 Projects per Manager
- 5 Users per Manager
- 150 Tasks in a Project
- Support Integrations
- 20 Projects per Manager
- Unlimited Users
- Unlimited Tasks
- Priority Support
- Unlimited Projects
- Dedicated Customer Agent
- Uptime SLA
- Customized Training
TeamGantt has three plans – Free, Standard, and Advanced.
- The Free Plan allows you to add up to 3 members to your team, create multiple tasks, and share files with your team members.
- With the Standard Plan, you can create unlimited Gantt charts, manage multiple projects, and create a project discussion dashboard for your team members.
- The Advanced Plan offers insightful reporting features and allows you to track your team's workloads with the time-tracking tool. The plan also gives you access to phone, email, and in-app messaging customer support.
With TeamGantt, you can avail of a Free 30-day premium trial of their advanced collaborating features without even giving up your credit card information.
10. ProWorkflow
Best Project Planning Platform With Powerful Integrations
ProWorkflow makes remote collaboration easier, helping you to unite your entire team through a single platform. With powerful tools and multiple integration options, you can easily save time and streamline your processes.
Main Features
Flexible Time Tracking
ProWorkflow offers you different methods to track your team's billable hours and bill your clients more efficiently. By choosing a suitable plan for your organization, you can centralize all the billing information with a single platform. Flexible time tracking options include a live time tracker, timesheet page, and manual time entry. With the comprehensive mobile app, you can even track time on the move.
Purpose-Built Templates
Streamline your task, projects, and invoice creation with the help of pre-built, customizable templates. These powerful template options help you create project plans or invoices within seconds. It allows you to pre-assign tasks, attach files, add task descriptions, and a predetermined priority to different subtasks. You can customize these templates to fit the brand identity by assigning company logos and slogans.
Seamless Integration Options
This project planning software allows you to integrate your platform with multiple internal and external applications, including Adobe, Microsoft Outlook, DropBox, and Kashflow. These integrations help you save time, improve the platform's functionality, and allow you to streamline your tasks or processes easily.
Advance Data Security
ProWorkflow ensures that your data is safe by employing some of the best industry practices. Located on the servers hosted by Microsoft Azure, it provides regular local and offsite backups. The platform offers authentication features and audit logs, which you can track for 90 days. You can also set up user-level access and sharing permissions to control the data sharing.
Benefits
- Handle your invoices efficiently with the Invoice Manager plugin.
- View all your projects, track their progress, and schedule multiple tasks with the timeline option.
- Allocate tasks to members and view workload across the entire organization with resource management tools.
- Customize the platform to match your business style.
Pricing
ProWorkflow has two plans – Professional and Advanced.
- With the Professional Plan, you can create a comprehensive plan summary, generate backups, and access project archives or reports.
- The Advanced Plan allows you to manage internal and external projects and generate resource reports, task reports, and individual project reports.
With ProWorkflow, you can get a 10% discount on both their plans by choosing the annual payment option.
11. Hive
Top-Rated Project Planning Platform for Easier Work Approvals
Hive is a project planning platform that is exclusively built for users by the users. It helps you stay on top of all your projects by staying updated on upcoming deadlines and tasks. The platform offers powerful proofing tools to simplify your workflow.
Main Features
Efficient Calendar Views
Hive offers multiple views which you can switch between, depending upon your requirements. With the calendar view, you can organize all your tasks and actions based upon the milestone and stay ahead of your project's deadline. Calendar views offer a simple drag-and-drop feature that you can use to change or update task deadlines. It gives an overview of the task and to whom it is assigned.
Visual Workloads
This project planning software allows you to efficiently plan out your work and manage your team's workload. You can calculate an estimated time to complete each task by entering details into a resourcing dashboard. These visual workloads allow you to set a maximum capacity for each member, ensuring not overload your team with work. The resourcing dashboard can be color-coded to avoid any clutter and confusion.
Integrated Proofing and Approvals
Hive makes the approval process much easier for a faster turnaround with fewer approval rounds. The platform lets you track who approved the task and stores all the information in a centralized location. An external approver section allows you to get your work approved by people not part of your Hive team. You can use this project planning tool for video proofing as well.
Smart Analytics
With powerful and smart analytics features, you can access the dashboard and visualize critical business insights, along with productivity trends about your team. It helps you respond quickly to potential issues, along with identifying opportunities to improve. These dashboards give you an insight into your productivity, your team's productivity, and the time logged by individual members. You can view all the action details via a line or a bar chart.
Benefits
- Collaborate with your team members, set meeting agendas, and assign future steps to employees with Hive notes.
- Use artificial intelligence tools to assess and alert you about project risks.
- Automate your basic, repetitive administration tasks by setting up triggers.
- Use Hive chat to send an instant message to your teammates.
Pricing
- Unlimited Tasks
- 10 Team Members
- 500 MB Storage
- 400 Gantt, Kanban, Calendar Views
- Unlimited Projects
- Unlimited Team Members
- Unlimited Storage
- Unlimited Views
- Access to API
- Dedicated Customer Agent
- Custom Analytics Dashboards
- Advanced Permission Controls
Hive has three plans – Solo, Teams, and Enterprise.
- The Solo Plan can add up to 2 members to your team, offering unlimited cloud storage for your team.
- With the Teams Plan, you get access to Gantt, Kanban, and calendar views, along with setting up automated workflows for repetitive tasks.
- The Enterprise Plan offers a dedicated support team to its customers, advanced external integrations, and free team resourcing options.
Hive offers a Free 14-day trial to their customers to try out their fully-featured web and mobile-based applications.
12. Mavenlink
Leading Project Planning Application with Intuitive Tools Designed for Better Results
Mavenlink is an advanced project planning and management application designed specifically for professional service organizations. It offers robust tools and high-end features to help you empower your team and get things done faster.
Main Features
Automated Tasks
Mavenlink helps you keep your tasks and projects consistent with advanced tools and features. You can easily streamline your processes by breaking down information silos into helpful insights, making them accessible to the entire organization. By creating reusable templates and workflows, you can automate simple tasks to replace manual processes and workarounds.
Smart and Intuitive Tools
This project planning platform offers robust and intuitive tools to estimate the risks associated with the projects. These tools also help to create an efficient workflow for your team and get things done much faster. Mavenlink offers smart tools to plan out your goals and then turn them into reality.
Birdseye View
Access your entire company's portfolio with a single click and get a 360° view of all your projects. When you have all the information at a single location, you can make informed, data-driven decisions. The platform allows you to create Gantt charts and organize your entire portfolio, helping you gain real-time insight into your projects, prioritize needs, and align your resources for better productivity. The bird's eye view helps you meet your timeline goals and submit projects within budget.
Benefits
- Create multiple reusable templates and workflows to save time.
- Get real-time insight into your status with Project Pulse.
- Unlock productivity and flexibility by connecting to third-party applications.
- Easily align your schedules, scopes, and budgets, all from within the platform.
Pricing
Mavenlink has four plans – Teams, Professional, Premier, and Enterprise.
- The Teams Plan offers a personalized dashboard to every user, along with project plan templates and 10GB of storage space. It costs around $19 a month, when billed annually.
- The Professional Plan gives you access to over 50GB of storage space and project accounting features, including expense tracking and budgeting. It costs around $39 a month, when billed annually.
- The Premier Plan offers additional resource planning features, portfolio management, and real-time business analytics insight. Its pricing is available on request.
- With the Enterprise Plan, you can access 1TB of cloud storage space, advanced business intelligence features, and security options. Its pricing is available on request.
With Mavenlink, you can access the Free 10-day trial and enjoy premium planning, scheduling, and budgeting features. You can contact their customer service and can even increase your trial days.
13. nTask
Cheapest Project Planning Software for Tracking Task Dependencies
nTask is a robust project planning and management software, helps you streamline your processes, track task dependencies, and schedule resources to improve your team's efficiency. Trusted by more than 25,000 companies, the software offers flexible task management features.
Main Features
Pre-Built Templates
Easily manage your workflows, organize them, and collaborate with your team with pre-built templates. These adaptable and flexible templates allow you to streamline your tasks and get started without any hassle. nTask also enables you to create customizable Kanban boards to enhance your workflow, link projects, assign tasks, and track your team's working hours. These visual boards can be personalized according to your needs by adding several status columns as required.
Visual Progress Management
Plan and manage your timelines with this advanced project planning platform. You can easily schedule your tasks with the drag-and-drop feature and use it to track task dependencies, create sub-tasks, and set up milestones. With the visual, online Gantt chart creator, you can allow your stakeholders to track the progress of projects in real-time. It helps align your tasks, thus boosting productivity.
Online Risk Management
nTask allows you to identify, evaluate, classify, categorize, mitigate, and communicate project risks effectively. This robust risk management software offers an easy-to-use register for assessment purposes. The custom risk matrix also provides a wide range of search filters. To mitigate project risks, you can create a detailed mitigation plan. These controls and measures can be assigned to users and you can schedule reviews according to availability.
Bug Tracking
With nTask's issue tracking software, you can easily streamline your releases and track bugs. This professional tool allows you to list all the bugs in a simple dashboard and assign each bug a priority level for the development team to work on. nTask assigns each issue a unique ID, which you can use later to find or track the bug. The tracked issue report can be exported and shared with your team.
Benefits
- Set a planned milestone and deadline to all your tasks, and track them with an in-built time tracker.
- Streamline team communication with shared comments and easy file attachments.
- Conduct productive meetings, take online notes, and set up a plan with the online meeting software.
- Create a dedicated workspace and store all your information at a centralized location.
Pricing
- Unlimited Projects
- Gantt & Kanban View
- Subtasks & Dependencies
- 5GB Storage
- Custom Fields
- Risk Tracking
- Priority Support
- 10GB Storage
nTask has three plans – Basic, Premium, and Business.
- The Basic Plan allows you to add up to 5 members to your team, schedule meetings, and access timesheets.
- With the Premium Plan, you get access to 5GB of storage space and create Gantt charts and Kanban boards.
- The Business Plan offers risk management features, allows you to set custom role permissions, use Kanban board templates, and integrate with advanced tools.
With nTask's Free Basic plan, you get access to their premium meeting management software, along with issue tracking features and viewing your dashboard with multiple views.
14. Zoho Projects
Top Cloud-Based Project Planning Tool with Advance Timesheets
Zoho Projects is a cloud-based project management software that helps you plan out your projects, track work efficiently, and collaborate easily with remote or in-house teams. Trusted by Dell, BigBasket, and Vodafone, this planning tool has an easy-to-use interface with a minimal learning curve.
Main Features
Automated Blueprints
Visualize and design your workflows with Zoho Projects Blueprint editor. You can use this tool with a drag-and-drop feature to set up task statuses, assign tasks, and ensure the correct process is followed. Once you have planned out a workflow blueprint, you can automate repetitive tasks, including sending out email alerts or updating specific fields. Automating your tasks with a blueprint can help prevent project delays.
Hassle-Free Timesheets
With the help of time-trackers and advanced timesheets, your team can record every billable and non-billable hour. Members can use the timesheet to log in their hours and keep track of the pace of their projects. These sheets also help you identify bottlenecks accurately. With Zoho Invoice integration, you can turn your timesheets into invoices for client billing.
Efficient Team Collaboration
This project planning software’s online collaboration tool can help you work with in-house or remote teams. The visual feed gives you a quick view of project updates and allows you to add comments or attach files right through this interactive feed. You can also create personal or group chats with your team for easy exchange of ideas and hold detailed discussions with your team through forums.
Hundreds of Integrations
Zoho Projects allow you to integrate your platform with hundreds of native and third-party applications. These seamless integrations help improve the functionality of the platform. You can integrate with advanced applications, including Google Drive, Zoho CRM, Jira, and Crashlytics.
Benefits
- View your project dashboard either as a visual Kanban board or in a plain grid view.
- Set up recurring tasks and avoid the hassle of scheduling repetitive tasks every day or month.
- Easily handle your hybrid projects by integrating the platform with Zoho Sprints.
- Access your Zoho portal directly through your domain name by mapping the domain to the platform.
Pricing
- Unlimited Projects
- Custom Views
- 100 GB Storage
- 20 Project Templates
- Worlflow Rules
- Custom Fields & Roles
- 10 Guests
- 30 Project Templates
Zoho Projects has three plans – Free, Premium, and Enterprise.
- With the Free Plan, you get access to task tracking features, Gantt chart viewer, and add up to 3 members to your team.
- The Premium Plan offers over 20 pre-built project templates, 100GB of file storage space, and project budgeting features.
- The Enterprise Plan allows you to add custom fields to your workflow, set up user permission levels, and view your dashboard in portfolio form.
With Zoho Project, you can avail of their Free 10-day trial and get access to advanced resourcing, budgeting, and security features.
15. Microsoft Teams
Affordable Project Planning Platform with Group Chats
Microsoft Teams is excellent collaboration software for setting up meetings, group chats, audio conferences, or video calls. Its extremely user-friendly interface helps facilitate a work environment between large organizations and remote team members.
Main Features
Built-In Translator
With remote work gaining popularity, more and more people support teams based in different geographical locations. Microsoft Team's built-in translator feature supports on-spot translation of messages and personal chats. This helps an organization to be more inclusive and breaks the barrier of language. The platform can translate in over 60 languages, including Duch, French, German, and Japanese.
Meeting Whiteboards
This project planning application allows teams to collaborate more freely with a dedicated whiteboard space. With whiteboard sketching, all the participants can sketch their ideas out freely, leading to real collaboration without restrictions. Members could see anything you will draw in real-time. Meeting whiteboards allow you to draw, erase, and share content easily.
Live Events
With Microsoft Team's live events feature, you can broadcast meetings, webinars, and other live announcements to a large audience. With this feature, you can easily schedule and produce a live event. These events can either be watched live by the audience or can be recorded on their devices.
Powerful Team Analytics
This planning software allows you to gain helpful insights into your team members' activities. The platform offers exclusive analytics reports for a single team and a report for cross-team communication as well. These reports help analyze the participation of your team members. With these reports, you can schedule an efficient workflow map, assign essential tasks to active members, and fully understand the running project.
Benefits
- Collaborate in real-time within and across different teams with the in-built chat option.
- Save all your shared files automatically in Sharepoint's cloud storage.
- Share your ideas with several people at the same time using the audio conferencing feature.
- Enjoy seamless video calls and screen-sharing features.
Pricing
Microsoft Teams has three plans – Free, Business Basic, and Business Standard.
- The Free Plan allows you to add 100 participants to your team, share screens during video calls, and schedule meetings with team members.
- The Business Basic Plan offers a maximum meeting duration of 24 hours and the capacity to add up to 300 participants at a time.
- With the Business Standard Plan, you can host webinars, share up to 1TB of file attachments in your chats, along with offering data encryption and advanced auditing and reporting features.
Microsoft Team's Free plan offers customized backgrounds, unlimited chat messages, more than 250 app integrations, and up to 10GB of file storage across the platform.
16. Trello
Top-Rated Project Planning Platform with No-Code Automation Options
Trello is a powerful tool, helping teams move forward by managing and collaborating on multiple projects. Trusted by more than 1,000,000 teams worldwide, this scalable application is widely used by industry leaders, including Google and Costco.
Main Features
Easy Task Management
With Trello, you can keep all your information at one centralized location, keeping your team organized and managed. You can add members to Trello cards, so you always know who is working on what project. The platform allows you to set up due dates for tasks and sub-tasks, along with setting up alerts. Trello cards can also include file attachments with a single drag-and-drop feature.
Advanced Checklists
Trello’s checklists help you map out all the details of your projects. When you have too many cards on the dashboard, you might miss out on an essential point or two. You can create these checklists right within the card and distribute every task amongst team members with an assigned due date.
Automated Workflows
This project planning software can create intelligent workflows with Butler automation. It is an AI-powered tool that helps you set up automation, rules, and commands for your Trello boards, helping you cut down on repetitive work. This automated tool does not require any technical or coding knowledge. You can set up automatic tasks simply by using English language commands.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Trello offers multiple, useful keyboard shortcut options to save your time. These shortcuts help improve your productivity and efficiency. They are also helpful when you are multitasking and creating a complex workflow for your team. You can use basic shortcuts like N to add a new card to your dashboard, B to access the board menu, and SPACE to assign the card to yourself.
Benefits
- Plan out your projects with multiple views, timelines, calendars, and board options.
- Use Trello cards to manage deadlines, along with providing and tracking feedback.
- Add more functionalities to the platform with advanced external app integrations.
- Create custom buttons to build your processes quickly.
Pricing
Trello has four plans – Free, Standard, Premium, and Enterprise.
- The Free Plan allows you to add up to 10 boards for every workspace, along with unlimited file storage.
- The Standard Plan gives you access to advanced checklists, custom fields, and over 1,000 workspace commands.
- With the Premium Plan, you can manage your projects in multiple views and access pre-built workspace templates.
- The Enterprise Plan allows you to set organization-wide permission levels, invite multi-board guests, and offer advanced attachment permissions.
Trello’s Free Forever plan offers power-ups, unlimited storage, and activity logs, along with allowing you to customize your dashboard based on your business branding.
17. Asana
Leading Project Planning Tool with Visual Timelines
Asana is an all-in-one project planning tool that allows you to organize work in a centralized platform, keeping your team members on the same page. Plan out your schedules with multiple project views and collaborate with your teams, no matter where you are.
Main Features
Strategic Goal Setting
View and track your team’s progress by setting and achieving strategic goals. These help you align your organization, reduce conflict or confusion, and allow everyone to move in the same direction. When your team has clear goals in front of them, they can make better and informed decisions. It helps you prioritize projects, support the company’s strategy, and deliver better results.
Real-Time Reporting
Track your team’s work from every angle and get real-time insights with interactive dashboards. These dashboards help you visualize the progress of your project, which you can easily share with your team members. With visual charts and graphs, you can troubleshoot problems instantly. The platform allows you to build charts either with a template or through customization. These charts can then be downloaded and shared with stakeholders or clients.
Intelligent Forms
Asana lets you manage all your work requests at a single platform with the help of intelligent forms. You can also use these custom forms to manage all the incoming work, making it easier to track and prioritize tasks.
Visual Timelines
This project planning platform can create highly visual timelines to plan and track your project workflows. These help you stay on schedule, ensuring that you never miss out on a deadline. You can share these visual plans with everyone across your team, clients, and stakeholders. These plans can also be updated and modified with time. Trello also lets you import your spreadsheets to the platform and turn them into actionable timelines.
Benefits
- Break your project into workable tasks and subtasks with Gantt charts and Kanban boards.
- Create custom fields and track anything on Asana, including field names, types, and values.
- Track and set up task dependencies to understand which tasks need prioritization first.
- Limit user access to different projects, create hidden teams, or make public ones depending upon your requirements.
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
Find out more Asana pricing
Asana has three plans – Basic, Premium, and Business.
- The Basic Plan allows you to manage unlimited tasks, projects, messages and track activity logs.
- The Premium Plan offers limitless dashboards to organize projects, advanced search options, task templates, and custom forms.
- With the Business Plan, you access portfolios, set strategic goals, and customize your workload to boost productivity. The plan also offers advanced integration options with Salesforce and Adobe Creative cloud.
Asana offers a fully-fledged 30-day free trial period to its customers, allowing you to get familiar with the platform and try out their advanced features.
18. MS Projects
Most Suited Project Planning Application with Flexible Boards
Microsoft Projects offer powerful and simplistic project planning features allowing you to create intuitive and appealing workflows. You can get started on your projects quickly, as the platform has a minimal learning curve.
Main Features
Multiple Project Views
Microsoft views allow you to plan out your project and tasks with different project views using grid and Kanban-style boards. When you want to organize all your tasks in a list and sort them out based upon their due date, assignee, or milestone, you should plan it out in a grid manner. However, when you want your team to visualize the entire project workflow, you should use Kanban-style boards. These help you visualize the current status of your project, which you can customize based on your brand requirement.
Custom Reports
This project planning software can deliver advanced, high-level reports. You can use this easy-to-use feature to create reports of any type, including financial or productivity ones. The platform also lets you add images, tables, or charts to make them more visually appealing, allowing members to understand them better. These reports can be exported and shared with your clients or stakeholders quickly.
Efficient Resource Management
This advanced project management tool offers efficient resource planning and scheduling features. It helps you identify your team’s capacity, allowing you to assign tasks to them more intelligently. Other than people, You can also use MS projects to manage materialistic resources, including equipment, materials, and project-related costs. You can add the unit of measurement for these resources as well.
Centralized Homepage
Microsoft projects have a centralized and easy-to-use dashboard. The interface is similar to other Microsoft tools, making you feel right at home. The application has a minimal learning curve, where you can access several essential information on the centralized homepage. The platform is most suited for managing multiple teams and projects at a time.
Benefits
- Create simple or complex projects by using scrum, kanban, or customized workflows.
- Track your team’s time with the Timesheet Submission feature.
- Best suited for scalable businesses.
- Provide advanced data security features with a secure platform built on Azure.
Pricing
Microsoft Projects has three plans – Project 1, Project 3, and Project 5.
- Project Plan 1 offers collaboration features, allowing you to create Gantt charts.
- With Project Plan 3, you can access advanced reporting features, visual and interactive project roadmaps, and resource management options.
- Project Plan 5 offers portfolio optimization tools, demand management features, and efficient resource planning options.
Microsoft Project offers a Free 30-day trial to its customers, allowing them to experience all the premium features.
Key Features of Project Planning Tools
Good project planning software is crucial to the success of your projects and your business. It helps prevent overblown budgets, missed deadlines, and minimizes the possibility of confusion or stress.
Here are a few key features that you should look for in project planning tools.
1. Time-Tracking Tools
An in-built time tracking tool is a crucial part of a project planning platform. These tools help track the number of hours your team has worked on a project, making it easier to generate billable invoices for a client.
A time-tracking tool also helps to analyze the time taken to complete a single task which helps you plan out your project delivery date more efficiently, reducing the risk of missed deadlines.
2. Resource Management
Resource planning and management allow you to analyze both personal and worldly resources that you would use to complete the project. Based on these resources, you can generate an estimated budget for your client.
With proper resource planning and management, you can avoid over-assignments and possible conflicts due to a lack of resources. These tools help you plan, schedule, and allocate the company's resources as efficiently as possible.
3. Visual Customizable Workflows
Planning and personalizing your workflows is necessary for your teams to understand their role and the project's current status. You can create a visual workflow with the help of Kanban Boards and Gantt charts.
Kanban boards enable better collaboration amongst your team members. They eliminate the need to hold status meetings and allow you to convey important information through visual cards. They not only make the process easier to understand but also improve the efficiency of your team.
Gantt charts, on the other hand, help plan out schedules and resources. They allow you to oversee every aspect of your project and track its real-time progress. You can also use it to track dependencies and prioritize tasks.
4. Project Budgeting
Planning out your project budgets is essential for your company, the clients, and your stakeholders. It lets you estimate your client budget accurately and help you plan out your expenses, so you don't run out of the approved budget.
Project budgeting includes creating budget reports to track, document, and manage your team's expenses, giving you quick and transparent reporting on your budget's performance. A good project budgeting software should offer weekly and monthly reports of your expenses.
5. Efficient Real-Time Collaboration
No project can be successful without the collaboration of your entire team. While planning out a project report, you need to share and brainstorm your ideas with your team in a simple, centralized location. A real-time collaboration tool is a crucial part of project planning and management.
Efficient collaboration tools offer document sharing features, audio or video calls, instant messaging options, and feedback criteria. A good project planning software is one where team members can provide active feedback and improve productivity.
6. AI Automation
Project planning is all about efficiently scheduling your processes and automating recurring tasks to save time. With efficient no-code automation, you can set up triggers to activate for simple administrative tasks automatically.
You can use automation to send follow-up emails, generate invoices, create timesheets, and set project update reminders.
7. Workload Planning
Planning out your workloads before starting a project would help you utilize your team's capacity more efficiently. It reduces employee burnouts and stress, thus increasing the engagement and productivity rate of your team.
An efficient workload planning tool would help you visualize individual capacity, availability, and the number of hours worked to date. It allows you to distribute tasks intelligently, track task dependencies, and ensure you don't miss the deadline.
Choosing the Right Project Planning Tools
The right project planning tool you should choose for your team would widely depend upon the size of your organization, the type of industry you work in, the needs of your team, and the general requirements of your clients.
- If you are looking for software with visual and customizable templates, you should try out Monday.com, Asana, ProWorkflow, or Teamwork. They offer purpose-built templates that can create personalized workflows and reports.
- Suppose you are looking for software that provides seamless integrations. It would help if you choose ClickUp, Wrike, Runn, or Zoho Projects. They allow you to integrate with hundreds of native and third-party applications.
- If you want to customize your workflows with visual Gantt charts, you should try out GanttPro, TeamGantt, or nTask.
- If you require a secure platform for your projects, you can try out Nutcache, Kissflow Projects, or MS Projects. They protect both your company’s information and client data.
- If you are looking for a platform with real-time collaboration features, you should try out Microsoft Teams, Trello, or Hive. These platforms allow your teams to collaborate on ideas and share insightful feedback.
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Anastasia Belyh
Anastasia has been a professional blogger and researcher since 2014. She loves to perform in-depth software reviews to help software buyers make informed decisions when choosing project management software, CRM tools, website builders, and everything around growing a startup business.
Anastasia worked in management consulting and tech startups, so she has lots of experience in helping professionals choosing the right business software.