Project Management tools for small teams — 2021
As a startup, finding the right tool is often an activity ripe with trial and error. When it comes to project management tools focused on task/project tracking, we’ve tried several.
In this project management software comparison, I’ve selected 4 project management software tools that we’ve used in some capacity at Giraffe: Asana, Trello, monday.com, and Hive.
What Is Project Management Software?
Project management software helps you manage different projects and tasks. These tools offer features to help your team plan, collaborate, and assign responsibility on projects, while also helping you visualize progress and allocate resources effectively. Most options these days are SaaS offerings, making them accessible from all of your devices whenever you’re on the run.
Let’s take a look at a handful of the common tools we hear about in this space.
1. Asana
Asana is designed for any sized team, but it’s geared for medium-sized businesses. Asana has some great distinct features such as task weight, deadline tracking, and dependent tasks. With Asana you’ll be able to seamlessly create tasks and project workflows that can be assigned out to your team members. Asana lets teams add notes and upload supporting documentation to each task. They also have built in notifications to notify team members when there is a pending task to complete. Asana offers over 100+ app integrations including Google Drive, Box, and Jira.
2. monday.com
monday.com is a great for seeing a centralized, clear view of your team’s work and tasks. Each task has a color coded status, making it easy to filter and visually see progress. monday.com is a pseudo spreadsheet that lets you quickly toggle between multiple views of your activities i.e. Kanban board, list, and spreadsheet view. It’s quick and easy to measure your team’s productivity through reporting dashboards that provide the ability to pull in and collect data from multiple monday.com boards. Like most of the PM tools these days, monday.com has tons of integrations into all of your favorite apps including Slack, GitHub, Dropbox and more.
3. Trello
Trello is a Kanban board style tracking tool. Teams add cards to Trello and drag and drop each card into its appropriate list (column). Trello offers core features such as public boards, filtered views and permission management. Our team really liked Trello because it was super lightweight and very easy to use. We got up and running super quickly. Trello felt the most user friendly for our (small) team because it was intuitive, and we weren’t distracted by the many bells and whistles on other platforms. Trello still offers much of the same tracking and tagging functionalities as other tools but does Kanban really well. If you find yourself addicted to dragging and dropping cards to visually see progress (we do!), Trello is for you.
4. Hive
Hive is a project management tool and collaboration platform. They were a great tool for us in areas of better understanding other team members’ work and upcoming projects. We also used Hive to build early CRM boards which helped our team see various prospects and leads moving through our pipeline. Hive has some super helpful email integrations allowing you to send and receive Gmail and Outlook messages directly from the app. This feature helped us better collaborate with each other whenever a particular Hive task was the topic of conversation and needed to be included in an email.
We’re just scratching the surface of what is out there in this space! We’re a small team and we’ve already dabbled with 4. Most of the solutions here are geared towards the same objective: better tracking of tasks and activities whenever there are a lot of moving parts. Ultimately there is no one size fits all, and it will come down to your team’s workflow and what specific functionality you need. Our advice is to leverage free trials to see which tool makes the most sense for you and your team before committing to any particular one.
Free Trials & Pricing for each of these tools:
Monday.com Free Trial & Pricing
Let us know which one you end up liking the most!
❤️ The Giraffe Team
Click here to learn more about how the team at Giraffe is thinking about search at work.
Join our waitlist today to check out our AI-powered platform that centralizes the content your team relies on.
