An In-Depth look at the Top 10 Project Management Tools for 2022
Project management tools and apps have come a long way in the last few years. We thought it was about time for a detailed article about the modern tools designed to support the ways teams work today.
Modern project management tools, or PM tools, are a mix of strong functionality, intuitive features, and a clear user interface.
We scoured the market to come up with the top 10 tools. These are products that scale with you, let your team manage their projects the way they want to and have a user experience that isn’t… horrible.
The tools that made the shortlist are (click on each one to jump directly to the review):
- Paymo — Project management software with time tracking and invoicing functionalities that aims to support project delivery professionals for the whole lifecycle.
- Basecamp — Project management tool made up of multiple boards grouped by Team and Project, with a central HQ board for company-wide communication.
- Wrike — Cloud-based online collaborative work management system that all team members can use.
- Asana — Project management software that combines Project Tracking, Team Management, Task Management, and more to improve productivity throughout the entire project.
- Scoro — Comprehensive work management software solution for professional and creative teams that helps you manage everything from the initial tendering to the final invoicing.
- Podio — Customizable work management solution centered around the personalization of any workflow.
- Redbooth — A collaboration and communication platform that offers teams a central hub to share tasks, conversations, and files.
- Monday — Formerly known as “dapulse”, the tool is highly visual with a low learning curve and it helps you track your high-level overview and daily tasks from a single place.
- ClickUp — A project management tool that aims to increase bring back productivity into the workplace.
- Mavenlink — Project management solution for enterprises who are looking to get the most out of reporting.
We’ve extensively tested these project management tools and we’ve got loads to share. You’ll find out what the benefits are, whether they are right for your team, and what you need to get going. Plus we’ve assessed what you might miss from each tool so that you’re going into your decision with your eyes open.
But first, let’s look at some of the key criteria for choosing any project management tool.
Key Considerations for Choosing a Project Management Tool
Here are 6 key considerations for choosing any project management tool:
- Features: Top of the list for your decision making should be the features. Consider what your team needs, and match this to what the tool has to offer. Think about what they must have to do their work, what would be nice to have, and what you’d be delighted to have. In other words, if you’re saying yes to a feature, what am I saying no to elsewhere?
- Cost: What are you really paying for? Many products charge more for additional users, so you’ll need to consider how many people are going to be logging into the app once you’ve rolled it out to the whole team. Look for transparency around the pricing, especially if there’s a minimum number of users you have to sign up to. Also consider your internal costs: would you need to invest in onboarding new team members, transferring your existing project documentation, and schedules or training the team?
- Support: However good your team is at picking up new tools, you’re going to need to tap into the support network at some point. How can you access support for the product? How do customers rate the support? If hands-on support is important to you, consider the vendor’s opening hours, the languages that support is available in and whether you can have a dedicated customer success or account manager. This level of support might only be available with the larger plans, so weigh up what’s on offer with what you think your project team will need and what you are prepared to commit to financially.
- Speed: No one likes waiting around for their schedule to save. Whatever product you’re going for, test out the speed with as much data as you can to simulate real-life projects as closely as possible.
- Reviews: Read what other people say about these tools. Look for reviews on independent platforms like Capterra and G2. Pay special attention to people who have reviewed the product and work in the same industry as you, or who have similar workflows and business models to your organization.
- Awards: The best products win awards! Have a look through the project management software’s website and see what accolades they have picked up over the years.
These were the main factors we took into account when reviewing the products.
OK, now let’s see the apps in our project management tools list in detail:
Paymo
Paymo is a project and work management software that takes the headache out of being a service-based business because it’s aimed at supporting project delivery professionals for the whole lifecycle, and that includes the part where you have to get money from customers for doing the job.
It stands out for helping you keep your project’s work in one place and simplifying your workflow. With users in 50 countries, Paymo is an established modern app that around 4,000 companies and more than 40.000 freelancers (~100,000 users in total) rely on to help manage their projects from start to finish.
Best For:
Small and medium businesses, agencies, law and architecture firms, consultants and freelancers who handle multiple client projects and want to be able to track their time, organize resources, and monitor finances as they work.
Why We Say It’s Awesome
A modern and intuitive software for project-based businesses that helps your team manage projects through their entire lifecycle. Plan and schedule your projects, collaborate with your team, share files, track time and make sure you stay on budget.
(And btw, we know it’s great because we made it!)
Top 5 Features
Paymo is made up of a series of modules, each one specifically built to deal with a certain function of managing projects. The top five features we thought were most valuable are:
- Time tracking: Track your time through the web timer, a mobile app (on iOS and Android), a desktop app for automatically track work time or add time through the Timesheets area.
- Accounting: Generate invoices based on the amount of time spent on a task or project, track your expenses and create accurate estimates for clients.
- Project management: Four different views let you see what you need at any point during the delivery phases of the project. The Simple View lets you add and edit tasks, Table View provides a way of sorting activities, the Gantt Chart shows you the project schedule in a more traditional layout (timeline) and there’s also a Kanban view for Agile teams.
- Team scheduler: Manage your resource allocation easily through the automated scheduling tool that books your staff against the right tasks based on what they’ve done in the past. Yes, it learns from your resource scheduling to give you a head start! You can simply approve the resource bookings or change them as needed.
- Vacation Planner: This leave planner works for more than just vacation time and lets you know when your team members are going to be available for work.
Project Management Features You Might Miss
Paymo doesn’t have a native chat feature, so if you are used to using Slack or other IM tools, you’ll need to stick with them.
How To Get Started
There’s a lot of online help to get you started with Paymo. The initial onboarding process has you choose your preferred use of the tool (plan projects, manage tasks, track time, or invoice), giving you 9 different project templates to get started with work. There’s also a detailed Knowledge Base to explore the more advanced features.
You can get personal help from the Paymo clients community. With 100,000 users worldwide, there’s bound to be someone who can help you!
Review Round Up
Paymo has some of the best reviews among similar software. And we’re not making that up! Capterra’s review score is 4.5 out of 5 and G2’s is 4.5. The Paymo team has also won 6 awards this year including Most Usable PM Software (G2) and the Great User Experience Award (FinancesOnline).
Pricing and Plans
There are 3 Paymo pricing plans:
- Free plan: For up to 10 users.
- Small Office: $11.95 per user per month.
- Business Plan: $18.95 per user per month.
There is a 20% discount offered for annual payments.
Non-profits are eligible for a 50% discount on any of the paid plans and Schools, Colleges, and Universities can use the paid plans for free for 1 year.
Read next: Why automatic time tracking is a must-have feature
Basecamp
Basecamp is regularly in the lists of best project management tools, and for a good reason. Available on the web, iOS, Android, Mac and PC, it’s a popular, solid choice for large and small businesses, and everyone in between.
Launched in 2004, it’s aimed at giving you a better handle on your business and the work your teams are doing. It combines task management features with file storage and a native chat app — the idea is that everything is in the same place so that you can feel more organized and in control.
Best For:
Team collaboration for small to medium-sized businesses.
Why They Say It’s Awesome
Before Basecamp: Projects feel scattered, things slip, it’s tough to see where things stand, and people are stressed. After Basecamp: Everything’s organized in one place, you’re on top of things, progress is clear, and a sense of calm sets in.
Top 5 Features
Basecamp is made up of multiple boards grouped by Team and Project, with a central HQ board for company-wide communication. Each project includes:
- To-Do list: Assign your team members to tasks and check in on their status.
- Message board: Post updates, solicit ideas, gather feedback and more. The idea is that it replaces email threads and keeps the conversation out of your inbox.
- Campfire: The in-app chat room for casual conversations with the team. If you have Slack already, you probably wouldn’t need it anymore if you switched to this.
- Automatic check-ins: Take the team’s pulse with a quick feedback question at the end of the day.
- Schedule: Set your important dates and sync them with your Google calendar, iCal, or Outlook.
Project Management Features You Might Miss
There’s no Gantt Chart feature, so project managers used to schedule work visually like that will definitely miss having this option.
There are no options for Kanban boards either, so teams used to Agile approaches could struggle.
Project management tools today are often heavily integrated with resource scheduling and time tracking so that they can help you effectively manage the people on the project team and their project workload. Both of these are missing, so if you have a big team, or you are using resources from multiple areas and need to stay on top of what they are doing, you could find that a challenge.
Basecamp doesn’t have an invoicing module, which probably isn’t an issue if you are working on in-house projects and don’t charge your customers, but could cause problems in a client-facing environment.
How To Get Started
It’s easy to register for an account, and once you do so you get a signed letter from the CEO, which is a nice touch.
There are 7 videos as your initial training sequence but no knowledge base if you just want to browse what the tool can do. You can find user-generated content on YouTube but as with all cloud-based systems, the product is frequently updated so be careful if you choose to rely on third-party created user guides as they might not be up-to-date.
Review Round Up
Basecamp is a mature tool that’s been around long enough to collect thousands of reviews. The reviews on both Capterra and G2 average out at 4.5 out of 5. Basecamp and Asana were the two products with about equal numbers of reviews (at the time of writing) in our survey, far outstripping the number of reviews for any other tool we looked at.
They are also a favorite with the judges: they have won accolades from Forbes (Small Giants 2017) and G2 (Summer Leader).
Pricing and Plans
At $99 month for your whole business, it’s certainly a transparent price structure. There’s also a free plan with limited features for personal usage.
Basecamp is free for students and teachers and offers a 50% discount for NGOs.
🔷 Read the full story on Paymo’s blog 🔷.
