One of the most common misconceptions in business is that small companies are easier to organize. With fewer people, task delegation is easier, and you can easily keep track of everyone’s jobs, and be on top of all of your projects.
But things often aren’t as easy as they seem, and if you don’t invest yourself in your business, you’ll soon find that organizing everything can be a nightmare.
Luckily, people have always had a penchant for organization, so, they created all kinds of project management software, for both big and small companies. And, in this article, we’ll go over 10 of the best project management software for small businesses.
Asana
When we think of “project management software,” the first thing that comes to mind is Asana.
Asana is the quintessential project management software, offering exceptional flexibility, and an impressively intuitive interface, at a very reasonable price.
One of the software’s best features is flexibility – no matter which methodology your company uses, Asana can handle it.
Users are offered an incredible variety when it comes to customization, and you can create task templates, and subtasks, delegate tasks across multiple projects, add details, organizational tags, due dates, and pretty much anything else you can think of.
Asana also supports multiple viewing models – the app’s default view is as a list, but you can change that to a board, dashboard, calendar, or timeline, according to your needs.
When it comes to pricing, Asana has a free plan for up to 15 team members and a Premium plan that will cost you $10/person/month (billed annually), but you also get all view models, an admin console, as well as many other advanced features.
Wrike
Wrike is the ultimate email-centric project management software.
A good part of managing a team is writing emails. However, Wrike makes this ordeal much easier by allowing for a native email integration within your profile.
This allows you to delegate tasks, schedule them, add priorities, mark them complete, add timelines, and a whole host of other things solely through your email.
Wrike is also very similar to Asana, as it also appears as a list. However, with Wrike, you can add information to every task, creating multiple columns with information relevant to the task clearly displayed.
This further allows you to highlight the most important info according to the nature of the task, as well as according to the team, as your IT team and your marketing team will probably have different priorities when it comes to the information.
When it comes to pricing, Wrike also has a free version, with unlimited tasks and users, and a paid plan costing $9.80/user/month, which adds Gantt charts and shared dashboards for up to 200 people. Like Asana, this price is also billed annually.
nTask
nTask is one of the simplest but most functional Kanban boards available on the market. And with a price to match!
nTask allows you to create kanban-style boards where you can create tasks, assign teams, and then progress those tasks through the boards as they near completion.
The software is also created with full Agile functionality, making it an ideal tool for those that follow this methodology in their business.
The system also has a number of features that larger project management systems have, making it almost as flexible as Asana, and, with a little effort, nTask can also be used to lead larger teams of 20+ people.
Price-wise, we already gave you a hint at how affordable this piece of software is. nTask has a free version for up to five users, but your wallet would be no worse for wear if you went with the Premium version that costs a mere $4/person/month while being almost as feature-rich as some of its more expensive and expansive competitors.
Trello
Similar to nTask, Trello is another Kanban-focused project management system. The favorite of some of the top managed services providers, Trello is a nifty piece of software that allows you to set up teams and tasks quickly and manage them effectively.
One of the best features of this system is its drag-and-drop capability. Drag-n-drop is one of the easiest systems to learn, which is why it enjoys great popularity among managers and employees alike.
Within Trello, you can also choose from a myriad of different templates, depending on which team is using it and what task you’re organizing your team for. From there, you just create cards (tasks), and drag them to the appropriate boards to set them in motion or mark them complete.
When it comes to pricing, Trello is very generous. Their free plan includes unlimited users, 10 boards, and over 250 command lines, expanded to unlimited boards and 1.000 command lines in the Standard edition for only $5/user/month (also billed annually, adhering to industry standard).
Paymo
As a business acquires more clients, it becomes a necessity to start organizing projects on a client basis. Luckily, Paymo is there for that exact purpose.
Paymo is our one and only entry of this kind on this list. Its unique feature is, as you may have guessed, the organization of projects based on clients rather than teams or projects themselves.
However, the uniqueness or utility of Paymo doesn’t end there. As a client-centric system, Paymo allows you to track the time the project took and automatically generate invoices to bill your clients based on your time. You may also create fixed billing projects and invoices, too!
As far as other features go, the system operates pretty much with as much functionality and flexibility as a standard project management system. Paymo lets you view tasks as a Kanban board, list, Gantt chart, or calendar, and you can assign teams and tasks as you please, as well as make comments, attach pictures or documents, and many other things.
Paymo also has a free plan, covering 10 users, 100 tasks, and 3 invoices, while the paid plan will cost you $9.95/user/month and unlock infinite tasks, projects, and invoices, as well as add 50GB of storage.
Nifty
Nifty truly lives up to its name. Not only is this software easy to set up, but the clever bit of foresight the devs had in adding a Discussions feature is of great help when delegating tasks, and keeping on top of them.
In terms of functionality, Nifty is nothing unique when compared to its peers. You can create tasks using templates that fit different teams and departments or create your own from scratch.
Nifty also supports Kanban, swimlane, list, calendar, timeline, and roadmap view models. Still, its most useful feature is the Discussion feature, which allows the entire team to come and talk about the project in one place without having to switch to Slack, email, or any other chat platform, making projects a lot more streamlined.
Price-wise, Nifty is on the higher end of the scale. Its free plan allows for unlimited users and two projects, while its Standard pack costs $39/month flat (paid annually), and unlocks 40 projects, as well as unlimited clients and guests, but limits your team size to 10 people.
Monday.com
Monday.com is one of the most elegant project management systems to date. Its simplicity is only matched by the likes of Trello and nTask, while its flexibility in creating, delegating, and overseeing tasks is only matched by Asana.
Monday.com is a preferable system among construction website design agencies and other bigger businesses since its flexibility suits big companies like that.
The system revolves around a list where tasks are created and teams/team members assigned. Each item on the list can be assigned a color to indicate priority, and the tasks, from there on out, can be filtered using the colors for better visibility.
The biggest issue with Monday.com, however, is its price. The system is still affordable enough for smaller businesses, but for one-man operations or for a single team of 10 or fewer people, it might be a bit too much.
Monday costs $120/person/year on a Standard plan, but you can also get a free plan or a Basic plan, though they’re not as feature-rich and don’t represent a good value for the money you’ll be spending. Only the Standard plan has a good value, as it sports the most amount of useful features and supports the most users.
ClickUp
When it comes to versatility and customizability, ClickUp is one of the best systems in the industry.
While most project management systems offer a few view models to spice things up, ClickUp’s main feature is that it offers a total of 11 of them. These include Kanban, Gantt, calendar, timeline, roadmap, mind map, workload, Scrum, and a few others. And the best thing about all this? You can get all those view models in the free version!
In terms of customizability, each task dashboard can be created freely, and the users have a total of 20 widgets they can choose to enhance their task management capabilities.
In terms of plans, ClickUp is very standard, as it offers a free plan that includes unlimited users and time tracking and an Unlimited plan costing $5/user/month (paid annually, of course), which adds even more views, widgets, and features.
Jira
Jira is a very narrowly focused piece of software. The main focus of Jira is Agile; however, what Jira lacks in scope, it makes up for with functionality within its scope, and it is lauded as one of the best pieces of scrum software on the market.
Jira features boards as its main functional part – however, those boards aren’t entirely like Kanban boards, though they look and act similarly in terms of function and purpose.
It should also be noted that Jira and Trello are owned by the same company, so you can expect the same quality from the two tools, and if you like one, you’re bound to like the other.
Price-wise, Jira is very affordable, with its free plan supporting up to 10 people on a team, with every additional person costing you $7.5/month.
GoodDay
Our final pick for today is GoodDay. GoodDay is an incredibly versatile platform, allowing the user to set up multiple projects tailored specifically for different departments within your company.
Another awesome thing about GoodDay is that it has a My Tasks functionality. There, you can find a highly personalized page with all your tasks and deadlines, so you can always keep track of your work and never get lost.
The platform is also very good when it comes to integrations, as GoodDay supports integrations with Slack, email, and even the cloud for faster and more reliable sharing of data, as well as quick messaging across the platform.
The system has a very generous free plan that accounts for 15 users, and a paid plan that costs $4/user/month, and unlocks additional features, custom fields, and advanced controls while supporting up to 250 users. As usual, this plan is charged annually.
Final Words
And, there you have it, 10 of the best project management software pieces that will elevate your small business to the level of a large enterprise.
As we said in the beginning, running a business, even a small one, is not easy without a good way to manage all your work and these 10 platforms are more than good enough to make managing a company a breeze.