Top 5 Project Management Tools
Almost every software development process begins with an appropriate project management tool. This software helps to manage tasks, time, and budget as well as establish effective communication within teams, track progress and much more.
Today there are hundreds of different tools and programs, so choosing the right one is not an easy thing. It becomes even more challenging as most popular project management tools provide equally rich functionality and are constantly enhanced. In this blog post, we are going to help you simplify the task of choosing the tool for your project management by sharing an insight on the top 5 project management tools that are worth using.
The Key Features Of Project Management Tools
Before we move to some particular programs and their features, let us list the main functionality that a good project management tool should have.
Task Management
One of the key features we need is the possibility to set up tasks and deadlines, assign and re-assign them to different performers, create smaller subtasks for large and time-consuming tasks as well as submit the accomplishment.
Real-time collaboration
Since projects today are complicated and the working teams can be pretty large, good communication is a must for successful product development. Discussing tasks and the required changes in comments allows solving issues faster and more effectively.
Time-tracking
A proper project management tool also allows tracking time required for resolving certain tasks. That helps to evaluate team productivity and make more accurate estimations for scheduling and budgeting as well as to prepare reports for the customer.
Third-party integration
The project management software that integrates with other popular and useful tools (like e-mail, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) can significantly simplify and streamline the development process.
User-friendliness
Long-lasting projects that involve a lot of people require an easy-to-use management solution with a well-thought UX/UI design. That will help to avoid human mistakes and make working routine simpler and smoother.
Top 5 Project Management Tools
The choice of high-quality and effective project management solutions is a very important step to be done before starting any development activities as it can strongly affect the end result.
Based on our 20 years’ experience we would like to mention just 5 project management tools that we consider to be the most useful ones.
Redmine
Redmine is a cross-platform and cross-database project management software that is built and maintained by community volunteers. It offers all the most required features: task management, time tracking, documents and files management, third-party integration, roadmaps creation, and much more. It can be used by companies of all sizes.
Jira
Yet Jira is flexible and customizable to any type of workflow, it is mainly designed for agile teams: it supports Scrum, Kanban, and unique hybrid models created for certain projects. It allows assigning tasks and subtasks, prioritizing and discussing them with colleagues, tracking activity and time spent, has a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface. Jira provides a high level of security and leverages encryption for data protection. Reports and releases, as well as third-party integration possibilities, are covered, too. Suits for teams of any size: from 10 to 10 000 people.
Asana
Asana is an easy-to-use and reliable project management solution with clean design, rich third-party integrations list, and time tracking functionality. It has a well-thought mobile application enabling notifications. Asana provides reporting and analytics tools as well as different types of task views: to-do list, taskboard, spreadsheet.
Basecamp
Basecamp is one of the easiest project management tools because of its user-friendly design and quite a short list of features. This software solution is focused on managing tasks in to-do lists and establishing fast and effective communication between team members. The functionality also covers scheduling as well as documents and file sharing. It is a perfect option for small and mid-sized companies that require a minimum of key features.
Wrike
Unlike Basecamp, Wrike has a wide range of features that allow it to be one of the leading project management tools on the market. The Wrike’s functionality covers a lot of tasks handling capabilities, time tracking, team communication, file sharing, progress monitoring, powerful analytics and reports, goals and priorities setting, third-party integration opportunities, etc. It is a good software to choose for growing companies of any size across all the industries.
ProofHub
ProofHub is a SaaS-based project management software that comes with integrated Group chat, quick Discussions on projects, Workflows and boards, Project reports and many more powerful features. It enables teams to collaborate and communicate over projects in an easy and flexible manner from one place and is also available for both Android and iOS operating systems; making it easy for even remote teams to stay connected. Plus, you also get a free trial before going for the paid version.
If you think some important issues where not mentioned in this blog post or you still have doubts on which PM software tool to choose, let’s get in touch and discuss it.