5 Project Management Tools You Should Know

5 Project Management tools ranging from lightweight applications for lean startups to complex, feature-rich applications for large organizations

Trello

Trello is one of the most popular lightweight project management tools out there. It's generally used by startups and small agencies to organize tasks in a simple structure.It is a simple Kanban-based tool that lets you organize your tasks into visual boards and cards. You can then track the person assigned and the status of the tasks.

Pros

• Trello is a lightweight and intuitive application.
• It is easy to customize based on your growing and ever-changing needs.
• Trello gives you a birds-eye view of all tasks across the organization.
  

Cons

• Trello doesn't have the features that you would generally find in top project management tools.
• As the team and your project grows, it becomes hard to maintain all the tasks on Trello.
• It is not the best tool when it comes to collaboration with your team.
  

Asana

Asana was started by Facebook founder, Dustin Moskowitz with a focus on usability and collaboration for small teams. It has a Slack-like task management system that is lightweight and clutter-free. Moreover, AI and machine learning will be used in future features for intelligent suggestions on deadlines, workloads, and planning.

Pros

• Strong search: Advanced options make it easy to find tasks and files among multiple projects.
• Asana has a host of integrations with all the major Office and Work tools.
• Unlike Trello, collaboration on Asana is much better. You can add comments and alert your team members in case of any change
  

Cons

• Asana's UI could take a while to get used to. While it is intuitive in its own right, figuring out all the features will take some time.
• Lack of time tracking can be deal breaker for many teams
• Asana can become complicated to manage when your team gets too large.
  

Wrike

According to its founder Andrew Filev, Wrike was borne out of his frustrations of managing multiple teams and projects in a distributed environment. It has robust collaboration features including real-time communication with your team. Its is structured into Folder, Project and Tasks, with Folders being the high level structure of your organization, Project including detailed information of each function and Tasks being individual actions assigned to each person.

Filev has also mentioned that Wrike is not necessarily the easiest tool to master, but if we compare them with the most powerful tools out there, it is certainly the most intuitive among them.

Pros

• Dashboard and a robust Approvals process.
• Wrike offers a functional built-in time tracking solution.
• Apart from a Kanban-styled boards, it also provides Gantt Charts, Spreadsheet table and a list view.
  

Cons

• Expensive for small teams and solo users.
• Third party integrations, although growing are limited at this point.
• UI could be confusing for new users and could be sluggish at times.
  
  

Jira

Jira, one of the most popular Project Management tools out there was started way back in 2002, when there was a lack of robust Agile tools in the market. Since then it has been a mainstay at IT and Software Development companies of sizes to track features and bugs. It can be most fully utilized by larger companies, which need to coordinate between multiple complex projects and have a need to customize the task workflow.

Jira follows Agile principles and is very easy to use. Although it is generally aimed at more technical folks, over time other industries have also adopted Jira.

Pros

• Custom workflows means that you can customize it in any way that suits you.
• Powerful Agile views such as Scrum and Kanban can be implemented out of the box
• Additional features such as Roadmaps and Roadmaps
• Plethora of third party integrations, especially for software development
  

Cons

• Complex interface that is more focused towards software development can be hard to get used to sometimes.
• No built-in time tracking. Although you could achieve it using integrations.
• It has a slow querying time
• Pricing not suitable for small teams.
  
  

MS Project

MS Project is an old-school tool that has been around for 30 years and it is still a major player in the market. Although it has more to do with dated practices rather than ease-of-use. It is mostly used by traditional and experienced project teams that manage projects at scale. The tool itself has a similar look and feel to Excel, with views based on spreadsheet-like tabs and charts. Due to its Excel-like appearance, it became popular among early project management teams and currently has a 66% market share according to multiple surveys.

However, there are tons of easy easy-to-use and inexpensive alternatives available today.

Pros

• Feature-rich - Multiple Project Views, Time Tracking and Resource Management are all out-of-the-box
• Since they have been around for so long, they have fine-tuned and refined every feature and the application in itself.
• Bundled along with Office 365, which allows you to integrate other Microsoft tools easily.
• Ideal for supporting large-sized organizations.
  

Cons

• Lack of third party integrations limits the number of use cases.
• Dated and sluggish UI not in tune with modern benchmarks
• Steep learning curve makes it unsuitable for beginners
• Desktop only application. No way to track your tasks on your mobile.
• Lack of collaborations and data sharing makes it unsuitable for most products.
• Lack of a dashboard and reporting features makes it difficult to work on multiple projects.

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