10 Best Project Management Software Of 2024

• ClickUp: Best for Agile Development Teams
• Monday.com: Best for Startups on a Tight Budget
• Asana: Best for Collaboration Tools
• Zoho Projects: Best for Integrations
• Smartsheet: Best for Workflow Automation
• Notion: Best for Content Creators
• Airtable: Best for Data-Driven Companies
• Teamwork: Best for Client-Facing Service Providers
• Wrike: Best for Artificial Intelligence Features
• Jira: Best for Product Development Teams

The Forbes Advisor Small Business team is committed to bringing you unbiased rankings and information with full editorial independence. We use product data, strategic methodologies and expert insights to inform all of our content to guide you in making the best decisions for your business journey.

To compile this list of the top 10 project management software options, we reviewed 16 providers and rated them according to factors such as transparent pricing, types of dashboards available, integration compatibility, access to customer support and customer ratings. Our Australian-based editorial team then applied an additional layer of editorial judgment and oversight, ensuring the shortlisted products were suitable to local users and their needs. All ratings are determined solely by our editorial team.

This list was a result of a careful evaluation of 16 popular project management software platforms that small Australian businesses use. We looked at each contender using our rubric that considers seven categories of 31 project management factors important to small businesses. Next, we gave each criterion a weighted score and tallied all the scores together to land a final star rating.

Some factors we considered when choosing inclusions for this “best of” list include:

Cost and Fees

Small businesses must always be budget-conscious. For this reason, we looked for project management software with options for less than $10 AUD per month per user. Companies with free versions received bonus points. Pricing accounts for 11% of the total score.

General Features and Functionality

We considered the software’s ability to offer basic project management tools (such as Kanban and Gantt charts) and customise the project management experience to your company’s needs, including via integrations or automation tools. General features amount to 26% of a product’s total score.

Additional Features

To further flesh out the scoring, we looked for functionality that goes above and beyond generic project management software. Tools that provide client access, invoicing functionality and budget tracking received extra points. This section makes up 20% of the final ranking.

Mobile App

Every project management tool should include a mobile app for those who need to work on the go. We look at reviews of the apps to ensure they aren’t too buggy to be useful and whether the companies offer compatibility with both iOS and Android devices. We devote 6% of this data to the scores.

Service and Support

We look at the type of support each project management software provides. We give more credit to those that offer live chat, especially if it’s with a human representative than just a chatbot. We also check to ensure there’s a knowledge base or help centre for finding answers to your questions on your own. This section makes up 8% of the total ranking.

Expert Score

A good project management software is one that any person on your team can learn to use with minimal tech training. The software options on this list offer tools to keep the learning curve manageable, such as pre-built templates.

When implementing new software into your company processes, you are bound to run into questions. We prioritised software solutions that offer the customer support needed to help you quickly and easily overcome these hurdles. All told, our expert analysis makes up another 20% of our score.

Customer Reviews

Finally, there is nothing more telling when assessing a choice than what customers who have used it think. We chose project management software options with at least 3.5-star ratings across their customer bases. These ratings encompass the final 9% of a company’s score.

To choose a project management software, consider each provider’s cost and added fees, overall features and functionality offerings, reporting, integration capabilities, necessary features vs. feature overload, customer reviews and customer support. In this section, we walk you through how to approach this assessment.

Essential Project Management Software Features

Project management software has basic features that most projects need to be successful. However, extra or unique features make some software options better for certain teams or businesses. It’s important to do your research to understand what unique features might make your project more successful based on your team approach, type of business or type of project. Some highly prized project management tools and features include:

• Budget planning tools. Budget planning tools allow you to upload your set budget, then track expenses and invoices to compare project costs to the planned budget. By tracking this variance, you can determine if you are running into a budgeting problem. Financial forecasting tools further help you to ensure you don’t run over budget or, worse, have to stop the project because of a lack of funds.
• Resource management tools. Resource utilisation tools allow you to plan, track and record where resources—such as your talent—are used in the project’s execution. In doing so, it helps to reveal gaps in availability or when certain team members are overused (risking burnout), then adjust resource allocation to prevent problems.
• Task management features. Task management features include automations (that eliminate redundant tasks from to-do lists). Examples include automating invoicing, the identification of critical project changes and managing project workflows. Other task management tools include boards (to visualise moving tasks through their stages to completion), calendars, timeline views, scheduling, task tracking and task prioritisation.
• Risk management features. Common project risks include finishing over budget, with a lower-quality outcome than expected or not finishing on time. Many tools within a project management software can help you balance competing demands to finish the project as intended, including critical path charts, checklists, scheduling tools, cost breakdowns, cost variance reports and timelines.
• Reports and charts. Project management software offers digital charts for planning, tracking and readjusting your projects’ timelines, budget and quality as needed. For example, Kanban charts show tasks on a timeline board and their status. Gantt charts also give an overview of a project’s timeline complete with its phases, tasks and outputs. You can gather or feed data into these charts to update in real- time.
• Mobile app. Mobile apps help teams easily track, manage and deliver project deliverables from anywhere, helping to ensure all members are always in the know no matter where they are. Real-time knowledge can help them make smart decisions that keep projects progressing as planned. Apps also offer personalised content so team members know the tasks, activities and milestones they must complete each day.
• Integrations. Integrations help to boost a project management software’s performance and cater it to your needs. Slack and Google Drive integrations, for example, allow team members to collaborate within the software on project deliverables. And, Stripe allows your team to invoice clients for deliverables. Many project management software offer hundreds or even thousands of integration options.
• Client management tools. Many project management software offer various features for including your clients in the project’s execution, keeping them up to date on the project’s status and maintaining a professional relationship. Such tools include video-conferencing tools, invoicing and the ability to add clients as users to the project management software while maintaining control over what they can and cannot see.
• Collaboration tools. Many project management platforms offer tools to help project execution team members work together seamlessly, even across locations. Some come in the form of integrations, such as Slack. Others, however, are built in. Such built-in tools often include shared calendars, group chats, document sharing, chat forums and team email.

Ease of Use

Look for tools and designs that can help your organisation use the software easier, despite barriers such as little knowledge of best practices or a cumbersome number of tasks that must be completed daily. Choosing the right ease-of-use features for your organisation depends on many factors, including your company’s tech-savviness and size. However, some ease-of-use features commonly used by small to mid-sized companies are:

• Templates. Project management software templates incorporate project management best practices.
• Learning materials and opportunities. Software knowledge bases allow project managers and team members to learn how to expertly implement the software’s features based on layman’s terms definitions, videos and more. Demos are another opportunity to learn via often live interaction with software experts who know how to present its features and answer questions in layman’s terms.
• Automations. Automations make complex tasks instant and effortless by taking repetitive and often tedious tasks out of human hands. Less hands-on interaction makes the software’s involvement in project management easier to manage. Preset automation recipes make this ease-of-use feature even more intuitive.
• Mobile apps. Logistically, mobile apps make using the software easier by facilitating the gathering and dissemination of necessary information and helping team members complete tasks in a timely manner. Project field practitioners, for example, can update pertinent information on a project’s status without having to hold up the project to go back to the office to input such data.

Reporting and Analytics

Reporting within project management software presents key data in a meaningful way to help you understand the success or needed improvements in your projects. The best project management software offer dashboards that break down data in the form of graphs, tables and the like to make gleaning insights from the data instant and intuitive.

Determine the types of key performance indicators (KPIs) you may need to track and the types of needed reports to help you track them. Then, when evaluating your considered software, explore its reporting and analytics options and dashboards to determine if they have what you need.

Common reports that may be helpful in a project management software include project status, health, team availability, risk, variance and timeline reports. Common KPIs include percentage of tasks completed, return on investment (ROI), schedule variance, planned vs. actual hours and the planned project value.

Next, evaluate whether the software will continue to meet your needs by exploring whether you can customise the reports or dashboards to meet needs as they arise. Customisation options may include the ability to add or remove columns or create new reporting views.

Customer Reviews

Customer reviews offer real-world insights into what it is like to use your considered software and do business with its provider. Search your considered software on tech review sites such as Capterra and TrustRadius. Read the reviews of past and current users. As you do, you are likely to learn the glitches the software experiences, hidden costs not highlighted on the provider’s website and how the software compares to competitor solutions.

Customer Support

Access to quality customer support ensures that, should a glitch happen in the software, your entire project isn’t derailed. To learn more about your chosen provider’s customer support, search for it on review sites such as TrustRadius and look at the company’s plans to understand what will be available to you and when. Aim to at least ensure support will be responsive during your normal business hours and via the mediums your team is accustomed to using.

Business Size Considerations

As you look at the feature set, remember that start-ups have different needs in project management software than do large enterprises. For example, enterprise companies may need to manage projects with execution steps that span the globe, while start-up projects are more likely to span one or two locations. Demos can help you determine what tools are useful for your organisation’s size and which will unnecessarily create a steeper learning curve.

Though one software plan or tool may be best for your organisation at your current size, those needs are likely to change as you grow. For example, as you grow, you may need a software or plan with greater automation capabilities to scale operations or greater file storage capacity. So, while it is important to choose a software without unnecessary features, it is equally important to choose one that will continue meeting your feature needs as they grow.

Pricing for small to mid-sized business project management software generally ranges from free to $20 AUD per user, per month, depending on the features you want. Most also offer a discount of between 15% and 50% for paying your bill annually. In addition, many companies can use such software for free, including start-ups, non-profits and educational institutions. Free trials help users assess whether they want to upgrade from a free plan to a paid one.

More specifically, most providers offer a free plan with a limit on the number of users allowed. For example, monday.com allows two users on each free account. As plans scale up, more users are allowed. In addition, higher-tiered (and so, more expensive) plans offer more robust features, such as more storage, viewers, customer support, security, collaborative tools, automations, customisations and charts. Enterprises often have to request a custom quote.

Significant changes are occurring in nearly every industry as technology advances and attitudes surrounding work and leadership evolve. Project management is no exception, and the styles and strategies for managing both the technical and human aspects of team projects are being adapted to accommodate the new workplace landscape emerging in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here are the 2024 project management trends that we anticipate growing in the year to come.

A Continued Shift Towards Digital and Remote Work

In our post-pandemic world, fully remote and hybrid work options are here to stay. Gallup reports approximately 56% of full-time employees can fulfil job requirements entirely from home. The transition to fully remote work during the pandemic further illustrated productivity and effectiveness in the workplace could be maintained, even when a majority of employees were working from home.

From a project management standpoint, this transition has its pros and cons. Working in the same physical location as other team members promotes team-building and spontaneous collaboration that can be otherwise limited in a virtual workspace. Despite the perks of in-person collaboration, however, remote employees enjoy the flexible nature of working from home and report increased satisfaction with their work. When given the choice, many remote employees would prefer to remain remote or partially remote instead of returning full-time to the office.

As we move into 2024, project managers are challenged with navigating team dynamics and productivity in an increasingly digital environment.

Project Management and Change Management

In recent years, companies have enacted increasing numbers of change initiatives to organisations and the structures within. Project managers are learning to integrate the requirements of these change initiatives into project management strategies and plans. It is crucial to create a flexible methodology for integrating change initiatives with specific steps and protocols that your team can follow. These skills will continue to be relevant in the coming years as companies grow and conform to the ever-evolving workplace standards.

Hybrid Approaches

Project success strategies have traditionally relied upon adherence to a single project management methodology. Recently, an increasing number of companies have merged multiple approaches to project management  to increase flexibility and create a style that’s adapted to the needs of the individual project. Hybrid approaches also work well when faced with the task of integrating the expectations of new change initiatives presented by company leaders.

Increasing Connection Between Projects and Strategy

Project managers increasingly are asked to expand the scope and scale of strategies in growing workplaces. Rather than simply focusing on individual projects in isolation, project managers are tasked with learning how individual projects relate to one another and how they work together to advance the goals of the company. This type of understanding can promote the strategic use of a project manager’s skills and help them to consistently make decisions that align closely with the company’s vision.

Increasing Prevalence of AI and Automation

Artificial intelligence, automation, machine learning and data collection and analysis are rapidly becoming critical elements in project management strategies. According to PwC, 77% of high-performing projects utilise project management software to help streamline their work and meet their goals.

AI can evaluate outcomes and provide insights into performance strengths and weaknesses, provide organised data to guide important decisions, predict outcomes, estimate timelines, analyse risk and optimise resource distribution. Project management tools and software can also automate time-consuming administrative tasks normally performed by the project manager, leaving the project manager free to focus time and energy on more critical or more nuanced tasks.

Project managers who take the time to understand how the AI and automation processes in their organisation can complement their role will be well-prepared to take advantage of this resource.