The year is 2025. You’re organized, crossing items off your to-do list regularly with the help of project management software, and leaving the office (or closing your laptop in your living room) before 5:00 PM. Not your reality yet? We’ve got you covered with this list of the best tools to revolutionize your workflow.
Who Does Project Management Benefit?
Whether you’re a non-profit founder or part of a large enterprise organization, project management tools are essential for businesses of all sizes. These digital platforms assist with task tracking, resource allocation, goal-setting, collaboration and much more — think of it as your one-stop-shop for streamlining project processes, enhancing productivity, and fostering effective communication.
Utilizing project management soluitions can greatly enhance your team’s collaboration, allowing for seamless communication and project tracking in real-time. Implementing effective project management tools can streamline processes, making project execution smoother.
Future jobs will also require high proficiency in these software and technology. Gartner study predicts that GenAI is expected to play a role in 70% of text and data-heavy tasks by 2025 (up from less than 10% in 2023), making human-machine collaboration essential.
The right project management software can help you streamline your workflow, ensuring that every task is accounted for and that your team remains on target to meet deadlines.
With a robust project management tool, you can visualize your progress, prioritize tasks, and allocate resources effectively. This level of organization is key to achieving project success. Investing in the best project management tools can provide invaluable tools for tracking progress and managing resources effectively, ultimately contributing to your project’s overall success.
By utilizing the best PM software, businesses stay organized, meet deadlines and deliver projects successfully and on track in this evolving landscape. Here’s everything you need to know to find the best tool for your needs.
The Benefits of Project Management Software
Overall, project management tools are beneficial for businesses who want assistance tracking the progress of projects, campaigns, resource allocation, and tasks across an organization. According to FinancesOnline, 77% of high-performing projects use PM tools. With a PM tool, project managers and team leads can better understand how organizations and teams are pacing, and help keep teams on the same page.
Collaboration is another key functionality. “Project leaders need strong written and verbal communication skills to effectively engage stakeholders and the political acumen to navigate a wide range of disparate and often conflicting interests,” wrote Pierre Le Manh, the president and CEO of Project Management Institute (PMI), the most important global non-profit professional organization for project management professionals.
Alongside the recent shift to remote and hybrid work, teams without a collaboration tool have struggled to keep tabs on all remote work and project updates, as we can no longer rely on in-person meetings to relay information.
Why is Finding the Best Project Management Tool important?
That’s why project management is more important in 2024 (and beyond) than ever before. Whether you’re just starting a business or looking for ways to adapt your well-established organization to a a new way of working, finding the best project management tool is a imperative to bring people together and maximize efficiency.
Here are some key benefits of using project management software and tools:
- Facilitates communication and builds teamwork across an organization
- Allows leadership to have a macro-level view of project progress
- Helps teams keep tasks in perspective and understand priorities
- Assists in controlling costs and managing budget
- Helps with resource allocation and prevents team-wide burnout
- Enhances remote collaboration for teams that are distributed or follow a hybrid work model
- Expedite report generation and analysis of documents with multiple types of data, summarizing meeting notes and performing calculations
Read on to learn about the best project management tools for 2025 and beyond:
1. Hive
Hive is a comprehensive, intuitive, all-in-one project management tool – the only tool you need to open in the morning to get your work done. It is one of the best project management tools because Hive is unlike other tools on the market because it’s the world’s first democratic productivity platform. But what exactly does that mean?
At Hive, new features are constantly being developed based on user feedback on the Hive Forum. You know what you need in a tool to work better and faster, and Hive is committed to creating a PM software that does just that.
Key Features of Hive
When it comes to project management software, the right features can help streamline your workflow and enhance productivity across your team.
In today’s fast-paced work environment, effective project management software is essential for maintaining competitive advantages and delivering successful outcomes.
The building blocks of Hive are Action cards, which exist inside of projects. Within an Action card, teams can upload files, provide feedback with proofing and approvals, tag each other, and leave provide comments with @mentions. Teams at all-star companies like Comcast, Toyota, and Starbucks work in Hive – just another reason why it tops every list of PM tools. Learn more about all of Hive’s features here.
As you explore options for project management, consider the value it can bring in terms of facilitating communication, task management, and overall project organization.
In addition to task management, time-tracking and resourcing, Hive takes workplace productivity and project management to the next level with:
- Native chat and email
- Dashboards and reporting
- Collaborative note-taking tool
- 1,000 integrations with top work tools including Zoom, Gmail, Slack, Dropbox, and more
- 7 different flexible project layouts (Gantt, Kanban, Calendar, Portfolio, Table, List & Label views)
- Workflow automation tools
- AI-powered writing tool, HiveMind for creating content like blog posts, press releases & more
- AI project planner
- Goal-tracking application, Hive Goals to monitor KPIs, OKRs, and other key business metrics
- Time tracking and timesheets
- Resourcing and capacity finder, which lets you in a few clicks identify over-allocated teammates and reallocate tasks to those with available bandwidth
Incorporating effective project management apps into your operations can lead to better resource allocation and increased team collaboration.
Request a demo for your team above.
Overall, Hive is a versatile and intuitive project management tool that simplifies collaboration and enhances productivity. With a user-friendly interface and comprehensive features, it provides a seamless experience for teams of all sizes. Hive offers various project views, including Gantt charts and Kanban boards, allowing users to visualize their workflow and track progress easily.
With its extensive integration options and mobile app accessibility, Hive empowers teams to stay connected, manage their projects effectively and save money. “We estimate that Hive saves us 60 hours per month on case management alone, and at least $150,000 per month on workflow and billing,” shared Jennifer Estremera, Deputy Managing Partner of Reichman Jorgensen, an elite national law firm that uses Hive.
Hive offers a free 14-day trial and a free-forever plan for teams up to 10 users. Hive Starter is the lowest paid plan on the market, starting at $5 per user per month. Hive Teams plans offer advanced functionality and start at $12 monthly per user.
Request a demo of Hive here. Keep in mind that Hive is one of the only tools on this list who allow customized add-ons, making it one of our best project management tools for 2025.
2. Trello
With comprehensive project management software, you can enhance accountability and transparency, fostering a culture of collaboration among your team.
Project management apps are essential for any team looking to streamline their processes and improve project outcomes effectively.
By selecting the right project management tool, teams can enhance their productivity and ensure successful project completions, driving results in their organizations.
Effective project management solutions can be a critical factor in achieving operational excellence and meeting business objectives.
Trello is a great option for small businesses. Trello is primarily a Kanban board tool, which is a project management methodology started by an industrial engineer in the 1940s. While it doesn’t offer additional project views like most other PM softwares, it’s one of the most popular Kanban board tools on the market. It is a top free project management tool as well, considering it’s versatility.
At its core, Trello helps individuals and teams organize and prioritize tasks. It utilizes a simple and intuitive interface in the form of boards, lists, and cards. The boards represent projects or categories, whereas lists within boards can represent stages or phases of the project. Users can create and customize cards within lists to represent individual tasks.
Free for basic, or $10 per user for Premium monthly.
3. Nifty
Nifty is a top tool if you’re in the market for an intuitive, easy-to-use tool for individual or team work. Within the app, you can modernize and centralize work operations to help minimize the internal tools that your team has to juggle. Nifty lets you manage full projects, campaigns and individual tasks in views like Kanban or Gantt, which can be organized by milestone.
The cost of Nifty:
Pricing starts at $10 per month per member, for a team up to 5 members.
4. Asana
Asana is a top project management software that can easily manage small and larger projects, which is why it’s part of our list as we compare tools. The software is designed around tasks and subtasks arranged into different sections that can be assigned to either an individual or teams.
When we compare project management software, this is a good option that helps teams stay organized, collaborate effectively, and achieve their goals. With its intuitive interface and powerful features, Asana allows teams to create and manage tasks, assign responsibilities, set deadlines, and track progress all in one place.
For each task, the project manager and the rest of the team can communicate and provide feedback in the same place, keeping collaboration for each project at a central, easy to access location.
Free for basic, premium for $10.99 per user per month, $24.99 per user for the business plan. Learn more about other solutions like Asana here.
5. Basecamp
Basecamp is a cloud-based project management tool that helps individuals, project managers, and even marketing teams collaboration on tasks. Some of the features include to-do lists for tasks, which can be assigned to different users, and tasks that the system will automatically follow up on when the due date lapses.
With Basecamp, teams can easily collaborate, communicate, and coordinate their tasks and projects in one central location. The platform allows users to create projects, assign tasks, set deadlines, and track progress in real-time. It also provides a space for team discussions, document sharing, and file storage.
It also has a real-time group chat feature and a tool that enables the client to view the progress of the project. As with the majority of services on this list, Basecamp can also be integrated with other products for reporting, analysis, and time tracking, among other features. Aside from its cloud-based solution, Basecamp can be integrated with iOS, Android, Mac, and PC.
Since September, 2022 Basecamp no longer offers new free personal package subscription, which means it doesn’t have a free project management software option. However, its basic plan for freelancers and small teams starts at $15 per user monthly. Business plans start at $299 monthly for unlimited users and projects.
6. Proofhub
ProofHub lets teams collaborate, organize and deliver on projects across an organization. Users can assign specific tasks to individuals, which can have a breakdown of deadlines and recur at a determined frequency. ProofHub has several views including Gantt, Kanban and calendar view, and is also a central place to store files related to all of your projects.
Like Hive, Proofhub also has more advanced capabilities. These include proofing, timesheets and reporting to better equip teams with all of the tools they need to collaborate.
7. Smartsheet
Smartsheet is a project management app that is based on a table view, which looks similar to an Excel spreadsheet. This tool is cloud-based, and also allows users to switch between a few other data visualization views. With its user-friendly interface and customizable features, it streamlines project planning, tracking, and reporting. Users can create sheets and templates to organize tasks, set deadlines, and assign responsibilities.
Smartsheet also has work automation flows that help you reduce manual tasks and automate recurring actions, which helps take over some of the more mundane day-to-day work. Overall, Smartsheet simplifies project management and improves communication, leading to increased efficiency and successful project outcomes.
8. Wrike
Wrike is a good project management app because you can create custom team workflows. From there, you can easily set a timeline, create interactive charts like Gantt view, and easily visualize tasks and next steps. Wrike also allows you to analyze performance with their real-time report building feature.
With its user-friendly interface and customizable workflow templates, teams can streamline their project management processes. Features like task tracking, real-time communication, and file sharing make it one of the best options for businesses of all sizes.
9. TeamGantt
One of TeamGantt’s biggest advantages is that it’s an easy-to-use product that is great for beginners, or those who might not have had extensive experience with PMS in the past. As the name suggests, this tool is Gantt-heavy, which gives teams an easy and straightforward was to manage projects. With TeamGantt’s Gantt charts, you can plan, schedule and manage Gantt charts.
Cost: TeamGantt’s basic plan is free. Its Pro plan starts at $49 per month per manager.
10. Jira
Jira is a bug-tracking and agile project management app that started as a platform primarily used by engineering and remote dedicated development teams. It’s currently used by a variety of teams all over the world, but it’s an especially useful tool for a software development company, as it has roots remain in issue/bug tracking, agile and test case management spaces.
Some of the features of Jira include customizable scrum boards, roadmaps to sketch out plans and individual team actions, as well as flexible Kanban boards that help visually manage issues.
Now that we’ve covered our top 10 tools, let’s take a look at some other options:
11. Monday.com
Monday is a simple online project management tool that helps teams visually organize tasks and projects. First of all, it’s a very simple tool. Projects are managed via one central board, which serves as the hub for each project and reflects changes made on a task-by-task basis. Boards are also customizable — you can add new columns to see data on hours spent, status, and location.
This tool made our list of best project management tools because it has views including workload view, where you can see pending tasks by individual, timeline, where you can plan work out by due date, and charts, where you can review team efforts and outcomes.
The cost of Monday:
Pricing starts at $36/month for the first five users billed annually.
12. Plaky
Plaky is an online project management software ideal for task, product, and workflow management. Its customizable features allows the flexibility needed in a B2B oriented platform, making Plaky a great option of project management for any industries. Some of its major features include Kanban and Table view, ready-made templates, a time-tracking integration with Clockify, @mentions, activity log, and guest access.
Users can easily filter and sort their tasks, assign due dates, and attach relevant documents. Plaky also allows unlimited users, workspaces, and projects. It offers first-rate 24/7 customer support, and it is ISO certified and GDPR compliant.
13. Zoho
While it’s not a traditional project management app, Zoho is a web-based CRM suite that is best used to manage leads, purchases and pipelines. Among the tools in this CRM platform are automated tasks like account management, lead tracking, prospect tracking and other sales tasks. Zoho also has a native chatroom that can either be private or public, and the ability to track the time spent on projects.
The tool also has features outside of the project management and marketing scope, including HR and finance management. In addition, you can utilize a Zoho CRM Integration to connect the platform with other common project management tools that you already use.
14. LiquidPlanner
LiquidPlanner is a fusion of traditional PM and time-tracking. One of the best features that make it a good project management software is that it updates and shifts due dates and projects when resources per project change. This helps you manage expectations around when a project can be completed or when milestones can be hit based on workload.
LiquidPlanner also has a great resourcing feature that clearly shows how many available hours an employee has per week, as well as a helpful budgeting feature for controlling costs and keeping expenses on track.
ClickUp is a PMS with customizable views, similar to Hive. ClickUp’s views include list view, board view (similar to Kanban view), box view (which breaks out individual workload), and calendar view (sorts actions by due date). With ClickUp, users can work towards goals, which function as a user’s “mission control center.”
Other features include a 2-way calendar sync and integrations with time-tracking tools like Toggl. ClickUp is also very simple, so it’s easy to understand for newcomers to PM.
ClickUp is free up to 100MB of data, after which paid plans are available for teams of all sizes.
16. Airtable
Airtable is an advanced spreadsheet-based project management tool. Within the spreadsheet, you can list out tasks and projects, as well as attach a variety of items, including images, links to other tasks, and assignees.
Airtable also has other views aside from the spreadsheet/table view, which include calendar view, Kanban view, and gallery view. This spreadsheet-based tool is one of the best tools if you’re primarily used to working in Excel or Google Sheets.
The cost of Airtable:
There is a free version of Airtable, and paid plans start at $20 per user per month billed annually.
17. Mavenlink
Mavenlink was built specifically for the operational and financial sides of service businesses. This management software serves as the “Operational Service of Record” for service businesses and connects whole organizations with ease. Whether you’re creating a business plan or streamlining operations of a long-established organization, Mavenlink benefits businesses by helping them manage finances and stay on track.
Within the tool, there are several different functions including traditional project management, resource management, and business accounting, which help unite multiple people working on a specific project. Mavenlink made our list of best project management apps because their resourcing and budgeting tools are particularly useful, as they help increase overall financial visibility within an organization.
18. MeisterTask
MeisterTask is another Kanban-based tool (like Trello) that helps you sort projects and tasks within a larger team. Compared to other project management tools on the market, MeisterTask’s offerings are much more streamlined and tailored. This tool also has pre-made workflows that can help you get started quickly, or you can design your own custom workflow for your team.
19. ProjectManager
ProjectManager helps people plan projects, build workflows and manage resources with powerful features your whole team can use. This software has five project views — Gantt charts, kanban boards, task lists, calendars and sheet views. The powerful Gantt links all four types of task dependencies, filters for the critical path and sets a baseline to capture project variance and help keep you on track.
Real-time dashboards give you a high-level overview of your project or projects, without the time-consuming setup required with lightweight alternatives. Customizable reports go deeper into the data and can be shared across multiple formats to keep stakeholders updated.
This is a highly collaborative tool that lets users share files and comment at the task level, also has automated workflow, task approvals and risk, resource and task management features.
20. Adobe Workfront
Adobe Workfront is a highly customizable project management tool that helps users to manage their projects, which is why it’s one of our picks for a great PMS. Features include setting up priorities for tasks, assigning them to specific team members, managing an entire project, and reviewing its progress. Besides automating the whole workflow, it also provides a centralized platform for digital collaboration and integration with various other services.
Adobe Workfront also delivers powerful tool integrations to help your team take their tech stack to the next level, which is why it made our list of best project management apps.
The best of the rest: More PM software to consider
21. GanttPro
As the name suggests, GanttPro is one of the leading PM tools that functions based on Gantt charts. With GanttPro, users can plan projects with interactive Gantt charts, split projects out into tasks, milestones and subtasks, and set a specific timeline with resources allocated. GanttPro also allows users to measure out team resources, availability, and estimate project costs.
22. Scoro
Scoro is a complex project management tool built to help teams manage tasks and reporting. Tasks can be tracked and divided into subtasks, assigned to individuals, and have deadlines and milestones attributed to them. Scoro is also great if you send invoices — the tool lets you send sales quotes and bills with ease via the app itself.
This project management tool also contains thorough reporting functionalities that let you view project status reports, unscheduled time, and projects by accounts.
The cost of Scoro:
Pricing starts at $26 per user per month.
23. Timely
Timely is an automated time-tracking tool that also lets you track projects, monitor budgets, and view team performance all in one software. With Timely, you can examine past costs, tasks and turnarounds to set competitive rates and improve future project profitability and efficiency.
Timely prioritizes privacy in its functionality, giving each team member their own private work timeline so they can control what information is displayed publicly. It’s made onto our list of best project management tools because it also has automatic time-tracking and timesheet drafts, your team can focus less on daily admin tasks — and more on the work itself.
The price of Timely:
Paid plan for one person costs $25 per user per month, scaling up to the $225 per month for a team up to 20 team members.
24. Proggio
Proggio is a collaborative portfolio and project management app with a range of features including high-level portfolio monitoring, Kanban and list views, a mobile app, and a robust Jira integration.
The Jira integration helps teams connect with their coworkers in the development and software space, which is great for teams across many organizations. In Proggio, you can also sort tasks by “My Tasks,” “Assigned by Me,” “By Projects,” and “My Team,” which helps sort and filter to-dos.
The cost of Proggio:
Proggio costs $600 per month for up to 50 users.
25. FunctionFox
FunctionFox project management is rooted in tasks, timesheets and budgeting functionalities that make it easy to view the full scope of a project via the app. FunctionFox caters specifically to creative professionals, and those who work in a project-based space. The tool also allows for detailed reporting and has a view called CEO Desktop, which provides a graphical representation of projects alongside estimated hours they will take.
The cost of FunctionFox:
FunctionFox Classic starts at $10 per month per user.
26. Timecamp
If you’re in the market for a time tracking tool that also connects with your project planning tool, Timecamp is a great tool as it offers automatic time tracking that works in the background and logs time for projects seamlessly.
The tool’s unique project structure allows you to create or import as many projects as you need, track time for them, and then analyze the reports to figure out how the team is performing, making it the last on our list of best project management apps.
Timecamp offers a free plan for single users and paid plans that start at $4.99 per month per user when billed annually.
Are there any other tools on your list of best project management apps that you think we missed? Let us know and we can add your favorite tool to this article.
