These days, you won’t always have immediate access to everyone who works on a given project. Maybe some aspects are being handled by freelancers or contractors. Maybe members of your team work remotely. Maybe you just aren’t in the office today. No matter how your team is distributed, you need to be able to assign tasks, share files, check status updates, and manage your projects from anywhere. Here we present the 10 best project management tools that give you the ability to do so from any Internet connection.
Basecamp
Basecamp
Considered one of the most popular project management applications online, Basecamp offers a very easy-to-use interface that allows you to manage your projects. You can even give your clients a certain level of access to your Basecamp projects in order to get feedback on progress.
DeskAway
DeskAway Dashboard
With tools to track projects as well as what your team members are working on, DeskAway focuses on showing the progress you’ve made on a project. You can easily share information with your team, even scheduling events or posting to a shared blog to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Goalkeeper
Goalkeeper
You can choose different plans with Goalkeeper, meeting the different needs of a freelancer or individual or a larger business. The tool offers a variety of collaboration tools as well as the ability to track bugs and other problems, making it a particularly useful tool for product-oriented projects.
Copper Project
Copper Project
While Copper Project has been out there since 2001, it has undergone numerous upgrades. It’s focused on making paperless project management possible, even down to managing budgets and tracking time use.
Project Spaces
With Project Spaces, you can quickly set up a new project, creating email lists and RSS feeds to stay in touch with team members as well as stakeholders who aren’t closely involved but do need to be kept up-to-date. It also provides a workspace for sharing documents and files.
Huddle
Especially useful for creative projects, Huddle offers a variety of features that can make a difference in the speed of approval for a given aspect of your project. You can also use the application’s tools for live conferencing to make sure all your communications are in one place.
QuickBase
QuickBase
You may be familiar with the maker of QuickBase, Intuit. The company has brought its experience with business software to the table, creating a project management tool that can scale from a small business to a large company easily.
Central Desktop
Central Desktop
A project can require more than a few meetings, but Central Desktop makes it easy to handle those meetings along with the other steps of completing the project. In addition to standard project management tools, the application offers the ability to put together a web meeting or webinar in the same place you normally work with your team.
Thinkature
Thinkature
If your collaborative process relies on mind maps and visualizing steps of the project, Thinkature can make creating and managing shared mind maps as easy as every other part of your project management. It also includes the ability for voice chats as you develop your mind maps.
Trello
Trello
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In a glance, it tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in the process.
###
Thanks for featuring DeskAway, appreciate the support.
Recommend to try my favorite web based project management tools called “5PM” – http://www.5pmweb.com
I think is a great alternative for known SaaS like Basecamp, Huddle and etc.
Hallo.. ich vermisse ActiveCollab das es auch in Deutsch gibt.
You forgot one, which is open source:
http://www.todoyu.com/en/screenshots/
A couple of mentioned ones are not really popular, but half of the mentioned ones are well established products. I assume they are listed in no particular order?
I would definitely include 5pm (http://www.5pmweb.com), for example.
Another web-based project management tool worth consideration is Intervals.
Ah, Intervals looks pretty cool.
DeskAway seems to be the best among all these tools.
Hey, cool Project Management tools!
I would like to add GanttProject. It is a pretty nice and easy to use tool and of course free
cheers,
Have a look at ZCOPE – http://www.getzcope.com – it especially focuses on the communication in the (remote) team and tries to overcome emails. Good luck for this goal
ClockingIT (www.clockingit.com) free & open-source, has it all.
Gantt charts
Projects, tasks, task history, tags, clients, chat rooms, forums, email reminders, multilingual interface, etc… Only con : no iphone app
Thanks a lot for a great list and summary of each service. It really helped me pick the right one for my project.
Thanks for this list.
I would recommend Ganttzilla.
Great tool.
http://www.ganttzilla.com
It includes complete set of features for web-based creation, editing, viewing, discussing, versioning, secured sharing and publishing of project plans.
By the way it’s free.
You might want to look at the HyperOffice Collaboration Suite. Its one of the oldest and most well known names in the market since 1998.
Hi,
Thanks for this article. I think you’ve featured a good part of the basic project management tools out there.
Have you had the chance to look at our Clarizen (http://clarizen.com) tool? While it’s not free (there’s a 30 days trial though) – I think it offers some high even features to the more advanced user and project managers, while still keeping those oh-so-important SaaS featuers such as securely sharing parts of your project as or for external resources, budget controls, resource management, etc.
Another to add to this list is Dooster. It’s my favorite project management tool at the moment. Highly recommend you check it out: http://www.dooster.net
I’d like to add AceProject to that list. I’m kind of surprised you missed that one as it’s a pretty decent tool. It has saved our lives quite a few times!
I don’t see WorkforceTrack in this list.
So far, they are the cheapest but most comprehensive i’ve found. They have not only PM but CRM, Accounting, (invoicing, etc.) Reporting and many more.
just in case you need: http://workforcetrack.com
And another one:
http://www.onepoint-project.com
Although RationalPlan is not an online solution it is a good product that is worth to be tried:
http://www.rationalplan.com/
I think workforcetrack can be the next generation solution for PM. Such solutions as workforcetrack, smartsheet etc always have integration with google apps and you can easily find them on google marketplace.
Workgroups 2011 is another option. It includes modules for digital asset management, job management, workflow management, and online proofing.
My company wanted to get BAsecamp but were told that it is for larger organisations and that they should try Dooster at the moment. I haven’t used project management software before but the customer service at Dooster is very good and I enjoy it now. Our company seems to be going from strength to strength anyway.
We are using Manitoo Project Management from ADIOS CLOUD. Check out http://www.adioscloud.com.
Our tool works just as well for personal project management as it does for larger groups. We have been getting extremely good feed back both from individual users as well as from bigger companies. I think you should try it out to see if you think it deserves to be on your list. It is based on Social Project Management which is a quite new concept. You can read about how it compares to traditional teqniques on our blog: http://blog.projectplace.com/projectblog/2011/10/11/how-is-social-project-management-different-from-agile/
Kind regards,
Roza
Hi Thursday,
I wonder how much relevant your post is after more than 2 years (26 months to be exact).
The only 2 remaining tools in the market are the first two, the rest are all dead!
Looks like we need to come up with the 2012 version! Thanks for your comment.
Red or Dead !
Well, we use Dooster and it’s red hot. It’s really good. We haven’t had it for long but I think we’ll be keeping it.
Dooster looks cool. Will have the check that out as well. Any others that you’ve tried?
As PM Hut says, most of these tools are already dead. So, for someone that may be interested in the topic now, I would like to recommend the tool that we use in our company, with which we are really happy. It is TransparentBusiness (http://www.transparentbusiness.com), and it is ideal for distributed work.
It has several advantages over other tools, such as Dooster, while including the same set of basic features: project scheduling, tasks creation and assignation, discussion, updates on completed tasks, etc. On of the advantages is that is free at the beginning (up to 5 users and for unlimited projects). Also, it offers a time tracking feature which is great to control your workers and see that they are really working on the tasks they have. It also has a real-time Gantt chart feature, which shows a view of the phases and tasks of the project and their completion rate at real time.
Great roundup. I’ve used tools like this for 20 years — long before they even arrived on the web — and for me the biggest hurdle has been getting staff to consistently use them. It’s no wonder. They’re all about tasks and treat people as machines you feed task lists to. I found something that takes a different approach. It puts people first and addresses issues like creating supportive teams, developing my skills and finding challenging and fulfilling work. IMO, if you have that, the task part is easy. Check it here: http://propstoyou.com
@AldenGannon Will have to check it out. I like the concept of team motivators in the form of virtual awards, etc.
I always knew Basecamp will be listed in the top 10 and also would be on top 3, as its worth the value. I have used others too, such as Zoho, Dropbox. I have got some good reviews and multiple options from your post too.
It’s quite surprising that Wrike (http://www.wrike.com) is not on this list. We have started using it some weeks ago and were able to adopt it right from Day 1. I think it’s a nice match if you are looking for a powerful, yet intuitive solution. The coolest thing about it is that it keeps our creative team on the same page. We see each other’s updates in the activity stream, and that’s really helpful. It’s also great we can create and update tasks from e-mails. , My personal favorite feature is working on documents without downloading them. Since I work with dozens of them daily, this prevents any confusion with file versions. To sum it up – the tool is definitely worth checking out.
Have a look at Gigantt, too: http://www.gigantt.com
It offers a unique user-interface based on a zoom-UI, which lets you deal with large, complex projects involving lots of people.
You can try it even without signing up by visiting our live demo tutorial: http://www.gigantt.com/r/tutorial
It seems strange to me that Proofhub is not included in this list. Take a look at http://proofhub.com