The Best Project Management Software for 2023

Let’s say you’re building a house. It’s a complex process and some tasks must be done in a particular order. You can’t install windows if you haven’t put up the walls yet. You probably have dozens of people working on the house, and you have to know which days they are available to pour the foundation, lay the tile, and so forth. Then you have to schedule them based not only on their availability but also on each task happening in the right order. The way to manage a complex project like this one—including all the jobs that need to be done by whom and when—is to use project management software.

We’re here to tell you about the best project management apps we’ve tested and what makes each one unique. Below our recommendations, you’ll find more information on what project management software is and advice on how to shop for the right app for your team.

Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks

GanttPro

Best for Beginners

Who It’s For

GanttPro is one of the best project management apps for beginners. That also means it’s a great pick for teams, especially small teams, that don’t have an expert in project management on hand to run their projects for them. It does not have customizable reports and dashboards that larger teams may need, however.

Why We Picked It

With reasonable pricing, an interface that anyone can learn to use, and a good balance of features, GanttPro is one of the best project management apps. We also appreciate that it includes custom fields for tasks, a kanban board view, and a critical path feature, as well as a save history that allows you to do multiple undos.

PROS

• Competitively priced
• Well designed and easy to learn to use
• Includes custom fields for tasks, kanban board view, critical path feature
• Saves history for undo

CONS

• No customizable reporting tools or customizable dashboards
• No billing or invoicing
• Light on integrations

Teamwork

Best for Client Work

Who It’s For

If your business takes on projects for clients, then Teamwork is one of the best project management apps you’ll find. It comes with billing and invoicing included, so it’s easy to track hours worked on a project and know what to bill.

Why We Picked It

Before Teamwork became focused on organizations that take on client work, it was already a superbly designed project management platform. If you are new to project management, you could spend a bit of time using Teamwork and watching some of its excellent video tutorials to learn enough to use it in practice.

PROS

• Simple and intuitive design
• Great customization options
• Billing and invoicing included
• Free account available

CONS

• No PDF or image markup tools

Zoho Projects

Best for Small and Growing Teams

Who It’s For

Zoho Projects is a low-cost project management app with an array of helpful features, which makes it an attractive option for small and growing businesses. Its tiered pricing, with attractively low rates, is also targeted at organizations that are on a budget and those that expect to grow quickly.

Why We Picked It

We picked Zoho Projects as one of the best project management apps because it offers excellent value. It’s easy to set up and navigate, offers deep configuration options, and includes the option to track time worked. You can make your own project templates in Zoho Projects, but the app does not come with its own set of templates.

PROS

• Excellent value
• Generally easy to set up and navigate
• Multiple ways to communicate in app
• Deep configuration options
• Strong time-tracking tools

CONS

• Does not include premade templates
• Slightly unusual resource management view

Who It’s For

Celoxis is one of the best project management apps for medium and large organizations. This app provides ample reports and other tools that give decision-makers and business owners value. For example, you can use Celoxis to not only work most efficiently by adjusting project schedules, but also to forecast revenue.

Why We Picked It

Celoxis is reasonably easy to use, with a short setup time. Medium to large businesses will like that it includes time tracking, budgeting, and resource management tools.

PROS

• Ample reports and other tools for decision makers
• Excellent value
• Easy to use and short setup time
• Includes time tracking, budgeting, and resource management

CONS

• No proofing tools
• No billing or invoicing features
• No free version

LiquidPlanner

Best for Automated Scheduling

Who It’s For

While LiquidPlanner can be a great project management app for teams of any size, we think it’s especially well suited to larger teams working on complex projects. One reason is because LiquidPlanner’s area of specialization is automated scheduling. If a pain point for your organization is scheduling people to take on certain tasks at specific times, then LiquidPlanner can help. This app comes with ample tools for automatically fixing project schedules when tasks slip or when workers are suddenly unavailable.

Why We Picked It

LiquidPlanner is impressive at managing projects, tasks, workloads, and more. It can automatically and dynamically schedule work for your whole team, even as factors change—which may not be everyone’s cup of tea. If you’re open to what LiquidPlanner offers, this app can project best- and worst-case scenarios for projects and tasks, dish up rich management and insight tools, and give you the tools you need for time-tracking—as long as you opt for a Professional or Ultimate plan.

PROS

• Automated, intelligent scheduling
• Projects best and worst case scenarios
• Rich management and insight tools for a variety of resources
• Good time tracking included in Professional and Ultimate plans

CONS

• Takes significant time to set up projects and learn to use
• Some functions are difficult to find
• Gantt chart is not interactive
• No milestones
• No nonimage attachments

ProofHub

Best for Proofing

Who It’s For

ProofHub is a project management app for team that including proofing stages as part of their workflow. In other words, if your team evaluates or critiques visual materials—whether ad campaigns or mobile app designs—ProofHub has tools that other project management apps lack to help you through those processes. More specifically, it has markup tools you can use to draw on PDFs and image files while you give feedback or otherwise collaborate on them with your team.

Why We Picked It

ProofHub aims for simplicity without skimping on core features. It’s also competitively priced for small teams. This app is also surprisingly easy to use, making it great for teams that don’t have a dedicated project manager.

PROS

• Quick and easy setup
• Competitively priced
• Nice balance of features and simplicity
• Good tools for discussing visual materials

CONS

• Sometimes loads slowly
• Lacks budgeting tools

Redmine

Best for Open-Source Project Management

Who It’s For

Redmine is the go-to project management app for anyone who wants a free and open-source option—but you also need to have people on hand that know how to install and maintain it. Redmine is not an off-the-shelf project management app. It’s focused on projects that include issue- and bug-tracking.

Why We Picked It

While Redmine isn’t for everyone, we chose it as one of the best project management apps because it’s free and open source, which is a rarity in the project management world.

PROS

• Free
• Open source
• Customizable
• Includes time estimates, dependencies, Gantt charts, project wikis

CONS

• Requires self-installation and maintenance
• No included support (beyond the online community)
• Support limited to community docs
• Not suitable for all teams and projects; favors software developers

Smartsheet

Best for Automations

Who It’s For

Smartsheet is the project management app for people who like to increase productivity through automations. That means you’re willing to put in the time to set up “if this, then that” type commands that Smartsheet carries out for you automatically. For example, you might have an automation that says, “When someone marks a task as blocked, and the task status is ‘in progress’ or ‘for review,’ then alert the person assigned as the manager for that task.” Most other project management apps don’t have automation options built into them, though sometimes you can create them using third-party tools, such as Zapier. One note about Smartsheet: to get time-tracking, budgeting, and resource management, you need companion software that come with added fees.

Why We Picked It

If you’re willing to put in the time to learn what Smartsheet can do and customize it to your needs, it’s very powerful. It might become your go-to tool not only for project management but also for other collaborative business.

PROS

• Endlessly customizable and quite powerful
• Supports automations, input from web forms, proofing and approvals

CONS

• Requires companion software with added fees for time-tracking, budgeting, resource management
• Pages don’t update in real time or autosave with every keystroke

TeamGantt

Best for Easy Entry Into Gantt Charts

Who It’s For

TeamGantt is for beginners because it’s so easy and intuitive to use. If you don’t know anything about Gantt charts, you will quickly and painlessly learn while using TeamGantt. We like this app best for small teams who may not have a dedicated project manager on hand. TeamGantt doesn’t have budgeting or invoicing tools, which is another reason it’s better suited to small teams rather than large ones.

Why We Picked It

TeamGantt has lovely interactive Gantt charts that are incredibly easy to learn to use. The app has exceptional tutorial content to help you learn anything you don’t know. We also love a feature that automatically corrects any errors created among dependencies.

PROS

• Intuitive and easy to use
• Excellent interactive Gantt charts
• Exceptional tutorial content
• Automatic dependencies correction feature

CONS

• Features for discussions, notifications, and uploaded files could be improved
• No budgeting or invoicing tools
• Average reports

Wrike

Best for Managing Projects and Ongoing Work

Who It’s For

Wrike has a few plan types that are targeted at very specific types of teams, namely marketing and creative industries, and professional service teams. Wrike is very good at what it does, so long as you put in some time to pick the right plan and learn its features—expect to work with Wrike’s customer support on this process, rather than merely paying for an account and setting up the app on your own. In that sense, Wrike is for larger teams that have the time and resources to dedicate at least one person to work with Wrike during setup.

Why We Picked It

Wrike is a powerful tool in both the categories of project management and collaboration software. Now owned by Citrix, Wrike supports team collaboration, work management, and project management, and it continues to grow by adding new work intelligence features that can, for example, predict when a project is at risk of falling behind and call attention to possible causes.

PROS

• Easy to use
• Special account types for marketing/creative teams and professional services
• Can manage both projects and ongoing work
• New intelligent features flag projects at risk of slipping

CONS

• Difficult to choose the right plan without customer assistance

Buying Guide: The Best Project Management Software for 2023

What Is Project Management Software?

Project management software is a type of online collaborative app. All the people who are working on a project login and see what they’re supposed to do and when. These workers also record their progress on those tasks and add relevant details, such as notes about any changes. With the appropriate permission level, people can also see what everyone else is doing, what requirements must be met for them to get it done, and when.

For the person or people managing the project, the project management app provides a clear overview of the project and its health. Are all the tasks on track to be completed on time? If one task is late, how does it affect the projected deadlines of other tasks? Is someone available to pick up an urgent task if the person assigned to do it is ill? Plus, if the project management app supports tracking finances, the app will also tell the people in charge whether the project is running on budget.

How We Choose the Best Project Management Software

For this roundup of the best project management apps, we evaluated and tested more than 25 project management platforms and have included here the products with the highest scores. Inclusion is based on PCMag’s independent testing and evaluation. In determining scores, we consider the needs of a variety of business types, including small businesses on a budget and large organizations that need to manage many projects, people, and budgets simultaneously.

For this category, we stick to traditional project management apps only. These apps are specifically created to manage projects, rather than ongoing work. A project is a set of work with a start date, an end date, and a deliverable.

Zoho Projects’ Gantt chart view
(Credit: Zoho Corp.)

To be included in this roundup, the app must offer Gantt charts, which is a type of timeline view that’s commonly used in project management. All the apps included here also have other standard tools in addition to Gantt charts for tracking, organizing, and scheduling project-based work.

There are many other excellent collaboration apps that sometimes get called “project management apps,” such as Trello, Basecamp, and Airtable. While some collaboration or work-management apps are very capable at managing certain kinds of work, they aren’t necessarily designed for juggling the complexities of dozens or hundreds of projects and their schedules simultaneously. Therefore, we don’t include them here.

What Can You Do With Project Management Software?

Project management apps let you track and manage nearly any kind of project, such as the creation of a new product, building a house or website, or launching a marketing campaign. Teams that use project management apps typically track more than one project at a time. The software helps them figure out when to schedule work based on when things need to get done and the human resources available to do them.

The very best project management apps detect problems before they happen. By tracking the progress of work and individual tasks (for example, having completed six hours of a task that’s estimated to take a total of eight hours), project management apps can sound an alarm when a deadline is in danger of slipping, but before it actually happens. The most powerful project management apps also offer to automatically reflow the project schedule when tasks do fall off course. They generate reports that give managers insight into which team members have too much or too little work assigned to them. Some let you track project budgets, too, and log billable hours so that you can send invoices to clients for time worked.

TeamGantt’s Gantt chart and workload view
(Credit: TeamGantt)

What Is the Best Free Project Management Software?

A few of the best project management software systems have free versions. Usually, these free versions are severely limited in some way. For example, you might be allowed to manage only one or two projects at a time or invite only a handful of people to work alongside you. Plus, you usually don’t get all the best features of the app in the free version. Still, if you have a small team and need to only manage one or two projects, it might work.

You can get a free account from Zoho Projects, Teamwork, Wrike, TeamGantt, ProofHub, plus a few others that did not make this list, such as AceProject. 

Redmine, which did make this list, is a 100-percent free project management app, but you have to install and maintain it yourself. It’s not an off-the-shelf product, but rather an open-source alternative. If you’re looking for something simple you can start using right away, Redmine isn’t it. For simplicity, you’re better off with Zoho Projects, TeamGantt, or AceProject.

Teamwork’s project management dashboard
(Credit: Teamwork)

What’s the Easiest Project Management App to Use?

If you’re new to project management and especially if your organization doesn’t have a dedicated project manager, you need a project management app that’s easy to use. TeamGantt and GanttPro are the easiest project management apps to learn and use. They are both designed for beginners and other people who are inexperienced at project management.

Many of the project management apps we’ve reviewed are easy to use, provide good video tutorials, and work well for beginners, but after testing dozens of them, we believe GanttPro and TeamGantt are best.

What’s the Best Project Management App for Small Business?

If your team needs to manage and track a couple of projects, but you’re less concerned with employee scheduling, collecting time sheets to bill clients, and comparing the progress of dozens of projects in development, a low-cost tool such as Zoho Projects (starting at $5 per person per month for Premium) is the best bet. What we especially like about Zoho Projects is that it scales easily if your team ends up growing and needs more features. Zoho, the company, offers a wide range of other business apps that can connect to Zoho Projects to expand what you can do with it.

We also like GanttPRO as a low-cost option. It’s one of the easiest tools to use and is great for people who have limited or no prior experience with project management.

There’s no need to spend more than about $15 per person per month if you aren’t going to use the tools that are unique to more expensive software, so stick with something low-cost.

What’s the Best Project Management App for Large Organizations?

Large organizations have starkly different needs than small businesses. Organizations with hundreds or thousands of employees and hundreds of projects use project management apps for scheduling, insights into their resources, budget-tracking, revenue projection, and time-tracking for billing purposes, among other reasons.

For a large company, it’s important to be able to manage not just individuals, but also teams. If you have 15 hours of work for a junior designer, and it doesn’t matter which junior designer does it, you want to be able to see how much work each junior designer has assigned to them and whether you can free up one of them for the task.

For the same reason, all the managers and team leads in your company should be able to see what tasks are high priority and which projects are in danger of slipping so that they can triage accordingly.

If your organization handles complex projects and has many team members collaborating on projects, we recommend Celoxis or LiquidPlanner.

Wrike’s Inbox and Spaces view
(Credit: Wrike)

What Project Management Software Has the Best Special Features?

Teams that aren’t quite small businesses, but also aren’t enormous organizations may have special needs that they want their project management software to address.

Our top pick in this category is Teamwork, which is specialized to handle client work. If your team primarily completes projects as billable work for clients, then Teamwork is the app we recommend using for managing your projects. It includes billing and invoicing, as well as the ability to create intake forms for new projects. Another app called Paymo, which didn’t quite score highly enough for this roundup, also has built-in billing and invoicing tools.

There are other areas of specialization for project management software, of course. If you’re looking for a tool that can manage both project and non-project work, we recommend Wrike or Celoxis. (LiquidPlanner is a good pick too, but it’s best for large groups.) If your team spends a lot of time discussing and iterating visual assets, ProofHub is a great choice. Smartsheet is good for building automations into your project management. 

The Right Project Management Software for Your Team

Choosing the right project management software can take time, but it’s worth it to get it right before rolling it out to an entire team. Project management apps typically have a significant setup cost. Even when they are simple to learn to use and let you import data, it still takes time to fine-tune the app to do what you need it to do and then get everyone on board using it.

When deciding which app to use, it’s important to consider what kind of work your team does, how many people are in the organization, and how you want to run your business. There are a lot of excellent options to fit every budget.

With a reliable project management app in place, people can collaborate with greater ease on project work. Plus, business owners and team managers can get useful insights into how their teams work, whether projects are on track, and how to guide them back to a successful place when they slip.