Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
- Simple and intuitive design
- Great customization options
- Billing and invoicing included
- Free account available
- No PDF or image markup tools
Before Teamwork focused on organizations that take on client work, it was already a superbly designed project management platform. If you are new to project planning, 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.
If your small business takes on projects for clients, then Teamwork is one of the best project management apps available. It comes with billing and invoicing tools, so it’s easy to track the hours employees work and know what to bill.
Price Per Person Per Month
$12.50
Storage Included at Price Listed
100GB
Storage Space for Free Accounts
100MB
Number of Projects in Free Account
2
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Teamwork Review
- Competitively priced
- Well designed and easy to learn to use
- Includes custom fields for tasks, board view, critical path feature
- Saves history for undo
- No customizable reporting tools or customizable dashboards
- No billing or invoicing
- Light on integrations
With a good balance of features, an interface that anyone can learn to use, and reasonable pricing, GanttPro is one of the best project management tools. We also appreciate that it includes a critical path feature, custom fields for tasks, a kanban board view, and a save history that supports multiple undo actions.
GanttPro is one of the best project management apps for beginners. That also means it’s an excellent pick for teams (especially small teams) that don’t have a dedicated project manager on staff but still need to organize work and complete tasks. However, GanttPro doesn’t have the customizable reports and dashboards that larger teams might need.
Price Per Person Per Month
$9.99
Storage Included at Price Listed
5GB
Storage Space for Free Accounts
N/A
Number of Projects in Free Account
N/A
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GanttPro Review
- Excellent value
- Generally easy to set up and navigate
- Multiple ways to communicate in the app
- Deep configuration options
- Strong time-tracking tools
- Does not include premade templates
- Slightly unusual resource management view
Zoho Projects is one of the best project management apps because of its excellent value. It’s easy to set up and navigate, includes tools to track time worked, and offers deep configuration options. You can make your own project templates in Zoho Projects, but the app doesn’t come with prebuilt templates.
Zoho Projects is a low-cost project management app with an array of helpful features, making it an appealing option for small and growing businesses. Its tiered pricing, with attractively low rates, also targets organizations that are either on a budget or expect to grow quickly.
Price Per Person Per Month
$5 (Premium)
Storage Included at Price Listed
100GB
Storage Space for Free Accounts
10MB
Number of Projects in Free Account
2
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Zoho Projects Review
- Ample reports and other tools for decision makers
- Excellent value
- Easy to use and short setup time
- Includes time tracking, budgeting, and resource management
- No proofing tools
- No billing or invoicing features
- No free version
Celoxis is reasonably easy to use and makes its setup process simple. Medium to large businesses should appreciate that it includes budgeting, resource management tools, and time tracking. Celoxis offers two plan types: a cloud-hosted one and an on-premise option that comes with custom pricing. You need a minimum of five users for any plan type, and the company provides custom price quotes for potential customers.
Celoxis is ideal for bigger businesses. It provides ample reports and other tools that give business owners and decision-makers need. You can use Celoxis to not only work more efficiently by adjusting project schedules but also to forecast revenue.
Price Per Person Per Month
$25
Storage Included at Price Listed
2GB per User
Storage Space for Free Accounts
N/A
Number of Projects in Free Account
N/A
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Celoxis Review
- Quick and easy setup
- Cost-effective flat rate pricing for midsize teams
- Nice balance of features and simplicity
- Good tools for discussing visual materials
- Sometimes loads slowly
- Lacks budgeting tools
ProofHub aims for simplicity without skimping on core project management features. It also has a competitive price for small teams. This app is surprisingly easy to use, making it great for teams that don’t have dedicated project managers.
ProofHub is a project management app for teams that include proofing stages as part of their workflow. In other words, if your team critiques or evaluates visual materials—like ad campaigns or mobile app designs—ProofHub has features that other apps lack. More specifically, it has markup tools you can use to draw on PDFs and image files while you give feedback or otherwise collaborate with your team.
Price Per Person Per Month
$50 (Unlimited Users)
Storage Included at Price Listed
15GB
Storage Space for Free Accounts
25
Number of Projects in Free Account
1
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ProofHub Review
- Endlessly customizable and quite powerful
- Supports automations, input from web forms, proofing and approvals
- Robust resource management options for Business plan users
- Lacks real-time time tracking and invoicing tools
- Pages don’t update in real time or autosave as frequently as we’d like
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 work.
Smartsheet is the project management app for people who love automation. You need to be willing to set up the “if this, then that” type of commands that Smartsheet carries out for you, though. Most other project management apps don’t have automation options, even if you can sometimes create them with third-party tools such as Zapier. One note about Smartsheet: Not all the tiers of service come with budgeting, resource management, and time tracking for free, but you can pay for the companion software that adds them.
Price Per Person Per Month
$32
Storage Included at Price Listed
100GB
Storage Space for Free Accounts
N/A
Number of Projects in Free Account
N/A
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Smartsheet Review
Best for Getting Started With Gantt Charts
TeamGantt
- Intuitive and easy to use
- Excellent interactive Gantt charts
- Exceptional tutorial content
- Automatic dependencies correction feature
- Features for discussions, notifications, and uploaded files could be improved
- No budgeting or invoicing tools
- Average reports
TeamGantt has lovely, interactive Gantt charts that are easy to use. The app provides exceptional tutorial content to help teach you anything you don’t understand, too. We especially like the feature that automatically corrects any errors among dependencies.
TeamGantt is great for beginners and small teams that don’t have a dedicated project manager because it’s so intuitive. If you don’t know anything about Gantt charts, you can quickly and painlessly learn the basics simply by using the app. TeamGantt doesn’t have budgeting or invoicing tools, however, which large teams might require.
Price Per Person Per Month
~$11
Storage Included at Price Listed
Unlimited
Storage Space for Free Accounts
Unlimited
Number of Projects in Free Account
1
Learn More
TeamGantt Review
Best for Managing Projects and Ongoing Work
Wrike
- Modern, easy-to-use interface
- Can manage both projects and ongoing work
- Warnings when projects are at risk of slipping
- Good proofing tools
- Lacks robust budgeting and invoicing tools
Wrike is a powerful tool that goes beyond project management; it also supports team collaboration and work management. 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.
Wrike has a few paid plans that target very specific types of teams, namely those in creative industries, marketing, or professional services. It’s very good at what it does, so long as you put in the time to pick the right plan and learn its features. You should expect to work with Wrike’s customer support on this process, instead of merely paying for an account and setting up the app by yourself. In that sense, Wrike is for larger teams that have someone who can work closely with the company during the setup process.
Price Per Person Per Month
9.80
Storage Included at Price Listed
2GB per User
Storage Space for Free Accounts
2GB
Number of Projects in Free Account
Unlimited
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The Best Project Management Software for 2025
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Buying Guide: The Best Project Management Software for 2025
What Is Project Management Software?
Project management software, sometimes called PM software, is a type of online collaboration tool. All the people working on a project log in and see what they’re supposed to do and when. These workers also record their progress on those tasks and add relevant details. With the appropriate permission level, people can also learn more about what everyone else is doing and what needs to happen before they can complete their tasks.
For the project manager and any stakeholders, the project management app gives a clear overview of each project’s progress, including a work structure breakdown within each project when relevant. Are all the tasks on track to finish on time? If one task is late, how does it affect the projected deadlines of other tasks and deliverables? Is someone available to pick up an urgent task if the person assigned to do it is ill? Furthermore, if the project management app supports tracking finances, the app will also tell the people in charge whether the project is running on budget.
The very best project management apps give everyone who works on the project some level of visibility into how it’s all going. A project manager may want to limit visibility in some cases. For example, if your organization develops projects for outside clients, you may want the client to be able to see the overall progress but not the details of each task and comments that employees make on the tasks.
How We Choose the Best Project Management Software
For this story, we evaluated more than 25 project management platforms and included the products with the highest scores. We consider the needs of various business types, including small businesses on a budget and large organizations that need to manage many budgets, complex projects, and people simultaneously. We also look at ease of use, features, and value.
For this category, we stick to traditional project management apps only. A project is a set of work with a start date, an end date, and a deliverable. We don’t include apps for managing ongoing work, such as answering support emails.
To be included in this list, the app must offer Gantt charts, a type of timeline view common in project management. All the apps included here also have other standard tools besides Gantt charts for organizing, scheduling, and tracking project-based work.
While many might group workplace collaboration and task management apps (such as Airtable, Basecamp, and Trello) with project management apps, we don’t include them here. Collaboration or work-management apps are very useful for managing certain kinds of work, but they aren’t ideal for juggling the complexities of dozens or hundreds of projects and their schedules simultaneously.
Zoho Projects’ Gantt chart view (Credit: Zoho/PCMag)
What Can You Do With Project Management Software?
Project management apps let you track progress and manage nearly any kind of project, such as creating a new product, building a house or website, or launching a marketing campaign. Teams that use project management apps tend to track multiple projects at a time. The software helps them figure out when to schedule work based on the tasks at hand and the human resources available to do it.
The best project management apps detect problems before they happen through detailed task management. By tracking the progress of work and individual tasks (for example, completing six hours of a task estimated to take a total of eight hours), project management apps can sound an alarm when a deadline is in danger of slipping before it happens. The most powerful project management apps also automatically reflow the project schedule when tasks fall off track. They generate reports that give project managers insight into which team members have too much or too little work assigned. Some let you track project budgets and log billable hours so that you can send invoices to clients for time worked.
TeamGantt’s Gantt chart and workload view (Credit: TeamGantt/PCMag)
What Is the Best Free Project Management Software?
A few of the best project management software systems have a free plan. The only truly free one that made this list is Redmine—more on that service momentarily. The free plan for most apps is severely limited in some way. For example, they might allow you to manage only one or two projects at a time or invite only a handful of people to work alongside you. In the paid plan, you might get unlimited projects. You also usually don’t get all the most advanced features of the paid plan in the free plan. Still, it might work if you have a small team and need to manage just one or two projects. Free versions also let you try the app before deciding whether the paid plans meet your needs.
You can get a free account from ProofHub, TeamGantt, Teamwork, Wrike, Zoho Projects, and others that did not make this list, such as AceProject.
Redmine is a 100% free PM tool, but you have to install and maintain it yourself. It’s not an off-the-shelf product but rather an open-source alternative that requires you to have your own tech support. If you’re looking for something simple to use right away, Redmine isn’t it. For simplicity, you’re better off with AceProject, TeamGantt, or Zoho Projects.
Teamwork’s project management dashboard (Credit: Teamwork/PCMag)
What Project Management App Is the Easiest 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.
GanttPro and TeamGantt are the easiest project management apps to learn and use. They both target beginners. Many of the other project management apps we’ve reviewed are also easy to use, provide good video tutorials, and work well for beginners, but they just aren’t quite as approachable as GanttPro and TeamGantt.
In testing, we found that some rather popular and well-known project management apps aren’t especially easy to use if you are new to them or not a professional project manager.
What’s the Best Project Management App for a Small Business?
If your project team needs to manage and track a couple of projects, but you’re less concerned with collecting time sheets to bill clients, comparing the progress of multiple projects in development, and employee scheduling, a low-cost tool such as Zoho Projects (starting at $5 per person per month for Premium) is your best bet. What we especially like about Zoho Projects is that it scales easily if your team grows 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 with limited or no prior experience with project management.
There’s no need to spend more than about $15 per person per month if you won’t use the tools unique to more expensive software.
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 budget tracking, insights into their resources, revenue projection, scheduling, and time tracking for billing purposes, among other reasons.
Recommended by Our Editors
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 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 high-priority projects and tasks 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.
What Project Management Software Has the Best Special Features?
Teams that are neither small businesses nor enormous organizations may have special needs they want their project management software to address.
Our top pick in this category is Teamwork, which specializes in handling client work. Teamwork should be on your shortlist if your team primarily completes projects as billable work for clients. It includes billing and invoicing, as well as the ability to create intake forms for new projects. Paymo, which didn’t quite score highly enough for this list, is another app that 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 to manage project and non-project work, we recommend Celoxis or Wrike. If your team spends a lot of time discussing and iterating visual assets, ProofHub is a great choice. Smartsheet is good for building automation into your project management.
Choosing the right project management software can take time, but it’s worth having as much nailed down as possible before rolling the solution 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 project 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.
It’s also important to consider how many people are in the organization, how you want to run your business, and what kind of work your team does. There are a lot of excellent options to fit every budget.
With a reliable project management solution, people can collaborate more easily on project-based work. Small business owners and team managers can gain useful insights into how their teams work, whether projects are on track, and how to guide them back to success when they slip.
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