If you’ve ever talked with me or read any of my posts about “what is the best…” whatever, you’ll know that I don’t have a lot of religion around tools. I firmly believe the best CMS, or CRM, or accounting software, or email program, or project management software is the one that works for YOU. I believe this so much that it’s even a service we offer: we’ll help you choose the right technology tools for YOUR business. If you’re interested in talking about that, simply fill out our contact form to arrange a free initial consultation. Or you can keep reading and find out what project management tools we’ve tried and what project management tool we currently use.
What is Project Management Software?
Before we talk about the best project management software, maybe you’re not exactly sure what project management software even is or whether you need it. So, let’s start there. Project management software is software designed to help manage and automate task management, file storage and other items related to getting your projects done. Project management software is perfect for when you’ve outgrown a basic to do list, or when you’ve gotten serious about working ON your business, instead of IN your business but still want to make sure that everything you’ve delegated is still running smoothly. For large corporations with a formal project management department, this might mean using tools like Microsoft Project or Oracle Primavera. But these tools tend to be too complicated and too costly for small businesses. So, we’re going to narrow down the topic to project management tools for small businesses.
What is the Top Project Management Software for Small Businesses?
To be clear, I’m not sure what the best project management system for YOU is. We spent years finding the one that works best for us. Here are some things that we used to evaluate the best tool for us, and you might want to start with these questions.
- How many users do you have? And are you willing to pay per user?
- What is your budget?
- Do you need to use task dependencies?
- Are there other tools, such as accounting software or your CRM, that need to connect to your project management software?
- Do you want to track multiple projects across a single client?
- Are you using a particular project management methodology? Some tools are specifically designed for Agile, for example.
- Do you need to allow clients to access their project?
- Do you need to allow contractors to access the project?
These are just a few of the questions we asked. You may have different questions. The more you ask, the more likely you are to find the best project management software for YOU.
The Best Project Management Software for Our Business
Here’s a list of some of the project management tools we tried before deciding on our current tool. Some of these we used for weeks; some we used for months. All were eventually discarded for one reason or another – usually because we outgrew them, or because we didn’t do a good job of knowing what we were looking for to begin with.
- Apollo HQ
- Pro Workflow
- Dapulse
- Wrike
- Zoho (evaluated)
- Asana
- Accelo
- Basecamp
So, what do we currently use? The best project management tool for our team turned out to be Teamwork (affiliate link). Here are the things we really enjoy about Teamwork.
- Easy to use overview of all of our tasks
- Ability to track time
- Per employee view of workload
- Estimated time for tasks and projects to help us stay on track
- Ties into Quickbooks
- Email notifications and ability to reply through email
- Integrates with Teamwork Chat (for free)
- Integrates with Teamwork Desk (ticket system with additional cost)
- Great mobile app for working when away from the office
- Chrome app for ease of use when on desktop
- Integrates with GMail, allowing us to easily create tickets directly from email
You can check out the full list of features.
In conclusion, I hope you’ll check out Teamwork and see if it’s right for you. If you have any questions about it, please leave them in the comments or reach out through our contact page. And remember we’re happy to talk to you about your small business technology needs.