So, you are finally making it as a freelancer and have suddenly discovered that you need something to help you with project and task management. You are starting to have a couple of projects on your plate with different notes and deadlines, and you need to sort things out if you are going to make it.
Don’t panic. We’ve got you what you need good project management software to handle your project and task commitments. Luckily for you, there are plenty of project management tools for freelancers that will be very useful and will not cost you much.
Most of the project management tools for freelancers are free, and they still offer all the features that help you stay on top of all your freelance projects and meet all your deadlines. So, let’s get right to it.
Best Project Management Software for freelancers
- ClickUp
- Teamwork
- Asana
- Wrike
- Trello
- Thrive
- Podio
- Bonsai
- FreshBooks
- Taskboard
- Red Booth
ClickUp
ClickUp is a comprehensive project management tool that offers many features to help freelancers across industries manage their work efficiently and all in one place.
Start by creating a solid structure and organizing your projects using ClickUp’s robust Hierarchy to ensure every task or action item has a designated place. The levels of Hierarchy in ClickUp allow freelancers to get an overview of their work while also giving them the freedom to manage client work and categorize tasks accordingly.
Freelancers can streamline client communication by using the guest and public sharing options in ClickUp. Collaborate more efficiently by inviting guests to your Workspace and adding them to specific Folders, List, and tasks.
To add more flexibility to your workflow, ClickUp gives you the power to create individual tasks using Custom Fields, Custom Statuses, and tags. These customizable features help provide the much-needed clarity and visibility required when managing multiple client projects simultaneously.
ClickUp also offers ready-to-use and customizable templates for every use case to help you get ahead and keep your processes consistent for every client.
Best of all, ClickUp offers a customizable Dashboard for time tracking widgets and allows you to export and send reports to clients. If you wish to maximize ClickUp, integrate it with other work tools, including time tracking apps to help you keep track of time spent on client projects and additional billable hours.
Key features for freelancers:
- Hierarchy
- Collaboration features (Permissions and Privacy)
- Customizable features (Custom Fields)
- Templates available for many use cases
- Integration power to time tracking apps for invoicing
- Dashboards- using time tracking widgets to visualize time spent on tasks
- export your reports to share with clients outside of ClickUp
ClickUp Pricing:
- Free Forever Plan– Free!
- Unlimited Plan– $5 per member/ per month
- Business Plan– $9 per member/ per month
- Enterprise Plan– Contact Sales
Get 20% off when you signup using this link
Teamwork
Teamwork is a great project management tool focused on making team collaboration more streamlined to the point where it becomes effortless.
It offers excellent project management features, including time tracking, billing, estimates, milestones, notifications, task boards, and more.
It is suitable for businesses of all sizes, whether large or small and can bring all your workspaces and teams to one place for easier management.
The ability to track time and log billable and non-billable hours is handy; users can track and log time on each task individually. In addition, setting task status and adding labels, reminders, and tags is easy, and the ability to import tasks right from excel is super convenient.
Users can also create multiple tasks and link them to milestones and/or the Teamwork Calendar. In addition, the Task Board allows users to exchange ideas in chat or comments, and managers can control who gets the notifications.
Teamwork is great for startups because it’s free for up to five users and the Email integration with Gmail. Teamwork also integrates with Basecamp, Trello, Slack, YouTube, and more.
TeamWork offers a lot of features, but this does affect its usability at times. It also has a bit of a learning curve and is not as easy to use as possible.
You also can’t import tasks with TeamWork and always have to manually enter them.
Teamwork Pricing:
- Free plan– Costs nothing – offers up to 5 users, 100MB of file space, and two active projects.
- Pro – Costs $10/user/month (billed annually)– offers up to 50 users, 100GB of file space, and 300 active projects. Adds Integrations with Slack, Google Drive, Onedrive, and more.
- Premium – Costs $18/user/month (billed annually)– Offers up to 100 users, 250 GB of file space, and 600 projects. Adds custom domains, project portfolios, extra integrations, and more features.
- Enterprise – Custom quotes – Offer more security, unlimited projects, a dedicated customer success manager for onboarding and training, and better branding control.
Asana
Asana is a task management software with a clean and straightforward layout that makes it a pleasure to use. Mastering the solution is an easy feat, one of the reasons behind its immense popularity. Asana allows you to break projects into sub-tasks with individual deadlines for each of them.
Asana breaks down individual projects, making it easy for freelancers to monitor their progress and prioritize the project that needs it the most.
Asana is an excellent choice if you’re running a freelance business as it allows teams to schedule, assign, and comment on any project or task easily, making collaboration a breeze.
The solution’s mobile apps make it easy for users to access their tasks quickly from any device they have, and the solution offers reminder emails to keep you on track if you get distracted.
Asana’s notifications to email are also a prevalent feature for those who need an extra push to complete tasks on time.
Updates are synchronized in real-time, so you always see the latest version, and clients or freelancers can organize tasks. In addition, the solution is free for teams with 15 members or less, so it’s perfect for freelancers and startups.
Asana Pricing:
- Basic Free Plan
- Premium: $10.99 per user, per month (billed annually) or $13.49 per user, per month (billed monthly)
- Business: $24.99 per user, per month (billed annually) or $30.49 per user, per month (billed monthly)
- Enterprise: Contact Asana for pricing information.
Wrike
Wrike might seem like it’s very similar to Asana and Trello, but some things help it stand out from other project management apps. For example, you can still set up tasks, deadlines, and folders to work with the other solutions, but Wrike also has time tracking capabilities.
Not only that, but Wrike can automatically track the time you spend on each task, which is tremendously helpful for freelancers paid by the hour as it allows them to know precisely how long a project takes to be completed.
This way, they can quickly and accurately know the time spent on each task and do their billing calculations in seconds.
Wrike has a timeline feature that uses drag and drop, and it has this neat feature that allows you to share your scheduled timeline with a client, and the client can view it. It’s super easy, too, as the client doesn’t even need a Wrike account to view the snapshot.
Wrike is a great collaboration app. It makes it super easy to share important information with other team members. In addition, it offers integrations with some third-party apps and services such as Google, Microsoft, GitHub, Jira, and more.
Wrike is a free project management software for freelancers and small teams. Its free plan now offers unlimited users. Wrike is great for use across different platforms and is one of the best project management software for Mac users.
Wrike Pricing:
- Professional: $9.80 per user/month
- Business: $24.80 per user/month billed annually
- Enterprise: To receive accurate pricing, contact Wrike directly.
Trello
Trello is probably the most accessible and intuitive use of freelancers’ many project management tools. The simple interface and the incredibly intuitive drag-and-drop functionality of Trello make it the easiest to use.
Trello uses a system of boards, cards, and lists. You can create boards for each project you have, and each board creates lists to represent the stage the task is currently in. In addition, you can create tasks as cards, and in those cards, you can attach files, descriptions, due dates, and comments.
You can move the card from one list to another as you work on the task. For example, you can add a task like “Create a Blog Post” and add it to “To-Do,” then move it to “Doing” as you start working on it, move the card to “Done” when you finish working on it, and finally move it to “Paid” once you are paid for the task.
Trello is free forever for freelancers and combines that with a beautiful interface and intuitive UI. You will get why it’s one of freelancers’ most popular project and task management solutions worldwide.
Trello Pricing
- Free plan
- Standard: $5.00 per user per month
- Premium: $10 per user per month
- Enterprise: $17.50 per user per month (starting for 250 users, billed annually)
URL: https://trello.com/
Thrive
Formerly known as Solo, Thrive is an excellent project management software. The solution is a perfect choice for freelancers for a good reason; it was designed for them.
Thrive allows freelancers to create a client list, and projects and set deadlines. In the client list, you can analyze your returning clients and how many of them there are.
You can also see what sectors those returning clients belong to and how profitable it is for you to be working with them to determine your most valuable clients. Of course, it also keeps all your client’s basic information, like emails and phone numbers, for easy access.
This makes Thrive more than just another project management solution, combining project and task management with customer relationship management. Fortunately, it’s easier than most stand-alone CRMs out there. The solution is easy to use and user-friendly in general, and you shouldn’t have problems making the most out of it in no time.
A handy feature of Thrive is that it allows freelancers to create invoices, and then it can track these invoices and know which clients have paid, which are overdue, and which clients you haven’t billed yet.
Podio
Podio is a project management solution that freelancers and large corporations alike use. The solution offers many valuable features for freelancers and businesses of all sizes, such as replicating similar projects for recurring clients, which can be a huge time saver for some.
Podio is also liked for its customization and personalization options; users have complete control of the design of each project outline as they can add text boxes, links, numbers, categories, and even maps if they wish to.
This makes Podio an excellent choice for users who often have detailed and complex tasks, as it can help you make sense of it all and stay on track. In addition, the customization options in Podio trump the offerings of most project management tools.
Podio’s basic version is free for freelancers and small teams with 5 members or fewer. However, upgrading to the full version will get more advanced features like contact syncing, file sharing, integrated app customization, and contract signing.
URL: https://podio.com/
Bonsai
Bonsai is a project management app that developers and designers favor for its clean design and excellent features. The solution features one of the cleanest dashboards you can find in project management solutions.
In this dashboard, freelancers can see their projects, proposals, invoices, expenses, and more – all neatly organized and laid out so they can get as much information in as little time as possible. Bonsai also comes with time tracking and expense tracking to make your life easier.
The tracked and recorded expenses can be easily accounted for by importing them directly into your client invoices to save time and effort. Bonsai also offers contract templates that should cut the time needed to get things sorted out with every new client you take on.
Bonsai is free for freelancers but is limited to 3 projects per year. However, the unlimited plan has a 30-day free trial that allows you to try out the features before committing.
URL: https://www.hellobonsai.com/
FreshBooks
This might come as a surprise to you, but FreshBooks is pretty good for project management. We’ve discussed FreshBooks before as one of the best accounting software for small businesses, but it also works as a project management solution.
FreshBooks lets users stay on top of their projects and keep track of everything. It will enable them to keep everything going according to plan and even get paid in time. In addition, the solutions can handle all the project details to allow freelancers to produce better work in less time.
FreshBooks’s time tracking feature comes pretty handy here and allows you to become more efficient and know where you spend your time. Creating invoices is another strength of FreshBooks that freelancers love, as it enables you to create invoices in a few clicks.
URL: https://www.freshbooks.com/
Taskboard
Taskboard is a completely free and open-source project management tool. Unlike all the other solutions, this is not a cloud-based application. Instead, you can download it for free and start using it.
Taskboard offers several great features: the automatic update feature automatically updates certain items when specific criteria are met – criteria that you’ve already set.
For example, you can ask the solution to clear the deadline once you mark it before its deadline is due. The automation feature means you can save a lot of time and effort instead of fiddling with the options and details to keep everything updated and the board clean.
Taskboard has what is known as Markdown compatibility, which means that it has a plain text style that can convert into HTML in technical terms. In simple words, this means even though you are using the solution on-premise, you can seamlessly transition your notes, reminders, and comments from documents to the software to a website. But, of course, it also works the other way around.
URL: https://taskboard.matthewross.me/
Redbooth
Redbooth is ideal for procrastinators and freelancers juggling many deadlines who tend to forget or get overwhelmed. The solution offers email and desktop notifications to keep you on track. In addition, the solution aims to make sure you never forget a deadline and finish all your tasks and projects on time.
The reporting feature is also great as it gives you insights into your work. It will record all your activity for a while, and you can see it to understand better your workflow and what you need to work on.
Redbooth is free for one user, making it great for freelancers, but the premium version offers cloud storage, making it worth the cost for freelancers who deal with large files like video editors.
We hope you enjoyed this article. If so, you might enjoy these resources:
- Project Management Tools for Startups
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- 11 Best Project Management Software for Nonprofits
- Best Online Training Courses for Project Management
- 13 Best Marketing Project Management Software
So now, you know the best project management software for freelancers to manage your projects.
*Disclosure: Some of the links in this article are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, Reviano will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Of course, all opinions remain our own.
