13 Best Project Management Tools for Startups

Does it seem as if everyone is launching their startup companies? That’s because there are millions of new startups every year. However, this doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Far from it, in fact. Running a startup company is quite tricky and complicated, but luckily, there is plenty of project management software for a start that can make things a bit easier.

Today, we will introduce you to some of the best startup project management software that can help you with tasks and projects, won’t cost you a fortune, and yet offer plenty of valuable features and functionality to make your life much more comfortable.

Best Project Management Software for Startups

• ClickUp
• Teamwork
• Asana
• Wrike
• Trello 
• Slack 
• Jira
• Podio 
• Smartsheet 
• ActiveCollab
• Nifty 
• Spreadsheets
• Proofhub

Let’s dive into our list of the best project management for startups with that in mind.

ClickUp

ClickUp is a comprehensive project management tool that offers tons of features to help startup companies 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 startups and small businesses to get an overview of their work while also giving them the freedom to manage client work and categorize tasks accordingly.

Startups 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 at once.

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 reports and send them 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 additional billable hours.

ClickUp features:

• Hierarchy
• Collaboration features (Permissions and Privacy)
• Customizable features
• Templates available for many use cases
• Dashboards- using time tracking widgets to visualize time spent on tasks
• export your reports to share with clients outside of ClickUp

Cons

• It’s sometimes difficult to find things
• Resource management could be better.

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

As you can guess by its name, teamwork is one of the best project management software for startups and more prominent companies that focus on making team collaboration more streamlined to the point where it becomes effortless.

Teamwork offers excellent project management features that include time tracking, billing, estimates, milestones, notifications, task boards, and more.

It is suitable for companies of all sizes, whether large or small business and can bring all your workspaces and teams in one place for easier management.

The ability to track time and log billable and non-billable hours are handy, and 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 project managers can control who gets the notifications.

Teamwork is a great startup project management tool because it’s free for up to five users and the email integration with Gmail. It also integrates with Basecamp, Trello, Slack, YouTube, and more.

Cons:

You can’t import tasks with the solution, and you always have to enter them manually.

Teamwork Pricing:

• Free – offers up to 5 users, 100MB of file space, and 2 active projects.
• Pro – $10/user/month (billed annually)– offers up to 50 users, 100GB file space, and 300 active projects. Integrations with Slack, Drive, Onedrive.
• Premium – $18/user/month (billed annually)– Offers up to 100 users, 250 GB file space, and 600 projects. Adds custom domains, project portfolio, extra integrations.

Asana

Asana is a project management tool that Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz founded. The platform allows users to create and manage tasks individually or assign them to projects.

Asana’s Dashboard allows users to efficiently create different projects, teams, conversations, and calendars.

Asana is available on mobile devices, making it easy for managers to follow up on what is going on, making it easy to stay on top of things even if you manage large teams.

Asana offers different modules, such as My Tasks lists, which give users an easy way of managing, assigning, and following up on tasks. Tasks can then be divided into subtasks for a more flexible workflow — Asana’s focus mode to help users focus on pressing matters and urgent tasks. Asana is a great collaboration tool that allows team members to exchange ideas through comments and files.

You can also share files and tag other members in tasks. Asana is an excellent option for startups because you get plenty of features in the free version, including integrations with Slack, Dropbox, MailChimp, and more.

Cons:

You can’t have multiple people assigned to the same task with Asana, and it offers no time tracking or estimates functionality.

Another complaint from many users is that the UI tends to slow with heavy use and increasing documents and tasks.

The app is also heavily text-based, which means that accidentally breaking structure, changing the naming of a task, or even removing it altogether is easy to happen unexpectedly.

Asana Pricing: 

• Premium –  $9.99/user/month – Basic features required for a small team.
• Business – $19.99/user/month – adds lock custom fields, onboarding plans, and portfolios.

Wrike

Wrike is a specialized project management software for startups companies that organize everything they need to complete a project on time, on budget, and with the required quality.

The app has a hierarchy of projects, tasks, and subtasks that allow users to break their large projects into smaller tasks and subtasks that are more easily tracked and managed. In addition, Wrike enables users to set timelines by creating Gantt charts, assigning tasks, attaching documents and file sharing, and adding tasks to multiple project folders.

Wrike doesn’t stop there as it offers time tracking to improve your productivity and gives you detailed reporting, so you are always on top of things. In addition, it provides chat to make collaboration much more accessible.

Cons:

If you are not familiar with the software, you can find it challenging to navigate.

Breaking up tasks is complex, and with so many files and comments, things build up within tasks quite quickly, and you can’t find an excellent option to break them up.

Wrike Pricing: 

• Free plan – perfect for teams with 5 users
• Professional – $9.80/user/month
• Businesses cost $24.80/user/month
• Marketers cost $34.60/user/month

URL: https://www.wrike.com 

Trello

Trello is a popular and free project management software that’s based on the Kanban boards system. The app offers a simple board system with columns and cards. The idea is elementary: Created tasks are in the cards, and the workflow moves from left to right.

You have different boards for different projects, workspaces, teams, businesses, departments, etc. Each board is made up of lists, which are columns. These boards represent projects, stages in the workflow, or different team members.

On the boards, you can find cards. Each card represents the task and shows all the details of this task. For example, in cards, you can add a due date, attach files and documents, exchange comments, mention other team members, add labels, add checklists, and more.

Cons:

Like Wrike, Trello can also get a bit cluttered, mainly if you use many cards on board.

It’s also unfortunate that Trello doesn’t offer any time tracking abilities, which many competitors offer.

There’s no overview, making it difficult for managers to understand how everything is working out without spending a lot of time looking into the tasks themselves.

The app is also missing sub-task functionality.

Trello Pricing: 

• Free – costs nothing, free forever, unlimited boards, limited to one powerup, and no files larger than 10MB.
• Business – Costs $9.99/user/month – adds app integrations, team overviews, and security features.

URL: https://trello.com

Slack

Some would argue that Slack isn’t a project management tool, per se. However, it allows a project manager to manage a team efficiently, making it a management system.

It integrates with Drive and allows users to create, share, access, and standard files from their Slack Workspace. You can also search in the app, but it only read the data you’ve created or shared in the workspace.

You can create multiple threads and chat channels for projects and include all team members working on the same project, and team members can chat directly one-to-one. Slack is excellent for keeping project managers up-to-date with everything that’s going on multiple projects at a time and is an ideal solution for remote teams with no central location.

Cons:

Slack has a learning curve, but we are glad to evolve and adopt a more straightforward interface. Unfortunately, it can also get distracting with all the discussions, reducing productivity with every notification.

Slack Pricing: 

• Free – Costs nothing; search for 10K messages, up to 10 app integrations, and 1-to-1 video calls.
• Standard – costs $6.67/user/month
• Plus – costs $12.50/user/month

URL: https://slack.com

Jira

Jira is a commonly used Agile project management tool designed to help software development teams plan, track, and release software with increased efficiency. Jira supports all agile technologies such as Scrum and Kanban.

Jira focuses on collaboration and clarity to help the software teams produce the best results while staying on track in their time plan and budget.

It allows the project manager to see the bigger picture and measure its progress while tracking the details.

Users can create custom workflows for different projects, tasks, subtasks, and issues that match the exact way your team works. In addition, the flexible dashboards give users the ability to completely personalize how they track projects, create reports, monitor teams, and more.

What makes Jira a powerful project management tool is the use of many built-in features offered. For example, you can efficiently assign flexible and customizable permissions to any team member.

Cons:

Jira can get cluttered easily if you have many subtasks for a master task, making the workflow quite tricky to follow.

Jira Pricing: 

• Free plan: 1-10 Users
• Standard up to 20,000 users – costs $7.5/User
• Premium up to 20,000 users – cost $14.5/User

URL: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira

Podio

Podio is a favorite cloud-based project management tool founded in 2009 and has quickly claimed its place as one of the best project management software available for small businesses and startups.

Podio is currently used by more than 500,000 teams, businesses, and organizations of all shapes and sizes worldwide, including some brands such as Volvo and Sony.

The Workflow hierarchy is made of Organization, Workspaces, Apps, and Items.

Organizations: The Company’s network that connects all its employees and contains all the Workspaces

Workspaces: Contains a smaller group of employees that are working on a specific project.

Apps: An overview of the work which helps companies organize and track different Items

Items: They can be a project, a meeting, a sales lead, or anything else you need them to be.

The project management tool integrates with many third-party apps such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Calendar, etc.

Podio allows for more comfortable and efficient collaboration and gives your team everything they need to have their daily workflow in one space.

Cons:

It can be confusing for some, and the learning curve may be steep for those with no experience with similar software.

Also, they don’t offer time-tracking functionality.

Podio Pricing: 

• Free – Costs Nothing – up to five employees
• Basic – Costs $9/user/month, basic features + unlimited storage and external users
• Plus – Costs $14/user/month, adds light user roles
• Premium – Costs $24/user/month – adds advanced workflow orchestration and the ability to upload large files.

URL: https://podio.com

Smartsheet

Smartsheet is a task management and collaboration platform designed to help startups and small businesses become more productive and efficient. Smartsheet enables businesses to plan, capture, manage, and report on work more smoothly.

The task management tool Smartsheet is an idea for users who are already familiar with Excel or, preferably, have experience in using Excel to manage their projects. It is considered an upgrade from managing your work with excel, and fortunately, it’s an affordable one.

The solution allows users to instantly share spreadsheets for effective collaboration and share data from the sheets to the Internet. In addition, it can notify users of updates in a project via email. The solution focuses on speed, efficiency, and accountability and works to empower users and help them make better-informed decisions that yield outstanding results more quickly.

Integrations with apps such as Onedrive, MS Outlook, Evernote, Google Docs, Salesforce, Office, and many more. Unfortunately, no free plan is available.

Cons:

Smartsheet lacks a time tracking feature, which makes project planning and task scheduling harder.

The solution’s reporting feature is complicated and needs the patience to request reports, which is not productive. The user interface could also use some work to make it a bit more modern, as it looks slightly outdated compared with its competitors.

Some would describe it as easy for the learning curve, and some describe it as moderate. Still, it’s not as intuitive as Trello. However, anyone with prior experience with a similar solution will find it easier to get used to it than someone who has never dealt with a similar one.

Smartsheet Pricing: 

• Pro – Costs $9/user/month – offers unlimited sheets, reports, and dashboards (1 sheet per report, 10 widgets per dashboard)
• Business – Costs $32/user/month – offers unlimited users, dashboards, charts, analytics, workflow automation, task progress & activity log, custom branding, reports, and more.

URL: https://www.smartsheet.com

ActiveCollab

ActiveCollab is a powerful project management software for startups and small teams. It helps them organize and streamline their workflow.

The solution’s flexibility, ease of use, and functions have made it the favorite management software for many government organizations and academic institutions.

ActiveCollab is cloud-based, and the synchronization happens in real-time, so you always see the latest updates. You can create and organize tasks easily on one board, assign them due dates, labels, and team members.

Also, you can add reminders to your tasks and share files with your teams. You can view your tasks in Column view, list view, or Gantt-like view. Time tracking can be done with their stopwatch, and you can generate reports for open tasks.

Unfortunately, it lacks sub-tasks and task dependencies, which are helpful, especially when handling large projects. Unfortunately, there is also no issue tracking.

ActiveCollab offers integrations with many third-party solutions such as Google Drive, Slack, Zapier, Asana, and more.

Cons:

While not a deal-breaker, it’s unfortunate that users can change tags from the projects page instead of going into each project to edit the tags.

ActiveCollab could’ve benefited from a check-in/check-out feature, too.

ActiveCollab Pricing: 

Free plan up to 3 members.

ActivCollab Pro Plan costs $7/user/month, and this gave you unlimited projects, tasks, and time records, plus all their other features. This plan gives you the ability to add unlimited users.

While it costs $9/month for Plus Plan up to 3 members, which can be suitable for smaller teams that need a platform for collaboration and managing projects.

URL: https://activecollab.com/

Nifty

Nifty is a project management tool that is gradually rising to the top. It provides users with valuable features that enable smoother collaboration and better efficiency, leading to better project management.

The Kanban board view allows team members to categorize the tasks according to their progress (New Tasks, In progress, and Completed). In addition, the visual overview will enable managers to see the deadlines and milestones of the tasks at a glance.

Users can filter tasks by user or milestones, and managers can assign team members to each task and control notifications. File storage is available for spreadsheets, code, images, videos, audios, and presentations.

Nifty project management tool offers integrations with Google Drive and Google Calendar with integration to Slack currently in the works.

Unfortunately, being a relatively new player in the field means that Nifty is still a work in progress and lacks essential features such as Gantt Charts, an activity dashboard, task priority, and task progress.

Cons:

• Unfortunately, there is no time- or expense-tracking.
• Multi-factor authentication is missing, which could level up their security if added. They encrypt their sensitive data at rest, but this could still give team members more peace of mind.

Nifty Pricing: 

• Basic – costs nothing – Offers up to 2 users, 2 active projects, 1 GB Space per member, and unlimited Guests.
• Standard – Costs $8/user/month – offers unlimited users, projects, and guests. You also get 5GB space per member, live training, and priority support.
• Enterprise – Custom Quotes – offer advanced security and control features.

URL: https://niftypm.com

Spreadsheets

Simple Sheets offers more than a dozen project management-focused Excel Templates, including a Kanban Board, Gantt Chart, 12-Week Yearly Planner, Plan-Do-Check-Act, RACI Matrix, Gap Analysis, Earned Value Analysis, and more. 

These templates are designed with step-by-step instructions for utilization and customization. So whether you want to evaluate the progress, budgeting, or responsibilities of a project, these templates have you covered. 

Using OneDrive online, you can edit the templates in real-time with colleagues. 

Cons:

While you can use these templates without Excel training, it still helps to grasp Excel and requires further training for customization. 

Spreadsheets Pricing:

• Starter: $49 (one time payment)
• Premium + University: $199 (one time payment)
• Premium: $99 (one time payment)

URL: https://www.simplesheets.co/

ProofHub

Proofhub is an all-in-one project management and team collaboration software designed to help teams meet their deadlines and stay on top of their deliverables. The solution allows managers across all projects to act as a central hub for their groups, clients, and contractors. A central hub where everyone can share knowledge, tasks, notes, ideas, and discussions to achieve a more efficient and effective collaboration.

Proofhub is intuitive and easy to use, so even non-technical users can make the best of it in no time. Teams can be divided into separate groups by any parameter. Users get email notifications about changes in tasks, milestones, or project status. In addition, the solution integrates with Google and Outlook to synchronize your calendar events across all your calendar apps.

Users can also upgrade or downscale their plan and features anytime they need to, making sure the solution stays flexible with you as the needs and requirements of your business change with time.

The project management tool also comes with many customization options for the user interface and many advanced features such as Casper Mode, Proofing, and more.

Cons

• Proofhub doesn’t come with a budget management tool, which means you will have to use another application to do your budgeting, which could annoy some businesses.
• The calendar synchronization is also one-way, meaning you have to pay attention to where you input your tasks and events. You could easily miss something important if you are not used to using Proofhub’s Calendar.
• The lack of a recurring option for tasks is also an annoyance.

Proofhub Pricing:

• Essential: $50/m per month
• Ultimate: $99/m per month

URL: https://www.proofhub.com

Important Note: 

The pricing you see in all of the solutions is the pricing you get when you choose to pay annually. If you decide to pay monthly, this price goes up slightly, and some solutions don’t have this feature.

We highly recommend checking out the free trial of any software you like to get a feel for it and see if it’s a good fit before making a decision. As an entrepreneur, you need to identify two or three options that best fit the bill for what you need to advance in your business.

We hope you enjoyed this article. If so, you might enjoy these resources:

• 10 Benefits of Project Management Software
• Best Project Management Training Courses Online
• Why is Project Management Important for Your Business?
• 11 Best Project Management Software for Nonprofits
• 13 Best Marketing Project Management Software
• 14 Best Free HR Software for Startups
• 9 Best HR Software for Nonprofits

So now, you know the best project management for startups to manage your business.

*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.