Project Management Software overview

Brief Project History

Giant pyramids, majestic churches, long naval expeditions that opened new worlds - all these are projects whose realization required the remarkable cooperation of all participants, planning, and communication. But, with the leap of humanity into the technological era, the scale of the projects became fundamentally incommensurable with the manual management capabilities.

But the project management known to us does not go as far as Ancient Egypt or the European Middle Ages. The starting point is the mid-20th century — the formation of the first world corporations, and, at the same time, the strengthening of the technological potential of the countries opposing the Cold War. And yet, this is the time of the first space operations (it was in NASA that the life cycle management of programs appeared). “Project Management” as specific theoretical knowledge emerges from the US Air Force and their Navy. It was from there that the method of analysis and evaluation of PERT programs (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) came, which, by the way, worked there so successfully that it was classified for a while.

Industrial corporations themselves have come to similar methods of management - almost simultaneously with the military. It was a revolution: their introduction brought a tremendous gain of time, which was freed from the use of exact mathematical methods in managing complex sets of works. But in 1960-80, only large players in the market could afford such luxury, because processing a large amount of digital data was performed on expensive computers. The inaccessibility of computers did not last long - in the 1980s, a new generation of computers and IT for a wide range of users made it possible to more effectively use methods and tools for planning, scheduling work, monitoring and analyzing time, cost, resources and more.

And by the 90s, the usefulness of such management becomes evident even in previously unusual areas, for example, in public administration and government reform. This happens with the cheapening and availability of computers targeted at the wide range of consumers.

Today, effective project management is unthinkable without the use of modern software — after all, project sizes are growing, information is growing, and the number of employees working on the same task all over the world is growing.

What the software offers in general

Now for those who are faced with the need to choose software for project management, there is a problem that is the opposite of what it was half a century ago - a huge choice. And it will have to be made inevitably: the researchers of the American magazine “How to open a business” analysed 11,046 companies and found that planning helps the company to develop 30% faster. Think for yourself.

It is important to understand that before immersion into search of suitable software, it is worth highlighting the goals you want to achieve with this tool and, as always, what your budget is. With the definition of goals, we will not be able to help you, but we will be glad to in other respects.

Depending on the willingness to invest, the programs can be divided into two and a half groups - paid, free, and those which offer a free version for familiarization (demo), often with limited functionality before full payment.

The dispersal of your employees around the world and the need for continuous business monitoring determine whether you need an online or offline platform. It is also important in what area you work and where your project begins. For creative industries, collective sketching of ideas can become a priority task, whereas in construction there is often a clear plan where you need precise distribution of tasks and control over their implementation.

Without seeking to cover all the existing offers on the market, in this article we will make review, basing on the comparison table.




We will look at what the most popular companies on the market of project management solutions offer: Trello, 37Signals (Basecamp), Asana, Wrike, Genius Inside, Doist, Microsoft, Zoho, Clickup, monday.com. For convenience, in the article, as opposed to table on the site, where you can get involved from a closer angle, we have limited the number of criteria to the key ones. These will be: payment, on which the application is available, integration with other services, options for accessing the project, live chats, detailed reports on the implementation of tasks, project templates. Let's do it!

Trello

Trello is a new company of one product. Since 2010, software development company Fog Creek Software (New York, USA) has conducted weekly internal research on potential products. There, in January 2011, a prototype was presented, designed to perform high-level planning tasks, Trellis at that time. After beta testing and presentation, having typed more than 500,000 users over the year, Fog Creek creates apps for Android as well. At the same time, Trello has a mascot - a talking husky dog, the model for which was the pet of the co-founder of Fog Creek. In July 2014, with 4.75 million users, Trello is separated from Fog Creek and becomes Trello, Inc. Since 2017, Trello has been owned by Atlassian.


At the moment, the Trello application is one of the most popular project management systems online, which is in particular demand among small companies and startups. The organization of work is based on the “kanban” method (from Japanese - just in time), based on a clear distribution of tasks among employees. In fact, this is an analogue of work boards with stickers on it, only in a web application. Thanks to its simplicity and virtually unlimited free functionality, Trello managed to win universal love.

Technical parameters

Payment: free / paid (monthly or annual payment). It is worth noting that the freemium model of the Trello allows you to work fully, with a little bit reduced functionality.

Where is available: Web, IOS App, Android App.

Integration with other services: MailChimp, Slack, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Hangouts, InVision, Evernote, GitHub, Bitbucket Cloud, Jira, Salesforce, Zendesk, other.

Variants of access to the project : personal project, group project, open project, project with joint access.

Live chat: no.

Detailed reports on the implementation of tasks: no.

Project templates: no.

Basecamp

The company 37Signals was founded in 1999, first doing custom web design. Later, it focused on developing web applications that are distributed as a service, and in 2014 it was renamed Basecamp by the name of their most popular product. Known to 37Signals for creating the Ruby on Rails framework. The company is based in Chicago, while its employees live around the world - the experience of their remote work is even described in the book, which now occupies the tops in business publications on Amazon.

By developing the Basecamp application, the company invested in its strengths - simplicity and speed. The team identified them based on the unchanged needs of clients in this area. Quoting the company, “10 years from now people aren’t going to say “I wish Basecamp was slower and less reliable”. (After 10 years, hardly anyone would say - “oh, I wish that Basecamp was harder to use” or “that would be Basecamp was less reliable and slower!”).




Basecamp is a simple and effective project management system. The application contains tasks, calendar, discussions, profiles, wiki documents, files, project log. It will suit managers who need to maintain several approvals on various issues within the project, as well as a manager who prefers to control the work of several employees at once. Basecamp will fit into the workflow, if it involves the constant transfer of media files, for example - when coordinating the design or content with visual content. There is a fairly large functionality of communication, polls, control in real time.

By the way, the company openly declares that it does not pursue the number of users of the program, preferring to provide services to those to whom the software really suits. On the company's website there is a whole showcase of cool projects created using this software, so you can try your luck in such free mutually beneficial advertising.

Technical parameters

Payment: monthly.

Where is available: Web, IOS App, Android App, Desktop App.

Integration with other services: Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, One Drive, other.

Variants of access to the project: group project, project with joint access.

Live chat: yes (+ automatic polls).

Detailed reports on the implementation of tasks: no

Project templates: yes.

Asana

After leaving Facebook in 2008, where they worked to increase the productivity of company employees, Dustin Moskowitz and Justin Rosenstein created their company where they began work on the Asana project (from Sanskrit - “sitting posture”, a reference to the culture of meditation that permeates the entire application).

The beta version was launched at the end of 2011, underwent multi-round investment, collected tens of millions of dollars and is still being developed. A feature of the company itself can rightly be considered their corporate culture. The company has key values - equality, diversity, respect, lack of prejudice, hospitality. In general, judging by the photographs of the office and interviews of employees - this is a dream company, but we were a little distracted.




A feature of the application Asana is that the work in it takes no more than an hour a day. In fact, you go into the application, familiarize yourself with the details and deadlines of the project and... go to implement it. Only the user responsible for the project conducts full-scale work in Asane - distributes the load, sets or transfers dates, controls the execution of tasks. The ease of use of the service, by the way, will greatly depend on whether the user responsible for the project is able to correctly identify and structure the tasks, write understandable briefs to them and set realistic time frames. In general, everything is like in life.

Technical parameters

Payment: monthly.

Where is available: Web, IOS App, Android App.

Integration with other services: MailChimp, Slack, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, One Drive, GitHub, other.

Variants of access to the project: group project, project with joint access, personal project.

Live chats: yes.

Detailed reports on the implementation of tasks: no.

Project templates: no.

Wrike

Founded in 2006, Wrike has more than 700 employees worldwide and offers users a platform for project collaboration and management. The first beta version of the platform was released in the year the company was founded. The functions on the platform have been actively updated since 2012, and by 2018 more than 100 million tasks were performed on the platform.



The Wrike platform allows to create tasks, group them by project, and track their progress. The main advantage of the service is a more advanced collaboration functionality compared with competitors. Wrike is great for immediate project control.

Of the nice features of the platform is offline mode. In the absence of a network, you can sketch tasks or comments without fear that the information will not reach the recipient: as soon as a connection appears, the application will figure it out.

Also, the platform is rich in visualization of time frames for tasks, including the Gantt diagram.

Technical parameters

Payment: free / monthly.

Where is available: Web, IOS App, Android App.

Integration with other services: GitHub, Jira, Slack, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, One Drive, Evernote, Salesforce, Zendesk, Adobe, WordPress, other.

Variants of access to the project: group project, project with joint access, personal project.

Live chats: yes.

Detailed reports on the implementation of tasks: yes.

Project templates: yes (positioned as one of the application features).

Genius Project

Genius Inside is a platform-independent software company, the Genius Project, for managing SaaS and On-Premise projects and portfolios (PPM). In our list, this is the most time-tested application, the launch was carried out back in 1997. Gradually penetrating the world market, by 2003, meeting high quality standards, the company was accepted into the IBM “Start Now Proven Solutions Program”.

From the very beginning, Genius Inside has set as its mission to make life easier for project managers — by improving planning, staffing, executing, and tracking with easy-to-use and powerful tools.

By the way, you may not even have heard about the Genius Project. Indeed, we have this product is not very popular. Perhaps this is due to the fact that it is more focused on companies of medium or large businesses, or corporations - in general, it will be of interest to companies from 50 people.



The Genius Project offers a very wide range of customization - without losing ease of use. Also, the company provides you with its consultants, allowing you to optimize the program exactly for your needs.

The application is virtually unparalleled in providing reports of all kinds, schedules, there is also the possibility of online communication - and this is not just chat rooms, but access to creating online conference rooms. And since the servers where data is stored belong to one of the IBM companies - be sure that your information is protected 24/7 very carefully.

Technical parameters

Payment: monthly (discounts available for the duration of use).

Where is available: Web, iOS App.

Integration with other services: SAP, Salesforce, Oracle JD Edwards, IBM Lotus Notes, Microsoft Share point, Microsoft Office, Google Drive, other.

Variants of access to the project: group project, project with joint access.

Live chat: no (for real-time communication there are online conference rooms).

Detailed reports on the implementation of tasks: yes (+ all sorts of tasks visualization)

Project templates: yes.

Todoist

Doist is registered in North Field, USA, but it positions itself as the first completely remote company with employees all over the world. The company has two main products, Todoist and Twist, both of which are productivity applications, with different functions, but with one goal - to make working together easier and more productive, and the lives of employees are not so stressful. The company considers 2007 to be the year of its foundation - the release of the first product, Todoist.

Todoist is a simple and beautiful online scheduler that supports almost all mobile and desktop platforms. It works in mail programs and services. Allows groups to interact on tasks, receive reminders and alerts. Simplicity and attractiveness made it popular not only in the business environment, but also in personal use.

If the real-life Trello equivalent is a reminder board on it, Todoist is your virtual business notebook. With apparent simplicity, the program has a lot of options. But many of the features are not available in the free version, for example, notifications, comments, project templates.

Technical parameters
Payment: free of charge (version with reduced functionality) / monthly

Where is available: Web, IOS App, Android App, Windows Desktop App, Linux Desktop App.

Integration with other services: Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, One Drive, other.

Variants of access to the project: group project, personal project.

Live chat: no.

Detailed reports: yes.

Project templates: yes.

MS Project

The history of the world-famous company Microsoft originates in 1975, but global leadership comes to it in 1990 - it was then that the release of the Windows operating system began.

MS Project is a comprehensive software, project management system and a way to optimize portfolio management. It is not just a scheduler and a communicator - it is also a powerful analytical tool.

The program has been regularly updated since 2007, and in the single-user and small solutions market the software product takes about 80% (about 20 million people).



It is famous for its templates, as well as easy integration with other Microsoft products. Focuses on a small number of users and projects, it is suitable where estimates are needed and step-by-step project plans.

Work is carried out with the following options: "task", "resource" and "calendar". This corresponds to the construction of the “project triangle” of management: time - cost - efforts. If from the very beginning to deal with these basic concepts, the process of interaction with the application, despite its apparent complexity, will be simple and straightforward. The “task” has a resource, a duration, a volume, and many more characteristics - and those that are not there can be added. Also, tasks can be related. “Resource” also has many meanings, but the main thing for it is the time you set, based on the calendar. It is on the basis of these given values that the software visualizes data in graphs, charts, tables, sheets. In addition, the program has an algorithm that allows in some cases automatically calculate the start and end dates of tasks.

A huge advantage is the widespread use of the program, and as a result - a large number of guides and training materials to improve and make the use to be maximum productive.

Technical parameters

Payment: monthly.

Where is available: Windows Desktop App.

Integration with other services: Microsoft Share point, Microsoft Office, Skype, other.

Variants of access to the project: group project, personal project.

Live chats: yes.

Detailed reports: yes.

Project templates: yes.

Zoho

Zoho Corporation is the largest Indian IT company that was one of the first to start competing with industry giants like Microsoft and Salesforce.com. It is a successful company with two and a half thousand employees all over the world, and an income of about $ 200 million, engaged in the development of software for managing the IT infrastructure of enterprises. It owes its success due to the founder’s approach, Sridharu Vembu. At the beginning of his career, he failed to get a job, where only the best specialists with an ideal diploma and work experience were required. After futile attempts, he decided to create his own company, which would look for those whom the large corporations overlooked, not noticing their talent for lack of laurels. And he was correct.

Zoho Sprints is a tool for Agile planning. The service simplifies work in fixed cycles, the so-called sprints. For flexible management, various panels are available, measurement of progress. The system works through priority planning, backlog and sprints, task boards, timetables for tracking hours, dashboards, reports, meeting management, and event tape.



The program is also built on the principle of kanban board. From the pleasant - the paid program becomes only from 5 users - before this the functionality is free and without limit. The project is focused on work on the principle of SCRUM, so it will be of interest to groups of a small number of users. The user has access to all project boards, so everyone can keep track of what stage a particular task is at. The application is intuitively clear, all data is easily moved from one task to another, there is the possibility of commenting in real time, visualization is provided through graphics.

Technical parameters

Payment: for each user (over five).

Where is available: Web, IOS App, Android App.

Integration with other services: GitHub, Jira, Zapier, other.

Variants of access to the project: group project.

Live chat: no.

Detailed reports: no.

Project templates: yes.

Clickup

Clickup was founded in 2016 - this is a startup from San Francisco, USA, which believes that the norm is boring. Based on this, a small team (no more than 50 people) designed their original project management application. Clickup believes that existing project management platforms are too complex or not functional enough. And they created an application balancing in the middle - having the necessary functions, but also intuitively clear.

The ClickUp application provides users with three different options for viewing tasks: in the form of a board, a table and a box. Here you can create your own statuses for each unique project that can be edited, reorder the boards in accordance with the needs of the organization.




Managers can assign tasks to several people at the same time, as well as freely manage multiple tasks themselves, using a multi-tasking table view.

The ClickUp panel provides an Agile view, developed under the SCRUM, providing a simple but at the same time highly informative representation of the data.

Technical parameters

Payment: free of charge (reduced functionality) / monthly / annually.

Where is available: Web, IOS App, Android App.

Integration with other services: Slack, GitHub, Google Drive, Dropbox, GitLab, Bitbucket, other.

Variants of access to the project: group project, personal project.

Live chat: no.

Detailed reports: yes.

Project templates: yes.

monday.com

Founded in 2012 and launched as an independent startup in February 2014, monday.com attracted a total of about $ 84.1 million of investment. Monday.com (formerly dapulse) was founded by Roi Mann and Eran Zinman. The goal of the project was to help teams create a culture of transparency that allows everyone to achieve more and be happy at work. Now among the clients of this Israeli startup are Adidas, AT & T, Carlsberg, Discovery Channel, McDonalds, Samsung, Uber, WeWork, Wix and more than 35,000 other companies.

The monday.com service allows to visualize data and draw timelines for fulfilling tasks. There is a rather rare feature here - the ability to invite a client to track the process, and rather advanced search. The service offers 71 templates of work boards for various tasks - from a large project to the work of a sales department.



The program does not work on the shareware model, like competitors in the face of Slack or Trello - on Monday you can use the trial, after which you will have to pay for access.

From the logic point of view of doing one or another tasks, the templates are well planned out and the task functionality is already configured with regard to their features, which simplifies the start of work. It is not necessary to use a ready-made template - in this case, you will create a view for your needs by yourself. Boards can be created with different levels of access: the whole team, individuals or only you. And even with access by clients and partners - so that they see the process of work and can take part in it: leave a comment on the tasks, attach documents and contacts, communicate with team members.

Technical parameters

Payment: free trial period, then annual payment.

Where is available: Web, IOS App, Android App.

Integration with other services: Slack, Google Drive, Dropbox, Zapier, Trello, other /

Variants of access to the project: group project, personal project

Live chat: no.

Detailed reports: no.

Project templates: yes, one of the main features of the program.

We tried to give you an idea of the average temperature in a hospital as part of a project management program: what does most software provide, what features are there, and how many users are used for certain applications. It is safe to say that regardless of the size of your company or the means you have, the market for these services has something to offer. We, in turn, hope that could help you decide on your favorite, and, having increased your efficiency through planning, you will recall the modest ROI4CIO team that once helped you with this.

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Author: Natalka Chekh for ROI4CIO

*Article was previously published at Techmoran