best free project management software 2016

Trello offers paid premium plans, which extend the functionality, but at $10/user/month it struggles to compete with the other tools in this list.

However, you will quickly run into Trello’s limitations if you want to have a more elaborate team process or if you want the whole organization to work with the same tool. The basic interface has boards, columns, and cards as the main units of operation. It is also a good tool to use when introducing a team to an Agile Kanban workflow. It’s favored by startups, small teams, temporary projects and in various other scenarios where a project manager needs a minimal structure to keep things organized. Trello is one of the most popular lightweight project management tools out there. Red means that feature is not available at all or the suggested workarounds are not satisfactory. Yellow means that this feature is available via third-party providers, most of the time for an additional fee. The green color indicates whether a feature is built into the standard version of the tool. This is important to note because as a PM you want to work with the tools that have a higher probability of being around in the long-run.īelow we provide a table comparing some of the key features to look at when choosing a tool for project management. The tools covered in this article are developed by already established players in the field.

Heavyweight (Jira, MS Project): Tools used when you have really elaborate processes and need to customize a lot of components to fit them.

Midweight (Basecamp, Asana, Wrike): More elaborate tools, used when you need to balance more complicated processes and ease of use.

Lightweight (Trello): Designed for short, temporary projects or teams with lightweight processes.Here we cover six of the most popular project management tools, which are divided into three categories: It is similarly difficult to make a decision based solely on the feature sets provided by the vendors. Software comparison websites list about 600 different project management tools and comparing different alternatives can be very time-consuming. The competition in the project management software market is high.

Best free project management software 2016