7 Best project management software for more efficient teams in 2023

Built in 1914, the Panama Canal became an enabler of global maritime transportation. It connects the Pacific with the Atlantic Ocean, allowing ships to cross from side to side without having to circumnavigate South America. It was a highly ambitious project that cost the US over $300 million at the time^[1]—which is estimated to be $9.1 billion today.^[2]

Over 75,000 workers were part of this massive project that took 11 years to complete—and it’s still getting modifications to this date.^[3]

But it’s not just Panama Canal-type projects that require planning and organization. All projects need a clearly defined scope and goals, accurate resource allocation, and an approved budget—which project management software can help you handle. 

Effective project management also depends on your ability to communicate with your team and give them what they need to get their work done—independently and as a group. Choosing a project management platform will simplify task management and communication, keep your team organized, and improve transparency around goals and responsibilities. 

In this article, you’ll get to know the different project management solutions in the market, their key features, use cases, and price points to choose the right ones for your business. Let’s get started. 

[1] “What Roosevelt Took: The Economic Impact of the Panama Canal, 1903-37” (2006) 

[2] “CPI Inflation Calculator” (2023)

[3] “Today in labor history: Panama Canal, built by 75,000, opens” (2012)

Top project management solutions for more successful projects

Managing projects is about more than setting tasks and assigning priorities. Project management software needs to enable team communication and collaboration. Ideally, it should also support task automation to help you cut work about work

Here’s a summary of seven top-rated project management solutions for your business:

Let’s take a closer look at each tool: 

1. Switchboard: Best collaborative workspace for cross-functional teams

Switchboard is a visual collaboration platform that lets you organize all browser-based tools in project rooms. This makes everything instantly multiplayer. With Switchboard, colleagues can work together across different apps. You can hold productive coworking sessions, add interactivity to meetings, and easily collaborate on shared projects async.

When you organize all of a project's tools and docs in a Switchboard room, you and your team always know where to go to find what you need. Instead of toggling tabs and context switching, you can go to your project room for asynchronous work or to gather as a team. 

Best of all, Switchboard saves all your files after every session, so you never need to download anything or repopulate the room again. That means you always know where to find the information you need for a specific project. 

Key features: 

• Dedicated, persistent project rooms that save your work
• A huge canvas to visually organize apps, documents, and files in one view  
• Interactive, multiplayer browsers that support all of your existing web-based applications
• Project collaboration tools like in-room sticky notes, whiteboards, chat, polls, and surveys to gather and leave feedback
• Live video and messaging for interactive project planning sessions
• Room recording to leave video notes for asynchronous review
• AI to help with writing, brainstorming, and expediting other tasks

Pricing

• Free: For small teams and individuals, with limited features, rooms, and members 
• Pro: $15 user/month for up to 200 rooms and 500 members 
• Enterprise: Custom priced 

Who should choose Switchboard?

Highly collaborative companies looking for a comprehensive and team-oriented solution for organizing files and managing projects. It’s designed to improve team effectiveness no matter where you are—sitting side-by-side in an office, spread across time zones, or hybrid. It's a great option for cross-functional teams that need a dedicated, interactive space for projects and meetings.

For example, in Switchboard's persistent meeting rooms, anyone can add customer feedback to the team’s product innovation dashboard, by sharing whatever browser-based app you use. You can then discuss those thoughts with the product team in an idea screening session. There, you can also set deadlines and assign tasks to others in your preferred browser-based project management solution. 

The research team can also enter the room and work side-by-side with the product and design team to determine the priority or viability of each idea—or get updated on the project’s progress by simply looking at the files. 

Find all project-related information and make edits in one central location. 
Use Switchboard’s persistent rooms as a unique source of data, work on project files or apps, and make faster decisions. 
Sign up for free

2. Asana: Best for remote teams

Asana is a dedicated project management solution that enables remote and hybrid teams to set, manage, and move tasks through a workflow. It simplifies remote communication since everyone can see project statuses, task owners, and due dates. 

Asana can also organize projects in portfolios so you easily access all related information in one place. You can use Asana in a Switchboard room for real-time project teamwork. Or, leave the app open in the room to gather async feedback from colleagues, leave comments, attach files, or add in-app videos. 

Key features 

• In-app communication (comments and like buttons) 
• Boards, list, timeline, and calendar views for project visualization
• Task automation 
• Report dashboards 
• Project templates library 
• Portfolio management

Pricing 

• Free plan
• Premium plan: $10.99 user/month 
• Business plan: $24.99 user/month
• Enterprise: Custom priced 

Who should use Asana?

Asana can be used by anyone who wants an easy-to-use and highly effective project management solution. However, remote and hybrid organizations will likely benefit the most from Asana as it has great in-app communication features.

3. monday.com: Best for goal-centered small businesses

This WorkOS offers three different products: monday work management, monday sales CRM, and monday dev. Each one covers a certain aspect of your business, but here, you’ll read about the work management solution. 

monday work management invites teams to organize work in tasks, projects, and processes so they can focus on reaching goals. For monday.com, goals are the center of every project. For example, if the product team is planning to launch a new feature, you should:

• Determine the project goals: Make the new feature available for beta testing by November 4th. 
• List or create the processes needed to reach goals: How to conduct user research; how to conduct information architecture tests; how to get the budget approved by key stakeholders. 
• Set tasks based on the processes to reach the goal: Meet with the team to brainstorm feature ideas; validate ideas; conduct user research; do fake door testing; test wireframes; and so on.

Key features 

• Customizable templates for boards, processes, and projects
• In-app communication like status updates and comments to align teams
• Budget and resource management 
• Time tracking
• Set dependencies and blockers
• Notifications and task automation

Pricing 

• Free plan
• Basic: $8 seat/month 
• Standard: $10 seat/month 
• Pro: $16 seat/month
• Enterprise: Custom priced

Who should use monday.com?

As you’ve seen, monday.com invites teams to think of goals first. That, along with low prices, makes this solution appealing to small business owners who need to work toward clear and ambitious goals to keep their business moving forward.

4. ClickUp: Best for project documentation

ClickUp is a project management and document collaboration platform for teams of all sizes. It stores all project and business information, allowing you to set tasks and track time in a single platform. 

With ClickUp, you can create, edit, and share project documents, standard operating procedures (SOPs), or business information and share them with whoever you want. ClickUp also lets you invite guests and collaborate with clients, vendors, or third parties in a shared workspace. You can use one of their multiple templates like priority matrices, action plans, or Gantt charts for more complex projects. 

Key features: 

• Intuitive dashboards and workload, timelines, and box view
• AI assistant to manage projects, help with writing, or summarize tasks 
• Project milestones 
• In-app comments, videos, voice notes, and threads 
• Sidebar with document folders 
• To-do lists and tasks’ and subtasks’ delegation

Pricing: 

• Free plan
• Unlimited: $7 user/month
• Business: $12 user/month 
• Enterprise: Custom priced 

Add AI capabilities on top of any plan for $5 user/month.

Who should use ClickUp?

Teams looking to organize their data in dashboards and have all project documents in their task management app—with task-level security and access management. 

5. Jira: Best Agile project management app

Agile teams often opt for Jira. That’s because it lets them plan and prioritize user stories, keep track of sprints’ progress, organize backlogs, and review sprint plans.

This solution enables Agile and development teams to track the team velocity and customize their workflows following Scrum or Kanban methodologies. It also makes it easy for them to create and solve technical tickets. 

Jira empowers Agile teams to get real-time insights into their projects, make data-driven decisions, and continuously improve their processes through dashboard visualization. 

Key features

• Advanced security such as role-based permissions and access control 
• Agile templates and customizable dashboards
• Bug tracking
• Timelines, Scrum, and Kanban boards
• Project reporting and analytics 
• Drag and drop automation

Pricing 

• Free plan
• Standard: $7.75 user/month 
• Premium: $15.25 user/month
• Enterprise: Custom priced

* Pricing is based on a team of 10 users 

Who should choose Jira? 

Startups and enterprises can both benefit from using Jira. But, since it’s a complex tool designed for technical and Agile teams, it’s best for large-scale organizations following Agile processes. 

6. Airtable: Best for spreadsheet fans

If you’re used to managing your projects on charts and spreadsheets, then Airtable will do great things for you. This smartsheet solution is similar to Excel or Google Sheets, but allows you to organize project data in:

• Tables
• Gantt charts
• Kanban boards
• Cards
• Grids
• Personalized filtered views

Airtable integrates with multiple other platforms that you already use as part of your tech stack. It also comes with a no-code builder to create automated workflows and front-facing apps. 

Key features 

• Shareable links for others to view projects without accessing private data
• Automate notifications and communications
• Dashboard creation to visualize project data
• Integrations with popular tools
• Invoicing templates 

Pricing 

• Free plan
• Team: $20 seat/month 
• Business: $45 seat/month
• Enterprise: Custom priced

Who should use Airtable?

Teams of all sizes that are used to managing projects on spreadsheets and Excel and want to present data in a more visually appealing way. Airtable is also suitable for fast-paced organizations as it comes with a big template library to help you come up with workflows faster. 

7. Basecamp: Best for fast-paced businesses

Basecamp is a project management software that makes it easy for teams to collaborate on multiple projects at the same time without misplacing information or missing updates. It has a document creation and storage module, an in-app messaging chat, and multiple views for organizing pending work. 

It also comes with the Lineup view, where you can review the status of multiple projects on one page. For example, you can view the progress of the new feature development project alongside the homepage usability testing one. 

Key features 

• Message board to share project updates and collect people’s comments
• Pings and campfire to have real-time conversations with the team
• To-do lists and project views
• Calendar creating and integrations with popular providers
• Async check-ins to gather project updates 

Pricing

• 30-day free trial
• Basecamp: $15 user/month
• Basecamp Pro Unlimited: $299 unlimited users/month

Who should use Basecamp?

Basecamp makes it easy for you to move through the project quickly. This makes it a great option for fast-paced businesses that can’t spend too much time looking for information before making decisions. 

Which project management software is the one for you?

Massive projects like the Panama Canal (and also smaller ones) need cross-functional teams and multiple contributors working together toward clear common goals. To set those goals, assign tasks, and share updates, you need project management software. 

When it comes to choosing the right project management solution for your team, any of these project management tools might help you organize to-do lists and delegate responsibilities. However, if you want to make the best use of the platform, you should think of your needs. 

For example, if you’re used to managing projects on Excel, then Airtable might be a more complete alternative. But, if you want to organize your work in sprints or stories, you might benefit from using Jira.

In any case, bringing your project management software to Switchboard enables you to plan and delegate work, review updates, access documents, and meet in the same project room. Plus, all Switchboard rooms are persistent, so you never have to spend time populating them again or looking for misplaced data—making your team more efficient and competitive. 

Find all project-related information and make edits in one central location. 
Use Switchboard’s persistent rooms as a unique source of data, work on project files or apps, and make faster decisions. 
Sign up for free