Top 37 Best Online Project Management and Collaboration Software for Individuals and Teams
Project management and collaboration are important to every business. In many cases, the results of a project are highly affected by initial planning and monitoring. If you are running a modern business like web design agency and employing people all around the world working from their home, having an effective communication and collaboration are keys to the successful outcome of any projects. There are a variety of project management and collaboration software available in the market for small and medium-sized enterprises. They help you keep track of your projects, schedule daily tasks, manage your workers and more importantly maximize your productivity. Some necessary features like real-time update, files sharing and mobile synchronization can also be found in these tools.
If you are looking for an easy-to-use but powerful online project management tool to suit your business’s needs, here’ a compilation of some of the best project management and collaboration software for you to choose. While there are a number of general features that these tools have in common; they also have different and unique services to offer. I hope this article will help you make the right choice.
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Zoho Projects
Zoho Projects is an online project management software with collaboration and bug tracking that allows teams to collaborate and get work done faster. It helps you keep the project on schedule and improves the communication within the team. And the Bug Tracker allows you to track and fix bugs fast.
Assembla
Assembla provides an integrated set of online tools for distributed software teams, including source code management, ticketing/issue management, and collaboration tools. It also provides professional services for building software with distributed agile teams.
Confluence
Confluence was designed for enterprise use. With its fine-grained permissioning capabilities, you control who can view, create, edit, comment, or upload attachments in work spaces and pages. This keeps confidential information private.
TeamLab
TeamLab is an open-source platform for business collaboration and project management. Its features include Projects, Documents, Milestones, Tasks, Reports, Events, Blogs, Forums, Bookmarks, Wiki, Instant Messenger, Document Management, CRM and more.
Teamwork PM
Teamwork Project Manager is an easy-to-use online teamwork and project management software application that helps managers, staff and clients work together more productively online. Some of its features include project management, task management, milestone tracking, messages, file management and time tracking.
Podio
Podio is an online work platform with a new take on how everyday work gets done. It gives people more power than they’ve ever had before to manage their work better, smarter and in their own way. Combining hundreds of specialized and flexible work apps with messaging, tasks, reporting, workflow and contact management, Podio lets you build and shape the online workplace most fitting to your role.
Lighthouse
Lighthouse will simplify your workflow so you can do the job you were hired to do. Whether you’re a team of 5 or studio of 50, it will help you keep track of your project development with ease.
Teambox
The Teambox site includes the tools you would expect in a straightforward project manager, including those for creating tasks, communicating with one another, tracking people’s time, sharing documents, and more. Especially useful is the “People & Permissions” area, in which you invite people to participate in the project, and assign roles for them.
Producteev
Producteev offers a range of dynamic organizational tools to ensure your projects get done quickly and efficiently. From simple features like labels, and reminders, to powerful file sharing capabilities and real-time tracking tools, Producteev makes task management a breeze. You can build custom filters to sort and prioritize your workload, sync calendars to stay in touch from multiple devices, and assign tasks to others on your team, or in the social web.
Central Desktop
Central Desktop is a web-based collaboration platform that allows business teams to manage teams, documents and projects from anywhere at any time. The most powerful features of Central Desktop’s solution include intranets, document management, team workspaces, project reporting, tasks and milestones, online calendars and databases.
Campfire
Campfire is a web-based group chat tool that lets you set up password-protected chat rooms in just seconds. You can invite a client, colleague, or vendor to chat, collaborate, and make decisions. It allows you to link to a room on your intranet for internal communications.
WORKetc
WORKetc combines CRM, project management, billing, sales, support and more with a powerful automation engine to help take your small business to the next level.
Socialcast
Socialcast software unites people, information and applications across the enterprise in a collaborative community. It helps employees focus on meaningful work, share knowledge and discover data in real-time.
activeCollab
activeCollab is a web based project management and collaboration system that provides platform for planning, progress tracking and communication. It lets you define what’s important, assign tasks and communicate with your team and clients until projects are done.
Freedcamp
Freedcamp is a streamlined project management tool that makes it easy to share only what you want to with team members. Other features include email and SMS notifications, a central dashboard for getting a broad overview of your current projects, and project templates to save time.
Time Doctor
Time Doctor is a time tracking software which makes sure that you really do track your time with reminders, and also confirms if time tracked was really worked. With up to the second time tracking data, you can easily bill clients or find out how efficient your work is.
Huddle
Huddle provides a secure online environment to facilitate file storage online and makes file sharing with colleagues, teams and departments inside and outside of your organization easy. Being cloud-based, Huddle gives you the ability to access content from anywhere, at anytime.
DeskAway
DeskAway is a simple yet powerful web-based project collaboration tool that provides teams a central location to easily organize, manage and track their work from anywhere. With the project collaboration software you can stay in control of your deadlines and work, save time and do more, bump up team efficiency and much more.
Basecamp
Basecamp is a Web-based project management tool from 37signals. Groups can come together and work on large or small projects, sharing the same collaborative space. It’s essentially a mash-up of various productivity tools, including a to-do list maker, shared storage space, message boards, and calendaring. What has made it so successful is how it’s been tied together. It’s well known as a service that fits both personal and group organization into one handy tool.
Action Method
Action Method Online is an intuitive task management application for people and teams. It helps you to manage tasks to be completed, delegate action steps to anyone and track their progress, coordinate deadlines and organize projects.
Goplan
Goplan offers a combination of online project management, collaboration and browser-based text chat. Features include task management, calendars, note sharing and issue tracking.
Flowdock
With Flowdock you can share ideas, opinions, links, files, whatever you need to get the message across to your team. No matter if your team mate is in the same room or on the other side of the globe, you’ll know what they’re working on without interrupting them.
Apollo
Apollo is a project management and contact tracking solution for individuals and organizations. With features like time tracking, users can keep a good handle on the completion of certain tasks and quickly determine which areas of a project are going smoothly, and which might be taking a bit longer than anticipated.
Conceptboard
Conceptboard provides users with total freedom to create and record ideas in real time. The application provides users with a simple white board tool that allows the user to create specific shapes or draw freehand. Users can also upload a document, image or other file to edit and collaborate. Along with uploading files, the user can also take screen shots.
OneHub
OneHub is a functional online workspace that is designed to suit many needs and industries. Users can collaborate effectively regardless of how far apart they may be. The application can streamline team tasks and reduce the amount of time needed to wait for response or ask questions. OneHub also allows users to create client and partner portals to open up communication while also improving the functionality of a virtual team.
Kapost
Kapost organizes content marketing into a structured business process that delivers results. The platform offers Planning, Production, Distribution and Analysis functionality that drives improvements in the amount of time spent, content produced, contributors managed and traffic generated.
Rule.fm
Rule.fm helps businesses stay organized online. The application is capable of handling many different tasks. Users can share, track and manage assets quickly and effectively. Features include contacts which can be organized into groups and include information as well as an image. Projects can also be managed with relevant discussions, tasks, milestones, related documents and people who are involved all associated in one place.
So1o
So1o is brimming with tools to help you keep track of everything. There’s a calendar so you can set up important meetings, appointments and deadlines. There are financial tools to help you track how much you’ve spent on a project, timesheet and invoicing tools, and a dashboard to keep track of things from an overview.
Projecturf
With Projecturf you can manage all of your projects through this Internet application through any computer. This application keeps things simple as you monitor team members’ progress as well as the individual tasks everyone has been assigned. There are discussion forums for each project where the team can talk about the concerns or successes as they happen. If you want to stay up to date with what is happening with the project, you can set up emails so that as soon as anyone makes a change you will know.
Thoughtboxes
Thoughtboxes is a simple web application that helps to organize your thoughts so you can make things happen. You can keep track of just about anything, create “to do” lists, and share your thoughts with friends.
Google Docs
Google Docs is an easy-to-use online word processor, spreadsheet and presentation editor that enables you to create, store and share instantly and securely, and collaborate online in real time. You can create new documents from scratch or upload existing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. There’s no software to download, and all your work is stored safely online and can be accessed from any computer.
Skype
Skype is software for calling other people on their computers or phones. You can use it for daily phone calls, video conferencing, daily meetings as well as simple screen sharing. The calls have excellent sound quality and are highly secure with end-to-end encryption.
Dropbox
Dropbox is a simple file-synchronization tool. You can use it for sharing files with clients, backing up documents, images, passwords, accessing files from multiple computers. The service stores files with strong encryption on multiple servers and lets you get your files quickly, easily from virtually any Internet-enabled device.
Jing
Jing is a great tool for adding basic visual elements to all of your online conversations. It allows you to instantly capture images and record video on your computer, and then share them with anyone.
Mantis
Mantis is an easily deployable, web based bug tracker to aid product bug tracking. It’s a great way to record and log any bugs, improvements or feature requests. You can use it for any issue management collaboration where teams are involved.
Peers.me
Peers.me is designed to help users clean up their email inboxes and hold coherent conversations with a group. The application works by providing hosted conversations to its users. The user can begin a conversation, called a wave. Responses to each message appears on the user’s wave.
Brix
Brix is a flexible and adaptable agile project management system to meet all your needs. You can collaborate with your team across agile Projects and Tasks all in an online environment no matter where they are. The project management system also allows you to track your online Agile Projects velocity, by Team Member, by Status, and Red flags for tasks that are overdue.
- Freshbooks – An invoicing application that includes time tracking, task and project management.
- Smartsheet – Project management, CRM and other features based around using online spreadsheets.
- Wrike – Some unique features such as the ability to create and update tasks via email and timeline view of project plans.
- 5pm – Colorful interface, and lots of features including time tracking, contacts and an iPhone app.
- Manymoon – A project management tool focused on integration with Google Apps.
- Clarizen – Many features including budgeting, billing, Gantt charts.
- Nozbe – Project management based around the David Allen “Getting Things Done” methodology.
- Harvest – Focused on invoicing and time tracking.
- Ace Project – Some HR and expense management features.
- Feng office – Includes time tracking, calendar and contacts.
- LiquidPlanner – Project scheduling, time tracking and lots of graphs and analysis.
- Comindwork – Includes Gantt charts, and a business wiki.
- EGroupware – Consists of multiple installable applications and includes a calendar app, project management, timesheet, etc.
- Hyperoffice – Has a hosted email service and contact management.