Team management can include many things — from delegating tasks and managing a budget to making schedules and ensuring good communication.
It’s difficult to do any of these without a team management tool to help you.
So, let’s take a look at what team management software is, why it’s useful, and showcase the best options.
What is team management software?
Team management software refers to the tools that enable you to organize your work, teams, and projects without stress.
These tools shape your workflow by streamlining communication.
Why is team management software useful?
Remote work has become a new standard in recent years. In fact, Gallup’s State of Workforce study shows that only 6% of remote workers want to work fully on-site.
With so many remote workers in the workforce, it’s important to set up a way for remote teams to communicate and work together. The best solution — a platform they can all access.
20 Best team management software
We’ve narrowed down the vast number of tools available into a list of the top 20 team management tools worth your time in 2023.
Plaky — best for project management overall
Plaky is a team management platform that helps you keep track of your work and teams. It offers templates to help with initial setup and even integrates with Clockify for time-tracking capabilities. Moreover, all essential features in Plaky are free.
Plaky’s most notable features include:
- Great filter options,
- An activity log,
- Sorting options,
- Assigning roles with different administrative permissions, and
- Compliance with SOC2.
Monday — best for complex workflows
Monday is team management software that allows you to organize tasks, communicate with your team, and centralize all of your work in one place.
It comes in many flavors, such as Monday dev, Monday marketer, etc. However, its free version is quite limited.
Some of Monday’s useful features include:
- Multiple views,
- Many integration options,
- Co-editing docs in real-time,
- Time tracking, and
- Automatization options that eliminate repetitive work.
Asana — best for aligning company goals
Asana is an easy-to-use tool that helps you track and manage teams and set goals.
Its free version offers unlimited tasks, projects, and storage. However, if you want unlimited users and workspaces as well, you might want to look into Asana alternatives.
Asana’s features include:
- Turning common processes into templates,
- Multiple views,
- Automatization of tasks, and
- Integration with over 200 tools.
Clockify — best for time tracking
Clockify is one of the most popular time-tracking tools out there. It helps you track working hours, manage projects, monitor progress, and track project profitability.
Some of its features include:
- Tracking billable and non-billable hours, holidays, and time off requests,
- Creating invoices from your billable hours,
- 80+ integrations,
- A kiosk version that you can log into from a shared device with a PIN code, and
- Availability in 8 languages.
ClickUp — best for visual collaboration
ClickUp is a team management tool that can be used to divide complex projects into manageable tasks. Its whiteboard feature is great for making your ideas flow more easily.
With its key features, ClickUp lets you:
- Include all your docs, chats, and goals in one end-to-end tool,
- Make use of 1,000+ integrations, and
- Automatically assign tasks, comment, update statuses, and sync with other tools.
Notion — best for collaborative note-taking
Notion is a team collaboration and note-taking tool that helps not only your team but also you personally. Its personal plan is geared toward individuals, with a focus on self-organization.
Some of its best features are:
- Thousands of free templates to choose from, and
- Many customization options.
Trello — best for Kanban teams
Trello is Kanban-focused team management software that helps you plan projects efficiently.
Its free plan includes unlimited cards, but up to 10 boards per workspace. If you want unlimited boards and workspaces, consider a Trello alternative.
Some of Trello’s useful features include:
- The option to create your own commands, rules, cards, and board buttons,
- Plenty of integration options, and
- 2-factor authentication, which is included in every plan.
Teamwork — best for managing client work
Teamwork is a client-work-focused team management tool.
Teamwork’s most interesting feature is profitability tracking, which lets you oversee the financial efficiency of your projects and team members and compare it with the client’s budget.
Its other features include:
- Project time tracking,
- Billing and invoicing, and
- Integrated team chat.
Pumble — best for remote team communication
Pumble is a team communication and collaboration tool that lets you effectively communicate with your team on a day-to-day basis.
It offers one-on-one chats, group channels, and voice and video calls.
Pumble’s best features include:
- Public and private channels,
- Video conferencing,
- Status updates,
- Reminders,
- A pin option, and
- Separate workspaces.
Wrike — best for team organization
Wrike is a work management platform that offers customizable dashboards, Gantt charts, templates, and online Kanban boards.
Some of its notable features are:
- An online proofing platform, where you can proof different file formats,
- 400+ tools to integrate with, and
- A resource management feature, where you can store all your resources and team members can access them.
Podio — best for team collaboration
Podio is an online team collaboration tool that lets you keep everything relevant to a project on 1 page.
It offers 3 types of workspaces — open, private, and employee workspaces.
Podio’s most useful features include:
- Automated workflows,
- Reminders of upcoming deadlines,
- Task management with personal, shared, and recurring tasks, and
- Integrated file sharing.
ProofHub — best for team coordination
ProofHub is a team collaboration tool that offers custom roles to help project managers have control over access to their projects.
With its best features, it offers:
- A timesheet,
- Availability in 9 languages,
- Chat options, including direct messages and group chats, and
- A proofing option.
Hubstaff — best for improving productivity
Hubstaff is a time and productivity tracking tool. It helps you track working hours, manage shift schedules, and automatically generate timesheets.
Its best features include:
- Support of both manual time entries and an employee hours tracker in the form of an employee stopwatch, and
- A GPS time clock app that employees can download on their phones. to generate timesheets based on daily information.
ProWorkflow — best for remote collaboration
ProWorkflow is a project management tool with many team management capabilities, such as Gantt charts, task scheduling, resource allocation and sharing, and even time tracking.
Some of its notable features are:
- A plugin to handle your invoices,
- Project-focused and task-focused messaging systems, and
- The active staff view.
Hive — best for hybrid teams
Hive is a team management platform that is shaped by its users. It offers plenty of customization options, letting you add a personal touch to your workspace.
Some of Hive’s best features are:
- Time tracking,
- Different views,
- Automatization,
- Diverse chat options, and
- The Hive Notes feature.
Scoro — best for running an agency
Scoro is a team management tool with a focus on work management. It offers automated billing, time and profitability tracking, as well as a Gantt chart view.
Its key features include:
- 1,000+ integrations,
- Activity logs,
- Centralization of work and data, and
- Dashboards and reports.
Harvest — best for expanse tracking
Harvest is a time-tracking team management tool. It helps you track working hours, as well as manage invoices with invoice and timesheet templates.
Some of its best features include:
- Keeping projects within budget with real-time budget updates, and
- Integrations with PayPal and Stripe.
WorkOtter — best for project portfolio management
WorkOtter is a project portfolio management tool that helps you handle multiple projects at once. It’s a cloud-based platform that is useful for resource management.
WorkOtter’s most notable features are:
- Integration with apps such as DropBox, Google Drive, and JIRA,
- Almost 200 pre-configured and customizable dashboards and reports, and
- Automated 2-way data sync.
Basecamp — best for project collaboration
Basecamp is a project management platform that lets you keep all relevant information in one place, by giving each project its own page.
Its key features include:
- 750+ integrations,
- To-do lists,
- A calendar view for meetings, deadlines, and events, and
- A customizable homepage.
Slack — best for customizing team communication
Slack is a team communication tool with options to message, call, and share files with team members.
It offers direct chat options, as well as public and private channels.
Some of its best features are:
- 2,000+ integrations,
- Automation of repetitive tasks, and
- Slack Connect, used to cooperate smoothly with other companies.
Conclusion: What team management software is the best?
It’s difficult to choose from the many team management software available, so the best place to start is deciding what you need most.
It could be communication, time management, task management, or something entirely different.
After that decision, you can compare the software in this list with your requirements and see which one is best for you.
Further reading
This is just a summary of an article previously published on the Plaky blog.
To learn more about the best team management software, we recommend reading the full article: