Key Takeaways
Asana offers customizable project views, workflows, Slack integration, and messaging menus. Pricing starts at $11/month. Airtable boasts templates, customization, AI, app integrations, and no-code tooling features. Pricing starts at $24/month. Basecamp focuses on simplicity with a fixed price of $299/month. Features include real-time communication and project templates.
Starting a new business or running a startup is not easy. With hundreds of tasks, deadlines, and teams to juggle, it can be difficult to stay organized and efficient. This is where project management tools tailored for startups and small businesses come in handy. From different project views and third-party app integrations to real-time collaboration, these tools ensure that your projects run uninterrupted from start to finish.
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1. Asana
When it comes to project management tools for small teams, you can’t go wrong with Asana. It’s the perfect tool for tracking tasks, managing projects, and generating insights for your company. Asana immediately displays a clean homepage with upcoming tasks, overdue tasks, completed tasks, current projects, and people you frequently collaborate with.
The home menu is quite customizable with different background colors and useful widgets like tasks, goals, status updates, private notepad, forms, comments, etc. Among them, I like the private notepad option where you can jot down quick thoughts or feedback that you want to remember to share with your team members.
When it comes to project management, it supports various project views such as list, board, Gantt, dashboard, and calendar. Workflows are useful productivity tools to automate repetitive tasks for your team. Essentially, you can create workflows that connect people and tools with set rules, forms, and templates. You can also use the Slack integration to turn ideas and action items from Slack conversations into tasks or comments that can be tracked in Asana. The possibilities are endless.
It also has a dedicated messaging section and its own chat channel where you can start a conversation with your team about a task. Asana has native apps on all major platforms. Pricing starts at $11/month.
2. Airtable
Airtable is another solid project management solution for small businesses and startups. It has a wide selection of templates in a variety of categories, including project management, product and design, IT and support, marketing, engineering, and more. Overall, you won’t have any trouble getting started with Airtable.
Compared to Asana, Airtable requires a learning curve. But once you get over the learning curve, you will never go back to other tools. As for the project management tool, you can switch between different custom views, see the project status at the top, and enter all the relevant details like status, deadline, description, group, assignee and their availability, employment type, etc.
Airtable excels in customization, app integration, and AI. It also acts as a no-code tool that allows you to build custom apps based on your business needs. It seamlessly connects to the tools you use every day and allows for effortless collaboration. Pricing starts from $24/month.
3. Base Camp
Source: Basecamp
Unlike Airtable, Basecamp focuses on making complex tasks and projects simple: Once you start a project, you create a simple one-page dashboard for messages, tasks, chats, and documents, and track activity across your projects from the bottom menu.
As always, Basecamp supports multiple views and offers a rich task description field, real-time communication with team members, quick access to tasks, bookmarks, schedules, etc. You can also save your projects as templates and reuse them in the future. Other features include integration with third-party apps, native apps, timesheet view, mission control for tracking goals, and more.
While you can pay $15 per user per month, Basecamp offers a rather unique fixed-price option of $299 per month (billed annually) for unlimited users: Even if you expand your team and add more users in the future, you can still use all of Basecamp’s features without paying extra.
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4 monday.com
When it comes to the top tools for small teams, monday.com can’t be left out of the list. It goes beyond project management to provide a one-stop solution for managing resources, sales, and overall workflow.
Whether you’re creating contact management, lead management, customer projects, client onboarding or anything else, monday.com can help you get the job done in no time. It’s fully customizable, with a variety of options to create the perfect workflow for your team.
There is also a dedicated workflow menu to create different rules for your team. You can visually map out your workflow and automate tasks with several triggers. It also integrates with your favorite apps. For example, you can set it up to send an email to a project lead whenever a task status changes from In Progress to Completed. Paid plans start at $9/month.
5 Click Up
ClickUp is a single tool that can be used for multiple purposes: apart from effective project management, you can create documents, track time, chat with team members, brainstorm ideas using whiteboards, create forms, and much more.
You can visualize your tasks in different views, add relevant task details, and even glance at your goals from the sidebar. Among them, Docs is a great add-on for creating a company wiki, company home, knowledge base, and team hub, making it easy for new team members to understand your company rules and details.
Like Asana, it has a clean homepage for checking tasks, calendar, work, assignments, and more. These cards can be customized with different themes and views. It also has a ClickUp Brain add-on that connects every aspect of your work with AI. Unlimited plans start at $10 per month.
From chaos to control
No matter which tool you choose, all the basics are covered: task management, project progress, team communication, etc. Each offers enough tools to achieve your goals, so choose one based on your budget, preferences, and team size.
Apart from a project management solution, you’ll also need to invest in a cloud storage provider to store and sync all your important project files and media. If you want to know more about the differences between the top options like Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and Nextcloud, check out our comparison article.
