5 best project management tools for small businesses and startups

Starting a new business or running a startup is no small feat. With hundreds of tasks, deadlines, and teams to coordinate, staying organized and efficient can be challenging at times. Here is where project management tools come into play, which are tailor-made for startups and small businesses. From different project views and third-party app integrations, to real-time collaboration, these tools ensure your projects run from start to finish without getting sidetracked.

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1 Asana

When it comes to project management tools for small teams, you can’t go wrong with Asana. It can be your ideal companion to track tasks, manage projects, and generate company insights. Right off the bat, Asana shows a neat Home page with your upcoming, overdue, and completed tasks, current projects, and frequent collaborators.

The home menu is quite customizable with different background shades and useful widgets like tasks, goals, status updates, private notepads, forms, and comments. Among them, I adore the private notepad option, where I can write down my quick thoughts and feedback that I want to remember to share with team members.

As for project management, it supports different project views like List, Board, Gantt, Dashboard, Calendar, and more. Workflow is a handy productivity booster to automate your team’s repetitive work. You can basically create workflows to connect people and tools using set rules, forms, and templates. You can also use Slack integration to turn ideas and action items from a Slack conversation into a trackable task or comment in Asana. The possibilities are endless here.

There is also a dedicated Messages section with its own chat channel where you can start a conversation with your team about tasks. Asana has native apps on all the major platforms. The pricing starts at $11 per month.

2 Airtable

Airtable is another solid project management solution for small businesses and startups. It comes with a robust collection of templates in different categories like project management, product & design, IT & support, marketing, engineering, and more. Overall, you won’t have a hard time getting started with Airtable.

Compared to Asana, Airtable does require a learning curve. But once you get past the learning curve, you won’t look back at other tools. As for project management tools, you can switch between different custom views, check project status at the top, and enter all the relevant details like status, deadline, description, group, assignee with their availability, employment type, and more.

Airtable shines at customization, app integration, and AI. It also acts as a no-code tool where you can even build custom apps based on your business needs. You can seamlessly connect to your everyday tools and collaborate without breaking a sweat. As for pricing, it starts at $24 per month.

3 Basecamp

Source: Basecamp

Unlike Airtable, Basecamp focuses on simplicity to get through your complex tasks and projects. Once you start with a project, create a straightforward one-page dashboard for your messages, tasks, chats, docs, and track the entire project activity from the bottom menu.

As always, Basecamp supports multiple views, offers a rich task description field, real-time communication with team members, quick access to your tasks, bookmarks, schedule, and more. You can also save any project as a template and reuse it again in the future. Other features include integration with third-party apps, native apps, timesheet view, mission control to track goals, and more.

You can pay $15/mo on a per-user basis, or, Basecamp offers a rather unique fixed price option of $299 per month (when billed annually) for unlimited users. Even if you expand your team in the future and bring more users on board, you can continue using all the Basecamp features without paying extra.

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4 monday.com

Speaking of the top tools for small teams, how could we leave monday.com out of the list? It goes beyond project management and offers a one-stop solution to manage resources, sales, and overall workflow.

Whether you want to create contact management, lead management, customer projects, customer onboarding, and more, monday.com can get the job done in no time. It’s totally customizable and comes with a bunch of options to create an ideal workflow for your team.

There is also a dedicated workflow menu to create different rules for your teams. You can visually map out your workflow with several triggers to automate your tasks. You can also integrate it with your favorite apps. For instance, you can set it to email your project lead whenever a task status changes from Doing to Done. The paid plans start at $9 per month.

5 ClickUp

ClickUp serves multiple purposes with a single tool. Apart from effective project management, you can create docs, track time, chat with team members, brainstorm ideas using whiteboards, create forms, and much more.

You can visualize tasks in different views, add relevant task details, and even glance over goals from the sidebar. Among them, Docs is an excellent add-on to create a company wiki, company home, knowledge base, and team hub. Your new team members won’t have a hard time getting started with company rules and details.

Like Asana, it shows a neat home page to check your tasks, agenda, work, assignments, and more. These cards are quite customizable with different themes and views. There is also a ClickUp Brain add-on to connect every aspect of your work with AI. The Unlimited plan starts at $10 per month.

From chaos to control

Whichever tool you choose, they all cover the basics like task management, project progress, and team communication. Each one offers ample tools to achieve your goals. You should pick one based on your budget, preferences, and team size.

Apart from a project management solution, you should also invest in a cloud storage provider to save and sync all your essential project files and media. Check our comparison post if you want to learn more about the differences between top options like Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and Nextcloud.