What is Task Management Software and Its Significance?
Maintaining a grip on priorities can be challenging, particularly for small teams handling multifaceted roles. These teams manage various responsibilities, from client interactions to content marketing, product development, administrative tasks, and beyond.
In the absence of a structured task management approach, crucial assignments may fall through the cracks, leading to missed deadlines and dissatisfaction among customers.
This underscores the necessity for task management software. Such software serves as a centralized hub for work management and project planning, facilitating oversight from the project’s initiation to its conclusion.
It allows for the assignment of task lists to suitable team members within an environment designed for collaborative work. More importantly, it enables teams to focus on crucial tasks rather than spending valuable time on non-productive activities.
6 Best Task Management Software
At WPBeginner, our objective is to assist small businesses in competing effectively in the market. Task management tools expedite team productivity.
This motivated us to meticulously evaluate numerous task management solutions and present only those tools we consider as the most efficient.
1. Asana
In our evaluation, Asana stands out as the premier task management software suitable for small businesses. Beyond task management, Asana interconnects the entire spectrum of your company’s operations with overarching goals and business strategies, providing a method to deconstruct intricate projects into manageable tasks.
This platform empowers users to establish essential outcomes and objectives for the company, teams, and individuals, aligning and tracing their progress. Each task corresponds to a specific goal, ensuring that efforts are directed towards high-priority tasks. Asana also offers goal-related reporting to monitor progress throughout the organization.
Asana’s adaptability and versatility cater to the specific needs of your team. Its user-friendly interface allows for the creation of automated workflows without requiring any coding expertise. For instance, specific tasks passing designated stages can be automatically reassigned to the next person in the workflow, or recurrent tasks can be scheduled to prevent the oversight of important activities. Furthermore, Asana provides multiple viewing options for projects and tasks, including lists, kanban boards, timelines, calendars, portfolios, and workloads.
The platform’s free version is notably comprehensive, a feature often lacking in many free plans offered by task management software for small businesses. Asana’s free plan supports unlimited projects, messaging, file storage, multiple project files, and more, without major restrictions. Additionally, Asana is accessible through a mobile app for both iOS and Android devices, allowing users to manage their to-do lists on the go.
2. Kanban Boards for WordPress
Kanban Boards for WordPress introduces the popular project management methodology directly into your dashboard at no cost. It offers a seamless solution for businesses seeking to manage straightforward to-do lists without overwhelming complexities. The customizable project boards allow easy editing directly from the user interface.
This plugin facilitates the creation and assignment of tasks to team members, including due dates and tracking the time required for completion. Additionally, users can establish custom views to filter the board based on various criteria.
Why opt for Kanban boards in WordPress rather than platforms like Asana or Monday.com? WordPress is an essential platform for consistent content publication, crucial in driving traffic and converting visitors into customers. Leveraging Kanban boards in WordPress allows for comprehensive planning and the creation of adaptable editorial calendars. It’s worth noting that to fully integrate calendar views, you may consider combining Kanban Boards for WordPress with other calendar-specific plugins, as this tool itself does not offer a calendar view.
The installation of this Trello-like kanban board within WordPress is remarkably straightforward. Simply install the plugin, configure a few settings, and begin creating tasks, assigning them to your team.
3. ClickUp
ClickUp stands out as an all-encompassing task management platform, offering arguably more features than any other option in this list.
A major draw of ClickUp is its extensive customization options tailored to various business models and workflows. The tool allows for full customization, incorporating different types of information into views through the custom fields feature. Additionally, the custom dashboard provides over 50 widgets to construct personalized dashboards, enabling users to monitor critical business metrics.
Moreover, ClickUp simplifies time management through its flexible time-tracking features. Even for remote work scenarios, time tracking remains invaluable. Users can efficiently track task completion times. Conversely, project managers can review previous timesheets to aid in more precise allocation of total hours per project.
A recent addition to their toolset is ClickUp AI, introducing artificial intelligence across multiple planning phases. ClickUp AI offers capabilities such as creating project timelines, drafting project briefs, generating emails, summarizing meeting notes, producing status reports, and more.
4. AirTable
AirTable stands as a highly adaptable cloud-based task management platform that empowers users to create custom databases and applications from the ground up. This capability allows for personalized organization of data, processes, and workflows, offering a level of flexibility that surpasses most other task management tools.
However, building from scratch may pose a challenge for individuals less tech-savvy. Luckily, Airtable provides numerous templates tailored to common use cases, facilitating adjustments to suit your company’s specific needs. These templates cover a diverse array of categories, from content production and software development to PR and real estate.
A notable feature of AirTable is its seamless integration with prevalent business tools, including WordPress. Given that over 43% of the internet relies on WordPress, such integrations offer substantial benefits to task management tools.
AirTable offers two methods for integration: its native WordPress integration and the Uncanny Automator tool. Both avenues provide users with the complete AirTable interface directly within their WordPress site.
5. Teamwork
Following is Teamwork, recognized for its collaboration-centric features in task management.
Teamwork exhibits prowess across various use cases, particularly excelling in client work and managing creative teams. Notably, it offers billable time tracking, custom branding, invoicing, intake forms, and client-collaborator access, facilitating seamless project management.
For creating client forms or questionnaires, we recommend employing a separate, more robust form builder such as WPForms.
Empowering clients by granting them partial access to Teamwork allows them to add comments and view task lists.
Teamwork seamlessly integrates with popular tools like Google Drive, Dropbox, Quickbooks, and others. This integration eliminates the need to switch between platforms to access necessary files or data.
While most task management software typically offers a free plan for individuals, Teamwork’s free tier encompasses more features than most competitors. Accessing their free plan provides premium features for up to 5 users, including automation, team availability, Gantt chart views, time tracking, and milestones—a rare offering within a free plan.
6. Smartsheet
Smartsheet is a web-based solution designed to aid companies of all sizes in task management, crowdsourcing, reporting, and more.
Consider Smartsheet as an advanced version of Excel spreadsheets. This familiarity is beneficial for companies accustomed to utilizing spreadsheets for project management purposes.
The system permits the inclusion of formulas and functions for calculations and data manipulation. This functionality is particularly valuable when aggregating data from various sheets or performing computations, such as tracking sales team revenue or generating financial projections based on the team’s current workflow pace.
An outstanding feature of Smartsheet is its advanced reporting capabilities. The platform facilitates easy amalgamation of crucial data from multiple sheets into a singular report, enabling the identification of trends and potential bottlenecks to facilitate continuous team improvement.
The flexibility of Smartsheet allows for diverse applications, akin to a spreadsheet, spanning from task management, budget tracking, inventory management, campaign tracking, expense categorization, and beyond. This tool’s adaptability presents numerous options, making it a potential replacement for various existing business tools.
However, Smartsheet may not offer the same user-friendliness as more popular task management software and lacks the familiar Kanban boards that have gained widespread appreciation.