Best Agile Project Management Tools for Project Managers

Best Agile Project Management Tools for Project Managers

Agile is one of the most widely adopted project management and software development methodologies. It helps teams to have full control over their projects and provides the ability to complete those projects in phases. The final outcome is high quality and one that fits perfectly with the customers’ expectations. 

If you are a project manager and decide to adopt the agile methodology within your organization, you will find a plethora of tools that will help you accomplish your projects. As there are numerous tools available, it is obvious that you can get overwhelmed in choosing the right fit for your project. 

To make it easy for you, we have curated a list of some of the best agile project management tools that you can leverage within your organization. But before that, let us briefly understand what exactly agile is and how it is beneficial in project management. 

So, let us get started!

What is Agile? 

The general meaning of agile is the ability to move easily and quickly. The same applies in the context of project management. 

Agile is a popular and extensively used project management and software development methodology. It is an iterative approach to delivering value to customers quickly with fewer obstacles. Instead of delivering the entire project at the end of the development, agile emphasizes delivering the project in small increments. 

The primary idea of agile is breaking a large problem into small tasks and performing those tasks in short and incremental phases called sprints. The principal objective of agile is rapid and continuous delivery, continuous improvement, and easy adaptation to changing requirements.

In a nutshell, agile is a project management methodology that helps teams save time and money and provides the ability to make changes to a project anytime during its life cycle. 

Advantages of Agile for Project Management

Agile provides a lot of benefits when it comes to project management. These benefits are as follows:

  • Maximum customer satisfaction
  • Faster deployment of solutions for customers
  • Reduced waste
  • Increased flexibility for making changes
  • Faster turnaround times
  • Eliminates rework
  • Emphasizes the needs of customers
  • Improved collaboration between team members, stakeholders, and project managers. 
  • Faster and early detection of errors

10 Best Agile Project Management Tools

Let us now delve into our list of the best agile project management tools that you must consider using within your organization. 

1. Monday.com

It is a work management and productivity application that helps you and your team to manage projects effectively. It provides all management and collaboration features. This tool gives you a visual workspace where you and your team members will get your work done. It helps you organize, manage, and track all your work under one roof. 

Besides project management, you can use Monady.com for software development, marketing, creative and design, sales & CRM, task management, operations, human resource, and operations. 

This tool lets you centralize all your files, tools, and processes and work into a single Works OS. It bridges the gap between all teams within an organization and serves as a source of truth. 

Features

  • This tool lets you plan, organize, manage, and track all your work.
  • Keep everyone updated with real-time notifications. 
  • It makes team management easy with just a single click. 
  • You can mention people using ‘@’ in order to collaborate with the right people. 
  • It lets you track the daily activities of your team members. 
  • With the help of filters, you can track daily, weekly, or monthly tasks. 
  • It supports multiple views to analyze your data visually. 
  • You can measure the time required to accomplish each task with the help of the work time tracker. 
  • It allows you to create spreadsheets and charts, such as Gantt charts, Pie charts, and Kanban boards. 

Pros

Cons

  • Supports unlimited users and offers unlimited boards. 
  • The pricing plans are suitable for business based on the number of team members. 
  • Provides a Kanban-style visual layout.
  • Capable of handling complex projects. 
  • Easy integration with third-party applications. 
  • Available in multiple languages. 
  • Adding every member to the tool costs you extra charges. 
  • Adding a subtask can be pretty challenging. 

Pricing

There are three different pricing options available. They are as follows: 

  • Individual: Free forever
  • Basic: $8 per seat/month
  • Standard: $10 per seat/month
  • Pro: $16 per seat/month
  • Enterprise: Custom pricing

2. ClickUp

This highly customizable project management tool is a central place for all your work, goals, docs, files, and more. It is a productivity tool that helps you bring your team together and organize and manage all your tasks in one place. It is ideal for every type of team, whether it is an agile team working based on weekly sprints or a marketing team working on Black Friday promotions. 

As it is customizable, you can modify it and make it in a way that fits your needs. It allows you to manage every type of team, from small to large enterprises. The Everything view helps you find anything that you are looking for, regardless of its residence in any hierarchy. 

This tool is ideal for engineering, marketing, design, operations, and human resource teams. You can keep track of the work of your team members and bring them together under one roof to make collaboration easy. 

Features

  • This tool provides more than 15 different views. You can do your work in any of the supported views that is comfortable for you. 
  • Without the need to write a single line of code, you can customize ClickUp to fit your needs. 
  • It lets you automate your routine work by providing more than 50 actions, triggers, and conditions. 
  • It can seamlessly integrate with over 1000 other applications. 
  • ClickUp provides outstanding collaboration features that include whiteboards, comments, email, proofing, and chat. 
  • The ClickUp doc helps you document and share anything with your team, whether it is a list of bugs or meeting minutes. 
  • Reporting features assist you in setting goals, tracking progress, and managing resources effectively. 
  • This tool lets you make the most of your time with global time tracking, time estimates, and time reporting. 

Pros

Cons

  • To avail of basic management services, the free plan works. 
  • Offers a customer-centric approach.
  • Provides drag-and-drop functionality. 
  • Offers a plethora of templates.
  • Support multiple projects. 
  • It is not ideal for individuals. 
  • Reporting features are not up to the mark as compared to other tools. 

Pricing

ClickUp offers five different pricing options, as follows: 

  • Free Forever: Free
  • Unlimited: $5 per member/month
  • Business: $12 per member/month
  • Business Plus: $19 per member/month
  • Enterprise: Custom pricing 

3. Wrike

Are you struggling with managing multiple projects? If so, Wrike is a solution for you. It is a cloud-based task management and collaboration tool. It is suitable for many kinds of project teams, including marketing, IT, product management, agile software development, design project management, and engineering project management. 

Every team within an organization leverages Wrike to manage its projects with 360-degree visibility, cross-departmental collaboration, and out-of-the-box automation. 

All this can be achieved by ensuring peace of mind because Wrike provides enterprise-grade security. It supports user authentication, role-based access control, and 99% uptime. In addition, Wrike Lock is an extra security layer that allows you to own and manage the encryption keys to control cloud data. 

Features

  • Wrike lets you create and configure your team’s workspace, where you can bring the entire team together, workflows, and favorite tools together. The permission setup allows you to control access and visibility. 
  • It lets you create unlimited items, such as tasks, projects, folders, and subtasks. You can even assign tasks to different team members to streamline the workflow. 
  • With smart artificial intelligence, you can convert your rough work notes into subitems. 
  • The calendar view allows you to display your work items in the calendar view. It helps you know what items you need to work on and when. 
  • The Kanban-style board view makes it easy to track the progress or status of your work and helps you identify overdue tasks. 
  • You do not have to switch to Excel or Google Sheets. Wrike provides the table view to manage your work items. 
  • The time tracking feature helps you track the time spent by every team member on a specific task or project. 
  • Wrike provides a live document editor that allows team members to edit attachments without downloading the files and then editing them. 
  • This tool seamlessly integrates with over 400 applications, including HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoom, Slack, and many others. 

Pros

Cons

  • Easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor
  • Provides security protocols
  • Round-the-clock support
  • Unlimited project support in the free version
  • Expensive for small teams or individuals

Pricing

Wrike provides four different pricing editions, as follows: 

  • Free: Free forever
  • Team: $9.80 per user/month
  • Business: $24.80 per user/month
  • Enterprise: Custom pricing 

4. JIRA

JIRA is a popular issue-tracking, project management, and software development solution. It is the #1 tool that provides out-the-of-box features and the best agile practices. It lets you split large ideas into small chunks and distribute them across the team members, along with issues, tasks, and user stories. You can get complete visibility of your team member’s work. Also, you can prioritize and track their tasks. 

With real-time visual data, JIRA helps you improve your team members' performance and efficiency. No-code automation helps you and your team to save time as it takes care of repetitive tasks. In addition, there are ready-to-use templates, and you can customize them to manage the workflow however you want. 

Features

  • JIRA lets you manage your team and project through Scrum and Kanban boards. With the Scrum board, you can divide a large project into small and manageable tasks and assign tasks to different team members. The Kanban board helps you visualize the progress of each task. 
  • The roadmaps help teams get visibility into their projects' progress and provide the context to make better and quicker decisions. 
  • The dashboards and reports provided by JIRA offer you detailed insights into your project’s progress. This helps you ensure your team members are up-to-date and on track. 
  • You can extend the functionality of JIRA by integrating it with 3000+ third-party applications. 
  • With the JIRA automation feature, you can automate any task within your workflow. Some popular ready-to-use automation templates include auto-create sub-tasks, smart auto-assign, clone issues, sync parent and child tasks, and change the due date. 
  • Open DevOps is yet another out-of-the-box feature that allows development teams to develop, deploy, and manage high-quality software applications. 

Pros

Cons

  • Built for agile and scrum management 
  • Best issue management solution
  • Highly customizable
  • Centralized administration
  • Difficult to setup
  • No built-in timeline
  • No collaboration features
  • Expensive

Pricing

You can subscribe to one out of four pricing plans of JIRA. These plans are as follows: 

  • Free: Free forever
  • Standard: $7.75 per user/month
  • Premium: $15.25 per user/month
  • Enterprise: Custom pricing

5. Kanbanize

Kanbanize is a powerful, agile management tool that blends Kanban-style features and business automation into one. It is the only project management software that can scale in both dimensions - vertically and horizontally. This tool lets you start with a single team and later scale up to thousands of teams without losing anything. 

This tool is ideal for teams looking to manage multiple projects, prioritize their work, and streamline their processes more efficiently. It allows you to break down a large project into small tasks and assign each task to different teams and team members. In addition, Kanbanize helps you visualize the status of each task and the overall project. 

Features

  • The Kanban board helps you visualize your workflow and gain more transparency of work. Tasks are in the form of Kanban cards, where members can move cards into different sections. In this way, you can track the status of each task. 
  • You can interlink multiple Kanban boards on a team as well as management level. This lets you combine different workflows across your organization and easily manage team dependencies.
  • Swimlanes in Kanbanize are horizontal stripes that separate the Kanban boards into sections. This makes it possible to categorize different types of activities.
  • The sub-column structure helps you organize your work and provide your workflow with a more refined structure. 
  • You can create a card or task template with predefined properties and add as many subtasks as possible. This comes in handy for recurring tasks. 
  • The summarized reports help you keep track of each task and the overall project. 
  • Setting the Work In Progress (WIP) limits per user is possible. This indicates the maximum number of tasks a user can have in a workflow. Not only can you limit the number of tasks but also the phases of your workflow. 
  • Kanbanize can integrate with other this-party tools and services to help you accomplish projects quickly. 

Pros

Cons

  • Highly customizable
  • Flexibility
  • Extensible
  • All-the-time support
  • Excellent visualization capabilities 
  • A pretty steep learning curve
  • Single assignee to each Kanban card
  • No due date assignments to subtasks

Pricing

Kanbanize provides two different pricing options, namely Standard and Enterprise. Also, it charges according to the number of users and business rules. 

6. Asana

Asana is yet another agile project management tool that is suitable for all types of teams. It helps cross-functional teams of an organization work together and deliver work faster. In a single shared space, Asana allows you to bring your teams’ work together and choose the project view the way you want. 

With Asana, you can get rid of repetitive or routine tasks by automating them. Using a visual tool, You can customize your workflow according to the team. With real-time charts and reports, you are able to keep an eye on the progress of your project and each team member’s work. 

Features

  • Asana provides four options to visualize your work. They are Boards, List, Timelines, and Calendar. Choose anyone that you feel your team will be comfortable with. 
  • From the project initiation to termination, Asana helps you in every stage. Using any type of workflow visualization, you can break down your project into small manageable pieces of work called tasks. You can even break down a task into multiple sub-tasks. 
  • For each task, you can assign an owner, set the due date, its priority, and any other custom field that you feel is important to mention. 
  • You can attach files from your local computer, Google Drive, or Dropbox to individual tasks. 
  • Asana allows you to maintain the same task in multiple projects and synchronize it without any extra effort. 
  • Each team member can see the real-time overview of their associated projects. 
  • You get notified of any updates about the projects, task changes, and conversations. 
  • Asana makes it possible to limit access to a specific project. You can add only the necessary members to a project and protect sensitive data. In addition, you can make our project public if all your organization's members are involved. 
  • Team members of the project can comment on tasks and mention specific teammates by using the @ symbol. Also, a team member can add others as followers, allowing them to stay updated and notified about task updates. 

Pros

Cons

  • Easy to use 
  • Simple to set up
  • Easy collaboration
  • Extensible 
  • Customizable
  • No time-tracking feature
  • Not out-of-the-box chat and note-taking features

Pricing

The following are the three different pricing plans for Asana: 

  • Basic: Free forever
  • Premium: $10.99 per user/month
  • Business: $24.99 per user/month

7. Nifty

Nifty is yet another popular agile project management tool that helps teams improve their productivity by reducing the number of development cycles. It is suitable for a variety of teams, including IT, sales, marketing, engineering, client management, and product. Teams can manage tasks both in the Kanban board and list views. 

By providing all the necessary management and collaboration tools under one roof, Nifty has allowed teams to be more efficient and productive. In addition, you can integrate Nifty with more than 2000 external applications to achieve a higher level of automation. 

If you were using any other project management tool and now wish to switch to Nifty, migrating all your projects and tasks is a breeze. You can easily move your projects, files, tasks, and teams from Asana, JIRA, Trello, ClickUp, and even Spreadsheets to Nifty. 

Features

  • Nifty makes collaboration among people involved in projects easy with the Discussions feature. It enables project members to communicate in real-time and share their ideas, suggestions, and feedback. 
  • You can organize and manage your project tasks in different views, including Kanban, Swimlane, List, Timeline, and Calendar. 
  • Using the ‘My Work’ section, you can have complete control over your assigned tasks and their due dates.  
  • By assigning timelines to tasks, you can create milestones. In addition, you can even set tasks to recur by date. 
  • Every member can track the process or time other members spend completing their respective tasks. This brings clear transparency between all team members.
  • You can create collaborative documents and attach them to your projects. You can choose Nifty Doc or Google Doc, Spreadsheet, or Presentation for creating documents. 
  • You can attach files from your local computer, Google Drive, or Dropbox for any task. 
  • The Master Overview feature allows you to gain insights into all the projects and milestones. In addition, you can see your team’s completed, active, and to-do tasks, along with the deadline and time log. 

Pros

Cons

  • Easy to use and intuitive interface
  • Support team is amazing
  • Unlimited guest support
  • Multiple project views
  • No custom automation
  • No PDF annotation
  • Limited free plan

Pricing

You can subscribe to any of the following pricing plans of Nifty: 

  • Free: Free forever
  • Starter: $39 per month
  • Pro: $79 per month
  • Business: $124 per month
  • Unlimited: $399 per month

8. Teamwork

Teamwork is a task management tool that helps organizations manage clients’ work more efficiently and productively. It is the only tool specially developed for client work. You can deliver work on time within the given budget constraints while eliminating client chaos. 

This tool combines everything in one place, allowing you to manage your team, tasks, projects, freelancers, and clients. It provides all advanced project management features, from time tracking to resource allocation and budgeting. 

Moreover, Teamwork provides ready-to-use project management templates for different teams, including IT, marketing, engineering, sales, project management, and operations. 

As it is a client-focused tool, Teamwork provides unlimited client access and many other features, such as invoicing, to run all client projects swiftly. 

Features

  • The Kanban board view helps you visualize your projects and their associated tasks and manage them with ease.
  • With the help of time-tracking software, you can effortlessly track and create bills for all your client projects. 
  • You can have a complete view of all your projects in a single interface. This helps you prevent any obstacles and keep work going. 
  • Automations help you get rid of repetitive tasks and streamline your workflow. 
  • Teamwork also supports the Gantt chart view of your projects, where you can visualize your projects with milestones.
  • Break down projects into smaller tasks and tasks into sub-tasks. Also, assign tasks to different team members. 
  • Collaboration is also easy with messages, chat, files, and notebooks.
  • You get a comprehensive view of your project budget, allowing you to track it at every phase of your project.  

Pros

Cons

  • Real-time collaboration
  • Time-tracking
  • Amazing filter options to get the desired information
  • Unlimited client access
  • Customizable 
  • No chat option
  • Fewer integration options

Pricing

You can choose the right pricing plan for Teamwork for your organization. 

  • Free: Free forever
  • Deliver: $9.99 per user/month
  • Grow: $17.99 per user/month
  • Scale: Custom pricing

9. Active Collab

Active Collab is a robust, agile project management solution allowing professionals complete control over their projects. It helps you efficiently manage all your work, from start to end. Also, it makes collaboration between cross-functional teams easy. 

Like all other project management tools, Active Collab also allows you to split projects into multiple tasks and tasks into sub-tasks. You can assign tasks to different members and set due dates so that they never miss a deadline. 

Features

  • You can easily import your projects from other project management tools into Active Collab. 
  • This tool allows users to manage their projects in different views, including Kanban, Gantt, List, and Calendar. 
  • Among all projects and tasks, you can easily identify the one you want by filtering through different options, such as category, label, client, project lead, etc. 
  • Active Collab allows you to set due dates for each task, assign it to a particular team member, label it with a handful of color options, and attach files from your local computer, Google Drive, or Dropbox. 
  • The best part of this tool is that it lets you assign a team member even to subtasks. Hence, there are very few chances for misunderstandings. 
  • There is no need to create recurring tasks, as the tool takes care of them. In addition, you can batch-edit the properties of multiple tasks. 
  • Through the user roles, you can complete control over your projects. Member, Member+, Client+, and Owner are the different user roles available. 
  • The in-app chat prevents you and your team members from leaving the app and collaborating easily. You can even create custom groups, add comments for tasks by mentioning specific individuals using @, and easily discuss the project.

Pros

Cons

  • Easy to use
  • Reliable with an intuitive interface
  • Rich features at a moderate price
  • Unlimited projects
  • No sprint planning option
  • A few issues with the customization

Pricing

The following are the three subscription plans for Active Collab:

  • Plus: $9.5 for three members per month
  • Pro: $8 per member/month
  • Pro + Get Paid: $11.75 per member/month 

10. Smartsheet

The last agile project management tool on our list is Smartsheet. Managing projects, automating processes, and scaling up to enterprise-level programs, everything is possible with Smartsheet. Whether your team is marketing, IT, or operations, this tool is a perfect fit for you. 

Smartsheet provides a variety of workflows, views, dashboards, and reports to track and manage your projects and the required resources. In addition, you can integrate a wide range of external tools to extend the functionality of Smartsheet and get your work done. 

Features

  • The activity log allows you to track the changes made by team members over time on spreadsheets, reports, and dashboards. 
  • You can create cards for tasks, add a team member as an assignee, assign a color code, and add custom fields. 
  • Smartsheet comes with WorkApps, a no-code tool for creating web applications and mobile apps. 
  • Work Insights allows you to gain insights into what is happening in your project, bottlenecks, and key trends and activities. 
  • You can visualize your workflow in four styles: Card View, Gantt View, Calendar View, and Grid View. 
  • Smartsheet allows you to share sheets, dashboards, or reports with people inside and outside an organization, even if they do not have a Smartsheet account. 

Pros

Cons

  • Automated workflow
  • Extensive reporting capabilities
  • Improved team collaboration
  • Flexible and affordable pricing options
  • Steep learning curve
  • Limited activity log

Pricing

Smartsheet offers the following subscription plans: 

  • Free: Free forever
  • Pro: $7 per user/month
  • Business: $25 per user/month
  • Enterprise: Custom pricing

Conclusion

With a plethora of agile project management tools available in the market, it is obvious to get overwhelmed when choosing the best one. You can consider choosing your agile project management tool from our list, as we have listed some of the best and most popularly used agile tools. 

Before choosing any tool, we recommend you try its free version to explore its features and determine whether it suits your projects. If you think we should mention some other popular agile project management tools on the above list, feel free to share them with us in the comments section below. 

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Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is an agile project management tool?

An agile project management tool is computer software that helps agile teams improve their efficiency, customer satisfaction, and financial state. The primary objective of agile project management is to deliver value to customers quickly and continuously in increments. It divides the project into small builds that are developed and tested concurrently by self-organizing teams. Agile project management tools help team members collaborate, solve bit-sized problems, and track work progress.  

2. How should I choose agile project management tools?

It is essential to choose the right project management tool. To do so, you need to consider certain factors that are as follows: 

  • Team management
  • Generating reports, like bug reports and activity reports
  • Software rate
  • Tool vendor support and update policy

3. What are the types of agile methodologies?

The different types of agile methodologies include Kanban, Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Adaptive Project Framework (APF), Crystal, and Lean development. 

4. Is Kanban agile? 

Yes, Kanban is an agile methodology whose primary goal is continuous improvement, enhanced workflow, and flexibility in task management. As it is an illustrative approach, it makes it easy to understand the progress of the whole project in a glance. 

5. Is JIRA an agile tool?

Yes, JIRA is an agile project management tool and supports any agile methodology, whether it is Kanban or Scrum. It is an all-in-one tool for planning, tracking, and managing all your agile software development projects. 

 

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Sameeksha Medewar

With 3+ years of experience in curating highly-informative and well-researched technical blogs, Sameeksha is a passionate technical writer, technology enthusiast, and computer science graduate. She holds experience writing articles in niches like software testing, programming languages, like C++, Python, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript, computer networking, and data science.

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