Best Task Management Tools for 2021: How to Achieve Your Goals and Promote Smooth Work Process

Winston Churchill said

“Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning”.

Even though he was not talking about successfully running a business, his quote is applicable for every project: business, political, or academic nature. Successfully managing your time when doing tasks and careful planning and execution of activities that are to bring profit to your business is only possible when you are organized, attentive to details, and have a good memory. Since you can’t do all that without any help (as you need to focus on the quality of the products/services you are selling), you’d be happy to know that task management tools exist to facilitate your life. Without them, you won’t be able to deliver the value you have promised to your client. Let’s elaborate on the topic.

What is a task management tool?

A task management tool enables you to plan your work strategy, organize your tasks, and prioritize them according to significance and deadlines. Its purpose is to establish a smooth flow of the work activities while being interconnected with all the team members working on the project. These tools are designed to precisely pinpoint the work issues of project managers and help sort them out. They explicitly tend to the project’s requirements and ensure that project managers and team members won’t miss any deadlines or suppress budgets. 

What can a task management tool do?

Think about the whole organizational process from setting a goal and assigning a task to its completion in one place – that is what a management tool helps you do – stop losing valuable time in organizing notes, looking for info in your mails, and not prioritizing the tasks. With the time and task management tools, you can visualize the whole process from start to finish and observe the different stages of work, monitor how your team performs, and ensure that all deadlines are met. If we are, to sum up, the activities that a task management tool does, here is the list:

• Organize, prioritize, and assign details, files, feedback
• Delegate tasks to team members
• Set deadlines
• Adjust work schedules
• Get real-time task status updates
• Run reports
• Streamline communication
• … and much, much more (depending on the tool you have chosen)

What will happen if you don’t use task management tools?

You might think, “Well, how did people organize themselves in the past, when there were no such tools, and yet did everything fine while making a lot of money with their businesses?”

Yes, you are right to have doubts, mainly because these tools are relatively new to the market. And they have been available for businesses to use since 2010. However, the truth is that we live in a very dynamic world in which each second counts. In the past, people used lots of different tools that helped them organize including notepads, project plans, whiteboards, manually crafted planners, and so on. Today, you have all you need in one of these online tools, which is only a click away.

Also, not using them will lead to:

• Not meeting the expectations of the client
• Decreased visibility of the process flow
• Missed deadlines
• Loss of credibility
• Inability to accept changes 

Top 4 Best Task Management Tools

There are many team task management tools available on the market right now, both free and paid versions. I did my research to find which of them are considered the best task management tools, and I’m happy to present to you their features and pros and cons objectively. So, let’s begin. 

Asana

Asana is a task management software that helps you keep on course all activities for each project you work on. With it, you can file and track bug reports and sprints, prioritize tasks and make fast changes, plan and manage the marketing content calendars and campaigns, plan events, requests, product launches, and so on. You can even track prospects through your sales funnel and manage customer accounts while onboarding new clients.  

Asana is rated very high; it is a 4.5-star project management app considered an excellent collaboration tool. It is flexible and has a huge range of capabilities, and best of all, there is a free version you can use.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Asana

Asana Uses

• To communicate: both for formal announcements within the team and informal chats
• To track bugs: by creating a “bugs project”
• To run general project management, which is the most important role of Asana – to break projects into tasks and milestones.  
• To give suggestions and requests from the team members
• To track applicants for a newly open position at the company
• To organize and handle meeting agendas. 

Asana Pricing

You can choose from four options when it comes to using Asana’s tiers:

• Basic for individuals or teams just getting started with project management – free
• Premium for teams that need to create project plans with confidence – $13.49 per person per month
• Business for teams and companies that need to manage work across initiatives $30.49 per person per month
• Enterprise for organizations that need additional security, control, and support – price calculated upon a quote

Paying annually grants you a discount. 

ClickUp

ClickUp is a task-management tool that works as a cloud-based platform and caters to the need of all types and sizes of teams and businesses. It is an all-in-one online solution that imports business applications. It offers a variety of features – reminders, setting goals, calendars, schedules clearly visible dashboards, etc. You can fully customize it according to your needs and use its full potential to plan, organize and collaborate within the team. 

It has a 4.7 star-rating due to the fact that its scope of management can be described in four groups: 

• process management (it is used to streamline projects and workflows with the right steps), task management (to organize and execute plans), 
• time management (to create schedules and calendars, track time, and manage capacity), and 
• collaboration and reporting (to communicate within the team, report, and share information).

Advantages and Disadvantages of ClickUp

ClickUp Uses

• To plan and visualise the project plans
• To track bugs, manage sprint, or launch products
• To establish a smooth remote work

Click Up Pricing

There are 4 pricing plans that ClickUp offers:

• Free forever which offers 100 MB of Storage, Unlimited Tasks, Unlimited Members, Two-factor Authentication.
• Unlimited which offers Unlimited Storage, list, board, calendar views, integrations, Dashboards, Guests and Permissions, Goals, Portfolios, and Custom Fields – $5 per member per month ($9 per member if paid annually
• Business which offers Everything Unlimited from previous plan + Google SEO, SOal Folders, Custom Exporting, Private, Protected, and Default Views, All dashboard Widgets, Extra Guests, All Automations, Mind Maps & Timeline Views, Advanced Time tracking, Workload – $9 per member per month ($19 if paid annually) and
• Enterprise which offers Single Sign-on, Contact Review & HIPAA, Increased API Limits, Dedicated Success manager, Advanced Permissions, Advanced Workload, Custom SAML, Extra Automations, Custom Onboarding, Training Program, White Labelling – price calculated upon quote

Jira

Jira is an excellent task management tool for midsize and large business companies introduced by Atlassian. It provides good integration with other Atlassian products, so if you are a fan of this enterprise vendor, Jira will certainly meet your project management needs. Jira is considered to be one of the best agile task management tools specifically for software teams. You can plan sprints, create user stories and issues, and distribute tasks within the team. Also, you can track and prioritize the tasks while discussing the team’s work in complete visibility. Finally, you can improve team performance by looking at real-time visual data.

Jira is rated 3.5 stars as a robust desk solution that integrates well with many third-party modules. 

Advantaged and Disadvantages of Jira

Jira Uses:

It can be used by web developers, project managers, engineers, managers, and other business professionals not involved in technology.

• To track bugs related to software and apps during their development process. 
• To run general project management of tasks
• Kanban software development to provide users with complete visibility of the working process
• Scrum software development
• To track results and outcomes

Jira Pricing

The same as Asana, Jira also has four tiers of pricing plans:

• Free for small teams to plan and track work more efficiently (10 users) – free
• Standard for growing teams focused on building more together (10.000 users) – $7 per user / $70 a month
• Premium for organizations that need to scale how they collaborate and track work (10.000 users) – $14 per user/ $140 a month
• Enterprise for enterprises with global scale, security, and governance needs (10.000 users) – billed annually when 801 or more users are entered.

Trello 

Trello is a very intuitive task management tool that lets you completely customize the boards that you create. It is not a project management tool; let’s clear this out at the very beginning; however, it is an excellent tool for managing work and workflows. With its help, you can collaborate, manage projects, and reach your productivity peak. Over one million teams worldwide use Trello, including Google, Tinder, Squarespace, and Costco. 

With Trello, you can use lists and cards to build blocks of tasks on a board which then you can assign, set timelines, check productivity metrics, make calendars, etc. There is even a built-in automation tool called Butler that reduces the number of tedious tasks and clicks on your projects so you can focus on the work you need to do. Plus, you can easily integrate the apps that you use in the Trello workflow. 

Advantages and Disadvantages of Trello

Trello Uses

• To organize tasks on a daily level
• To track time
• To organize the reading list
• To manage the budget
• To do general project management for smaller projects.

Trello Pricing

There are three pricing plans you can choose from:

• Free for individuals and teams looking to be more productive – free
• Business class for teams that need to track multiple projects and visualize work in a variety of ways for up to 100 users – $10 per user per month bleed annually 
• Enterprise for companies that need to connect work across teams and enhance organization-wide controls, security, and support for more than 100 users – price based on a quote

TeamWork

Teamwork is a project management tool that comes with a huge variety of features that help task management. It is best for companies that must focus on deadlines and the improvement of team performance. What is great about this tool is the fact that it has ready-to-use project templates that aim at minimizing the manual efforts required for project task streamline. 

It has a 4.5-star rating and it is described as an easy task management software that anyone can use to manage the workflow. It has an extensive set of features that will help you even if your team grows extensively. 

Advantages and Disadvantages of TeamWork

TeamWork Uses

• To get an instant overview of team capacity
• To keep every project and tasks in clear sight
• To plan the project timeline
• To streamline communication 

TeamWork Pricing

There are four pricing plans you can choose from, plus a free trial of 30 days:

• Free Forever for individuals and small teams getting started with project management – free
• Deliver to manage multiple projects and delight your clients – $10 per user per month annually ($12.5 when billed monthly)
• Grow – ideal for larger teams with features to help get you efficient and organized – $18 per user per month annually ($22.5 when billed monthly)
• Enterprise for advanced security, extra speed, additional security, and priority support – price calculated upon quote

In Conclusion

Task management tools are essential for any company that focuses on quality and wants to provide nothing but value to its clients. With their use, the whole process of workflow is streamlined, facilitated and organized. Each team member can work more efficiently while the project manager can keep track of every activity in real-time while ensuring that the performance and productivity are on point. Needless to say, you have all data about a project in front of the eyes just by clicking on the dashboard. It is that simple.