Top 10 Best Creative Project Management Software in 2022

Project Management. Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

Starting a new project is fun. Getting the team together, drafting a plan, and defining goals get everyone’s creative juices flowing. After all, it’s all a game everyone has played before… until it comes to organizing all the ideas.

Most projects begin facing difficulties when ideas are disorganized and disordered. When the team is in disarray and roles and responsibilities unclear, or the project is too fast-paced, cracks start to appear.

The most successful projects often need creative project management software as an integral part of an organization’s workflow.

The typical project management software offers a single place to consolidate workflows, track feedback, and engage the project team and other collaborators. In addition, it features tools to reduce repetitive, technical, and administrative tasks.

However, if you want the best, you have to look beyond the standard features. The best tools in the market also nurture creativity and productivity in managing the project workflow. It should free the team to focus on delivering amazing results without worrying about how everything comes together.

With so many in the market, it can be a challenge to find the best creative project management software.

Lucky for you, we have analyzed and tested the top names in the niche and ordered them to save you time and effort in making the right choice. Please read on to discover them.

1. Trello

Trello is a fully-featured project management platform where teams can collaborate using lists, cards, and Kanban boards. In addition, the platform has a proprietary AI-powered ‘Butler’ that uses rule-based triggers to personalize workflow automation, project planning and management, and task tracking.

Trello has a board and card system that marks separate projects within a board with cards. This makes it easy for team members to keep track of and contribute to individual projects on a single board.

This project management software nurtures creativity and inspires collaboration with a robust commenting system and streamlined voting options.

Core Features of Trello

• It offers an easy drag-and-drop card management and task tracking system
• It simplifies task organization with colored labeling, searchable tags, and comments
• Provides quick overview and detailed views of front and back cards
• Features powerful data filters, progress meter checklists, and in-line editing
• Integrates with Jira project management platform

2. Teamwork

Teamwork is a powerful yet simple to figure out software that makes software management look easy. In addition, its excellent client permissions feature makes it one of the best project management software for agencies and businesses of any size.

The developers of Teamwork focused on implementing many time-saving and team and client collaboration features that make this software fast and efficient.

Core Features of Teamwork

• Teamwork’s automation features streamline projects to set the team free to focus on creative and strategic tasks
• Its in-depth time tracking feature helps teams track and bill clients for each project
• Offers robust resource management tools for efficient forecasting and capacity planning
• Provides a handy individual workload management tool
• Convenient client permission management makes it easy to include clients in projects

3. Monday.com

monday.com markets itself as more than a project management software. It is a Work Operating System (Work OS) built to empower teams to run workflows and projects confidently. Its intuitive and straightforward interface redefines workflows, adapts to the needs of the team, and brings transparency into project management.

On monday.com, team members manage projects on a central board that is the hub for each project. The main board is customizable to display in-depth details such as time spent on the project, members’ contributions, and timelines.

Core Features of monday.com

• Centralizes workflows and project management on a single customizable board
• Simplifies team communication and collaboration and stakeholder contribution
• Offers a range of popular views, including Workload, Calendar, Gantt charts, and Kanban

4. Flow

Flow is a flexible task and project management software that brings together projects, tasks, conversations, and timelines to help teams achieve more.

This sleek and intuitive software is targeted at creative teams in marketing, product development, and remote collaboration projects. With Flow, teams can centralize tasks, balance workloads, manage incoming requests, and eliminate repetitive administrative work to focus on creative collaboration.

Flow is packed with features that streamline planning and visualization.

Core Features of Flow

• Offers multiple dashboard views, including Board, List, and Calendar
• Flow’s simple drag-and-drop interface is easy to master and use
• Enables real-time comments and discussions, notifications, and schedule monitoring
• Supports task, project, and board filtering and sorting for better organization, tracking, and planning

5. nTask

If you manage a small team or are an individual looking for a cloud-based task management solution, you should check out nTask. This simple task management software offers the tools you need to collaborate with a small team or work individually. You can use it to assign tasks, automate recurring tasks, generate project reports, and attach and share files and checklists.

nTask is also great at monitoring users and project schedules. You can use it to plan, allocate resources, and evaluate team members’ time on tasks.

Core Features of nTask

• Offers robust task and project scheduling
• It makes it easy to prioritize tasks and notify team members of events and schedules
• Offers in-depth project and task tracking with Gantt charts and data filtering and sorting
• Provides handy time tracking, timesheets, and meeting management tools

7. Asana

Asana is a lot more than a mere project management software. It is also a task manager and a communication platform that provides detailed views and in-depth reporting.

Asana is designed to make design projects effortless. With over ten customized design templates and hundreds of integrations, it is a great software to create, track, and manage design projects with ease.

With Asana, project leads can assign and reassign tasks among team members, prioritize individual tasks, add comments, give feedback, and speed delivery.

Core Features of Asana

• Helps to quickly and easily manage teams by projects, tasks, timelines, and deadlines
• Offers detailed work and project management tools, including proofing, real-time discussions, and project and task monitoring
• Connects team members and encourages creative collaboration with a simplified task comments
• It makes team members’ lives easier with priority views, inbox, and search features

8. Workzone

Award-winning project management software Workzone aims at helping teams deliver complex projects on time. The software is a solution for document management, real-time project collaboration, and resource and task management.

Workzone offers detailed project information at multiple levels of detail to cater to different project team members. It also links dependent tasks and calculates timelines to help teams complete tasks on time.

Core Features of Workzone

• Includes automatic reminder notifications and emails and personal to-do lists to ensure teams stay on track
• Detailed workload reports provide teams with transparent views of project status and estimated completion times
• Enables team members to collaborate in the cloud — conveniently and securely with task sharing, reviews, and requests
• Offers file versioning tools to track document editing on-app

9. Milanote

Milanote is a web-based project collaboration software designed for creative teams. It is helpful in managing storyboards, writing briefs, note-taking, mind-mapping, and brainstorming ideas.

As a creative project management software, Milanote has a niche market. It is ideal for teams that primarily organize ideas in creative projects to produce stunning visuals, mood boards, and intensively analyze feedback from clients and management.

Core Features of Milanote

• Milanote is packed with a ton of features to promote creativity and remote collaboration
• Its simplified text editing and task management interface make it easy to collect and analyze notes and to-do lists
• Supports upload and manipulation of popular image and file types, including PDFs and design files
• It has a flexible drag-and-drop interface

10. Smartsheet

Smartsheet is a dynamic work platform that promises everything a team would need to plan, automate, document, manage, and report on work projects. It is an easy to use software with a colorful and intuitive interface and built-in features and templates designed to spur creativity.

With its several project visualization views, Smartsheet helps organize and view projects from different perspectives. This capability allows teams to map out and streamline their project workflows, allocate resources fairly, track tasks, and gather reports on project progress.

Core Features of Smartsheet

• Smartsheet is a quickly customizable and extensible platform with numerous templates, connectors, and integrations
• It has a simple-to-learn drag-and-drop interface
• Offers some of the most advanced team time and task management tools
• It comes with advanced reporting and task sharing features

Honorable Mentions

Scoro

Scoro is a comprehensive business management software that is built to target medium-sized creative agencies to deliver smart ways to get work done. Unlike most tools on this list, this project management software is a collection of multiple tools, including CRM, reporting, billing, and project management in one.

Scoro is popular among agencies that want to automate administrative work and organize projects and reports in one dashboard. The software improves intra-team communication and collaboration and offers superior project and task planning, management, and tracking.

Core Features of Scoro

• Promises real-time Gantt charts that adapt fast to changes and delays
• Provides a detailed overview of planned and executed activities, billings, and expenses
• Tracks project profitability in real-time, comparing budgets to forecasted results and margins
• It comes with a ton of sales and CRM features to optimize deals and opportunities

Wrike

Wrike is a versatile work management platform built to help small teams deliver fast results on creative projects. It is a collection of tools to help them get the visibility they need, streamline communication within the team, and boost productivity.

This project management tool is designed to adapt to the project, not the other way round, with customizable dashboards and shared calendars to Spaces and folders. It comes in handy when visualizing project timelines and deadlines, generating reports, and tracking each team member’s contribution and progress in the team.

Core Features of Wrike

• Provides complete transparency over every project for accessible project overviews and generating custom, dynamic reports
• It makes it easy to handle incoming requests by turning chats and group discussions into tasks
• Offers multiple purpose-built project templates
• Handy automated project workflows and management tools

Paymo

Paymo’s sleek and clean interface is designed to help agencies that handle many projects concurrently. This project management software helps teams organize projects and carry out administrative tasks without losing focus of their projects’ scopes.

With Paymo, team members can fully engage each other to encourage collaboration and nurture creativity on the same page. The software uses Timesheets to minimize project overlaps and idling. It also uses advanced task management tools to monitor progress, estimate project completion times, and ensure smooth workflow management.

Core Features of Paymo

• Paymo comes with resource management tools to track project time, bandwidth, and resource allocation
• Features Gantt charts and Portfolio Gantt gives users a broader project view to help them plan and schedule tasks
• It has a comprehensive task management tool that includes task templates and multi-user task assignments
• Uses Milestones to help team members set up custom alerts for tasks and events

ProofHub

ProofHub markets itself as a modern-day project management software that offers teams a central place to collaborate and complete projects. Its top-selling points are an intuitive, easy-to-understand interface and simple onboarding.

It comes as a suite of productivity tools for project management, tracking, communication, visibility, and accountability. It focuses on helping teams deliver faster and with great satisfaction.

Core Features of ProofHub

• It has a dedicated space in which teams can conduct brainstorming sessions and project discussions
• Offers multiple project views including Timeline, Calendar, Board, List, and Table for greater flexibility
• Visualize tasks better with kanban boards and custom workflows
• Includes file sharing and cloud-based proofing features for seamless remote collaboration in real-time

Summation

It takes time and effort to evaluate the many free creative project management software tools in the market to find what best suits you and your team.

Which is your favorite creative project management tool? If you are still searching, I hope this list narrows down the hundreds of tools to save you time and effort.