A Review of TeamWork, TeamGantt, Monday.com, Wrike, and Asana
This probably won’t surprise you, but I get a lot of questions about which project management tools work best.
Helping entrepreneurs create processes and systems that scale their businesses (but not their stress levels) obviously involves leveraging a project management tool or two. But perhaps it will also not surprise you to hear that I always answer these questions with another question. Namely:
“Who are you and what are your needs?”
In my consultancy, I have this conversation with many different types of clients.
Here are just four:
The Established Agency: they are established and simply need tools to operate with greater efficiency and effectiveness
The Growing Agency: they want to grow their team and need tools to manage that additional personnel
The Scaling Agency: they want to scale up their businesses and need tools to facilitate the increase in activity
The Creative Entrepreneur: these are creatives who also run their own businesses—and face all of the challenges that a person with an artistic bent typically faces when it comes to grappling with a left-brained world
So, in this post, I’m going to describe five different project management tools, and consider these types of clients (although, really, there are so many more types than the ones I listed). We’re going to explore: TeamWork, TeamGantt, Monday, Wrike, and Asana.
TeamWork
TeamWork is a highly flexible project management software that offers users an integrated chat (i.e., a chat room for the whole company) and real-time tracking for projects.
With TeamWork, you can:
Track time (on the desktop version only)
View multiple projects on team members’ portfolios
Engage in an integrated chat
My view?
TeamWork is an excellent tool for agencies that are growing or intend to grow. A team that’s 10 people or higher needs software that will enable the type of chat that TeamWork facilitates. Put simply, it has amazing capabilities that can be customised for a wide variety of groups. No two workplaces are the same; TeamWork recognizes that.
TeamGantt
TeamGantt is a project scheduling software with intuitive drag-and-drop features that make web-based communication between team members really easy.
With TeamGantt you can:
Create sophisticated project timelines
Collaborate with team members
Track progress
See team members’ availability
My view?
TeamGannt is the go-to project management tool for creatives who really connect with a visual interface. It’s intuitive and doesn’t involve a big learning curve. The magic is in the Gantt chart: it’s a visual that plots out tasks on one single, viewable timeline that shows due dates, time needed to complete each one, and the dependencies between them. For example, you can see if you need to complete Task X before Task Y. In my experience, creatives love this tool.
Monday.com
With Monday, team members can use the cloud to simply the way they communicate and project manage. It uses a “board”-like interface to show users where projects are at. It enables users to see which team members are overworked and which ones are underworked, so that workloads can balance out.
With Monday.com, you can:
Track progress
Communicate with team members
Create timelines
Track workloads
My view?
I’m going to be completely honest here. Monday.com is being addressed in this post because its recent marketing push has made people quite aware of it. But I’m not entirely sure it deserves to be ranked among these other tools. It quite simply hasn’t got the number of capabilities that software like TeamWork and Asana have. However, if you’re using Monday.com strictly as a project management tool—rather than as a tool for collaboration and communication—the “board” interface it uses can be an attractive option, especially for creatives with smaller teams.
Wrike
Wrike gets a lot of love from users for its visual interface. It’s also quite customizable and integrates with a very wide variety of other tools (e.g., Salesforce).
With Wrike, you can:
Plan and organize projects
Track time
Check-in with an interactive timeline
Communicate with team members
Collaborate with team members online
My view?
Wrike is undoubtedly a popular option with medium to large-sized teams. A wide variety of people can pick up its user-friendly interface without much trouble, and its integrative capabilities are an undeniable perk for teams with a lot of different departments and functions (e.g., sales, marketing). Where Wrike loses points for me is its predefined structure, something that our next tool offers a better alternative to, in my opinion.
Asana
Asana is a cloud-based project management app that allows users to track and manage projects within its “workspaces”.
With Asana, you can:
Plan projects
Set due dates
Communicate with team members
Receive due dates and status information to your inbox
My view?
Asana strikes a wonderful balance between the benefits many of these platforms offer. It’s highly customizable, it connects people and projects in complex but easily navigable ways, and it just has so many darn functions. Also, it has developed quite a lot on the interface front in recent years so that it can be a more approachable solution for creative and visually-oriented people. I find that established, growing, and scaling teams get a lot out of this tool.
I suppose after reading these reviews, the final question might be… what’s the difference between TeamWork and Asana, the two heavy-hitters from my overview?
Well, I’d say Asana has an advantage in terms of its functions for facilitating team collaboration. Assigning tasks, following tasks, and using hyperlinks to connect other team members to tasks is just so easy with Asana. And the one thing we’d all love to get better at is working together, wouldn’t you agree?
Finally, as far as creatives go, I do want to give a nod to TeamGantt. As far as visual, intuitive interfaces go, it’s hard to beat this tool. If you’re a visually-driven creative, consider giving it a try. You might find organizing your projects can be easier and more fun with TeamGantt.
Hopefully, these reviews have helped you to hone in on what project management tools are out there, and which ones might best meet your particular team’s needs.
Just remember… your team’s specific needs are the first thing you should be determining. When you’re not having an easy time doing that, feel free to reach out to me.