9 best, free and simple project management software

Are you on the hunt for a free project management software that is intuitive to use and fits your team’s workflow? You are at the right place.

A project management software can do wonders to your team’s ability to build great products.

Why? Because a good project management software doesn’t just let you see who is doing what task and when it will get completed, but also let you track progress in specific teams and view the progress as a whole.

The best part? You can improve your team’s ability to ship great products for free!

There are a ton of project management software out there to help you with your project management, some of which are completely free. But, it’s important to note, not all free project management software offer the same features.

The goal of any project management software is to help teams manage, track, and improve their work by providing a holistic view of what is happening in every team.

And the free project management software you choose should be able to deliver that.

Let’s jump in and take a look at the top free project management software that will fit your team.

1. Zepel

Zepel is the project management software that is built for software product teams. Unlike other free softwares that are built for simple task tracking, Zepel is designed to be intuitive so you can quickly plan features and track its progress across disciplines.

Zepel is free for up to 5 members without any feature restrictions.

What you get in the free version of Zepel:

• Effortless Feature Planning With a simple, intuitive interface, planning features in Zepel is as simple as typing in a document. All actions are just a / command away.
• Sprints to bring features to life Whether you want to build your features in phases or be functionality complete, you can effortlessly plan and prioritize key user stories and tasks with Sprints in Zepel. Timebox work, estimate time to completion, and ship delightful features for your customers every time!
• Boards for every discipline in the project With a Board for each discipline involved in your feature, everyone gets to work just the way they want. And you get to track work in specific teams, manage workload, and ensure your feature comes to life without any roadblocks. Because building features is a team effort. You need to bring members with different skill sets and get them to work together. Which is why team collaboration in Zepel isn’t just about assigning work and having conversations.
• Desktop Widget to track and complete from the comfort of your desktop With Zepel’s Desktop Widget sitting right next to your team’s code editor, every team member can view, get updates, work, and complete, all from their desktop. After all, getting your team to update progress regularly is probably the biggest pain most teams face today. Because when your team doesn’t update progress, none of your reports or charts will even matter.
• Make sense of all the updates across disciplines Go from task tracking to feature tracking with Progress in Zepel. Progress in Zepel lets you quickly distil every update every member made and see your entire feature’s progress. Across every discipline. In real-time.
• Take data-informed decisions with Reports When you need specific numbers and more information on how your team is performing, Zepel gives you a cumulative chart of everything that’s happening in your project and an activity feed to know exactly what’s happening. And with burn up and burn down reports, you can track how much progress you’ve made either by estimation points or by simple count.
• Integrations to fit right into your daily workflow Zepel integrates with the softwares you already love and use every day - Slack, Github, Bitbucket, and Gitlab. PR got merged? Zepel will autocomplete it for you. Need to update your team on Slack? It’s done. Automagically!
• Several other features for free Further in this article, you’ll see several other project management softwares. Zepel might cap you to just five members in the free plan, but it never limits your capabilities with it. Because the last thing you want is a project management software that stops you from satisfying your customer’s feature needs.

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2. JIRA

JIRA is perhaps the industry standard most organizations decide to use once the team becomes big despite the strong feelings team members usually have against it. It is effective in issue tracking and comes with a load of features.

They recently introduced their free tier for their cloud platform and is free for up to 10 members.

What you get in the free version of JIRA:

1. Scrum and Kanban Boards
2. Backlog
3. Agile Reporting
4. Customizable workflows
5. Roadmaps
6. Integrations

In the free plan, the storage is capped at 2 GB and the support is limited to only community support.

If you are looking for JIRA alternatives, you should check this list of 9 alternatives to JIRA that you can use today.

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3. Asana

Asana is one of the most popular project management softwares out there. It is used by several teams to see who is doing what and by when. The all-in-one software allows you to visualize your project with several views and use reporting to see how your team is performing.

Most users generally like Asana for its visually appealing look. It is easy to move your tasks around and assign to teammates. However, one of the things users complain about it is, if you want to go beyond simple task management, there isn’t much that you can do in the free plan and it gets really expensive when you want to upgrade.

Asana is free for up to 15 members with feature restrictions.

What you get in the free version of Asana:

1. List view to view your tasks
2. Board view
3. Calendar view
4. Simple project management features like assignees and due dates
5. Integrations

See how Asana compares with Zepel

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4. Trello

Trello is one of the widely adopted free project management software out there, especially if you just want a kanban board to keep track of your tasks. It does exactly one thing - help you keep track of tasks with a kanban board - and does it really well.

Each board in Trello is a project with each card in the board being a task. Within each card you can add checklists, descriptions, and comments. When you want to update progress of a card, you simply move it from one column (known as Lists in Trello) to another to indicate progress.

It is one of the go-to project management softwares for small teams because it is simple, doesn’t get in the way, and it’s free. The problem comes when you want to start running sprints or extract more information about how your team is performing.

Although you can use power-ups in Trello to add more capabilities, it is limited to only one power-up per board in the free plan.

What you get in the free version of Trello:

1. Unlimited number of personal Boards, tasks, and lists.
2. 10MB limit on file attachments
3. 1 power-up per board

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5. Teamweek

Teamweek is a project management software that lets you plan your project visually with a Gantt chart. It is designed for easy planning so you can get the visual overview of who is doing what and when.

Everything in Teamweek is viewed in a Gantt chart - tasks, projects, and groups of team members. This allows you to easily manage workload and always know what’s happening in your team.

What you get in the free plan of Teamweek:

1. Unlimited projects
2. Unlimited tasks
3. Upto 5 members to collaborate with

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6. Teamwork Projects

Teamwork projects is a well known project management software among remote workers and is also geared towards enterprises. It provides Gantt charts and integrations with Dropbox and Slack to name a few. It is great for collaboration, while still maintaining some of the more complicated aspects of a project management such as Gant Charts, Risk Register, Timesheet etc.

The free plan on Teamwork Projects however is limited to basic project management requirements and limited kanban boards.

What you get in the free plan of Teamwork Projects:

1. 2 active projects
2. 100MB space.
3. Limited Boards
4. Basic project management capabilities.
5. Subtasks

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7. Wrike

Wrike is a great project management software that creative and marketing teams are fond of. Wrike’s interactive Gantt Chart gives the full project scope and optimizes for planning and resource management. The software offers the ability to view your project in a calendar and board. With their mobile form, it allows teammates to update information on-the-go.

Their free plan however doesn’t provide an extensive support for all the essential features you’d expect and is limited to only 5 members.

What you get in Wrike’s free plan:

1. Board view
2. Task management
3. File sharing
4. Real time activity stream

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8. Zoho Sprints

Zoho Sprints is project management software catered to agile teams. Since it focusses only on the Sprints aspect of working, you’ll have a Backlog to house all your work and plan your next sprint, Epics to structure your work, and a Board to customize statuses.

Zoho Sprints also provides agile reporting so you can how your team is making progress.

What you get in Zoho Sprint’s free plan:

1. 5 projects
2. 5 users
3. 500MB storage space

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9. Airtable

Airtable is part spreadsheet, part database. So you can customize to your needs and make it fit your project management requirements. With several views such as calendar, kanban, grid, and gallery, included, you can be sure you can organize anything with anyone in your team.

If you’ve use Excel previously to meet your project management needs, then Airtable might be worth having a look at.

What you get in Airtable’s free plan:

1. Unlimited bases (like workbook in Excel)
2. 1200 records per base
3. Real-time collaboration and comments
4. Email support
5. Grid, calendar, form, kanban, and gallery views

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