Best Project Management Software for Features

If you’re paying for project management software, you certainly want it to perform operations that make project management smooth and – if not easy – easier. But with so many solutions in the market, it can be challenging to evaluate all but the most popular.

As a project manager, you’re looking for a software solution that allows you to effectively spread your wings and control the project from one place. From outlining and assigning tasks to automating processes and monitoring progress, you want your project management platform to help you do more than you’d ordinarily do by yourself.

That’s why you need project management software that offers a composite suite of features to stay ahead while keeping your team members on their toes to meet deadlines. We understand how important it is to do so – clients are not getting any less demanding, and projects aren’t getting smaller either. We’ll explore the critical features that help you optimize your project management to meet your client’s needs and crush your goals and deadlines.

What Makes the Best Project Management Software for Features?

We tested over 45 providers and selected the most important features that compose project management software offerings through market research and industry experts. To evaluate tools, we scored each provider by the presence and absence of features and limitations or additional functionalities. All features together form our overall features score and ranking of providers. We found the following features and ranking weights:

Tasks & Subtasks

With tasks and subtasks, you can add specific activities as part of a project and group them. It ensures coherence in the administration of a project, as you can group similar tasks toward a goal. For example, if a project goal is to publish a press release, you can add ‘publish press release’ as a task and add ‘write a press release’ and ‘edit press release’ as subtasks. With this grouping system, you can streamline your project and effectively assign tasks to competent team members. Grouping similar activities together help team members understand their roles' broader context.

Task Assignees

When nobody is assigned to a project or task, it may as well be ignored or a non-priority. Therefore, the task assignee feature is critical for project management software. With this feature, you can create tasks and assign responsibility to team members by mentioning and tagging them. This way, they get a notification as soon as they’re assigned the task and can get to work immediately.

Start & Due Dates

Deadlines and timelines are an integral part of the corporate world, so it’s important to be able to communicate these to co-workers when on a project. With start and due dates, you can show team members how much time they have to complete a specific task. Deadlines help them stay conscious of how best to approach a task. Many software solutions also provide a reminder before the deadline so that they can improve the pace if needed and meet up with their deadline.

Task Dependencies

As a project manager, it’s quite obvious that certain tasks depend on the completion of others. It’s impossible to edit a press release unless it’s been written previously, so that creates a task dependency. Likewise, it’s impossible to begin debugging a piece of code unless it has been written. With task dependencies, you can help your team members see where their work fits into the cycle and impose realistic and necessary deadlines on specific tasks.

Templates

Building a project outline for common tasks is bound to get boring and repetitive. On the flip side, building an outline can become burdensome and take a lot of time with complex projects. With predefined project templates, however, you can simply plug in your project details and get to work as quickly as possible. Hence, you can save time and harness the many benefits of software to improve your productivity as a project manager. Templates also come in handy when managing multiple projects, taking a lot of the work off your hands.

Checklists

Certain tasks have specific activities that teams must do before they’re completed. Hence, the reason for checklists. For example, before you can begin baking a cake, all the ingredients on your list must be present. It’s the same with certain tasks, both on and off-site, that come with standard processes. Here, checklists come in handy for you and your team members. Checklists are an excellent feature you can check for when picking project management software for your team.

Automated Workflows

Taking human delays from between different stages of a project has always led to greater levels of efficiency. Automated workflows allow you to streamline the project on the smallest basis possible. With workflow automation, you can handle projects faster and with greater efficiency. According to KRC Research, over 50% of organizations believe that automation reduces human errors. With automation in your workflow, you’d be better equipped to reduce errors and deliver high-quality work to your clients. When choosing a project management software for your business needs, this feature can be super helpful to automate repetitive tasks.

Forms

Feedback and opinions are essential for continually improving, and forms are a great way to collect feedback at scale. You can collect ideas and feedback from team members and stakeholders to optimize or modify the workflow with project forms. You can also submit work requests to team members, complete with the specific details you’d like to be met. Forms help you to standardize the request process and meet project-specific goals more quickly. There are many ways to use forms to collect information on whatever you want from your team or also clients.

Milestones

Milestones are an indicator of incremental success and serve as a beacon for team members to constantly produce high output levels, even on a tight schedule. With specific milestones set as your project progresses, you can visualize, measure, and share progress at various points from start to completion.

Approval Workflows

Before any task is initiated or completed, team leads must give a certain amount of approval. It’s necessary for synchronization during the process and quality management after completing a task. Automated approval workflows impose an automatic mechanism for reviewing and approving tasks during the project cycle. Automation eliminates another point of lag in the project cycle and improves the quality of work.

Time Tracking

With time tracking, it’s easier to measure and monitor worker productivity and ensure they’re putting in a good amount of effort during projects. You can also use it to evaluate tasks to see where you spend the most time and how to optimize it. With time tracking, you can also eliminate hassles regarding worker payments. Additionally, invoicing with clients can be streamlined, ensuring you’re paid adequately for your work.

Project Budgeting

With a project budgeting feature, you can dedicate and manage costs for your projects in a better way. You can allocate resources to each project depending on its scale and complexity and help drive down costs and create accountability across the chain.

Tags

With tags, sorting and arranging tasks by category or criteria is easier. You can add tags to similar tasks to group them with the tag function. Tags make it easier to get a general overview of your tasks. You can assign similar tasks based on tags to streamline the execution process.

Priorities

As a project manager with multiple projects in your portfolio, it’s important to define priorities. With this feature, you can assign different levels of urgency to specific tasks. This way, you’re sure to engage in each task with an appropriate energy level at any given time and deal with each task decisively.

10 Best Project Management Software for Features

How to Choose a Project Management Software with Great Features

Ultimately, when choosing project management software based on features, the choice is entirely yours. Critical features for your business may not be necessary for another business, so it’s important to determine what’s unique to you. When exploring the features of different solutions, it’s also very helpful to get the opinions of your team members.

Another thing to watch out for is the balance between features and other important criteria. Having tons of great features on a tool that’s pretty difficult to use, that is not within your budget, or doesn’t have good options to control and manage your project, is maybe not the best fit for you. While exploring the features of solutions for your business, check out our overall Best Picks for project management software. It will help you to get an overview of which areas may also be critical for your business.

Are you looking to explore tools that meet your specific needs regarding features and other criteria? Check out our Finder Tool. And if you want to compare one or more different offerings to make that final choice, you can check out our Comparison Tool.