The Definitive List of All Software PM Tools From Best To Worst

In the past five years, I've worked at twenty different startups. In that time, I've had an opportunity to use every popular software project management tool under the sun.

This is a definitive ranking of them from best to worst.

Curious where your favorite software PM tool falls on the spectrum? Read on below!

#1. Clickup. I keep coming back to Clickup, and whenever I am starting a new project or working with a "fresh" startup, if I am offered a blank slate, I choose Clickup. It has a system that lends itself well to little lists OR boards that can begin as "now, later, sometime" or "todo, doing, done", whatever works for you, and easily grows into having Priority or Difficulty or Points or Deadline columns later, IF you want that. I find that when I start a project on Clickup, we can keep the workflow simple at first, and then as it needs more structure, easily adapt what we're already doing into sprints, backlogs, and roadmaps. It's affordable, has never lost my data, and has understandable RBAC. Many companies I've launched on Clickup are still on Clickup several years later.

#2. Asana. Everything I said about Clickup, except just a little less good across the board. I will never complain if asked to use Asana; just like Clickup, you can start with your choice of board layouts and then add columns and get fancier from there as your needs grow. Again, RBAC is understandable. Tagging people and adding files to tickets is easy. I wouldn't mind putting this in the #1 spot if I find myself making this list again; I am just a little more familiar with Clickup.

#3 Trello. Sorry everybody! It's a fast-moving startups world out here and if you want free, easy, and grokkable, it's right there waiting for you. Start yesterday. It is the ultimate royalty of "all i need is todo, doing, done columns" and "all i need is now, later, sometime" columns. The only problem is that when you DO need to expand a little further beyond that and start incorporating priority, difficulty, points, co-assignment, and other venerable PM features, it's going to start getting real old real fast. But it's a fantastic place to start and you can get off it in a heartbeat when you outgrow it. Try three-column Trello today!

#4 Monday. Largely indistinguishable from Clickup and Asana, but carries a real and palpable sense of "we were thinking of traditional PM or other teams when we built this and weren't really thinking of software devs". It struggles a little with making its views both board-and-card-and-list interchangeable, and doesn't have out of the box answers for common Kanban and Agile setups. Still, it's a big flexible board that you can throw assignees and tags and files into, and you can make columns, so if you find yourself as a software PM entering an organization that is already Monday-committed, you can make it work.

#5 Notion. Pick a lane already! Clearly the most powerful tool on this list and WAY ahead of the others in AI adoption, Notion is simply too many things and good at too many of them to actually be a strong software PM choice. Because it's a really powerful document editing collaboration tool with strong AI integration, and because the RBAC is reaaaaally intense, I find it a challenge to actually use in practice. As a wiki, and for documenting things, it's flawless, but then when you also to try to create "dataset styled spaces" and specifically invite some users to have edit rights there, and then create tasks without accidentally creating more pages and workspaces, much less run analytics on them, I just get in over my head and go back to writing code. I have it on good faith from some of my peers that if you are really disciplined and understand Notion's arcane tasks-within-pages-within-Spaces model and avoid creating subworkspaces as you tag people in tasks, it can be pretty powerful, but I haven't done it right yet (while also correctly granting the appropriate permissions to the appropriate users).

#6 Nothing! It's true, it can be done! This is really only an option for the very earliest stage startups where the team is tightly aligned. But at the very, very beginning, when you've just got one FE, one BE, and a CEO, or something like that, there's a chance that if you've hired correctly and everyone is aligned on what the mission is, everybody just knows what to do. It doesn't last for very long, but while it does, it's magical! Try it!

#7: Github Issues. These are pretty okay and do a lot of things right! But they have an unforgivable flaw, which is that at some point your PM workflow is going to involve some people who aren't developers. Examples include a nontechnical product owner, a UI/UX designer, a data scientist, or a QA engineer. In every case, I have found that when the time comes to bring these other people into the process, they face this horrendous github learning curve and experience a great deal of pain trying to force their more traditional PM workflow into what is fundamentally a developer's-eye view of the world. What is this experienced domain expert, who has twenty years of experience in managing Forklift Supplier Life Cycles or whatever, supposed to do- comment on pull requests in order to move code from the staging area to the production area? Do they need email notifications when your unit tests fail in the Action pipeline? Are they allowed to push to main? If you embrace Github Issues as your PM tool, you will eventually find yourself answering questions like these when non-developers join your SDLC. Get out ahead of this problem by never using Github Issues as your PM tool unless it's a completely for-developers-by-developers project.

#8: A Google Doc, Google Sheet, Excel Spreadsheet, or shared Apple Note/Apple Reminder: Now we're really getting into it, and this is pretty hardcore. You can get by with this really early. It's basically an extension of "#6 Nothing" except at least you don't straight up forget things, and a precursor of "#3 Trello" where most of the guts are there but you don't get three columns and draggability, you just get two. Easy enough: Stuff you have to do goes into the Doc/Sheet/Note, and stuff you've done leaves it. Takes a lot of discipline and doesn't scale, but the price can't be beat, and if you know what you're doing, there are real returns here. Upgrade to Trello eventually anyway so that at least you can drag and drop the pretty boxes.

#9: JIRA. It's the industry standard, which means it stinks. Since it's what Fortune 500 companies use, it has a bajillion endlessly configurable workflow options, so if you truly want to impose a system like "Only tickets with three completed subtasks may be moved to the status of Change Approved and only a user with Change Approver rights in the appropriate region may then mark it as Change Approval Fully Approved" on your people, be my guest. Because it can do that stuff. If you want stuff like this, be my guest, but it's a good sign you've already lost the thread. It's also slow as bananas. Notable exception here for one particular company, hey Igor, who has already done the legwork of building a JIRA framework they can use across hundreds of projects; I can respect that. But don't build systems like this from scratch.

#10 Whatever the stuff stapled onto MS Teams is. I forget what it's called. Look, if you've made it this far, and you're on MS Teams, you're already playing from behind. This is not the relief pitcher who is going to save you. Also, it integrates seamlessly with Sharepoint, which is an extra minus 100 points as far as I'm concerned. Stay far away.

I hope you have enjoyed the world's only authoritative ranking of all common Software PM tools from best to worst!

The image on this article is a Dall-E prompt for "Kanban board if it was painted by Mark Rothko". He is my favorite artist.