Project Management Tools for Freelancers
benefits of freelancingWould you rather choose a job opportunity where you get to decide who your client is, choose your workload and have the flexibility of working at anytime that you deem fit? Because that is exactly what freelancing is all about. Owing to these reasons, many young adults have taken up freelancing jobs in various domains such as web development, content development, marketing and other fields. As lucrative as it may seem, freelancing does not come easy and demands its fair share of time investment and management software.
This is where Project Management Tools come in. These tools help users in planning, scheduling, and delegating work, collaboration with different team members with organised dashboards, storing files, and tracking your progress through resource management and reporting. Such tools can be of great help when it comes to taking up projects, as they help freelancers in almost all aspects of managing a project. In this article, we compare the top five Project Management Tools for freelancers, in terms of features, pricing and utility.
Asana
Asana is Project Management Tool for freelancers, which focuses on team work management and allocation of work. The list view feature of Asana helps users to identify what work needs to be done, and where and when it is due. You get to spot overlapping tasks and Asana helps you identify the unscheduled and independent tasks which you can replace with the one's overlapping. Moreover the board feature helps your team to focus the task at hand by creating stage wise work, so the project is easily manageable.
Solutions by Teams
- Solutions for Marketing teams: Asana helps Marketing teams by planning a course of action that reduces the work load and creating a clear vision of expectations and goals. It helps you develop a marketing strategy and and execute it with instant requests and approvals eliminating ad hoc tasks.
- Operations: Asana helps users by automating manual tasks and streamlines efficacy by reducing errors and reducing time spent on common projects. Moreover the Status feature in Asana helps turn progress into visual data to help track progress with ease.
- Sales Management: Asana helps get all the information to respond to customer requests and establish common projects as templates and visualize progress. Templates such as Pre-Sales Deal support, Pipelines and Account tracking help teams to get insights on their sales data and customize workflows.
- Product Management: Asana has been hailed as one of the best tools to market products and for good reason. It helps to plan product workplan along with priorities, reach milestones and have better coordinated product launches with resource shifting whenever required.
Solutions by Workflow
Asana offers solutions categorized by workflow such as Project Management, to track and manage team projects and Workflow Management which helps you create custom processes to cater to your needs. It also allows you to manage calendar to create and manage work by schedule along with remote collaboration, which has become the need of the hour, given the pandemic has halted travels and commute. Moreover, be it prioritizing tasks, or boosting productivity, Asana helps users be agile and flexible, which is the backbone of freelancing and hence is considered one of the best Project Management Tools for freelancers.
Pricing model for Asana
Basic | Premium | Business | Enterprise |
---|---|---|---|
Comes free of cost | Costs $10.99 per month per user when billed annually, and $13.49 per user when billed monthly | Costs $24.99 per month per user when billed annually, and $30.49 per user when billed monthly | Depending on the scale of enterprise, user needs to contact the sales team to find the actual cost |
Build for teams and individuals new to freelancing | For teams that have been in freelancing for a while and want to build projects for portfolio | To manage professional work for institutions | For large scale organisations |
To manage tasks and achieve goals for beginners with all the basic features for freelancers | Best for teamwork projects and comes with Dashboard, Advanced search and reporting and Admin console and much more | Comes with all amenities of Premium version along with advanced integrations and custom rules building | Advanced features suited for enterprises such as user provisioning, custom branding, and online support |
Trello
Trello is a team management tool for freelancers which helps users collaborate and coordinate with any team for the simplest projects such as a client meeting, webinar, or a website launch. Like any other project management application for freelancers, it helps users to draft out a schedule, create and follow up on deadlines, adding comments and attachments. Moreover its workflow automation tool, Butler helps you surge your productivity with rule based triggers, calendars, due dates, cards, and board buttons.
Pricing model for Trello
Free Edition | Business Class Edition | Enterprise Edition |
---|---|---|
Comes free of cost | Costs $9.99 per month per user | Costs $17.50 per user per month for 100 users and the cost per user decreases with increase in users |
Offers 10 Boards per team and unlimited cards and lists with just 10 MB per file attachment | All the free features along with 250 MB per file attachments and advanced checklists and priority support | All the Business class features with Powerup Administration, Oranization wide permissions and public board management |
Simple automation with Butler with 50 command runs per month | Strong automation features with 1000 command runs per team along with 200 per user | Best in class automation with unlimited buttons, rules and unlimited commands |
Wrike
Very similar to the first entry in the list, Wrike offers Project Management solutions by teams and by use cases. Like other tools, Wrike offers remote collaboration between employees of an enterprise or team of freelancers with customizable dashboards and workflows. Moreover real-time comments, dynamic reports, and notifications Wrike offers streamlined flow of information for seamless team management.
Solutions by teams
Wrike offers solutions ranging from Project Management and Marketing teams to Professional Service and Product Development encompassing most of the aspects for a Project Management Tool. Real-time visibility helps you avoid delays with proper planning and delivering result through them. Also, Wrike offers need based templates to cater to your specific needs. The Product Management solution offers a central product vision to break down silos, improving team coordination and managing resources efficiently to extract maximum output from the team.
Solutions by User Case and Workflow
Solutions for use case, provided by Wrike include:
- Enterprise Project Management
- Agency Project Management
- Agile Project Management
- Project Portfolio Management
- Resource Management
With features such as full visibility and minute details for enterprise level project management, to unification of group communication and actionable takeaways from meetings and discussions for Agile projects, Wrike works like magic and has earned its spot on the best Project Management tools for freelancers.
Pricing model for Wrike
Free Version for 5 users | Professional Edition for 5/10/15 users | Business Edition for 5-200 users | Enterprise Edition for Unlimited users |
---|---|---|---|
Comes free of cost | Comes at $9.80 per user per month | Comes at $24.80 per user per month | Varying cost according to the plan, requires the user to contact support |
Basic features such as Task Management and Activity Streaming | All basic features along with subtasks and advanced integrations including MS Project and Excel | Basic features along with real-time reports, graphic analytics request forms and other features | All business features in addition to directory integration, 2 factor authentication, audit reports and other advanced features |
Offers 2 GB storage space | Offers 5 GB storage space along with 15 GB video upload space per month | Offers 50 GB storage space along with 15 GB video upload space per month | Offers 100 GB storage space along with 15 GB video upload space per month |
Offers Gantt charts, shareable dashboards, and collaborators | Offers Salesforce integrations and branded workspace | Offers Network access, Buiness Intelligence, and advanced User Access Controls |
Thrive
Thrive has been a go to Project Management tool for many professional freelancers and amassed positive reviews owing to its user friendly interface and efficient and smooth running. Thrive helps users to be updated on projects with performance reviews, deadline insights based on past projects and manage tasks. Time sheet of Thrive is one of the most seamless to handle and maintain and gives users the easement of manually controlling it in case of errors. It also allows you to assess the hours put into work, so you can charge for the time you have spent working on a project, without any hassle.
Thrive also allows users to create quick and appealing invoices, which are simple to create and send, with instant field submission, hence saving time. Another reason you can use Thrive is because it allows integration of Business Intelligence making it easy to interpret figures and facts, along with insights into your expenditures, both, one-off and recurring. Additionally, Thrive also offers a client section, which comes in handy when your client list grows, so you can keep check on what all you have completed and what remains.
Pricing model for Thrive
Thrive offers an extremely simple pricing model, that costs $19 per month per user for the individual user version, while it costs $20 for team based version, per month per user. The features it offers in both editions are the same including invoices, expense assessment, time-sheet, clients, analytics, and resource management.
Bonsai
Bonsai is a user friendly Project Management tool for freelancers, that specializes in integrating applications and automating workflow for seamless business management. With creative and custom invoices, Bonsai sends automated payment reminders on your behalf to your employer. Moreover, with a Projects and Client CRM, it helps you organize your documents and files while keeping a track of time with an automated time-sheet.
Bonsai allows you to generate a contract template which can be e-signed in no time while also helps you in simple task management built for all kind of works, ranging from website development to photography. Moreover, Bonsai encompasses major countries including UK, Canada and Australia, and supports about 180 different currencies.
Pricing model for Bonsai
Workflow model | Workflow plus model |
---|---|
Costs $19 per month | Costs $29 per month |
Offers unlimited clients and projects, proposals and, contracts | Offers White-labelled client experience with client forms and questionnaires |
Offers invoicing, payments and client CRM | Offers all features of Workflow model along with Workflow automation, Calendly integration and subcontracting |
No Priority support | Comes with Priority support |
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