For startups and small businesses, it’s all about time. Time is life. The market won’t wait, and investors won’t wait, if you don’t come up with software that customers recognize quickly. While time is the same for everyone, it’s important to start using project management tools as early as possible to increase productivity.
However, most project management tools are prohibitively expensive for startups. With money tight, how to save money has become a university question. The good news is that tools with all the necessary features can save companies money! The better news is that there are still plenty of free and fully functional project management tools on the market. The following is a list of free project management tools for your reference.
1. The GanttProject (www.ganttproject.biz/)
GanttProject lets people organize work structure and project management in a simple way. Such as creating tasks, breaking down work in hierarchical trees, setting deadlines, priorities, milestones, and creating dependency constraints between tasks. Use basic contact information, rates, and roles, and set up profiles for system users. Assign work to members and monitor everyone’s workload.
You can use this application to export data in a variety of formats for easy processing and analysis in other software. The application can be installed on Windows, OSX, and Linux systems and can be used as a desktop tool without an Internet connection.
2. The DevCloud (www.huaweicloud.com/devcloud/)
DevCloud is a cloud platform integrating Huawei’s R&D practices, cutting-edge R&D concepts and advanced r&d tools, providing developers with end-to-end r&d tool services. Project Management is one of the DevCloud services dedicated to providing agile development teams with simple and efficient development collaboration services.
Its project management provides a wealth of statistical services, including iteration management chart, burn out chart, work item completion statistics chart, statistical tables, project members statistical management, etc. It also provides document management and encyclopedia functions to facilitate collaboration and sharing among team members. Leangoo’s snapshot sharing feature allows you to quickly share kanban content with relevant people via QR code, which is another highlight.
DevCloud project management as a project management tool, to support the team 5 people use free of charge, and provide the scrum process to streamline processes and two kinds of management services, including scrum is tailored for agile development process, including project planning, agile iterations, demand management, defect tracking, document management, kanban, statistical analysis reports, etc. The project planning function can use the visualized interface in the form of mind map to split the project into Epic/Feature/User Story levels. The planned User Story is displayed as a kanban in the project Backlog.
3. Taiga (taiga.io/)
Taiga is an open source project management platform that focuses on Scrum and agile development and features kanban, tasks, Sprints, issues, backlog, and EPics. Other features include credential management, multi-project support, Wiki pages, and third-party integration.
It also offers free mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows devices, as well as import tools that make migration from other popular project management applications easy.
Taiga is free for public projects and there is no limit to the number of projects or users. For proprietary projects, there are many paid plans [31] available under the “freemium” model, but it is important to note that the features of the software are the same regardless of your type.
4. The zen master (www.zentao.net/)
Zen Dao is a fully functional project management software, covering the core process of project management. Zen Tao is in the form of open source project management software.
Zen and Tao are two words with great representative significance in Chinese culture and the crystallization of Chinese traditional culture. Take “Zen Dao” as the name of the software, convey the understanding and thinking of management, through zen Dao to manage, can abandon red tape, abandon the malformation of official standard, restore the essence of things.
5. TeamWeek (teamweek.com/)
This tool is designed to visualize the project management process. It allows users to create project roadmaps, project long-term plan summaries, view the team’s current progress, set team project timelines, near-term work plans, longer-term plans, work schedules, and more associated information to share with the team.
Teamweek offers a free basic plan for teams of up to five users, with the option to switch to a paid plan if the team grows and needs advanced features.
6. Workep (workep.com/)
The tool is a collaboration platform that automates and centralizes G Suite, making it an efficient environment for project management, collaboration and planning. Create Google docs, sync calendar events, use chat loops, and more – and automate project work. Workep visualizes your team’s work as lists, kanban boards, or Gantt charts, and allows project data to be exported. The basic plan for a team of up to 10 users is free, and other features in the paid plan are available as the team grows.