Looking after a team is a difficult task especially if all hands are on deck. It’s easy to lose track of one’s to-do list and before people know it, they’ve already misplaced the task before they could even finish it.
When tasks are piling up, everyone needs to know what each member of the team is doing and who’s doing what. In this way, task organization is maintained despite the stacking list of things to do that never seem to end.
Task managing tools are important not just for keeping track of the in-progress tasks and tasks that are completed, but also in backtracking past activities. No organization is flawless, and that makes backtracking useful. For software development and tech companies especially, some phases of a task must be recorded and meticulously addressed.
In this blog, three task management tools that garnered one of the best reviews are presented: Jira, ClickUp, and Asana.
Jira
Jira is one of the applications that was created by Atlassian, a software company that aims to develop products mainly for software developers.
Jira has exceptional project management features and provides enough tools for its free version.
A good feature of Jira is it has exceptional bug tracking for its software developers. Issue management features are fairly good as well. These functionalities are a part of Jira’s core project management tools today.
Jira’s interface is highly customizable which allows teams to create their own visual representation of their workflow be that in timelines or through lists.
Jira is also built for scrum project management. It comes with scrum boards and Kanban boards for easier due process of the project designed for teams with different tasks.
We have to take note, however, that Jira is designed specifically to suit software development needs. This is a disadvantage for some because being made particularly for software developers, Jira may not be too welcoming for companies in a different field. People in the business arena may not maximize Jira to its full potential.
Unlike ClickUp and Asana, JIRA does lack some features for its free version making it an enviable choice if users were to choose between the free version of the three project management tools.
The free plan does not only consist of limited storage of about 2GB, the total number of users allowed for the free version is not suitable for businesses and enterprises.
It can then be said that larger businesses may benefit from JIRA if they choose the standard and premium plans, significantly increasing its features, storage, and users allowed in the project.
What’s good about JIRA’s pricing is that its enterprise plan has no fixed price. When companies are interested in availing of the enterprise plan, several meetings with JIRA’s sales team will be facilitated and through this, it’s certain that large companies that mean to take the enterprise deal certainly get the price that fits exactly what they need, no more, no less.
Overall, JIRA is a great project management tool, even so, when its users are not from IT or software development, but if a feature is being paid for and not being utilized, it’s not typically going to be worth it. It is therefore important to think every feature through.
ClickUp
ClickUp is a software company based in San Diego, California. It’s a cloud-based platform for small and large teams or businesses. ClickUp basically does the same thing as JIRA as typically what all project management tools do but unlike JIRA, ClickUp is not software-developer focused. ClickUp’s features are friendly for users in different fields.
A great feature of ClickUp is that every aspect of its interface is almost entirely customizable. This is perfect for users who mean to customize the application and make it close to their own, and the fact that statuses such as: “in-progress, in review, done” are customizable to whichever users prefer like: “in-progress, in review, up for revisions, final checking, finished” adds points to the organization. More than that, well-color-coded statuses make it easy to track what’s going on with the team as a whole.
ClickUp’s notification feature allows all its users to be updated about changes in their tasks, news, and refinements to projects as well.
Ironically, as almost every aspect of ClickUp is customizable, this has become a con as well. There just seems to have too many customizable ClickUp features. This may cause its users to become overwhelmed and overloaded with a variety of features. This is extra daunting when users are just starting to get a grasp of ClickUp’s features. This causes the learning curve of ClickUp to be much steeper among the three.
Nevertheless, ClickUp has survived the test of time as many users still utilize the application to date. It is not only suitable for teams, but they value solo users as well.
More than that, ClickUp’s friendly layout compensates for the steep learning curve of the application. Not only do they have effective dashboard and timeline views for better visualization, everything seems to be in order once its users get a grasp of most of ClickUp’s features.
ClickUp’s pricing is viable for small and large companies as well. Despite having just 100MB storage for its free version, they at least already have unlimited tasks and members offered in the plan. If these companies plan to upgrade, additional pricing of $5 for the next plan along with unlimited storage, calendar views, boards, dashboards, and many other features will not seem to hurt our wallets much.
Generally, the good aspect about ClickUp is that a lot of its features are customizable and color-coded to user’s preference and they don’t necessarily lean only on software developer features. The only roadblock that its users have to go through is learning it for the first time. Once they start to become familiar with ClickUp’s interface, every other good thing about it will follow.
Asana
Asana was founded in 2008. Asana is a web and mobile application designed to help teams organize and manage their work. Users love Asana as well primarily for its features like being able to have conversations inside tasks.
Asana also has flexible collaborative tools and feature to track work. It has recently added structures and templates for teams that mean to be guided upon setting up in the application.
One of Asana’s newest features include its ability to integrate video messages, a dark mode, and smart calendar integration, making it more accessible to various other applications that sync well with Asana.
The disadvantage of Asana is that its free version does not give access to Gantt charts and timelines. Users would have to purchase the costly plans to make use of them. Additionally, Asana does not have a built-in budgeting and expense tracking. Users are led to seek external applications to have budgeting and expense trackers.
In general, Asana provides just as much advantage as the other project management tools. Its pricing goes from free to $10.99 already for the next plan, so if users mean to invest in Asana for its bigger plans, they have to be certain about it because Asana has the biggest increase in price disparity between their plans.
Which task management tool should I pick?
If your company is IT or software development related, JIRA is a 10/10. JIRA’s phenomenal bug tracking allows meticulous works in IT and software development to be much less intricate. Every process is recorded and backtracking is made available.
ClickUp offers the best free version. It gives a taste of most of its features already, and the unlimited members for its free version allow large teams to already utilize the application with a lot of its functionality for free.
Asana needs much more flexibility concerning pricing, as users may or may not regret purchasing the next deals which go from free to $10.99 and no plans in between. Nevertheless, many users still enjoy Asana just as much as the other applications. It’s only a matter of meticulously planning and getting to know Asana much more before purchasing its deals to make sure that its users do not regret the application’s features when it’s already too late.
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References:
Atlassian (2021). Jira software. https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira?&aceid=&adposition=&adgroup=95003662249&campaign=9124878894&creative=475671268293&device=c&keyword=jira&matchtype=e&network=g&placement=&ds_kids=p51242207651&ds_e=GOOGLE&ds_eid=700000001558501&ds_e1=GOOGLE&gclsrc=ds
The Daily Egg (n.d.) Jira review. https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/jira-review/
Project-Management (n.d.). ClickUp Software Pros and Cons. https://project-management.com/pros-and-cons-of-using-clickup/#:~:text=Its%20suite%20of%20features%20are,and%20information%20from%20its%20dashboards.
PCMag (2021). Asana review. https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/asana
Software Advice (n.d.) Jira vs. clickup vs. asana. https://www.softwareadvice.com/project-management/atlassian-jira-profile/vs/clickup/asana/