Our favorite free or low-cost project management tools for small teams

As a small team, you need project management tools that help keep you organized, enable better communication, and reduce duplicated effort— without too much overhead. Here are the tools we keep coming back to again and again, because they help us do just that without draining our bank account.

Notion

Notion is an all-in-one workspace for visualizing shared and interdependent work with flexible organization of related documentation. There are many third-party integrations with Notion, so it can easily connect with your existing tools. We especially recommend Notion for teams working in Sprints or Kanban.

• What’s it best for: visualizing shared work, collaborative documentation, shared schedules, improved workflows ****
• Why we like it: Notion punches above its weight class in terms of the features you get for the cost you pay. It’s convenient to have a single team space for your documentation and team calendars, in addition to the sprint board. The design is sleek and set up is simpler than comparable tools. Notion is a good tool for teams who want to be flexible in their ways of working, because it it allows enough customizable features without being too overwhelming.
• Where it falls short: Sprint reports and data visualizations are not included by default, and set up is not intuitive. There are many templates available, but it can be tricky to customize.
• What it costs: If all team members join a work space as guests, your entire team can use Notion completely for free, forever (though you’ll still be limited in the areas we mentioned above). Notion also has a start-up program where you can get free access to paid features for a limited time while you get your business off the ground. If you’re ready to pay, the lowest tier costs $10/user/month and gives you unlimited access to everything most teams would to work together.

Jira

Jira is an expansive tool for visualizing upcoming work, current progress, requirements, and tasks.

• What’s it best for: Visualizing Sprint or Kanban boards, backlog management, automated reporting.
• Why we like it: Jira has tons of features with a high level of customization. Permissions can be flexibly set to allow users to be creative, or limit to a more prescribed standard of use across multiple teams. Day-to-day workflows can be set to the team’s preferences to show the status of work and next steps. There are endless options for dashboard set up to customize your view of metrics and progress. With built-in issue types (epic, task, bug, test), customizable labels, and issue links to highlight cross-team risks and dependencies, you can create a high degree of visibility into the work. This makes Jira a good choice for organizations with multiple teams collaborating on interdependent work.
• Where it falls short: The interface can feel a bit more “clunky” and less intuitive than something like Trello or Notion. It might require more time to train users in standardized practices for use of features. Jira feels like it is mainly intended for use at an enterprise level, which is a turn-off for some small teams who might prefer a free or low-cost tool.
• What it costs: A team of up to 10 users can collaborate on Jira for free, though you’ll be limited to 2GB of storage. The lowest pricing tier is $7.91/user/month, which removes most limitations. Enterprise versions of Jira are where the most expansive features can be found, but you’ll have to contact Jira for custom pricing.

Trello

Trello is an intuitive, simple tool for creating lists organized into columns.

• What’s it best for: Kanban boards, to do lists, check lists.
• Why we like it: Trello is intuitive, colorful (with a colorblind friendly mode) and easy to set up. Customizable tags can be used to denote epics, flag risks, or any other categorization.
• Where it falls short: Beyond the basic features in the free version, you will need to add free or premium power-ups for data visualizations and reports. There’s no separate built-in backlog for planning, making it more difficult to get an overall view of upcoming work.