Choosing a Project Management Tool

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Team has finally decided that it’s time to set up project management software and you’re wondering which one’s best for you. In this article we don’t recommend, and then also more popular ones like ClickUp, monday.com, Asana and then our favorite, Motion. Choosing the right project management tool for your team can be a very daunting task. There’s a lot of options out there and this article aims to clarify which one may be best for your team. Here at Efficient App we’ve personally used monday.com, Asana and also Motion, and we’ve also deeply vetted ClickUp and Notion, which just recently started marketing themselves as a project management tool. Keep reading to find out which one was our favorite. As you read, keep in mind your team size because a lot of these project management tools were created for larger teams with hundreds of employees.

Caveats Before the Deep Dive

A few caveats are worth covering before a deep dive into the different tools available.

Setup Is No Joke

Number one, setup is no joke. In our experience, prepare to spend up to 50 hours or even more to set up some of these solutions for your team, deeply mapping out your processes and your projects and also training your team on how to use them. If you’re looking for a solution that you think is going to be set up overnight, take a moment and consider that this is typically a larger project.

Adoption Can Be Poor

Number two, adoption can be poor. A study by Reich reportedly found that 35 percent of teams with 10 or fewer employees stopped using their project management tool after one year. For teams larger than 10, about 28 percent gave up on their project management tool after the first year.

A Daily Commitment

Number three, using a project management tool is a daily commitment, not only for yourself but also for your team. Team members need to update the tool every single day, whether that’s marking what’s been completed or changing the status of things, so you really need buy-in from the entire team if you’re planning on rolling one out. Next come the actual project management tools on the market and which ones we recommend.

Notion as a Project Manager

Notion recently started marketing themselves as a project manager. They’re saying on their website that they’re a powerful project management tool without the chaos, which is kind of ironic and funny because chaos is probably the exact word that I’d use to describe trying to manage any kind of project in Notion.

Little Guardrails

The problem with Notion is that there are so few guardrails when it comes to the tool. There’s overwhelming flexibility and initially that can seem a little bit exciting because you’re thinking you’re going to set up this project manager exactly how you want it for your business. But with so few guardrails there’s no opinion on how things should work, and you end up building a project manager tool instead of actually managing your projects.

A Knowledge Base

You have to remember that tools like monday.com and Asana and ClickUp have their whole business dedicated to building a solution as a project manager. Notion is a knowledge base and they’re just giving you ideas of different ways that you can use it. So maybe if you’re a solopreneur working on your own and you want a really basic way to manage your tasks, you can toy with the idea, but even then I wouldn’t recommend it. The truth is we didn’t even want to mention Notion in this review, but because they’re starting to market themselves this way we thought it might be worth mentioning just to help lessen the confusion out there.

ClickUp as a Project Manager

Another popular one is ClickUp. ClickUp markets itself as one app to replace them all. They say that they can manage your tasks, and they can offer you whiteboards, dashboards, chat, goals and even docs. While this might be appealing because you’re thinking you’re going to need fewer tools, the problem with an all-in-one tool is that it tries to do way too much. The main complaint we hear about ClickUp, and the reason why we haven’t even tried to implement it in our business, is that it’s overwhelming to use. There are too many features and, from what we hear, it’s super buggy because instead of focusing on doing one thing well, it tries to do everything and ends up missing the final 10 to 15 percent of making features as powerful as they could be, in our view.

Thoughts on Reddit

Here’s some thoughts we found on Reddit. One user says, “My organization use ClickUp and I hated it. I spent more time creating cards and tracking time and reorganizing my space than I did actually working. Part of the problem is how my boss used ClickUp for micromanaging”. That can be true for any project manager. Someone else said, “I really dislike ClickUp. Am I missing something? So an organization I work with is moving to ClickUp.

Most of the reviews I’ve seen are super positive and the rest of my team seems to really like it so far, but I really really dislike it. I find it buggy, confusing, complex, poorly designed from an information architecture standpoint and more. When assessing potential PM tools last year, ClickUp was at the bottom of my list along with Asana.” We disagree with that comment on Asana, but let’s keep going. “I also think it’s odd that people keep talking about efficiency because its efficiency is just so vastly inferior. Anyway, what am I missing? I’m really curious because the reviews are so incredibly positive but I find it nearly impossible to use without getting frustrated every few seconds.

It would be wonderful if I can choke down the Kool-Aid since I’m stuck using ClickUp whether I like it or not.”

monday.com as a Project Manager

Another PM tool that we believe is trying to do too much is monday.com, and I have personal experience with it because I actually tried to use it for about a year with one of my previous customers. monday.com has expanded into trying to do everything as well, and recently we even saw them market themselves as a CRM, which really just made me want to pull my hair out. If you’re looking for a CRM, just use a proper CRM. Don’t try to use a project manager as a CRM.

How Pretty It Looked

I’ll be honest, the appeal of monday.com for myself and my team at the time was just how pretty it looked. They had all these colorful buttons and we thought, how cool would it be to manage everything in here. When you first set it up you’re encouraged to have many different statuses. You can prioritize things based on a five-star system and that’s cool and all, but then when you actually start using it every single day you find out how much work it is to update all these fields that you had set up initially.

Too Many Notifications

As we went on and used it more we found that we didn’t need all these fields, and we just kept cutting back. We also had a lot of trouble making it work for a greater team. There were so many notifications firing off everywhere that everybody felt confused about when they were actually needed in the tool and when they weren’t. Now granted, that problem can happen with other tools and it requires proper notification setup, which we then did, and eventually we assigned one PM to manage the tool.

Not Scalable

We were a team of about 15 people at the time and we totally fit into that Reich study, because after I’d say six to eight months it really started phasing out of the business and after a year we stopped using it entirely because it just wasn’t scalable for what we were trying to do. Yes, monday.com looks pretty, I really like their marketing, but in terms of being an effective tool I don’t think it’s great. I also think it’s kind of buggy, and if you’re looking for a more reliable project manager I think you’re going to benefit from checking out something like Asana that’s been around a lot longer.

Asana as a Project Manager

What we like about Asana is that it’s just a PM tool through and through. They’ve always been a PM tool and that’s all they’re still trying to be to this day. Last we checked they have about 1700 employees working on one thing, and that’s giving you a better project management experience and solution. In our experience this means their tool is reliable, it’s stable, it’s not as buggy as the other tools, and it has a powerful API with lots of cool integrations and features that come along with it.

Over 200 Employees

We actually used Asana here at Efficient App for seven years. It was our PM tool before we switched to Motion, which I’ll talk about next. We still recommend Asana if you have say over 200 employees. If you have a large team, and you’re familiar with the enterprise space and tools like HubSpot or Salesforce that require more of a consultant to set up, that is your Asana version of a PM tool. It is great when set up properly, and if you have proper team training and you can get that adoption, we really think it is one of the best tools on the market for larger teams.

Motion as a Project Manager

Last but not least, what’s the tool that we currently use? About a year ago we switched off of Asana and started using Motion, and the reason for that is because Motion is the ultimate time management platform, at least for us. What I mean by that is prior to Motion we had our work tasks in Asana and then we had our personal tasks stored in something called TickTick, which is another tool. And then we had a Calendly equivalent called Chili Piper that we used to schedule calls. We were using all of these different tools to try to manage where we needed to be and what we needed to do.

From Calendar Tool to Project Management Tool

Motion initially was a calendar tool that allowed people to schedule time on your calendar, and they did that in a really clever way by letting you chunk your meetings together and free up more time so you can actually get focus work done. Then they expanded into task management and now a full project management tool. What’s really cool about it is that we can put all of our tasks for our different customers and projects within Motion and then it puts those specific tasks on our calendar. As you can imagine we have meetings and places that we need to be, and personal appointments as well, and around that we have the tasks that we need to do, both work related and personal.

What Do I Need to Do Next

At the end of the day we are just one person. We all have the same amount of hours in a day, so it seems ridiculous in hindsight to use all these different tools to manage your time when in reality the only question you should be asking is what do I need to do next, and that’s what Motion helps answer for us really easily.

Motion Uses AI

Motion also uses AI to rearrange our tasks for us. In Asana we would spend a sick amount of time rearranging our deadlines and pushing things backwards when we didn’t actually complete a task by its deadline, which is super common across every job in every industry. But with Motion, if you have something that you need to complete for one day and you don’t get it done, Motion automatically reschedules that task for the next day or your next available time slot. This makes it so much easier because we open up Motion and that question of what do I need to do next is mainly answered for us.

Slack Integration

We also have a really cool integration between Motion and our Slack where say Alex, who is my business partner, sends me a message, I can just hit save on that message and it automatically puts it as a task on my calendar within Motion. We have a whole video showing that integration off.

Small to Mid-Sized Teams

If you’re a small to mid-sized team, so say one to a hundred people, you can probably get away with using Motion, and that setup I mentioned at the beginning, that’s 50 plus hours. The smaller your team the quicker it’s going to be with a tool like Motion because, like I said, you’re really just managing your time and then you have tasks and then you can break them up into bigger projects if you need to.

Solopreneurs

If you are a solopreneur I would also recommend Motion instead of the Notion setup I spoke about earlier, and that’s because it’s just really set up for you. It’s opinionated and all you have to do is go through the prompts, and before you know it you have all your tasks on your calendar in one place. You don’t have to figure out how to configure it.