15 Best Planning Tools to Organize Projects, Goals, and Workflows (2025)

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Project planning tools play a significant role in managing projects, from ideation to execution, and the nuances in between.
If you pick the wrong tool, planning can end up feeling just as chaotic as the work itself.
That’s why we’ve curated a list of top project management planning tools that actually make your job easier, not harder. Some keep everything simple and visual, and others are built to handle the demands of large, complex projects.
But before we explore the best free project management tools that made it to our list, let’s take a look at the key features to look for in a project planning tool.
The right tool often depends on your team’s size, style, and the kind of projects you manage. Here’s a quick overview of the tools we’ll be covering, so you can spot the one that fits your workflow.
| Tool Name | Key features | Best for | Pricing |
| ClickUp | 15+ project views, AI-powered automation, native time tracking, real-time communication and collaboration tools | Teams of all sizes organizing goals, timelines, and tasks in one collaborative space | Free plan available; Custom pricing for enterprises |
| Wrike | Interactive Gantt Charts, work intelligence, Agile custom item types | Small teams looking for structured, long-term project planning | Free plan available; Paid plans start from $10/month |
| Jira | Scrum/Kanban boards, Atlassian Intelligence (AI), dynamic backlog | Agile teams needing technical and collaborative project planning | Free plan available; Paid plans start from $7.53/month |
| Trello | Trello Inbox, Atlassian AI, automation | Visual task tracking for small teams or individuals | Free plan available; Paid plans start from $6/month |
| Microsoft Planner | Bucket task organization, visual status charts, MS Teams integration | Teams already using Microsoft 365, seeking lightweight planning | Free plans available; Paid plans start from $10/month (billed annually) |
| Teamwork | Resource management, client-level insights, intake forms automation | Project budget planning and resource allocation for mid-sized to large teams | Free plan available; Paid plans start from $13.99/month |
| Toggl Plan | Drag-drop timelines, team capacity view, integration with Toggl Track | Small teams needing simple, visual project timelines | Free plan available; Paid plans start from $11/month per user |
| Todoist | Natural language input, cross-device accessibility, and daily digest emails | Managing personal and team projects | Free plan available; Paid plans start from $2.5/month per user |
| Notion | Flexible database views, customizable blocks, Notion AI | Custom workflows combining docs, notes, and tasks for small to mid-sized teams | Free plan available; Paid plans start from $12/month per user |
| Asana | Multi-view planning, goal setting, automated workflows | Mid-to-large teams needing structured workflows & automation | Free plan available; Paid plans start from $13.49/user per month |
| Monday.com | Custom visual boards, board-level automations, and Pre-built templates | Marketing and PMO teams needing customization and scalability | Free plan available; Paid plans start from $14/seat per month |
| Zoho Projects | Dependency Gantt charts, blueprint automation, time and budget tracking | Scalable project management for growing teams | Free plan available; Paid plans start from $3.97/user per month |
| TeamGantt | Drag-drop timelines, time tracking visuals, portfolio baselines | Construction and manufacturing project planning for large teams | Paid plans start from $59/manager per month |
| Airtable | Relational databases, interface builder, Omni AI | Small teams needing flexible, database-driven planning | Free plan available; Paid plans start from $24/seat per month |
| Miro | Visual whiteboards, live team collaboration | Remote and creative teams needing visual planning | Free plan available; Paid plans start from $8/seat per month |
A good project planning tool keeps work organized, priorities clear, and collaboration simple. Here are the key features to watch for when choosing one.
🔎 Did you know? When NASA built the James Webb Space Telescope, project planning spanned over 20 years, involving 258 suppliers across many U.S. states and 13+ countries. What kept the project on track? Rigorous phased planning and seamless coordination.
Now, let’s take a closer look at each tool’s features, pricing, ratings, and user reviews.
Our editorial team follows a transparent, research-backed, and vendor-neutral process, so you can trust that our recommendations are based on real product value.
Here’s a detailed rundown of how we review software at ClickUp.

ClickUp, the everything app for work, helps teams plan, organize, and track projects efficiently in one place.
With ClickUp for Project Teams, you can manage tasks, visualize timelines, automate workflows, and collaborate with your team in real time so everyone knows what’s happening. It keeps work visible and makes it easier to stay on top of priorities.
Project managers can start by breaking projects into manageable tasks with ClickUp Tasks. Assign responsibilities, set due dates and priorities, add stages, and use Custom Fields to capture important details.
To plan and track work in a way that works best for your team’s needs, you can switch between 15+ Custom Views.
🎯 Visualize your work, your way:
For planning and collaboration, ClickUp Whiteboards provide a space where teams can brainstorm, map ideas, and outline project workflows in real time. You can draw connections, assign tasks, and involve team members in discussions as the plan develops.

ClickUp Docs complements this by letting you centralize project resources like meeting discussions, project briefs, notes, and SOPs. With formatting options, tables, banners, buttons, and attachments, you can create organized and accessible documentation without switching apps.

If you are looking for ready-made frameworks, ClickUp’s library of fully customizable templates makes it easier to maintain consistency across projects without having to create detailed project plans from scratch.
The Example Project Plan Template by ClickUp lets you write out the project objectives, key deliverables, timeline, budget, stakeholders, and scope. With tasks, subtasks, Custom Fields, and dependency mapping for sequential tasks, you can easily monitor progress and adjust as needed.
The template lets you:
ClickUp’s Planning a Project Template is another great tool that helps you ensure every step of the process is planned before execution starts.
It has four main views:
Within ClickUp, project planning becomes more efficient because it combines AI-powered assistance, automation, and knowledge management directly within your workspace.
ClickUp Brain is a context-aware AI assistant that can instantly generate a structured plan with tasks, milestones, dependencies, and timelines based on your project requirements.
To prevent important details from getting lost in discussions, it turns meeting notes and chat messages into tasks, and even fetches updates from across your workspace.

Here’s a TrustRadius review:
ClickUp has a lot to offer in one place such as project management, brainstorming options, task management, project planning, documentation management, etc. It has definitely made life comparatively easier as it’s easy to use, UI is well designed, and collaboration within the team and with other teams is easier. We were able to manage work better, track and report work easily, and based on progress daily huddles, future planning was easy.
Ready to get started with ClickUp? Watch this video to see how you can create a project plan in under 30 minutes!

Wrike is an AI-powered work management platform. It provides visual project boards that help teams create detailed project plans and execute them efficiently.
With Wrike, you can customize how projects are set up and organized. You decide how tasks, timelines, and workflows are structured to match your team’s needs. You can view projects using List, Kanban, and Calendar views, and organize tasks using folders and nested hierarchies.
Wrike AI works with the automation builder to analyze project flows and recommends automations at the account or space level, helping reduce repetitive work.
The cross-tagging feature allows you to connect tasks, subtasks, milestones, and even entire projects across multiple workflows. A single task can appear in multiple projects—like ‘Marketing Campaign’ and ‘Weekly Report’, so teams stay aligned without duplicating work or losing important details.
A G2 review says:
Wrike is one of the easiest project management platforms to set up and get started. It helps us to organize projects by their deadline, clients, and subject, and customize our workflow.
📚 Read More: Best Wrike Alternatives & Competitors

Jira helps you track and manage software, IT, and product launch projects by breaking work into epics, stories, tasks, and subtasks, giving you a clear picture of progress across your teams.
This Agile project planning tool lets you customize your workflows, adjust screens, and design boards that match exactly how your team works. If you want a shortcut, you can pick a template specifically designed for Agile sprints, bug tracking, or product launches.
The backlog view lets you prioritize tasks, plan sprints, and visualize exactly where each task sits on your Scrum or Kanban board.
A G2 review says:
Jira helps our team stay organized and on track with all ongoing projects. I really like how clearly it shows the progress of tasks, deadlines, and responsibilities. The boards and sprint views make it easy to follow up with developers, content creators, and designers; everything stays transparent.
📚 Read More: Best Jira Alternatives & Competitors for Agile Teams

Trello is a visual project management tool ideal for solo projects, small teams, and agencies. It has a minimalistic design, built atop the classic Kanban board view.
You create task cards for each piece of work and move them across columns as progress is made. If you need other perspectives, it’s easy to switch between Calendar, Timeline, Table, Dashboard, or Map views to see your tasks in different ways.
You can link design files from Figma or InVision directly to a task card, so your team always sees the latest version. Emails and Slack messages can become tasks automatically, and you can even turn cards into QuickBooks invoices.
Trello’s Power-Ups and automations add extra functionality. While power-ups help convert any email or Slack message into a task, standard automations let you handle repetitive work, like moving cards when a task is complete or sending reminders.
A G2 review says:
If you’re working on a small project with just a few team members and don’t want to spend hours setting up tools, I’d highly recommend Trello. It has all the features you need to track project progress and assign tasks to team members.
📚 Read More: Best Trello Alternatives and Competitors
📮 ClickUp Insight: 29% of people focus on whatever ‘feels’ most urgent, rather than planning their focus time.
Why? The constant pressure to “put out fires” can make it hard to step back and prioritize what truly moves the needle. 🚒
With ClickUp’s Priorities, Dependencies, and read-to-use effort vs. impact templates, you can break the cycle—spotlighting high-value tasks so your energy goes where it counts, not just where it’s loudest.
Microsoft Planner is a cloud-based project planning tool integrated with Microsoft 365, including MS Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint.
If your team already works within the Microsoft ecosystem, you can see and manage tasks without switching between applications. Collaboration is built in. You can co-author tasks, comment on them, and receive real-time updates, ensuring your team stays connected and informed.
The platform enables you to group tasks, add priority labels, assign owners, and create checklists to ensure no details are missed.
Tasks can be organized into buckets, and you can view them in different formats: List, Board, Calendar, or Timeline.
Planner also supports task dependencies, enabling you to establish relationships between tasks. This feature is particularly useful for complex projects where the completion of one task depends on the completion of another.
A G2 review says:
Microsoft Planner makes task organization a breeze and effortless. The ability to create tasks, assign them to members, set deadlines and prioritize them all in one platform is a boon to everyone in the industry.
💡Pro Tip: ClickUp is the only platform designed for true project execution, powered by contextual AI agents. Connect everything you need to run a full project lifecycle in one platform—powered by AI—to unlock flawless execution and deliver results for every team.
AI Agents in ClickUp can:


Teamwork is an AI-powered project management software perfect for businesses and agencies managing client work.
For teams handling overlapping deadlines, it has resource planning features and built-in cost tools to help track budgets, log billable hours, and stay on top of profitability without exporting to spreadsheets. You can sketch out projects using tasks, milestones, and goals, then visualize them all as a Gantt chart or in simpler list and board views.
The AI features can be used to plan projects, fill in missing steps, create action items, or summarize long task threads. They even help with smart task assignment—matching work to people based on their skills, availability, and workload.
A G2 review says:
Teamwork.com is remarkable in managing tasks, with brilliant features, including Gantt Charts, time tracking, budgeting, resource management, etc.
🔎 Did you know? Nearly 1 in 4 projects experience scope creep, delays, or budget overruns due to poor planning and lack of visibility. The right project planning software helps teams stay aligned, manage complexity, and deliver on time.

Toggl Plan helps you prioritize things, schedule tasks, and get projects done with drag-and-drop timelines. If you’re managing a team, a consultancy, or handling multiple projects, you can check who’s available and adjust workloads without the stress of micromanaging.
You can break projects into smaller tasks, add checklists or SOPs, and move things around quickly if priorities shift. Boards and timelines give you two different ways to track project progress, depending on how your team prefers to work.
Color-coded milestones and task cards in this free project management tool make it easy to see at a glance what’s coming up and what’s already in progress. Each card shows key details like due dates and hours spent.
You can zoom out to view your project’s progress by month, quarter, or year, which makes forecasting and long-term planning easy.
A G2 review says:
Toggl Plan offers several features that make it great for project management and team collaboration such as visual planning, user friendly interface, task management, customization and time tracking.
🌟 Bonus: When you’re starting a new project, ClickUp Brain MAX can help build a plan and structure it around priorities and dependencies. Because it links to your workspace, docs, task lists, and connected apps, it provides a “single source of truth” for project planning.
It knows your projects, team, deadlines, and work history, so you can ask natural-language queries like “Which tasks are planned in the first quarter for Project X?” and it scans your entire workspace for insights and provides accurate answers.
Here is a video on what it looks like in action ⬇️

Todoist is a versatile task management software for hobbyists, freelancers, and entrepreneurs looking to manage personal and team to-dos side-by-side.
Its clean dashboard keeps distractions away and makes it simple to navigate through your tasks. You can group tasks, set priorities, add deadlines, and create separate spaces for different parts of your life—one for personal work and another for a team project.
Todoist’s AI Assist helps generate project briefs, provides task and sub-task suggestions, breaks down complex work, turns emails into organized tasks, and even gives tips on what to prioritize next.
A G2 review says:
Todoist has completely transformed my workflow and productivity. Its intuitive interface, powerful task management features, and seamless cross-device syncing allow me to stay organized and focused, whether I’m at work or on the go. The flexibility to customize projects, set priorities, and automate recurring tasks makes it incredibly versatile for any type of user.
📚 Read More: Best Todoist Alternatives & Competitors

When you’re planning projects, you can build them in Notion using dashboards, pages, wikis, and task databases, and link them together for a comprehensive view of all your project data.
It lets you create dedicated workspaces, break down projects into small tasks with details like descriptions, statuses, and due dates, and switch between views to track progress. And because it plays well with tools like Gmail and Google Calendar, you don’t have to switch tabs to get the most recent status update.
Notion AI edits and polishes your documents and answers questions directly from your docs and databases, helping you find the right information without searching manually. It can also be used to design and automate project workflows, such as generating task lists, structuring timelines, or summarizing meeting notes.
A G2 review says:
Notion gives my team a ton of freedom to organize our work however we want. From project docs to back-and-forth brainstorming, it’s the only tool that doesn’t box us in.
📚 Read More: Best Notion Alternatives & Competitors

With Asana, you can create shared project hubs to plan, track, and execute multiple projects simultaneously.
This free project management software gives you flexible ways to track progress. You can map dependencies in Timeline view to see how tasks connect, or switch to the Calendar view when deadlines are piling up. If you’re running Agile sprints, the Board view keeps priorities clear, while the List view helps you with fine details.
Besides managing projects, Asana works well for content calendars, product launches, and cross-team initiatives. The tool also has a wide library of project planning templates built for different teams, such as marketing, HR, IT, operations, and sales.
If you’re looking to cut down on repetitive work, Asana’s AI Studio works with the Automation Builder to handle tasks like assignments, approvals, reminders, and routine updates. The AI also helps draft clear project goals, summarize team discussions into actionable tasks, measure project performance, and generate insights that highlight blockers or missed deadlines.
A G2 review says:
Asana is great for keeping projects organized and tracking team tasks. The interface is clean and intuitive, and the notifications make sure nothing gets forgotten.
📚 Read More: Best Asana Alternatives and Competitors

Monday.com scales with your team’s needs, offering a highly customizable and visual work management platform.
There are project boards to help you manage tasks with over 30 column types, like Status, Date, Timeline, and People, to tailor workflows for your team’s needs. You can switch between views like List, Kanban, Timeline, and more.
The tool lets you create both basic board-level and cross-platform automations with an automation builder.
For team and workload planning, it offers a native time-tracking widget, which you can embed on each task. When someone starts a task, they can simply start the timer. This way, you know which tasks are delaying projects.
A G2 review says:
Amazing tool to manage projects and products being released with multiple view options like charts, table and more which makes it highly useful. Easy to assign tasks and sprints to different teams.

If your team is already in the Zoho ecosystem, Zoho Projects is a reliable project planning software. You can connect with Zoho CRM to sync client details or Zoho Sprints to manage Agile workflows.
The tool lets you break down your long-term plans into a nested structure, including tasks, subtasks, milestones, deadlines, and clearly defined dependencies.
Time tracking is built in. This enables you to log hours and track billable and non-billable time. That data integrates with Zoho Books or Zoho Invoice for smooth invoicing and reporting.
Zia, Zoho’s proprietary AI, helps you work smarter by answering project-related questions, predicting outcomes, budget forecasting, and more.
A G2 review says:
Zoho Projects makes it easy for us to manage multiple projects at once with clear visibility of tasks and deadlines. It also supports different project management methods, from traditional task lists to Agile boards, which makes it versatile for different teams.
ClickUp Brain helps project managers streamline planning by generating project timelines, summarizing meeting notes, and assigning priorities in seconds.


TeamGantt simplifies visual planning, especially if Gantt charts are your go-to.
The platform enables you to view tasks, dates, dependencies, and milestones across multiple projects in one intuitive timeline. You get the flexibility to organize tasks into color-coded subgroups and use filters to zero in on specific tasks, team members, or timeframes.
The built-in RACI chart lays out who’s responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed, so everyone knows their role. If something changes, the drag-and-drop scheduler makes it simple to move tasks or rebalance workloads.
Moreover, you can also switch to Calendar, List, and Kanban board views. Collaboration happens in the task view, and the time-tracking features let you log hours, compare estimates against actuals, and check team availability.
A G2 review says:
I really like how TeamGantt enables team communication and coordination within the project environment, with features like @ tagging, discussions, and file sharing.
📚 Read More: TeamGantt Alternatives and Competitors

Airtable feels a lot like a spreadsheet at first glance, which makes it easy to get started.
However, unlike traditional spreadsheets, Airtable lets you use 25 field types to organize projects, tasks, and people and build relational databases. If you find it difficult to configure relational tables or automations from scratch, simply type your project idea in Omni (Airtable AI), and it builds tables, interfaces, workflows, and automations around your data.
You can interact with data cells and choose to visualize data using different layouts—List, Calendar, Kanban, Timeline, Gallery, or Form.
The tool’s built-in collaboration tools allow you to leave comments, attach files, and @mention teammates. And with integrations to Slack, Google Drive, Trello, and plenty more, it fits into most team setups.
A G2 review says:
It is a great platform can be used as an Excel and project management tool all in one place. Workspaces and templates and everything can be created with AI. Easy to use and manage projects and assign tasks with deadlines to people in teams.
📚 Read More: Best Airtable Alternatives & Competitors

Miro, a collaborative whiteboard platform, makes it easy to collect and organize your team’s ideas in one place. You can brainstorm, map out workflows, or plan projects visually using flowcharts, mind maps, and Kanban boards.
In addition to Whiteboards, it has project management tools like SWOT analysis, resource management, and a library of ready-made templates to get you started. You can build detailed flowcharts, process maps, and org charts with automated connectors, alignment tools, and interactive diagramming features.
Permissions let you control access to sensitive projects or external collaborators, while embedded voting and prioritization tools make decision-making straightforward.
You can bring in Figma designs, MURAL boards, or other third-party apps directly onto your canvas and turn your boards into interactive presentations for stakeholders without exporting.
A G2 review says:
The boards are incredibly versatile, allowing multiple people to contribute and collaborate in real time. It’s a great way to get started with collaborative whiteboarding.
📚 Read More: Best Miro Alternatives & Competitors
Not all planning tools are built the same. And that’s exactly what makes this list valuable.
While Notion or Todoist are personal productivity tools, Trello and Miro are good for brainstorming and visualizing workflows. But if you want all your project tasks, documentation, reports, and more in one converged workspace, pick ClickUp.
ClickUp, the everything app for work, excels at managing complex projects with advanced automation, AI, dashboards, time-tracking, and team collaboration features. That means fewer context-switches and a more consistent workflow across your team.
Sign up on ClickUp for free and manage every part of your planning in one workspace.
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