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There are seemingly countless project management solutions that claim to help remote teams, so figuring out which is best for you is tough. You want to bring your teams together under a single platform where they can collaborate just as if they were in the same room but need to figure out which tool is the best fit. I've got you! In this post I make things simple, leveraging my experience reviewing hundreds of different PM tools and experience in remote-first companies to bring you this shortlist of the best project management tools for remote teams.

What are project management tools for remote teams?

Project management tools for remote teams are digital platforms specifically tailored to support project planning and execution in a distributed work environment. These tools provide a centralized space where remote team members can access project information, collaborate on tasks, and stay updated on project progress, overcoming the geographical barriers associated with remote work.

Some common features include various communication channels, video-conferencing capabilities, and document sharing. The transparency provided by these tools ensures that all team members have visibility into project status and updates, regardless of their physical location – promoting a sense of unity and shared purpose.

Overviews Of The 10 Best Project Management Tools For Remote Teams

Here’s a brief description of each of the tools on my list showing what it does best, plus screenshots to showcase some of the features.

Best remote PM tool for 3rd-party integrations

  • 14-day free trial + free plan available
  • From $8/user/month (billed annually, min 3 seats)
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Rating: 4.7/5

Used by over 100,000 teams, Monday.com offers a host of tools for planning, tracking, and delivering remote work for different projects. Out-of-office teams will most likely have a collection of apps they need on a daily basis and Monday.com delivers with hundreds on third-party integrations to choose from. They connect with the apps you would expect, like Slack and Microsoft, as well as more niche software like Eventbrite.

monday.com costs from $6/user/month and comes with a free 14-day trial. They offer a free plan for up to 2 users.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Very easy to invite others, share timelines, and assign tasks
  • Simple organization by dragging and dropping tasks
  • Excellent collaborative features

Cons:

  • No bottleneck identification or assistance
  • Automations are not fully customizable
  • Best features locked to Standard or Pro versions

Best collaborative whiteboard for remote teams

  • Free plan available
  • From $10/user/month
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Rating: 4.8/5

Miro is a comprehensive online whiteboard designed with remote teams in mind, providing an extensive array of over 1,000 templates for various project management tasks. Its infinite canvas allows teams unlimited space for brainstorming and project mapping, supporting a wide range of idea expression, including numerical data, images, videos, and brand elements.

With the Miro Assist feature, the platform can generate ideas and pathways from initial prompts, facilitating collaborative brainstorming. Additionally, Miro enables asynchronous collaboration, accommodating diverse schedules and work habits, through features like comments and reactions.The platform also integrates well into hybrid work environments, offering interactive displays and mobile access, making it a suitable choice for teams looking to collaborate remotely.

Miro has integrations with a whole suite of tools, including Zoom, Figma, Asana, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Slack, Monday.com, Confluence, Google Drive, Box, Airtable, Notion, Azure, and Webex. Some integrations are limited to paid plans only.

Miro is free to use for unlimited members with up to 3 editable boards. Paid plans start at $8/user/month (billed annually).

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Free forever plan available
  • Intuitive and easy setup
  • Built-in communication features for streamlined collaboration

Cons:

  • Visitor/guest accounts locked to paid plans only
  • Zooming can be jumpy on larger projects
  • Free version does not allow high-quality export to pdf

Best for managing your projects, resources, and finances in one

  • Free demo available
  • Pricing upon request
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Rating: 4.7/5

Forecast is a project management software for remote teams that unites your projects, resources, and financials in one AI-powered platform. Project managers can leverage Forecast’s workflow automation capabilities to create smart schedules, estimate timeframes and budgets, and populate timesheets instantly. Forecast is currently used in over 40 countries by an assortment of remote- and hybrid agencies, consulting companies, SMBs, and enterprises.

PMs can control the workflow by building out detailed task lists and flagging clear priorities. Task cards allow remote team members to easily comment, share files, and register time spent. Everything related to the specific task appears in one place, including dependencies and subtasks. You can put together projects for any type of work: fixed price, time and material, or retainer.

Forecast’s AI learns from previous work and suggests the number of hours you normally register on similar tasks to help you log time faster. You can monitor time registrations from a team perspective and notify each member if they forget to enter something in. Time tracking utilization on a company-wide level is calculated for you for easy alerts, estimates, and reporting.

Forecast integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, iCloud Calendar, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Outlook, Harvest, Trello, Asana, GitLab, Github, and dozens more using a paid plan through Zapier. Higher-tier subscriptions include native integrations with Timelog, Xero, QuickBooks Online, JIRA, Azure DevOps, Salesforce, Okta, OneLogin, and Azure Active Directory.

Forecast cost from $29/user/month with a minimum of 10 users and offers a 14-day free trial.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Projects, resources and financials connected in one platform
  • AI powered auto-scheduling and time entry suggestions
  • Excellent iOS and Android apps
  • Automated cost and budget estimations

Cons:

  • No browser extension for time tracking
  • No asset management
  • Minimum of 10 seats

Best remote project management tool for freelancers

  • 15-day free trial + free version available
  • From $5.95/user/month
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Rating: 4.6/5

Paymo helps users manage tasks, create schedules, track time, and bill clients with a solution that's tailored to the needs of small and medium businesses. Used by over 50,000 recorded freelancers, Paymo has a simple but thorough time management system, easy invoicing, client-ready report templates, and convenient file storage. For simple task management and time tracking, Paymo offers a free freelancer edition of their tool.

Paymo costs from $9.95/user/month and offers a 15-day free trial.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Time tracking easily runs in the background with little interference
  • Organizes jobs intuitively and can easily archive jobs
  • Easy to share content with external stakeholders

Cons:

  • Large learning curve compared to others
  • Project table layout categories challenging to edit
  • Budgets from projects to tasks can be difficult to calculate

Best platform for client work

  • 30-day free trial
  • From $5.99/user/month (billed annually).
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Rating: 4.4/5

Teamwork is a jack-of-all-trades project management tool that remote teams will love for its task management, time tracking, resource management, and robust reporting capabilities. Small businesses or budget-strapped teams will appreciate their free forever plan for up to 5 users, 2 projects, and 100MB of storage space. Stuff like change history and burndown reporting are limited to the higher plans but many inventive teams can do without.

Teamwork costs from $10/user/month and offers a free version for up to 5 users.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Excellent time tracking features
  • Easy and comprehensive report building
  • Easily track comments and feedback from clients

Cons:

  • Billing and invoicing limited to paid plans
  • Doesn't sync with QuickBooks
  • Can be difficult to move/adjust milestones

Best software for remote teams using hybrid project methodologies

  • 30-day free trial
  • From $13/user/month (min 5 seats) (billed annually)
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Rating: 4.4/5

ProjectManager lets users choose their own project view, be it agile, waterfall, or a hybrid methodology—whatever suits their needs. Flexible project views offer kanban boards, Gantt charts, task lists, and other common workflow arrangements. Remote teams will also appreciate their dedication to interdepartmental collaboration through an intuitive commenting system, robust roadmaps, and unlimited file-sharing.

ProjectManager costs from $15/user/month and offers a 30-day free trial.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Good for costing and construction work monitoring
  • Easy to use project scheduling
  • Fits well into an Agile framework

Cons:

  • No way to track and update partially complete tasks
  • No way to sort Agile Boards by project, only by task
  • Most reports require a manual clean-up

Best free PM tool for remote teams

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $7/user/month
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Rating: 4.3/5

Hubstaff Tasks is a project management tool for remote teams with multiple task tracking and collaboration features. Its interface is based on the Kanban methodology; it lets you organize tasks in different project stages, which are represented by columns. Each task can be categorized using color-coded labels. One of its notable features is custom workflows. These let you automate assigning tasks to team members at different project stages and moving them forward with one click.

You can create checklists within each task and track them from the project view using progress bars. Files can also be attached to task cards, but the free plan only allows up to 100 MB of storage per user. Switching to the sprints view displays all your assigned tasks, organized by sprint. You can move tasks to current or future sprints or to the backlog with a drag-and-drop mechanism similar to Kanban.

Hubstaff Tasks integrates with Active Collab, Asana, Breeze, ClickUp, GitHub, GitLab, Insightly, JIRA, LiquidPlanner, Mavenlink, Paymo, PivotalTracker, Podio, Redbooth, Redmine, Teamwork Projects, Trello, Unfuddle, Wrike, Zoho Projects, Slack, Zendesk, Salesforce, QuickBooks, and other apps. You can boost your integration options with a paid plan through Zapier, unlocking hundreds of other possible connections.

Hubstaff Tasks is free for up to 5 users and 10 projects. The premium plan starts at $7/user/month.

Pros and cons

Pros:

  • Generous free plan for small teams
  • Excellent project management templates
  • Can opt in/out of sprints for each project
  • Very simple to launch/get started

Cons:

  • No WIP limits or swimlanes
  • Limited 3rd-party integrations
  • No mobile app

Best for extensive reporting and analytics tools

  • 30-day free trial
  • From $8.50/user/month

Height is a cloud-based project management tool that helps organizations boost productivity, streamline communication, and enable efficient collaboration among remote team members.

One of the critical features of Height is its centralized task management system, which makes it easier for team members to stay on top of their assigned tasks, the project's status, and essential deadlines. This system also allows team leaders to prioritize specific tasks and monitor the work progress of their team members. With its inbuilt messaging system and real-time collaboration tools, team members can easily communicate and collaborate regardless of their geographical locations. This helps minimize communication barriers, encourage transparency, and ensure everyone works towards the same goals.

Height boasts of various automation tools that help reduce team members' workloads and streamline project workflows. This includes task automation, recurring tasks, and the ability to create project task templates that can be reused for future projects. The software comes with extensive reporting and analytics tools that provide valuable insights into project performance, identifying potential bottlenecks and highlighting areas that require improvement. This helps team leaders make informed decisions, optimize project workflows, and ensure projects are completed on time and within budget.

The platform is highly customizable and quickly tailored to suit unique needs and preferences. Its flexible user interface allows users to modify settings, workflows, and visualizations to match their team's specific requirements. It also seamlessly integrates various project management components such as task lists, calendar views, and dashboards to provide a comprehensive overview of the work. With the tool's dashboard functionality, team leaders can easily see the project's progress and identify any issues that need to be addressed. It provides automated reports and analytics that allow team members to measure their progress against their goals, making it easier to identify areas of improvement.


Best remote project management tool for screen recording

  • Freemium plan available
  • From $7/user/month
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Rating: 4.7/5

ClickUp is a sturdy remote project management tool that offers tasks, docs, chat, goals, and everything else you have come to expect from a modern PM app. Where ClickUp stands out is its intuitive built-in screen recording features, which allow you to demonstrate processes and share data no matter where your team is physically located. You can even embed your recordings right into your group chats, making screen sharing basically effortless.

ClickUp costs from $5/user/month and offers a free version with limited features.

Best for building custom project workflows

  • 30-day free trial
  • From $24/user/month
Visit Website
Rating: 4.6/5

Kintone is a customizable project planning platform used by teams at Volvo Trucks North America, Japan Airlines, Shiseido, and over 23,000 organizations worldwide. Their unique approach to project and task management lets you build a wide variety of customizable “apps” either from scratch, using templates or from your existing spreadsheets, for data management, business processes, and workflows. Kintone apps can be customized for project management, sales CRM, customer databases, expense reports, shared to-do lists, equipment management, product feedback, and much more.

Apps can be built either from scratch, using templates, or from existing spreadsheets for data management, business processes, and workflow purposes. Kintone apps can be customized for project management, sales CRM, customer databases, expense reports, shared to-do lists, equipment management, product feedback, and much more.

Kintone lets you build agile project management apps by dragging and dropping elements that you want to see onto the page: rich text fields, date fields, drop-down menus, number fields with built-in calculations, spaces for attachments, user or group selection menus, related data from other apps, tables, and more. Your agile project management solution can look and work however you want it to.

What makes Kintone particularly great for agile project management is that it empowers project managers to track all facets of their project, from individual tasks and project data to workflows and communication—and then use their findings to rapidly improve their processes as they go. Because the end-users are also the app designers, feedback loops are instant, continuous, and actionable.

There are so many ways to customize Kintone it can be hard to know where to start. Read the starter blog “What Can You Build with Kintone?” or watch Creating an App from Scratch for a quick look at how the drag-and-drop builder works.

Kintone lets you expand its capabilities with both free native plugins built by the Kintone team as well as integrations with other tools like Slack, Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, Tableau, Dropbox, Salesforce, HubSpot, Eventbrite, WordPress, QuickBooks, MailChimp, and many more through a paid plan with Zapier or via API integrations.

Kintone costs $24/user/month with a minimum requirement of 5 users. They offer a 30-day free trial (no credit card required) and discounted prices for nonprofits and educators. Kintone’s team also offers a free custom app build as part of the free trial process.

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The Best Project Management Tools For Remote Teams Comparison Chart

Here is a table where you can compare the tools we just covered in the overviews.

Tools Price
monday.com From $8/user/month (billed annually, min 3 seats)
Miro From $10/user/month
Forecast Pricing upon request
Paymo From $5.95/user/month
Teamwork.com From $5.99/user/month (billed annually).
ProjectManager.com From $13/user/month (min 5 seats) (billed annually)
Hubstaff From $7/user/month
Height From $8.50/user/month
ClickUp From $7/user/month
Kintone From $24/user/month
Preview Image - 
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	Compare Software Specs Side by Side</h2>

Compare Software Specs Side by Side

Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.

Compare Software

Other Project Management Tools For Remote Teams

Here are a few remote project planning tools that didn’t quite make the list but are still worth checking out.

  1. MeisterTask

    Best tool for mixed OS teams

  2. Smartsheet

    Best remote project management tool for sales reps

  3. Productive

    Best for agency performance tracking

  4. Wrike

    Best for agile teams

  5. Hive

    Best remote tool for agencies

  6. Celoxis

    Best for remote project portfolio management

  7. Kantata

    Best for business intelligence (BI)

  8. Hub Planner

    Best for midsized to large companies

  9. Ravetree

    Best remote project management for professional services businesses

  10. Kissflow

    Best simple project management software for remote teams

  11. KeyedIn

    Best for PMO analytics

  12. Basecamp

    Best for IT teams

  13. Zoho Projects

    Best for CRM needs

  14. Asana

    Best drag-and-drop task list

  15. ProWorkflow

    Best variety of remote collaboration features

How I Picked The Best Project Management Tools For Remote Teams

First, I selected all the popular project management platforms on the market based on user reviews and ratings. Then, I narrowed down the list using my experience in building remote teams and the key features required for remote work. Finally, I weighed the remaining tools against each other based on their features and some of the criteria that I details below and used for my evaluation of each tool.

Key Features

Here are three of the features you cannot miss if you want to give your team the best chances to succeed when collaborating remotely.

  1. Team communication options – You’ll want the basics (like @-tagging and a commenting system) but look for those that go above and beyond with team collaboration features.
  2. File management and sharing – Every project team is going to have a series of documents or items that must be easily accessible to all team members at any time. Good file management is crucial.
  3. Time tracking – This is a must for remote working. Depending on your needs, you can get time tracking tools with inactivity sensors and other software solutions to prevent time theft.
  4. Collaboration tools – Features like screen sharing, video calling, shared to-do lists, and other means by which your team can collaborate.
  5. Workflow management – The ability to outline custom workflows, automate certain elements, and then track progress and milestones along your workflow.

User Interface (UI)

Remote team members may have a series of apps to switch through every day, so is the software UI intuitive and engaging to prevent burnout? Bonus: Does the project management software for remote work feature any gamification or accountability boosters?

Usability

Can remote workers figure out the tool with no in-person training required? Do virtual teams have access to online tutorials, whitepapers, live chat check-ins, real-time webinars, project templates, and community forums?

Integrations

Remote employees rarely use only one piece of software for their day-to-day; so, does the PM tool integrate with other common types of software (timesheets, collaboration tools, file sharing, messaging, task management, video conferencing, CRM, invoicing)? Does the project management solution easily and securely connect with popular workspace software like Slack, Google Drive and Google Docs, Dropbox, Jira, Skype, Zoom, Microsoft Suite, Proofhub)?

Pricing

Most remote projects require workflow tools that do a bit of everything. Does the functionality of the tool seem fair for the list of services they are providing? Is the pricing scheme accommodating to large and small teams alike? Does the cost include mobile app access for Android or iOS?

Remote Team Project Management FAQs

Here are some answers to common questions about managing projects on remote teams!

How do I manage my project team remotely?

Managing a remote team can be complicated. Most times you have to deal with time zone and geographical barriers that impede fluid work. Therefore, as you can probably guess, you’ll have to pay extra attention to team communication. And this comes in two variants, making sure they connect as a team and personally paying close attention to each member.

If you want to learn more about the communication needed and 8 tips to manage remote teams, go to our ultimate guide to remote project management.

How do project management tools help manage budgets?

Project management tools provide you with the tools and features to plan, track, and control project expenses effectively. These include:

  • Time tracking features that will help you know how much time is spent on tasks.
  • Resource management capabilities that can help you allocate the right resources for your project and know how much they cost.
  • Notification systems that can keep an eye on budget spending so that you know when you are approaching your limits.
  • Reporting that can help you see actuals vs budget details that you can compare with your timeline.

On top of all of these, the most value comes from having a system that stores historical data that can help you estimate project costs better. This project history can help you have better initial conversations with the client and set expectations.

project management tools for remote teams logos list

What Are Your Favorite Project Management Tools For Remote Teams?

We have lots of useful information if you need to improve your project management and remote team collaboration. For example, here are 4 tips for hiring remotely and how to do virtual mentoring with your remote team.

Did you learn about new project management tools for your remote teams from this article? If not, what are some tools you know deserve to be on this list?Also, what PM tools help you work remotely, especially across different time zones?

Related tool lists:

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By Ben Aston

I’m Ben Aston, a digital project manager and founder of thedpm.com. I've been in the industry for more than 20 years working in the UK at London’s top digital agencies including Dare, Wunderman, Lowe and DDB. I’ve delivered everything from film to CMS', games to advertising and eCRM to eCommerce sites. I’ve been fortunate enough to work across a wide range of great clients; automotive brands including Land Rover, Volkswagen and Honda; Utility brands including BT, British Gas and Exxon, FMCG brands such as Unilever, and consumer electronics brands including Sony. I'm a Certified Scrum Master, PRINCE2 Practitioner and productivity nut!