The 27 best project management collaboration tools in 2026

Complex projects demand effortless collaboration between team members. But to work together effectively, you need to be able to:

• Define and assign the tasks that make up your project
• Help team members discuss their work and give updates on their progress
• Securely store and manage the assets you need to complete your work
• Provide a system for reviews, feedback, and approvals of work
• Integrate different software and the platforms you use every day
• Automate workflows so your team can minimize repetitive tasks

The best project management collaboration tools will make all of this possible. 

This article outlines what to look for when you’re comparing different project collaboration software. We’ll start by introducing some of the simplest tools for creating to-do lists, messaging team members, and storing project files. 

But for complicated setups — especially cross-team projects with multiple outputs and milestones — using basic project management tools or piecing together a solution from a mix of different apps isn’t an effective way to work. 

That’s because switching between platforms makes your work slower and harder to track, and there are far too many places where things fall through the cracks. So, this list of project management software also reveals what to look for in a powerful, singular project management platform, including features that centralize your collaboration. 

With this in mind, we’ll introduce our own platform, Wrike, which is used worldwide by companies like Fitbit, Nickelodeon, and Walmart Canada. Read our customer stories here.

The best project management collaboration tools at a glance

If you’re short on time, here’s a quick look at the best project management collaboration tools covered in this article and what each one is best for.

Basic project management collaboration tools for small teams

Choosing the right project management tool for a small team is essential. Project collaboration tools connect teams so they can share resources, processes, and workflows. A good collaboration tool will ease the challenges of team collaboration and allow all project stakeholders to participate without friction.

7 basic task management tools 

Task management software helps you define and assign tasks, critical to both the planning and execution phases of any collaborative project. If all you need is a better view of your team’s shared checklist, these are some of the simplest task management tools on the market: 

1. Microsoft Excel (or Google Sheets): Shared spreadsheets you can build out with fields to describe tasks, statuses, due dates, and assignees. 
2. Trello: A Kanban-style system that visualizes project tasks as a series of cards that can be assigned to your team members. Cards are organized in project boards and can include tagged comments, checklists, and links to the files you’re working on. 
3. Todoist: An uncomplicated app for tracking project phases, tasks, and deadlines, which also includes the ability to set reminders and notifications for your team. 
4. Any.do: A Trello alternative for tracking a team’s daily tasks. Any.do includes a real-time chat function alongside a Kanban board. 
5. Instagantt: An online Gantt chart maker that helps teams visualize the tasks they’re working on simultaneously and gives a bird’s-eye view of what comes next. 
6. Toodledo for Business: A newer product that creates tasks securely, sets templates for recurrent tasks, and includes some automated report generation features (for example, to show the unfinished tasks at the end of the week). 
7. Evernote: Here, teams can create notes representing their tasks and edit them simultaneously with their colleagues. Notes can also be assigned to team members and added to individual to-do lists. 

These task management tools help you create a basic checklist for your team and assist delegation. But if your work demands a long-term or strategic approach, a shared to-do list won’t give you the visibility you need to avoid bottlenecks and miscommunications. In these cases, you need a way to see how tasks relate to each other, identify unassigned tasks, and see detailed progress updates. 

7 basic team communication tools 

Collaboration quickly breaks down without good communication. So the collaboration tools you choose must facilitate clear communication, real-time chats, progress updates, and project-wide announcements (ideally in one place).

If your main goal is to minimize/replace email and store your team’s communication history so it’s easily searchable, you could try these messaging platforms: 

1. Slack: A messaging platform to move your internal communications out of email by building a project dashboard with channels for different teams. Slack also includes direct messages and huddles for video and audio meetings. 
2. Microsoft Teams: Unlike Zoom, which only takes care of remote meetings, Teams also covers ongoing instant messaging and resource sharing. 
3. Webex: A platform from Cisco that handles meetings, calls, webinars, video messaging, and company whiteboards. 
4. Discord: An app that lets teams set up channels for voice, video, and screen sharing as well as written messaging. 
5. Rocket.chat: This asynchronous internal messaging platform sells itself on the strength of its data security. Companies can also expand into chats with their customers. 
6. Flock: Another channel-based messaging platform that aims to help teams collaborate through text, video conferencing, and voice notes. It also has native task management tools for simple progress tracking.
7. Google Chat: A messaging tool built into Google Workspace that lets teams send messages, start video calls, and share files without leaving the apps they already use.

But even if you get your team onto the same messaging platform, you still need to be sure that it’s actually going to save them time. The problem with a lot of these communication tools is the lack of automation. Also, your team will be slowed down if they have to abandon their flow, open the app, write a message, and check back again later for notifications. 

6 basic asset management tools 

How you manage resources and the way you gather and share files can make or break collaboration. If your team struggles to overcome information silos and resource hoarding, their work will fall short. Ongoing frustration will impact morale and damage teamwork.

The best team collaboration tools provide a system for all stakeholders to access the files they need without fuss. They’ll make sure everyone is working with the right assets at all times.

If you need a better way to save and share the assets that are linked to your projects, you might want to check out these services:

1. Dropbox, which backs up your documents in the cloud and gives your team access to a shared folder. Dropbox now includes collaboration features for signing and editing documents. 
2. Google Docs, where your team can comment on, discuss, edit, and accept changes on a single version of a document or spreadsheet. 
3. MediaValet gives organizations a centralized, searchable library for storing and managing all their digital content, including images, videos, documents, and creative files.
4. Zoho WorkDrive, which has similar editing and storage features to Google Drive and Microsoft 365, so teams can view and work on their files online. 
5. Coda, which helps teams create documents, give their feedback, and make changes online. It also covers spreadsheets and note taking. 
6. Quip, where your team can view their documents, chats, editing history, and task lists in one place. 

Project management collaboration tools for large teams

These tools are built to handle the complexity that comes with larger teams, more stakeholders, and projects spanning multiple departments. Below, we list a few project management collaboration tools for larger teams.

1. Wrike: Your complete, collaborative project management tool

When deep, productive, creative collaboration is your goal, Wrike ticks all the boxes. When your project team works in Wrike, they gain powerful tools and integrations to help them do their work, track their work, and keep each other in the loop.

• Custom workflows define the workflow for every individual team so you can visualize task stages in a way that makes sense for your colleagues.
• Customizable project and team dashboards track progress and tackle bottlenecks before they impact the project goals.
• Innovative cross-tagging systems store tasks and assets across multiple workspaces.
• Intuitive when/then automations update the task you’re working on instantly.
• Secure project folders mean you can choose specific individuals and groups to share sensitive info with.
• Hyper-efficient review, feedback, and approval features speed up processes.
• Over 400 integrations, including Slack, Google Drive, Adobe, and Salesforce, mean you keep all your work within Wrike. 

Drawbacks

• Wrike can have a steeper learning curve than the more basic tools we discussed earlier. 
• Small businesses might not need every feature. 

Customer reviews 

Wrike is rated 4.3 from over 2,500 reviews on Capterra, with great scores for features and customer service. Check out our customer stories to read more about how national brands like Wag Hotels, the Texas Rangers, and the San Francisco Chronicle use Wrike every day. 

2. Monday.com: Appropriate for small/medium-sized teams

Monday.com will probably feel familiar if your team has ever organized their work on a shared spreadsheet. It’s colorful and customizable, pretty simple to use, and comes with automations and integrations to help your team get through their work faster.

Features

• Customizable dashboards with options to visualize project roadmaps as Gantt charts or Kanban boards
• Request forms to facilitate information sharing
• More than 100 templates to build a workflow that supports your team 

Pros

• Monday.com offers 200+ integrations (Note: fewer than Wrike, which has 400+), which also cover some of the big-name CRMs. 
• The platform includes features like bug tracking for development teams who do regular sprints.
• Monday.com teams can create new documents with their built-in “Workdocs” feature. 

Cons

• Large teams may find they need to choose high-level plans to get what they need from Monday.com. Its Pro pricing plan only allows you to combine the data from 20 boards per dashboard. The Enterprise tier is better designed for large-scale portfolio management.
• Unlike Wrike, Monday has no equivalent of cross-tagging, which makes it harder to work together on cross-team projects.
• Some users have said that Monday’s layout can be confusing and it’s not always easy to get to grips with the chain of events that each task needs to go through, which impacts task tracking. 

Read more about why companies choose Wrike over Monday.com.

Monday.com customer reviews

On Capterra, Monday is rated 4.6 from over 4,500 customer reviews. Trustpilot gives the software 3.4 stars, with some recent reviews showing criticism of its customer service. 

3. Asana

Asana is a work management platform built for teams that need to manage projects, track goals, and automate workflows across departments. It’s a strong option for organizations that want visibility from high-level strategy down to individual tasks.

Features

• Portfolio and goal tracking to align teamwork with the company’s OKRs.
• Workflow builder for creating and automating multi-step processes.
• Timeline and Gantt views for mapping out project schedules and dependencies.
• 200+ integrations with tools like Slack, Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce.

Pros

• Asana’s portfolio view gives managers a clear picture of progress across multiple projects at once.
• The no-code workflow builder makes it easy to automate repetitive processes such as task assignments, approvals, and status updates.
• Goal tracking connects team output directly to broader business objectives, which helps keep large teams aligned.

Cons

• Key features, including goal tracking, approvals and proofing, and native time tracking, are only available on the Advanced plan at $24.99 per user per month, which can become expensive at scale. As of February 2026, native time tracking is available via an optional add-on for Starter plan users.
• Some users find the platform harder to navigate as projects grow, particularly when managing complex work across multiple teams.

Check out the reasons why teams choose Wrike over Asana. 

4. Notion

Notion is a flexible workspace that combines docs, wikis, databases, and project management into one platform. It works well for teams that spend as much time creating and storing knowledge as they do managing tasks, and who want the freedom to build their own workflows rather than fit into a predefined system.

Features

• Customizable databases with multiple views, including Kanban boards, timeline, calendar, and table.
• Real-time collaborative editing across pages and databases.
• Database automations to handle repetitive workflow steps without code.
• AI features, including AI Autofill, meeting summaries, and AI agents. 
• Integrations with tools including Slack, Google Drive, and GitHub.

Pros

• Notion’s flexibility means teams can build exactly the system they need, from a simple task tracker to a full project hub with linked docs, roadmaps, and meeting notes all in one place.
• Real-time editing lets multiple team members work simultaneously on pages and databases without version conflicts.
• The combination of project management and knowledge management in a single tool reduces the need to switch between a wiki and a separate project management platform.

Cons

• Notion is not a purpose-built project management tool. While it has added basic dependency tracking, teams with high-complexity requirements may still find it less robust than dedicated platforms.
• Native time tracking is not available in Notion. Teams that need it will have to rely on third-party integrations.

Notion customer reviews

Notion has a 4.7 rating on Capterra, based on over 2,700 reviews.

5. Basecamp: No-frills updates on project progress

Basecamp started as an internal project management tool for a web design agency. It’s now used by small teams across industries who only need a few features to track project progress.

Features

• To-do lists, message boards, and Card Tables for task and project tracking.
• Hill Charts for visually tracking progress across to-do lists at a project level.
• Scheduling with due dates and a shared team calendar.
• Real-time group chat and direct messaging.
• File sharing and document storage.

Pros

• For simpler or smaller projects, Basecamp covers the core features most teams rely on, allowing them to share documents, communicate, and update each other in one place.
• Pro Unlimited’s flat-rate pricing becomes cost-effective for teams of 20 or more, and clients and contractors can be added to any plan for free.
• Basecamp’s customer support is widely considered among the best.

Cons

• Only a few third‑party integrations compared with modern suites.
• Lacks Gantt charts, task dependencies, and advanced reporting, so teams with complex project management might outgrow it.
• Has a limited prebuilt template library and focuses on customizable, user-created templates rather than a large library of pre-built options.

See why teams switch from Basecamp to Wrike. 

Basecamp customer reviews

Basecamp has a 4.3 rating on Capterra, based on over 14,400 reviews.

6. Hub Planner: Time and task tracking combined

Hub Planner focuses on resource management for collaborative teams. It bills itself as a tool for gauging your team’s capacity for taking on new projects and making sure everyone’s skills are being used. 

Features

• Task management tools to set project milestones, phases, and budgets 
• Dashboards and reports to plan your project and forecast your team’s future capacity
• Timesheets and time tracking to evaluate the way you plan for and complete your tasks
• Vacation and PTO request functionality, so project managers can take these into account when assigning work

Pros 

• Hub Planner’s skills matching function lets project managers filter their available team members by skill set, helping them assign tasks to the people who are best suited.
• The top-level view of each team member’s capacity can help project managers identify the people who have too much to do, so they can redistribute work and foster a stronger collaboration. 

Cons

• When Hub Planner talks about resource management, it’s focused on human capital. Hub Planner doesn’t have the collaboration and communication features of some of the other tools on this list, so it’s not a one-stop shop for project managers and their teams. 
• Some users report having to contact Hub Planner’s customer support team to correct errors in their recording, rather than quickly editing them within the platform. 
• It can be difficult to set the permissions that let project managers delegate to line managers, for example, for approving timesheets. This limits the extent to which your team can share responsibility for core tasks. 

Hub Planner customer reviews

Hub Planner has a 4.2 rating on both G2 and Capterra (from over 100 reviews). 

7. Planable: Designed for content management teams 

Planable is one of the more niche tools on this list. It’s project management software targeted at content creators and content management teams, especially in social media marketing. 

Features

• Multiple calendar views to plan and track content for marketing campaigns 
• Integrations with major social media sites for easy posting
• Feedback and approvals workflows to make collaborative decisions on visual assets, captions, and hashtags 

Pros 

• Planable is a time saver for teams that want to create, approve, and publish content from one central location. Creating a new post involves dragging an asset into a Planable calendar, requesting approval, and adding it to the campaign roadmap.
• The feed view function gives an accurate impression of how a post will look when it’s live. 

Cons

• Because Planable is exclusively designed for content teams and agencies, other teams at your company might struggle to find the features they need. 
• If your content team has to request assets or information from elsewhere in your company, they’ll have to collaborate on a different platform before they drag the draft post across to Planable. It’s not great for end-to-end task management. 
• Although Planable is focused on social media marketing, they still can’t solve the common issues of scheduling posts to sites like Instagram from a desktop device, meaning that your team will have to use the mobile app.
  

Planable customer reviews

From just over 300 total reviews, Planable scored 4.6 on Capterra. Reviewers generally find Planable easy to use, but struggle with the Instagram features and can find repurposing content quite time-consuming. 

8. ClickUp: Colorful team collaboration software with a long list of features

When ClickUp started in 2017, its goal was to enable teams to work more productively by reducing the overwhelming number of tools that employees were expected to use at work. 

Features

• Docs Hub — the area of ClickUp where teams can add their files to a shared pool of knowledge for their collaboration  
• ClickApps — custom tools you can use to build a workflow that supports your team
• Task management tools like to-do lists, milestones, dependencies, and mindmaps

Pros 

• ClickUp integrates with many of the other platforms teams already use, and it has some integrations targeted specifically at educators and event managers.
• The clean, colorful dashboards help manage smaller or simpler projects. 
• Users also report that it’s relatively simple to migrate from a tool like Trello to ClickUp if you need to scale up. 

Cons

• Users often report issues with ClickUp’s stability, especially when it’s used by large teams. 
• Customer support is limited to email and chat, with no phone option if you need a faster solution. 

Find out more about how ClickUp compares to Wrike.

ClickUp customer reviews

ClickUp has a 4.7-star rating from over 4,000 reviews on Capterra, but only 3.2 On Trustpilot. Although it has amassed a lot of five-star reviews, it also has more one-star ratings than other tools on this list, with users reporting frustrating customer service and slow loading time. 

7. ProofHub: Proofing and approvals for creative teams

ProofHub has grown to include tools for discussions, time tracking, task management, and file versioning. This is a project management tool that aims to keep things simple without skipping the core features that creative teams need.

Features

• Detailed time tracking, including estimates and timesheets 
• Project templates to set up new collaborations
• Robust file sharing, markup, and discussion features for proofing and approvals
• Customizable reports on project status

Pros 

• For teams that need to discuss visual materials — especially JPGs and PDFs — the proofing tools that gave this platform its name are quite thorough. 
• ProofHub communications tools support task discussions, task notes, one-to-one chats, and team-wide announcements, which can be scheduled and published automatically. 
• Unlike other tools that charge per user per month, ProofHub has flat pricing, with a discount when billed annually. 

Cons

• The native options for managing budgets, invoices, and project finances within ProofHub are minimal.
• This platform has a very short list of only eight integrations, which doesn’t include any social media, content creation, or marketing platforms. 

ProofHub customer reviews

ProofHub has gathered fewer than 100 reviews on G2 and Capterra respectively. It’s rated 4.5 and 4.6 respectively. 

Centralize your project management

If you need to streamline the way you manage collaborative projects, you could introduce your team to a range of apps and methods, or you could choose one tool to be the central source of truth for every task and every person involved in getting the work done. 

When you manage projects within Wrike, you have all the features your team needs to communicate, share resources, approve, and deliver on all the tasks on their list. 

Plus, with a detailed overview of all the moving parts of your project, including overall progress tracking, task dependencies, and precision insights, Wrike is powerful enough to give your team the flexibility and responsiveness they need to collaborate successfully. 

Book a demo with our team and find out what Wrike can do for your next project.