Project timeline software: Which is the best tool for you?

Project timeline software gives you a central location to share and track your project schedules, milestones, and upcoming deadlines. However, the best tools don’t just help your team stick to the dates set in your brief. With the right project timeline software, you can: 

• Spot and reduce bottlenecks by accounting for all the tasks, deadlines, and people in your timeline. 
• Work more transparently by showing how your real-time progress compares to the baseline in your project plan. 
• Smooth collaboration by making crucial scheduling information visible at a glance while automating task and timeline updates. This gives you a massive advantage over using spreadsheets to track projects, as they’re just not built for this type of collaboration. 

Put simply, project timeline software brings all the key information about a project together in one place, so you can visualize your project plan, assess your progress, and ensure you deliver your work on time. 

Many different solutions can fall under the category of project timeline software (most of which are traditional project management tools). To help you find the best one for your needs, this post: 

• Begins with a rundown of four key features of the best project timeline software solutions
• Explores these features in action using real-life examples from our platform, Wrike
• Compares seven other widely used timeline software solutions on the market 

What are the essential features of project timeline software? 

An effective project timeline tool should have four key features: 

• It should make it easier to plan and visualize your project. This means doing the basics well — setting due dates, highlighting project milestones and task dependencies, and showing task ownership throughout a project. Because every organization is unique, tools to customize your project visualizations are essential, too. 
• It should highlight your project’s progress, deadlines, and any bottlenecks or delays. The project timeline exists to help your team complete a project on schedule. This means your timeline should show whether your progress stacks up to your plan, or whether individual tasks in the timeline are starting to fall behind. Ideally, this information should be available at a glance, and it should be updated automatically. 
• It should give everyone insight into the work they need to do. Most team members will be working on more than one project or task at a time. Effective project timeline software gives everyone a personalized space where they can prioritize their tasks, see how they fit into the bigger picture, and monitor the dependent tasks they’re responsible for.
• It should offer a collaborative overview, not just a static timeline. If teams are already working with multiple workflows and tools, timeline software shouldn’t be something else to juggle. Instead, it should streamline project processes and act as a shared source of truth for your work. 

But what about Excel spreadsheets or physical calendars? After all, they’re still the default option for creating project timelines for many teams, as opposed to dedicated timeline software. 

Despite their benefits, spreadsheets and calendars aren’t built for collaboration. They typically require manual updates, lack customization options, and can turn into a complexity nightmare when managing large projects.

Good project timeline solutions don’t have these limitations. Thanks to the features we explored above, they provide exponentially more visibility into your schedule and progress. They also make it far easier to share this information — in real time — with your team.

The 8 best project timeline software tools (for different teams and use cases)

Now, remembering these four key features, let’s take a look at the eight best project timeline software tools, including:

1. Wrike, our all-in-one project management software platform with automated project timeline features
2. GanttPro, an app to visualize a linear project timeline 
3. TeamGantt, an alternative Gantt chart generator with a free personal plan
4. Trello, a widely used Kanban tool for tracking tasks through a project roadmap 
5. Office Timeline, a tool that integrates with PowerPoint to illustrate project presentations
6. Microsoft Planner, a timeline option most useful to companies using other Microsoft 365 tools like Teams
7. Jira, a project management tool commonly used by developers that includes timeline tracking 
8. Plaky, an affordable project management and timeline tool

Next, I’ll cover these tools’ main features, use cases, pricing, and trial information, so you can make the best decision for your team. 

1. Wrike: Project timeline software for real-time visibility

Wrike is an all-in-one work management platform built to help teams plan, track, and execute their projects. 

Wrike generates and updates project timelines, but it’s also much more than that. Our software brings all your project information, resources, and communications together, so your team stays on the same page from initiation to delivery.

With Wrike, project timelines like the one above are easy to set up and manage, completely flexible, and naturally collaborative. 

Let’s look at how Wrike stacks up against the four features we outlined above. 

Wrike sets up your project timeline in a few clicks

The process of setting up your project roadmap is simple — you just add your tasks to your workspace, set the dependencies, and begin. 

Here’s how it works:

• Create and assign tasks and milestones in a few clicks. You can kick off your project in moments by setting up individual task cards and defining milestones. It’s also easy to assign tasks to team members within Wrike — simply click on the assignee box in the task card and add their name. Wrike sends them automated notifications about what they need to do. 
• Determine and view dependencies. With Wrike, you can define which tasks are dependent on others with a simple drag and drop. If the due dates on a task earlier in the workflow are postponed, the rest of the tasks in the chain will update. 
• Edit your project timeline without starting from scratch. If a specific task is taking longer than expected, you change the dates on the task card, your timeline updates, and Wrike notifies the team members assigned to the tasks automatically. 

What’s more, because every organization has its own processes, team structures, and compliance rules, Wrike includes custom item types to make setup even easier. Develop your own (with your unique labelling or language style) or choose from any of our available templates.

You can also use blueprints to define a repeatable task and create a template workflow. When you start a new project with one of these repeatable tasks, or move one from your backlog to your current sprint, all the subtasks are added to your timeline with an accurate estimation of their duration. 

Once a task exists in Wrike, any status change you make will be reflected in your timeline automatically. 

For example, when a team member completes a task and sends it for approval, your team will see this change to the project status when they view the task. If a task with a dependency is postponed, the subsequent tasks are rescheduled. 

When your timelines are spreadsheet-based, changes like this mean someone has to open the file, change the color and length of the bars by hand, manually adjust the dependent tasks, and send a new version of the timeline to the team. With Wrike, the very latest version of your project schedule is available to everyone with permission at every point in the project, making it far easier to align and prioritize your tasks. 

Find out more about Wrike’s workflow automations here. 

Wrike displays task statuses and project progress at a glance

With Wrike, your project timeline is your central source of truth. With a combination of the automation functionality I discussed above and our extensive customization features, you have everything you need to clarify your processes and progress and show how each team member’s tasks contribute to the project as a whole. 

Our platform helps you: 

• Tailor your timeline view to match your process. This includes color-coding tasks by team or workflow stage, or showing task ownership as part of your timeline overview. 
• Track timelines from multiple angles. With Wrike, you can set up your workspace to switch between a Gantt chart timeline, a list of dates and task status in Table view, or a Kanban board to show how tasks are progressing through your workflow. 
• Keep your project running smoothly and identify bottlenecks. Gantt charts can show you which tasks are preventing others from getting started. Kanban visualizations let you identify bottlenecks where too many tasks are stuck at a single status. Our built-in time tracking tools give you even more information on your team’s performance. All these features help you clear the bottlenecks and keep your projects on schedule. 

Wrike also includes risk management software to alert you to tasks in danger of missing their deadlines. 

This means that, as well as the bird’s-eye views you have of your project, Wrike notifies you when task tracking data shows that you don’t have the time or resources to complete a task as planned. These risk assessments are based on data such as team capacity, time tracking, and historical performance, and they help you adjust your project plan before you miss your target.With Wrike, you can keep your finger on the pulse of the project, understand any hold-ups, and monitor your resource allocation and use throughout your project. When it comes to delivering projects on time and to brief, this overview is indispensable. 

Wrike gives every team member insight into the work they need to do

When your timeline is robust, it’s not just the project manager who benefits; every member of your team gets the insight they need to complete their work. 

In Wrike, all the tasks you track are interlinked. When you click on a task in your timeline, you’re taken directly to the task card, and from the card, you can easily jump to the subtasks, comment history, and attachments. 

This connectivity has another massive advantage for your team: Because all this project data is centralized, it can be filtered to show the most important information for any team member, subteam, or project you manage. 

For example, alongside a shared project or even a portfolio management dashboard, you can set up personal dashboards to give team members an in-depth view of their upcoming tasks, their messages, their requests, and the work they should prioritize that day.Wrike is built to support your whole organization to stay on your project schedule. Project managers can trust they can deliver work on time, while individual team members have the clarity and structure they need to manage their own tasks. 

Wrike enables clear, centralized communication around the project timeline

Wrike is not just a project timeline software solution; it’s a shared workspace where teams can centralize communications around the project work. 

A project timeline is of limited use if your team then discusses their progress and deadlines in a separate channel, such as Slack, internal email, or even comments on Google Docs. Shifting discussions away from your project management software makes it easier to lose sight of the schedule and puts deadlines at risk — and it annoys your team by giving them another thing to juggle. That’s why Wrike optimizes project communication by bringing your team collaboration tools alongside your scheduling and task tracking. 

In practice, Wrike lets you:

• Communicate about your projects from within the same tool you’re using to track the timeline. With file sharing, commenting, and @mention features, you can start a discussion and notify your team members instantly. 
• Integrate other key applications with our software. For example, if your team uses Adobe Creative Cloud to give feedback and get your work through the approval stages, you can bring another aspect of your review process under the same roof as your timeline. 
• Eliminate internal emails with Wrike’s notifications and shared overviews. You can message external clients or other departments that don’t use Wrike from within Wrike and view the responses automatically on your task cards. We’ve seen multiple teams reduce their use of internal email by 85–90% by moving team communications to Wrike. 

By centralizing your work in a single tool, Wrike saves your team time and helps them stick to the project plan to deliver great results. 

Wrike pricing and benefits

Wrike’s timeline software generates a detailed, accurate project timeline from the tasks you track in the platform. In comparison to a static timeline or a more basic tool, the benefits are clear to see: 

• Real-time visibility to keep all your project tasks prioritized and in view, and inform your resource planning
• Intuitive project overviews and communication tools to encourage collaboration 
• Flexibility to adapt your timeline and workspace to the way your team works best 
• Risk management tools to make it easier than ever to keep your project work on track 

Wrike offers a free plan for teams that are just getting started, while paid plans begin at $10 per user per month with our quick-start Team plan, or $25 per user per month for the Business Plan.

For more information on options for enterprise teams or to discuss your needs in more detail, book a demo with our customer service team here.