Team management software: Features, benefits, and 8 options

Team management software brings together everything you need to plan, organize, and oversee your team’s work. From delegating tasks to tracking progress and capacity, these tools provide the real-time visibility you need to get the most out of your team and keep your projects on track. 

The right team management software can help solve many of the daily challenges that team leads and project managers face, including: 

• Lack of transparency, when it’s not clear at a glance who’s working on what or how much effort will be needed to complete the rest of a task 
• Miscommunication, when information or resources become siloed, and team members struggle to find the latest project updates or keep stakeholders informed
• Delays, when bottlenecks start to form, and teams don’t have the capacity or resources to complete their work on schedule
• Wasted time, when team members have to dig through email chains and Slack threads for status updates, manually compile reports, or sit through meetings that could be replaced with a project dashboard
• Burnout, when it’s hard to spot who’s over capacity and how best to rebalance the workload. 

The good news is that the right platform can solve all these problems, just by acting as a single source of truth for both you as a manager and the team members you oversee. 

In this guide, I’ve rounded up some of the best team management software on the market, so you can find the tool that fits your team’s way of working. 

What is team management software?

Team management software centralizes everything managers need to inform their decisions and delegate work effectively. It also lets team members track their progress, coordinate on key tasks, and maximize their team.

Team management software can either replace or integrate with the stack of tools teams often have to juggle to keep themselves up to date. 

For example, rather than toggling between an email inbox, Slack threads, spreadsheets, and a shared resource drive, a team management platform brings these disparate messaging and project tracking tools together. This keeps the latest project data in one place and allows everyone with permission to access it when they need to. 

This has clear benefits for team members, because it streamlines many different aspects of their work and communications. It also represents a huge improvement for the people managing and distributing the work. 

Managers can use team management software to inform their decisions with a real-time, accurate view of: 

• The total volume of work assigned to the team 
• The chains of accountability within the team 
• The capacity of individual team members and the project team as a whole. 
• The live progress on the current tasks and team projects.

Team management tools will then help managers share their decisions about new projects, task assignments, and resource distribution with the team. In fact,  the best team management software should always let you do all this from within the one platform, so tasks don’t slip through the cracks, and each team member has a better idea of how their work fits into the big picture. 

What’s the difference between team management and project management? 

The terms “team management software” and “project management software” are often used interchangeably, and the more robust platforms in each category can be quite similar.

Strictly speaking, project management software is focused on providing the tools a team needs to work toward their project goals.

Much of its functionality centers around visualizing a team’s path between the different milestones laid out in the project plan and tracking their KPIs through each phase of the project lifecycle. This means most project management tools highlight timeline, budget tracking, and project progress tracking as their standout features.

Team management software, on the other hand, is about optimizing the way team members complete the work and maximizing team productivity and collaboration. 

It shows managers what each team member is working on, which makes it easier to balance workloads and get to the bottom of issues before they start to derail the project. It supports better time management by tracking how long tasks are taking. It also removes roadblocks to communication in a team, for example, by shifting discussions about deliverables out of email and into a shared team workspace. 

In practice, though, the line between project management and team management is blurry. 

Project management tools aren’t useful even for small teams unless they offer a way for a manager to share updates. Team management tools would be severely limited if the team couldn’t use them to get an idea of their overall progress. That’s why many managers use a single platform that handles both team and project management in one place. 

Benefits of team management software

Team management software has a lot of benefits for both managers and project teams. These include: 

• Workload visibility, giving the manager a real-time view of what every team member is working on, where projects stand, and where potential roadblocks are forming.
• Accurate resource management, showing the manager the team capacity at a glance, based on the complexity of project tasks and the way the team tracks time. 
• Greater accountability, giving every task a clear owner and deadline, and tracking that information throughout the project. 
• Faster reporting, replacing manually compiled status updates with reports and dashboards generated automatically from the latest project progress data. 
• Fewer delays, because when bottlenecks or resource allocation issues arise, you can identify and address them before they push back your deadlines.
• Streamlined communication, because project updates, feedback, and decisions are logged in one shared space.

Key features of team management software

There’s a lot of variety in the field of team management software, so finding the right tool means understanding how your team works — what project management methodologies you prefer, how you track time or billable hours, whether you work with remote teams or in-house, and what features will make the biggest difference to your work. 

This list of key features should help you to articulate your needs and ask the right questions as you start to compare software platforms. 

• Task visualization and delegation. Team management software should give you a clear view of who owns what. Look for tools that let you assign tasks, set priorities, and visualize work in a way that suits your team — whether that’s a task list and checklists for upcoming sprints, Kanban boards to visualize multiple tasks in a workflow, or a Gantt chart timeline to show the dependent tasks leading up to your next milestone. 
• Progress tracking. Being able to see where a project stands at any moment — without sending an email to ask — saves huge amounts of time and keeps up the momentum behind your tasks. Robust progress tracking features can show your progress on both individual tasks and your projects as a whole from multiple angles, for example, as a percentage or as a burndown chart. 
• AI-powered automation and routing. Repetitive admin work like assigning tasks, sending reminders or check-ins, and manually updating tasks in an Excel spreadsheet can take up hours of your team’s time every week. AI automations handle routine tasks like populating briefs, notifying approvers, and routing files through your document workflows, so your team can focus on work that actually needs their attention.
• Time tracking and capacity management. When you choose a tool that visualizes both how long each task will take and how much bandwidth each team member has, you can plan more accurately, allocate work and resources fairly, and make decisions that avoid burnout for your team. 
• Reporting and performance analytics. Rather than compiling updates manually, built-in reporting lets you pull the data you need in seconds. Over time, performance analytics can also reveal patterns that help you run future projects more efficiently.
• Integrations with other tools. The ability to connect your team management software with the tools you already use — whether that’s Slack, Google Docs, financial tools like QuickBooks, or your CRM — keeps everything in sync and reduces the risk of work falling through the cracks.
• Communication and collaboration. The best team management tools keep conversations attached to the work itself. Shared notes, file attachments, collaborative editing tools, feedback threads, and centralized approval workflows mean fewer email chains and a clearer record of how decisions were made.

8 best team management software solutions (for different use cases)

For this list, we’ve focused on team management platforms that go beyond basic communications and task management tools. 

We’ve drawn on our experience serving thousands of companies across different industries, and our knowledge of what managers need when it comes to visibility and delegation. These are tools that genuinely centralize work and team management, so you can see clear, measurable gains in transparency and efficiency. 

We’ll cover: 

• Wrike, the best team management software for cross-team collaboration and enterprise project management  
• ClickUp, a flexible, consolidated option for fast-moving teams
• Smartsheet, built around a familiar spreadsheet layout 
• Mural, a tool for brainstorming and idea collection in teams  
• Miro, a visual workspace combined with additional planning and tracking features
• Jira (Atlassian), a team management tool favored by Agile teams
• Adobe Workfront, a platform for large creative teams relying on the Adobe ecosystem

Best tools for team management and collaboration  

The best team management platforms bring communication, planning, and execution into a single place, so teams don’t have to switch between tools. This matters especially in cross-team situations, where different groups need visibility into the same work. 

A consolidated platform creates a single source of truth, so managers and team members know what’s been decided, what’s in progress, and where responsibility lies.

Let’s get started with an in-depth look at our complete team management platform, Wrike. 

1. Wrike: Full-service team management software for complex projects and cross-functional teams

Wrike is a powerful, scalable work management platform built for both project tracking and team collaboration. 

Our platform visualizes every aspect of your work — even in complex, cross-functional projects — so you can view all your team’s tasks, progress, and capacity in detail. 

At the same time, Wrike supports your team to plan their work and to keep themselves up to date with the latest decisions connected to the project. Best of all, with the combination of Wrike desktop and our robust mobile app, you can use our team management software wherever your employees are located, so every decision you make as a manager is based on real-time, granular data. 

Wrike is trusted by 20,000+ companies, including global enterprises like: 

• Sony Pictures Television, where Wrike has reduced the time it takes to deliver projects by 40% and reduced internal update emails by 90%
• Arvig, where Wrike saves 900+ hours per year in the HR department, and has reduced the average cost per project by 20% 
• Fitbit, where Wrike saves the team 400 hours of meeting time per year, and halves the time spent building and managing project timelines. 

Let’s look in detail at the features that make it happen. 

Build a central hub for team collaboration.

The first element of team management is an understanding of where the team stands and how each piece of work fits into the bigger picture. With Wrike, this understanding starts with your task cards — a single representation of each piece of work that can exist across your entire workspace, detail every aspect of the task and its history, and update in real time. 

With the task cards as a foundation, you can view your team’s workload and capacity from whatever angle helps you most: 

• In Wrike’s timeline views, tasks are laid out in a Gantt chart that shows your team’s milestones and the dependencies between tasks. Crucially, if a delay occurs earlier in the chain, the tasks in your Gantt chart can be updated automatically — just set a dependency with a simple drag and drop. 
• In Wrike’s Kanban overview, you can view where each task sits in the workflow and spot bottlenecks as they start to form. 
• In the Table view, you can get an overview of who is assigned to each task, their progress, and the status of the individual tasks.
• In your capacity planning and calendar views, you can see who’s accountable for each task and when your team will be able to take on new work. 
• In custom team, individual, and portfolio dashboards, you choose the widgets that best display your tasks, your priorities, and your team’s KPIs, including key profitability metrics, status updates, and alerts about upcoming due dates.  

If a task changes in one of these overviews, it updates across your workspace, so every team is looking at the most up-to-date version of the workload and the ripple effect it has on your projects. 

One of Wrike’s most powerful collaboration features is cross-tagging, which allows a single task to exist simultaneously across different workspaces and folders. This means you can set up Wrike so each team has a separate, secure workspace with its own workflows and access permissions. But when a team needs to share an asset, task, or workflow, they have instant access to the latest version of that task, without duplicating it or sharing a file on a separate platform. 

Together, these features give managers the real-time visibility they need to see what everyone is working on, who’s accountable, and how work is progressing, and this information can inform every resourcing, delegation, or prioritization decision they make. 

Ensure regular communication with your team and your clients 

Great team management depends on clarity as well as communication. When you work in Wrike, your team’s messages and discussions are tied to the work they’re collaborating on, rather than siloed off in a personal email box or Slack channel. These transparent, integrated communication tools include: 

• Team-wide communications. Wrike lets you send updates to an entire workspace and share reports and dashboards that give every team member the same up-to-date picture of where a project stands. 
• Automated notifications. With rule-based workflow automations, you can update team members as tasks move through your workflow, which keeps the right people informed and saves time that would otherwise be spent chasing status updates through emails. 
• Collaborative editing tools. From live document editing to Adobe integrations, Wrike lets teams complete every stage of collaborative work from within the platform. This reduces the need to jump between tools and keeps feedback and revisions attached to the work itself.
• Cross-functional and external communications. Integrations with tools used by finance, HR, and other departments mean you can share the right information with the right people, even when they’re working outside of Wrike. For client communications, dedicated external sharing features like email integrations and access roles keep collaborators in the loop without giving them access to your internal workspace.

Together, these features ensure that everyone working on a project — whether they’re in the same team or spread across different departments and time zones — stays aligned, informed, and clear on what’s expected of them. This increased transparency makes it easier both for team leaders to manage their employees and for those team members to optimize their work. 

Simplify remote or decentralized work

Wrike’s mobile app gives teams on-the-go access to the same real-time project data available on desktop. With these tools at their fingertips, they can prioritize work, create and update tasks, and collaborate on documents from anywhere. This is particularly valuable for remote and distributed teams. 

This makes Wrike’s team management features particularly valuable for teams that work across time zones, and for teams with an on-site or mobile element. Wrike is popular with construction teams, for example, because it helps PMO teams send updates to the worksite, and on-site crews to update their progress and submit timesheets in real time. The same principle applies to manufacturing teams, where Wrike bridges the gap between the management office and the shop floor. 

With Wrike’s mobile capabilities, managers maximize visibility for every member of the team, which helps them work proactively and responsively at every stage of a project. 

2. ClickUp: Flexible team management software for smaller teams

ClickUp is a flexible work management platform that combines task tracking, communication, documentation, and reporting in a shared workspace. It includes multiple views to keep managers and team members in the loop, with Kanban, Gantt, list, calendar, and portfolio options to view progress. 

ClickUp brings team chat and messaging into the same space where their work lives, which closes gaps in the process. ClickUp’s AI, known as “ClickUp Brain,” includes generative AI features to help with jobs like task descriptions, summaries of updates, drafting documents, and breaking goals into achievable sets of subtasks. 

ClickUp has called itself “one app to replace them all,” because of its ability to consolidate jobs that would have been done by an entire tech stack — whiteboards, document management, goal setting, task management — into a single shared platform.  For this reason, it’s well-suited to teams who thrive on quick communication and informed collaboration, which is particularly useful for startups and other fast-moving companies. 

3. SmartSheet: Smarter team management for teams used to spreadsheets 

Smartsheet is a project management platform that takes the familiar spreadsheet format that many teams are used to working with and translates that into a more user-friendly experience in a platform with more of the features managers need. 

For team management, Smartsheet includes workload and capacity tracking in combination with task monitoring. This can help managers to balance work so teams can work sustainably. It’s also strong on no-code workflow automations, which can be set up to include external tools and act as a data source for the project dashboard and reports.  

Smartsheet is popular with teams who have become frustrated with spreadsheets and databases (or have simply outgrown them). 

4. Asana: Goal-oriented team and project management software 

Asana is a well-known project and team management platform that is easy to navigate even for non-technical users. Like the other consolidated, collaborative tools on this list, it includes timeline views and multiple visualizations for a team’s work. 

For managers who want to maximize efficiency in their team, Asana is set up to display workload and capacity, to generate reports on the level of the project or the portfolio as a whole, and to automate routine tasks. Asana also includes AI “Teammates” that free up your employees to focus on high-value work. 

Asana’s goal-setting features are particularly strong, which can be useful for team management as it shows how individual tasks and projects are connected to the company’s strategic objectives. 

Best team management tools for visual collaboration 

Visual collaboration tools are useful for aligning teams at the start of a project and ensuring that everyone’s voices are heard. They also record these early team management decisions, which can reduce miscommunications later in a project. 

5. Mural: Whiteboard-based team management tool for early project stages 

Mural takes a different approach to team management. Rather than organizing work around timelines and task lists, it sets up an infinite canvas where teams can add and discuss their ideas. This makes it feel less like a traditional project management tool and more like a dedicated space where teams can brainstorm and collaborate before the project execution stage begins. 

Mural’s key feature is the digital whiteboard, where teams can use sticky notes, drawing tools, mind maps, and diagrams to lay out their work. It includes generative AI to support ideation and planning sessions and to classify, summarise, and cluster new ideas.

This tool stands out as a collaborative option for design teams, marketers, and other creative teams. It’s best understood as a complementary team management tool — for collecting ideas and feedback — rather than a tool where a team can be managed through every stage of the project. However, Mural does integrate with some widely used work management tools, so the ideas can be synced from the whiteboard to the platform where execution will take place. 

6. Miro: Visual-first team management software 

Like Mural, Miro is built around a visual canvas that teams can use to think, plan, and align their ideas. The difference is that Miro includes more features for project execution and the team management that the project phase involves, so teams can use this platform for more of the project lifecycle. 

Miro includes many features to structure the project ideas generated in the whiteboard space, including Gantt charts and project timelines, and features to build briefs, presentations, and strategy documents. The platform has AI-powered workflow features, as well as conversational AI agents called “Sidekicks.” 

On the enterprise plan, Miro also allows users to set up cross-team workspaces, where (similar to Wrike), users can be members of multiple teams simultaneously, while each space is tailored to the needs of that specific team. 

Team management tools for specialized use cases

Most of the tools covered above are built to work across a wide range of teams — agencies, professional services firms, marketing departments, operations teams, and beyond. The two options below take a different approach because they’re designed with a specific industry or use case in mind. 

7. Jira: Team management software for Agile project work 

Jira tends to be the tool of choice for software developers and engineers, as well as some other teams who use an Agile project management methodology. If this is your preferred way of working, Jira includes the tools it takes to groom a team’s backlog, plan and manage sprints, and generally work in an iterative way.  

Jira is set up for Scrum and Kanban boards, sprint workflows, and advanced project roadmaps — both for individual teams and cross-team collaboration. For users in the tech niche, it also includes release and version tracking features that measure what’s going into each build, what needs to be urgently fixed, and what can be deferred. This creates a clean audit trail for teams to fall back on. 

Another benefit of Jira is the deep integration with the rest of the Atlassian software suite, which includes Confluence for documentation, Bitbucket for code repositories, Trello for Kanban workflow tracking, and Jira Service Management for IT support. This makes it a logical team management choice for companies that already use the other tools in the ecosystem.

8. Adobe Workfront: Team management software for large creative teams relying on the Adobe ecosystem

Adobe Workfront is an enterprise-level work management platform built for large marketing, creative, and content teams that already rely on the other tools in the Adobe Creative Cloud. For teams handling large and complex creative projects, closing the gaps between these tools brings the structure that keeps projects like this on track. 

Workfront’s key features include resource management and capacity planning, as managers have a real-time view of both a team’s workload and their forecasted future resource needs. This platform also includes several features to accelerate and improve collaboration, including strong features around approval workflows. 

For creative teams working as part of a larger company, Workfront also integrates with other project management tools, which helps keep these departments connected to the wider company tech stack. 

Build your ideal team management platform with Wrike 

The right team management software isn’t one-size-fits-all, and the best options adapt to the structure of your team and the way they prefer to complete, monitor, and report on their work.  That’s why Wrike is built with this customization at its core. 

Whether you need custom dashboards that surface the insights your team relies on, automated workflows that match your processes, or cross-tagged workspaces that keep distributed teams aligned, Wrike gives you the building blocks to create an environment where both managers and team members can do their best work.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about team management software

What’s the difference between team management and task management software?

Task management software focuses on creating, assigning, and tracking tasks through a workflow, and can often translate this data into to-do lists for individuals or teams. Team management software takes a broader view and is more focused on giving managers a 360-degree view of their projects, reporting on key performance metrics, and encouraging teams to collaborate. 

Is team management software suitable for small teams or just large enterprises?

Team management software is valuable for teams of all sizes, and some platforms are designed with smaller teams in mind. The advantage of enterprise-level software is that it manages multiple teams from a single, centralized platform. This is invaluable in companies where teams work cross-functionally. 

How long does it take to implement team management software?

Implementation time varies by platform, team size, and the company’s existing approach, but most modern team management software is designed to be up and running fast. Wrike, for example, includes templates to set up a workspace quickly, and imports for spreadsheets and data from platforms like Microsoft Project. 

Can team management software help prevent employee burnout? 

Yes, the workload visibility features of team management software can reduce the chance of employee burnout. By measuring the capacity of a team and the individual employees within it (based on time tracking and data on the complexity of tasks), team management software can alert employees who are over capacity and at risk of burnout. Then, managers can either manually redistribute tasks and resources or use AI to find the optimal solution.