7 Best Free Project Management Software in 2025

Looking for free project management tools that work across marketing, development, creative, operations, and nonprofit teams? You’re in the right place. Compare the top options without being overwhelmed.

Project management software is an essential tool for facilitating the planning, organization, and overall management of project tasks and resources. These tools are used to enhance team collaboration, track progress, and ensure deadlines are met.

Common project management features include task management, resource management, project planning, scheduling, reporting and analytics, and collaborative information-sharing tools. 

Many tools include numerous other features to help you streamline your project from start to finish. However, the same cannot be said for all free project management software. 

Project management tools also provide:

• Enhanced visibility: Dashboards and reports provide an overview of project status and team workload, enabling you to make informed decisions and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

• Time savings: Automations eliminate repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus on high-impact work and avoid manual status updates, file uploads, or chase-ups.

• Increased efficiency: By centralizing tasks, documents, and communication, you won’t waste time searching inboxes or tracking down the latest file version.

• Simplified task management: A task management tool helps teams manage tasks efficiently by organizing, assigning, and tracking work, ensuring nothing is overlooked.

• Improved team collaboration: Built-in collaboration tools streamline communication and support team collaboration, making it easier for teams to coordinate efforts and work together seamlessly.

Project managers rely on these software solutions to manage projects and track progress, ensuring that all stakeholders are aligned and project goals are met. 

Ultimately, these solutions help teams manage tasks and track progress across all project phases, supporting successful project delivery.

The best project management tools often include a robust free plan with essential project management features, making them accessible to small teams and individuals.  A free plan can help teams establish an efficient project management process before considering paid plans for more advanced features. Other major benefits include:

• Accessibility: Provides access to project information, enabling collaboration with teammates from anywhere. It integrates with tools like Google Calendar and Microsoft Teams to simplify schedule management and communication, while granting secure access to project data, along with dashboards and reports, for informed project planning decisions.

• Collaboration: Improves team communication with up-to-the-minute details across projects, tasks, and resources through a centralized work hub. Easily assign and track responsibilities, monitor project progress, and keep teams connected across all project management phases.

• Customization: Fits teams’ specific workflows, whether simple or complex, to eliminate friction, provide easier handoffs, and streamline management processes throughout the entire project.

• Scalability: Includes portfolio management features to oversee and coordinate multiple projects as they expand, providing comprehensive oversight, roadmap planning, and task prioritization to ensure alignment and productivity.

• Cost-efficient: Offers an affordable solution for teams of all sizes without licensing fees, so you reduce project expenses and reduce context switching with fewer tools, so teams stay on the same platform to successfully coordinate tasks and communicate.

Visual task boards

Free project management software enables you to create intuitive task boards that clearly outline your progress and priorities. With drag-and-drop functionality, you can easily prioritize and manage tasks visually, making it simple to organize your workflow. 

These boards enable you to create an unlimited number of tasks, ensuring scalability for any project size.

As a task management tool, it streamlines the creation and management of tasks. Boards update in real-time, giving your team a live snapshot of the project at any moment. 

This visual format enables easy identification of bottlenecks, reassignment of workloads, and celebration of milestones, ultimately leading to faster project completion.

Automation features can streamline repetitive tasks and simplify your workflows. Automation rules enable you to trigger actions automatically based on events, such as creating, updating, or assigning an issue.

With advanced tools, you can automate custom workflows and manage complex ones. This allows teams to tailor processes to their specific needs and efficiently handle intricate project requirements. 

They then take over the defined actions, allowing your team to spend more time on strategic work, minimize human error, and ensure consistency across your processes.

The project timeline view is a high-level project map that gives you a clear snapshot of your project plan. Gantt charts and the Gantt chart view offer visual scheduling and dependency management, facilitating easier coordination of tasks and deadlines. It enables you to spot issues, make changes, and keep your project on track from start to finish.

Upcoming work is easily identified in the timeline, helping you with resource planning, sprint planning, and materials ordering. Integrated time tracking and resource management features allow teams to allocate resources efficiently and monitor progress throughout the project. 

With a visual layout of the entire project schedule, you can assign tasks to team members based on their workload, skills, and availability.

1. Jira

There are plenty of options available, but which tools will work best for your team? Compare features, pricing, and more with this list of top software available.

Combining flexibility, power, and scalability, Jira is the perfect solution for teams that want to start simple and grow without limits. This customizable project management software puts teams in the driver’s seat to define clear, measurable objectives.

Also, Jira provides a structured framework that makes it easy to see and understand a project through completion. Jira’s free version provides you or your team with plenty of features to enhance stakeholder collaboration and ensure everyone stays aligned as project developments, timelines, and plans change.

Some of the unique free features include unlimited goals, projects, tasks, and forms, which allow you to easily collect data. This free project management tool offers various views, such as Board, Backlog, List, Calendar, and Timeline View, so you can visually customize your workflows for your specific needs. 

• Pros: Full agile features with free plan; enterprise-grade reliability; seamless integration with the Atlassian ecosystem.

• Cons: Can feel advanced if you only need very simple task tracking.

• Best for: Agile, marketing, design, operations, and cross-functional teams.

• Pricing: Includes up to 10 users for free, or paid options start at $7.53 per user/month.

• Capterra Reviews: 4.5/5

2. Trello

If you’re looking for a visual, lightweight tool built on Kanban boards, Trello is perfect for quick project organization. Trello is also ideal for creative, marketing, and remote teams that need a quick and easy way to visualize their work.

Trello has added various features over the years like Butler, its AI and automation tools. This helps you spend less time in the task creation and details by automating items based on set rules, so you spend more time on actually getting work done. 

• Pros: Intuitive drag-and-drop interface; generous free tier; easy onboarding.

• Cons: Limited reporting and workflow complexity on the free plan.

• Best for: Creative projects, small teams, individual task management, and visual thinkers.

• Pricing: Up to 10 users for free or paid plans starting at $5 per user/month.

• Capterra Reviews: 4.5/5

ClickUp is an all-in-one workspace with dozens of project views, including Gantt charts, mind maps, and docs. It’s a highly-customizable tool that can be a bit overwhelming for new users, but fits well with those needing to tweak every little aspect of your project view.

The tool has AI features to help automate tasks, knowledge sharing capabilities along with its own Docs, and various custom fields to help you manage and track tasks. 

• Pros: Highly customizable and strong all-in-one functionality.

• Cons: Steeper learning curve; setup can take time.

• Best for: Teams prioritizing customization and needing a broad set of collaboration features.

• Pricing: The free plan includes unlimited users, with paid options starting at $7 per month/user.

• Capterra Reviews: 4.6/5

Popular for its structured task lists and dashboards, Asana is a straightforward way to manage projects. For those looking to monitor progress at every stage, Asana has features like task assignments, due dates, project timelines, and board views to help you.

This tool includes an intuitive interface and reporting tools, making it easier to prioritize work, identify bottlenecks, and ensure that projects stay on track from start to finish.

• Pros: Flexible task management; multiple project views; polished user experience.

• Cons: Paid tiers add up quickly; less flexible than Jira for agile workflows.

• Best for: Small to mid-sized teams looking for simple project tracking.

• Pricing: Up to 10 users on its free plan or paid options starting at $10.99 per user/month

• Capterra Reviews: 4.5/5

At its core, Slack is a team communication tool that doubles as a lightweight task management resource with integrations.

At its core, Slack is a messaging platform designed to centralize team communication and reduce email overload. It also doubles as a lightweight task management resource with integrations.

Through organized channels, direct messaging, and searchable conversation history, teams can collaborate in real time and keep project discussions focused. Slack integrates with a wide range of project management and productivity tools, like Jira and Confluence.

If you want an easier way to share files, automate notifications, and streamline workflows within a single interface, it should be on your list.

• Pros: Best-in-class messaging and collaboration; integrates well with other tools.

• Cons: Not a full project management platform; limited free history.

• Best for: Real-time team communication paired with a dedicated PM tool.

• Pricing: Free with up to 90 days of chat history or paid plans starting at $8.75 per user/month.

• Capterra Reviews: 4.7/5

Airtable works with the simplicity of a spreadsheet alongside the power of a database. This allows the tool to help teams to organize projects, manage resources, and store information in customizable tables.

This database-style project management platform includes features like linked records, calendar views, and automation. Additionally, it adapts to a variety of project management needs. 

Airtable has several integration capabilities and a user-friendly interface. This makes it ideal for teams looking to streamline data management.

• Pros: Extremely flexible; templates for quick setup; strong customization.

• Cons: Can be overwhelming to configure; limited free plan compared to Jira.

• Best for: Teams who want to build custom workflows from the ground up.

• Pricing: Up to 5 users on the free plan or paid options starting at $24 per user/month

• Capterra Reviews: 4.6/5

Wrike leverages a spreadsheet-style approach to project tracking with built-in dashboards and task dependencies. Within the project management tool, users can customize workflows, set up task dependencies, and generate detailed reports to track project performance. 

With real-time updates and document sharing features, users help teams stay aligned. On the other hand, the tool offers dashboards and analytics that provide insights for optimizing processes and meeting deadlines.

For clear and to the point task dependency views, Wrike works well, but the UX might not be ideal for all teams.

• Pros: Clear, familiar layout; strong for task dependencies; real-time updates.

• Cons: Less customizable than other tools; user interface can feel dated.

• Best for: Teams who prefer spreadsheet-like workflows and dependency tracking.

• Capterra Reviews: 4.4/5

Free project management software helps teams of any size stay organized, collaborate effectively, and scale without added costs. While many options are available, the right solution depends on your team’s size, workflows, and future growth plans.

If you’re looking for flexibility, power, and a platform that grows with you, Jira is the clear choice. Its robust free plan includes Agile boards, flexible reporting, and seamless integrations, making it ideal for small teams just getting started and larger teams planning to scale.