JIRA vs Trello vs Asana vs TeamClerk vs … WordPress?

I mean, speaking about the tools that can be used for project management, we have: JIRA, Anydo, TeamClerk, Remember the Milk, Trello, Todoist, Wunderlist, OmniFocus, Asana, Producteev, and probably a dozen more that haven’t earned their stripes yet. But which one will be the best for your specific needs, not mentioning fitting your budget?

To make things easier, today we narrow it down to just a handful of tools. Here’s our side-by-side comparison of JIRA vs Trello vs Asana vs TeamClerk vs … WordPress (yes, WordPress, but let’s hold off on that one):

JIRA

Kicking off the JIRA vs Trello vs Asana vs TeamClerk comparison, we have to say that JIRA is one of the leaders in the project management space, especially among software developers and teams. The tools made available by JIRA cover a lot of ground and let you manage your work in a variety of ways.

First of all, JIRA has been designed to help agile teams make their often complex software projects more manageable and easier to grasp. This is visible throughout the features that JIRA offers.

For instance, you can work with things like scrum boards, kanban boards, agile reporting, project and issue tracking, backlog prioritizing, sprint planning, flexible workflows, and loads of other great features.

JIRA’s pricing is based on the size of your team. Namely:

Apart from that, there are also paid add-ons:

Trello

Trello is loved by many professionals due to its ease of use and simplicity. The tool has literally no learning curve. You just get your account, create a board, visit it, and you somehow know what to do right away with no guidance needed.

In a nutshell, Trello provides you with a blank canvas that you can populate with various lists and cards representing your projects and workflows. You can work in Trello either individually or with a team.

The UI allows you to do most things with drag-and-drop, and also to use colorful labels and icons/images to identify each card better.

There are three main plans at Trello:

• the free plan – $0
• “Business Class” – $9.99 / user / month
• “Enterprise” – $20.83 / user / month

However, it’s worth pointing out that you can use the free plan for teamwork as well (with some limitations).

Asana

Asana is a great middle-of-the-road solution when looking through JIRA vs Trello vs Asana vs TeamClerk. It delivers a great-looking simplified UI, but also introduces some structure into your projects making everything easier to grasp.

Asana is particularly helpful if you – and your team – work on medium-sized projects involving 10+ tasks to complete. The UI is really simple and has nearly no learning curve.

In many ways, Asana is quite similar to Trello. While Trello is based on cards that you can align in a canvas-like space, Asana relies on lists that already have a certain structure organized on a per-project basis.

Of course, Asana gives you all the common features like tasks, due dates, assignments, teamwork, and even project progress charts.

There are two main plans:

• free – $0 for teams of up to 15 people,
• $12.11 per member per month – with no member limits, and no limits at all for that matter.

TeamClerk

TeamClerk is a simple project management software in itself, but it does a good job at tracking your team’s progress on any given project, and letting you organize tasks based on their priority and even difficulty (not common in other project management tools among JIRA vs Trello vs Asana vs TeamClerk).

TeamClerk has a very clever UI that sort of goes from left to right. What I mean is that your projects are on the left, and then every consecutive column is related to the previous one.

So, when selecting a project from the most left column, you’ll see the project’s tasks in the next column, your own tasks related to the project in another one, and finally the project analytics column on far right. As you switch between the projects, all the other columns switch accordingly too.

This is a unique approach which may be to some people’s liking. Its strong point is that when looking through the projects, you always know what sort of information you can expect in each column. This makes interacting with the tool faster over time.

There are 4 main pricing points with TeamClerk:

• Free – $0 – 1 team, up to 3 members
• $9.99 / mo – 2 teams, 15 members / team
• $19.99 / mo – 5 teams, 20 members / team
• $39.99 / mo – 10 teams, 30 members / team

You can work with unlimited projects and tasks on all plans.

 

WordPress?

Managing your projects straight inside WordPress is surely an idea worth exploring. And technically, if you want to get into that, there are some plugins available out there. But they aren’t too stunning, if I’m honest.

Let’s discuss the pros and cons of the whole solution:

• First off, managing projects inside WordPress makes sense only if the core of your business revolves around your WordPress site. In other words, it only makes sense if you’re pretty much logged into your WordPress site round the clock anyway.
• Accessing your project management “place” requires some additional steps, and it’s certainly not as simple as just logging into Asana or something.
• You get no mobile apps for the project management part of your WordPress site. And those mobile apps are some of the main strengths of the other tools on this list.

Then, there’s potentially the biggest downside of them all: there aren’t that many quality project management plugins out there. And even the most popular ones don’t have that many active installs, not to mention sometimes rather harsh reviews.

If you want to take a look, here are the most sensible plugin options in the project management realm. Free:

 

 

Premium:

In the end, I would advise using WordPress for project management only if you and your team spend most of your time in the WordPress dashboard already (and if you don’t want to use third-party tools).

 

 

Managing projects with WordPress + plugins: Not really.

But what do you think? Which one is your winner: JIRA vs Trello vs Asana vs TeamClerk? Or maybe you use something entirely different for project management? Feel free to share in the comments.