JIRA vs Trello vs Asana vs TeamClerk vs … WordPress?

When it comes to project management tools, you certainly have a lot of options to choose from, and that’s mostly a good thing. However, sometimes the abundance of choice can backfire, and even entirely halt your efforts.

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):

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.

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

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.

• 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 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.

• 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 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.

• 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.

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

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