Notion is a project management, note-taking and productivity tool. The “All In One Workspace” replaces multiple apps used for note-taking, projects, tasks, spreadsheets, CRM, and much more. Notion enables users  to leverage a single platform to plan deadlines, goals, and assignments together.

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With more than 20 million users worldwide, Notion is valued at $10B as of their latest funding round. Originally, Notion started with a team of four in the year 2014. It has since then emerged as one of the poster-children for product-led growth.

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The tool is also known for its unique product design, drag-and-drop functionality, and design aesthetic. In a crowded productivity market, Notion continues to help people and teams to be more efficient and productive in their workplaces.

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Key Features

As a project management tool, Notion has the following key features:

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• Wikis: You can create and develop contracts, policies, goals, and projects for the growth of your company from a single location. 

• Kanban board: The Kanban boards in Notion display which member is linked with what task and its current status. These boards, therefore, help you in keeping track of the tasks.

• Blocks: All the texts, images, and tables in Notion are in the form of blocks that can be repositioned and changed in any way you like. 

• Pages: In Notion, a page is similar to a document. Each item here is a page devoted to itself where you can start work afresh. 

• Database view: Notion also provides database views of each of your projects. You have the option to view these tasks as lists, timelines, calendars, galleries, or tables. 

Drawbacks

• Low speed: The app takes considerable time for setting up team collaborations. Most companies need a tool that offers an efficient solution and works quickly with minimal configuration. 

• Search and navigation issues: The search and navigation features in Notion have scope for improvement. To find a specific work item or page, one needs more information. Enhancing the sidebar can enable users to find pages easily. 

• Formatting problems: While using the copy/paste features, there are issues with text formatting. Exporting a different type of file is also difficult. Other useful features like image and PDF annotation, encryption, and a public API, if added, can benefit users greatly. 

Pricing

Notion is available in four subscription plans:

• Personal: This is the most basic plan that offers unlimited pages and blocks. It allows a maximum of five guests. It's a free plan with limited features

• Personal Pro: It is an improved version of the personal plan that provides unlimited guests and file uploads. It is billed at $4 per month for an annual subscription. If billed monthly, it costs $5 per month. 

• Team: The team plan lets your entire team collaborate in one place. It allows unlimited team members and an extensive range of admin tools. It is billed at $8 per month for an annual subscription. If billed monthly, it costs $10 per month. 

• Enterprise: The enterprise plan is designed for accounts with greater than 100 users. It has advanced features like SAML SSO, advanced security and controls, complete version history, etc. This plan has a custom pricing model. 

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Asana

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Key features

• Powerful integrations

• Real-time progress report

• Agile management

• Automated workflow builder

• Kanban boards and scrum support

• Strategic workload tracker

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Drawbacks

• The software can get overwhelming for new users. With a few days of training, one can expect a smooth workflow.

• It does not allow managers to keep track of the time spent by one member on a task. Asana requires a third-party link for the same.

• Cannot add multiple members under one task. You can use subtasks, copy the task for a different member, or add task collaborators.

• It complicates simple tasks with its many features and task settings.

• The Asana mobile app is not as efficient as the desktop version.

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Pricing

• Basic (Free): For teams of less than 15. Perfect for small-scale tasks.

• Premium ($13.49 billed monthly or $10.99 per month annually): For larger teams. It unlocks most key features and easy planning.

• Business ($30.49 billed monthly or $24.99 per month annually): Advance integrations and one-centre control over many work units.

• Enterprise (Tailor Made): For massive operations. It provides security and data governance facilities.

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Airtable

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Key features

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1. Views Tool: Airtable transforms data into actionable insights. It helps to track resources, stakeholders, in meeting deadlines etc. Kanban view, Timeline view, Gantt view, Calendar view etc are some of its view modes.

2. Interface Designer: Interface designer builds visuals and interactive interfaces that give every team member the required information. Using this feature, even your most complex data becomes easily accessible and shareable. This can be used to customise interfaces to co-ordinate the working of your teammates

3. Automations: Airtable can automate simple to complex tasks as per need. One can streamline redundant work, run customised codes and can speed up workflow through trigger and action logic. Tools like Google workspace, Facebook, Twitter, and Slack etc. can also be integrated with Airtable.

4. Sync: The sync feature of Airtable allows collaboration of the shared view of data with different teams using Airtable and provides an aggregated view of consolidated data from multiple sources.

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Drawbacks:

• Complex decision: With so many features available in Airtable, it becomes complex to decide which tool to be opted for as per work requirements.

• Complex in navigation: This software is not easy to navigate for beginners or even for users with a well-versed knowledge about Excel. 

• Costly pricing plans: The free plan of Airtable has limited functionality with the lack of certain essential features. Adding some features like Blocks or personal and locked views will make Airtable pricey.

• Integration limitations: Currently Airtable’s low adoption rate and limited integration capacity limits it from being used as a widespread platform instead of Excel.

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Pricing: 

Airtable software comes with three price plans, they are

• Free: It is free for individuals or for small teams who have started using Airtable.

• Plus: The plus plan costs $10 per seat/ month and is billed annually. It is recommended for those looking to create a single source to manage all their workflows.

• Pro: The pro plan costs $20 per seat/month and is billed annually, the same as the plus plan. Recommended for organisations who want customisation in their work to move at a faster pace.

Wrike

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Key features

• Tool customization: The software is highly customizable, It comes with customised dashboards, workflows, request forms, and much more. 

• Better collaboration: It can enhance your user experience where you can easily and quickly share files, tasks, and reports. The visual proofing and automated approval system can reduce the feedback process.

• Gives complete visibility instantly: Wrike gives unparalleled visibility across departments. It also helps in finding information easily and making quick decisions in real-time.

• Builds trust in scalable software: It has all the company's tools for future growth. It can help the companies get best practices across for their organisation and set their team for success.

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Drawbacks

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• Filtering options are limited: The application does not have many advanced filtering functions in the dashboard.

• Less speed: The application has a slow loading speed and even less while uploading or downloading files.

• Task prioritisation: The application can properly prioritise tasks in the project, increasing productivity and reducing lags.

• Difficulty in changing task status: Changing the task status is not very convenient, and one needs to create a task and change its status to a Milestone, Which is not very suitable.

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Pricing

• Other than the free version, the cheapest plan of the application, which is called the professional plan, costs $9.80 per user per month.

• The business plan costs as much as $24.80 per user for a month.

• The plan becomes costlier since it must be purchased in a set of 5.

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Nifty

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Key features

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• Helps in better planning: This app helps the teams to set and achieve key milestones. It is useful in tracking business projects based on task completion. The automatic colour-coding of the progress and the due date in the app is fun, along with planning.

• Portfolio management: The app is good at organising projects into folders based on departments, locations, managers, etc. 

• Tracks time and reportings: The app's time tracking feature helps you track task duration, see everyone's work, and hence helps in keeping productivity in check.

• Imports and integration: It can easily connect with over 1000 apps and helps in switching from an old app or project management to Nifty smoothly.

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Drawbacks 

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• The app offers status automation, recurring tasks, and project templates but does not let one create its own automation.

• The app has no dashboard for visual insights, i.e., and it will give wordy reports but won't cut them to charts.

• Despite having many pre-made project templates for designing, Nifty missed the most important choice of the design teams, PDF annotation.

• It falls short of the idea management features like a whiteboard or mind map feature, which can help remote collaboration for the teams.

• Nifty does not have any native printing feature. One needs to either download the report or take screenshots to get the printouts.

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Pricing 

• The tool offers a 14-day free trial period to its customers.

• The starter pack including the core features costs $39 per month and is billed annually. 

• The pro pack costs $79 per month and is billed annually. The pack is well-suited for teams in the expansion stage.

• The pro pack costs $124 per month and is billed annually. The pack is well-suited for teams in the advanced stage.

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Jira

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Key features 

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• The tool is very easy to use as its Kanban board is based on a drag and drop system.

• This software can plan the agile work from project backlog to sprints.

• It can fully customise Kanban and Scrum boards.

• It can estimate the time for issues and prioritise their backlog.

• It has robust reporting features such as burndown charts to velocity measurements.

• It has customizable workflows which can fit your frameworks.

• Using Jira, teams can access more than a dozen out-of-the-box reports with real-time, actionable insights about how their teams perform sprints over sprints.

•  It can be time-saving along with increasing the power of your team.

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Drawbacks 

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• It is hard to set up and get used to it.

• The managing tool becomes complicated because of its hard-to-understand user interface.

• It has no in-built timeline to track project progress.

• This does not have collaboration features to communicate with the team.

• The software lacks idea management features to track the ideas and the plans.

• It is a slow tool with long query load times.

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Pricing 

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• Free plan: It is for up to 10 team members and has two pricing plans with free trials.

• Standard plan: It comes at $ 7.5 per user per month. In this plan, one gets the agile project planning features along with 250 GB of cloud space and can be shared between 5000 users.

• Premium plan: It provides access to all features and unlimited storage for up to 5000 users, comes at $14.5 per user per month

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Trello

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Key features

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• It needs no code automation as it has in-built automation, which helps to reduce the number of tedious tasks on the project boards.

• The Trello app helps to easily integrate the apps that your team already uses into the Trello workflow or add a power-up to help fine-tune your specific needs.

• The Trello cards contain everything you need to organise your work, and every single part of your work flow can be managed, tracked, and shared with teammates.

• It gives your team the ability to set up and customise workflows quickly.

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Drawbacks 

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• The Kanban system of Trello is not always helpful to manage all types of projects. It is suitable for small teams and projects whereas it is not an ideal choice for a large team with complex projects.

• The task dependencies are not displayed on Trello.

• Trello is not a fully-featured PM tool. Features like time tracking and expense tracking are not included in it.

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Pricing

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• The tool's free version gives you unlimited cards and up to 10 boards per workspace. It allows you to run 250 workspace commands per month and has an unlimited activity log.

• The standard plan costs $5 per month per user billed annually. It allows 1000 workspace commands per month and unlimited storage up to 250 MB per file. It has custom fields and advanced checklists.

• The premium plan can cost you $10 per user per month when billed annually. It includes everything that comes in the standard plan plus a dashboard view, timeline view, workspace table view, calendar view, workspace calendar view, map view. Admin and security features and simple data export are also available in it.

• The enterprise plan varies on the number of users in your organisation starting with 25 users per organisation. It is suitable for those who need to connect work across teams with more security and controls.

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Basecamp

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Key features

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• To-do list: It lets you create a to-do list for your work.

• Chat platform for communication: It supports both group and personal real-time communication.

• Reports: The reports help you know who is working on what in the team.

• Hill chart: This chart helps you track the project progress in real-time.

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Drawbacks 

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• Limited functionality: This app has very limited functionalities compared to other such tools.

• Confusing interface: The basecamp interface can be very confusing for the users to understand.

• Limited project tracking features: Its project tracking features are very few.

• Lacks time-tracking support: Basecamp does not let you track the time taken for project completion.

• Expensive: The high prices of the tool make it unaffordable for many.

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Pricing

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• Free trial: A free trial is available for 30 days. No credit is required to avail of it and can be cancelled at any time.

• The personal plan: It is available for free and allows the management of upto 3 projects and 20 users.

• The business plan: It costs $99 per month and offers unlimited projects for unlimited users, and no per-user fee is required.

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Meistertask

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Key features 

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• Unlimited sections: Any number of sections can be created, named, and arranged in the app. They can even be collapsed for a more focussed overview.

• Kanban-style: Meistertask’s Kanban style project board can be fully customised from project icons to workflow.

• Filters: You can see your projects in whichever way helps you by filtering by Assignee, Tag, Watcher, Due Date, Status, or Schedule.

• Calendar view: All the tasks within a project can be seen together in a calendar view by placing them in a timeline.

• Automations: It can increase work efficiency and consistency by automatically repeating steps in your workflow.

• Recurring tasks: While performing the same tasks regularly, you need not start from scratch each time by setting a template for a recurring task.

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Drawbacks 

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• The free plan has basic features: Though Meistertask offers a free plan, the plan has only basic features which don’t allow you to prioritise tasks or use tagging systems.

• Expensive for large businesses: The basic plan might be sufficient for freelancers. However, larger businesses will have to shift to the paid versions depending on their team size. The paid plans to access all features of Meistertask are highly-priced.

• Transferred to browsers: There are certain features of Meistertask that aren’t accessible in the desktop version. On using these features, you are transferred to the browser. 

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Pricing

• The basic free plan: It is available for free and offers up to 3 mind maps, real-time collaboration, and email support.

• Pro plan: It is for $4.19 per month - it includes everything as in the basic plan, word export, PowerPoint export, multiple team members, admin account, and google workspace for domain sign-on.

• Business plan: It is for 6.29 per month -along with the pro features, it has features like a group within your team, compliance export and backup, custom team domain, priority email, and phone support, and multiple team administrators.

• Enterprise plan is custom made and offers every functionality of Meistertask

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Hive

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Key Features

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• Unlimited tasks and projects

• Flexible project views (including Gantt, Kanban and more)

• Multi-project overviews

• Personal to-do lists

• Task by task time tracking

• Customise recurring tasks

• In-app messenger and email

• Task prioritisation

• Customised project access

• Project and action templates

• Easily identify risks

• Edit collaboratively in real-time

• Integration with other software (Google Drive, MS Teams, Slack, Github, etc)

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Drawbacks

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• Strange price model: Hive has a low base price compared to its competitors but charges for ‘workspace add ons’ for features such as timesheets, analytics, and resource management, which are included in the standard model for other platforms.

• Relatively steep learning curve: Users report that Hive needs time to get used to as it has a lot of features that can be challenging to learn since the software can be personalised.

• No search function for individual projects: Hive is used as a means of communication and keeps a record of all communication threads. However, there is no search feature if a user wants to refer to some past conversation.

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Pricing Model

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• Hive Solo – Free: Available for teams of 1-2 users

• Hive Teams: $12 per user per month, when billed annually / $16 per month monthly: Base price with optional add ons.

• Hive Enterprise: For custom project and team management, with customizable features. The price depends on the user’s needs and is decided after contacting Hive.

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Slenke

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Key Features

• Project timeline planning and status tracking (Percentage completion tracking)

• Budget management

• Gantt charts and Kanban boards

• Group calendars and discussion boards

• Collaboration tools

• Recurring task management

• Accounting integration

• Employee database

• Billable and non-billable hours

• Reporting (Analytics)

• Project templates

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Drawbacks

• Management of alerts: Slenke doesn't give users the options to select what type of alerts they want to receive, so they can sometimes become overwhelming.

• Does not provide API: API refers to Application Programming Interface, a software intermediary that allows two applications to communicate with each other.

• Minimal Customizability: Users of Slenke find that it would benefit them if features could be customised more to their unique needs.

Pricing

• Slenke Starter - Free to use: This can be used for one project, with up to 5 people as collaborators, with 1 GB of storage per member.

• Slenke Premium: $15 per user per month when billed annually/$18 per user per month monthly: Unlimited number of projects with up to 99 team members, with 10 GB of storage per member.

• Slenke Enterprise: No fixed price. Slenke determines the price after understanding the organisation's needs. This is ideal for custom projects and team management, with customizable features.

Pipefy

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Key Features 

• Automation: This feature is available across workflows like Pipefy HR, Pipefy marketing, Pipefy finance, Pipefy CS, and many more. For instance, in Pipefy HR, it exposes the recruitment workflow, new employees track, approval sheets etc.

• Portals: It encompasses distinct portals that emphasise more on easy flow and ease of use, which saves reading time and improves efficiency.

• Integration: This feature acts as a cherry on the top because it integrates the two applications, hence mitigating time and effort and making the transfer process much easier. 

• Other specifications: This application deals with other features too, like forms, calendar view, emails templates, request trackers, pie charts demonstrations, and many more. These features enhance the compatibility of the application. 

• Enhances management process: These simple yet small features mostly enable business management processes. For instance, Pipefy has a feature called connections, and it bridges the gap between the two groups working under comparable notions and projects. 

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Drawbacks 

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• UX modifications: The automations need to have a modified and new UX related to path creations.

• Connectivity issues: In most cases, it is cumbersome to connect the data analyses with other software.

• Making modifications is a long process: You can modify certain features only at the cost of the historical data. You can’t move a field from one phase to another without either recreating a new field or deleting the older one.

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Pricing  

• Starter: If an individual is a starter, Pipefy provides a free trial for exploration. This package is mostly for the demographic that falls under 18yrs. For instance, college students, freelancers, startups, and many more. With this, they provide a minimal yet enough exploration of features.

• Business: This package is charitable and focuses on the demographics that are in their working and growth phase. This package charges US$18 per month per user which is considered reasonable.

• Enterprise: It is inclined towards an advanced level in which it targets a population that is involved in big organisations that need security, control, and support management. It is also chargeable and requires $30 per month per user, the range considered accessible. It provides specifications that ensure transparency.

• Unlimited: This package is used by the population that needs this application regularly and has some specific requirements. So it has customised features too where it charges as per the customisation.

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Swit

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Key features

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The Swit application supports many unique aspects, hastening the organisation's workflow and saving time. Some features of this application have been discussed below:

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• Idealisation tab:  In this feature, in addition to chatting with a group of members, a unique idealisation feature is involved, in which members can easily discuss different projects or startups. Not only this, but Swit also encompasses a better way to "cut and paste," that is, "click and drag", making the application user-friendly.

• Email merged: It incorporates an imperative element of email within the application because switching applications can make the structure of work clumsy, leading to slow operation; this helps increase productivity. 

• Status updation: This aspect helps a group evaluate each member at every step by monitoring the work status. For instance, checking whether work is in progress or done on time. 

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Drawbacks

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• Same feature, many tabs: This application claims a steady feature in multiple tabs, which leads to a monotonou