Best Project Tracking Tools & Software

The buyer’s guide for project tracking software aims to provide users with in-depth knowledge about the significance of project tracking tools in project management for enhancing overall business performance. Businesses can leverage efficient project tracking tools to ensure streamlined project management through improved project progress, status tracking, communication, coordination, workflow efficiency, and productivity.

This buyer's guide explains the features, importance, and benefits of project tracking systems and offers insight into the critical parameters you must know and consider to shortlist the best project tracking software for your business.

A project tracking tool is a set of software tools designed to track and control project activities, deadlines, and resources. The software helps schedule project tasks and measure project metrics and costs through comprehensive project tracking features, including time and expense tracking, cost-to-completion tracking, Gantt charts, Kanban boards, milestone tracking, percent completion, and more.

Project tracker software helps project managers manage deadlines and resources and reduce the project’s overall costs, leading to profitability in the long run. The software also offers collaboration tools for seamless communication and coordination for better project management and business intelligence tools (analytics and reporting) for informed decision-making.

All primary industries leverage project tracking tools, including construction, manufacturing, healthcare, engineering, IT, etc. Studies suggest that 73% of construction businesses look for project tracking functionality in construction project management software, much more than any other functionality. Thus, many top project tracking systems offer construction-industry-specific tools, such as PlanToBuild.

Project tracking is a crucial element in project management. It involves monitoring deadlines, optimization of resources, and budget planning. Flawless project tracking is inevitable for business profitability and growth, so project tracker software is a must for businesses.

Project management systems typically include project tracking tools. Still, many businesses leverage project tracking systems because these provide extensive project tracking capabilities through a wide range of project tracking features. Studies indicate that 71% of respondents quoted project tracking as the most-used feature in project management software.

Challenges due to poor project tracking

Businesses face numerous challenges in the absence of reliable project tracking tools, including:

• Missed project deadlines
• Delays due to data access and update issues
• Losses due to human errors
• Collaboration issues resulting in reduced team productivity
• Lack of communication and coordination
• Resource deprivation and wastage
• Absence of contingency plans
• Lack of accountability among stakeholders
• Poor risk assessment
• Client/customer dissatisfaction due to a lack of transparency
• Increased costs and decreased profitability

With perfect project tracking software, project managers can resolve the above challenges and witness seamless team, resource, and task management.

Project tracking systems help businesses streamline their project operations, tracking projects throughout their lifecycle. Below are the advantages of using project tracking software for your business.

Centralized project tracking

A software-based project tracking system provides a unified view of the project lifecycle by controlling and tracking numerous processes on a single platform. It offers easy data access, updates, and sharing across various project stakeholders and departments for improved project management.

Real-time information access and updates

Online project tracking software allows real-time access, updates, and monitoring of project status. It enables quicker updates from anywhere, better data management, easy progress tracking, enhanced team monitoring, improved coordination, and time-saving, and it prevents delays at various stages.

Enhanced accuracy

Automating project tracking functions through a software application helps eliminate manual work and human error. This results in improved accuracy and reduced losses due to such errors.

Seamless project tracking

With real-time updates and quicker access to information, the project tracking tools offer enhanced visibility/transparency for easy tracking of project timelines and budgets. All relevant departments and stakeholders can share project status data through the common software platform and perform better.

Time and cost-saving

Project tracker software offers various tools to automate tracking in all project stages, thus saving time and effort for people at different organizational levels. With time, it results in significant cost savings and an upsurge in business profits.

Increased efficiency and productivity

Project progress and team productivity tracking become hassle-free with online project tracking tools that eliminate location and time constraints. The software allows better project management with the convenience of monitoring and managing projects from anywhere, anytime. In the long run, it improves overall process efficiency and team productivity, aiding business growth.

Privacy and data security

The best project tracking tools typically provide data encryption and access control features to assign and limit data access to specific and relevant authorized personnel. This ensures that business data and customer information are safe and that nobody can modify them without permission.

Forecasting for budget management

Modern online project tracking software offers Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)- based business intelligence tools that enable budget planning and forecasting by leveraging prior project data, timelines, and cost estimation. Thus, it helps in better budget management and project cost control with informed decision-making.

Customer and client retention

With reliable project tracking software in place, businesses gain greater visibility over project status and progress updates. This results in improved communication with customers and clients, leading to enhanced client/customer retention.

Project tracking software offers numerous tools to aid in perfect project tracking for your business. The must-have features of project tracking systems include:

Collaboration tools

Project tracking systems must include collaboration tools, such as document management, coordination, and communication tools. These enable better project status, progress, workflow, and team tracking.

Cost-to-completion tracking

Cost-to-completion tracking is a crucial project budget tracking feature. It provides an estimate of pending work, time, and budget needed to complete the project.

File sharing

Project tracking software typically offers file-sharing features to enable multiple team members to view and work together on the same document. This functionality helps in quicker project status and progress monitoring.

Gantt charts

Gantt charts are popular tools included in project tracking software to illustrate project schedules better. These bar charts display various activities or events of a project against time (duration, start, and end) for each, and the overlap between these activities. This feature allows teams and all involved project stakeholders to visualize, track, understand, and display the project progress in a structured manner.

Kanban board

Kanban boards are very beneficial for project status and progress tracking. These project tracking tools enable in-depth project workflow visualization, including illustrating work at various project stages. Kanban boards help implement the just-in-time methodology in project management, optimize resources, prevent wastage, offer better visibility & transparency into the project, set work-in-progress (WIP) limits, and maximize overall project efficiency.

Milestone tracking

The milestone tracking feature of project tracking systems helps project managers focus on and track projects based on predefined key deliverables or milestones. It enables a better assessment of delays at various intermediate stages of the project. Thus, it facilitates taking appropriate and timely measures to adjust the timelines of other tasks/activities accordingly, preventing further delays.

Percent-complete tracking

Project tracker software typically offers the percent-complete project status tracking feature to assess the progress of any project activity/task in terms of percentage completion. It provides a better picture of how far a specific task (or overall project) is from completion; this helps project managers streamline the workflow and ensure timely completion.

Prioritization

The prioritization tool for project tracking helps prioritize tasks and activities to streamline the project workflow by providing in-depth analysis and insights on the tasks requiring urgent attention (on priority) to prevent overall project delay.

Time and expense tracking

Time and expense tracking is another significant feature of online project tracking systems. It enables real-time updates for project duration and expenses. Project managers can take prompt action based on this data and prevent avoidable expenditures, thus helping enhance profitability.

Notifications and alerts

Project tracking software enables automated alerts and notifications for task allocation, deadlines, resource needs, progress, pending activities, schedule modifications, and more, ensuring prompt action and timely execution of project tasks.

Analytics and reporting

Project tracking systems provide business intelligence tools, including analytics and reporting. Analytics provide insights into possible outcomes based on past data, and reporting tools help generate insightful reports on issues and shortcomings requiring immediate attention. These tools enable project managers to make informed decisions and save time, costs, and resources.

Other features

Project tracking systems commonly offer project management, workflow management, bug tracking, and task management tools, including calendar management, workflow configuration, bug reports, track & resolve, access controls, version control, document management, resource management, etc.

Project tracking software can work wonders for your business, provided you choose the right project tracking system. Selecting and implementing the best project tracking system is a complicated and time-consuming task that becomes easier if you plan for the costs, time, and other resources in advance. Here is a checklist to help you select the best project tracking software for your business.

Feasibility for your business

The project tracking system you choose must be feasible for your business. Its costs should fit well within your budget, and the expected Return on Investment (ROI) or profitability from its deployment must outweigh its cost.

Features

Project tracking systems offer a variety of features, and the feature set varies from one software to another. Thus, ensuring that the project tracker software you choose provides all the necessary tools to cover your business’s project tracking needs is crucial.

Suitability for your industry

The best project tracking software for a business depends on its industry, too. Check reviews, ratings, and feedback on the project tracking system from other customers/users in the same sector to confirm that the software you choose meets the specific requirements of your industry.

Deployment type

Project tracking tools are available as both on-premise solutions with one-time costs and SaaS-based software hosted on third-party servers, for which software vendors typically charge monthly. When purchasing the software, analyze and choose the deployment type that works best for your business.

Integrations

The software must facilitate easy integration with your other existing systems and third-party systems as required; for example, project tracking systems commonly need integrations with accounting software and CRM systems.

Customizability and scalability

For the long-term success of your business, the project tracking software you deploy must allow scalability for business growth. The software vendor should also provide customization to match your requirements.

User training and customer support

Project tracking tools are typically easy to use and may not require dedicated user training, but the software vendor must arrange training if such a need arises. Moreover, the software provider must ensure diligent customer support as needed. Confirm this directly with the vendor and additionally through online reviews and feedback.

Security

While selecting the best project tracking software for your business, you must confirm that the software provides all the necessary security features to keep your business data secure, including data storage, sharing, access controls, encryption, multi-factor authentication, vulnerability scanning, etc.

Additional costs

Plan in advance for other possible costs associated with implementing project tracker software, such as maintenance/upgrade costs, hardware costs, training costs, etc.

Select the right software vendor.

Choosing the right software provider is as important as selecting the best project tracking software for your business. You must confirm the vendor’s expertise through feedback from other users (companies) in the same industry as yours. Also, compare the services offered by different vendors and their experience in the software market.

Request a Demo

Ask the project tracking software vendor to arrange a demo of the software for your staff (target users) or leverage the free trial version (if available) to better understand the software’s offerings and suitability for your business.

The pricing of project tracking systems depends on numerous factors. The parameters that significantly affect the pricing of project tracking tools include:

• Set of features
• Deployment type
• Number of users
• Number of projects
• Storage

Detailed pricing analysis - Project Tracker Software

Project tracking software vendors provide multiple software packages or plans for businesses; they typically offer free or low-priced versions with limited functionality for companies with budget constraints that need only basic project tracking tools. Advanced or feature-rich versions/packages designed for large businesses cost more.

Analyzing the pricing of the top project tracking systems, it is possible to get many project tracking solutions for less than $10 per month; for example, GoodDay offers a free version for up to 15 users with paid plans starting from $4 per user per month, Samepage provides a 30-day free trial with paid plans starting from $7.5 per license, Goals allows a 14-day free trial with paid plans that start from $7.98 per user per month, and Todo.vu costs $9 per user per month. Zoho Projects allows a 10-day free trial for all paid plans. It offers a free version for up to 3 users and 2 projects, and its paid packages start from $4.7 per user per month for up to 50 users.

A bit higher priced solutions include Backlog that provides a free version allowing 10 users, 1 project, and 100 MB storage; its Starter plan costs $35 per month for 30 users, 5 projects, 1 GB storage; Premium plan of Backlog costs $175 per month for unlimited users, unlimited projects, and 100 GB storage. ProWorkflow costs $20 per user per month for the Professional version, with core features allowing unlimited projects. The feature-rich Advanced plan of ProWorkflow costs $30 per user per month (for unlimited projects). AceProject offers a free version for 3 active users with paid plans starting from $24 per month. Confluence provides a free version for up to 10 users, and its paid packages start from $50 per month.

Celoxis, another popular project tracker software, facilitates both on-premise and cloud-based project tracking software packages. It charges a one-time cost of $450 for on-premise software and costs $22.5 per user per month for a cloud-based system. It offers a 30-day free trial.

Hidden costs

Top project tracking software vendors are generally transparent about the pricing of their tools. Still, before you plan to buy one, you must confirm with the software vendor/provider about possible hidden costs related to installation, maintenance, system upgrades, integrations with other systems, data migration, customer support, etc. Besides, software vendors typically provide user training and customization at extra costs based on the complexity of your requirements. All these factors can also significantly influence the pricing of project tracking tools.

With years of experience and expertise, over 30k+ verified/unbiased reviews from authenticated customers, and a listing of over 60k+ services and software companies (with their detailed information), Goodfirms is the most reliable and genuine source for the top software list in various categories. Goodfirms’ insights are based on data from industry leaders worldwide, extensive analysis, and shared user reviews and are thus very beneficial.

Goodfirms formulates the list of project tracking software after carefully analyzing their features, pricing, reviews, and more. We understand your needs and provide relevant filters to sort and shortlist project tracking systems for your business based on prominent features, pricing models, deployment type, business size, devices supported, and more. Mount your business beyond your imagination by leveraging the perfect software from this list of the top project tracking tools compiled by Goodfirms.