[Review] Best task management tools
The tool depends on what you want to achieve. If you are looking for a personal task then asana is good. If you want to do proper planning for a startup then Jira is the best tool in my opinion.
Here is a breakdown:
- JIRA cloud:
- The best tool there is in my opinion for task management, project planning etc.
- Best for Agile/Scrum
- Very easy if you have used any of the other big corporate tools for sprint planning
- Thousands of Integrations with other tools.
- It is free for the first 10 users I think. You also get confluence for free with it.
Confluence is a company wiki/documents tool.
- Asana:
- Love the simplicity and ease of use.
- Gets hard to use with larger lists.
- Really messed up pricing model. It says 10.99 per user but you need to but the 5 user plan minimum
- Really fancy tool, great UI and they have insane sales team.
- You will love this tool at first until the pricing hits you.
- Their Basic & Standard are quite useless. You can't even "filter" tasks until you have Pro
- Excel Sheet/Google Sheets
- Free and unlimited use
- Gets complicated really fast
- If you are going this path, then it's a good idea to download some templates.
- Notion
- Not a very good task manager. It is good for other usecases though.
- Very good for making quick landing pages with forms etc.
P.S. check out pipfeed.com, The reading app for professionals. We have a section dedicated to "product management" there. You can read the latest articles, tools & tips on the app.
P.P.S. This was originally a comment on this post: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/what-tools-do-indie-hackers-use-for-task-management-882f39b898 Since I wrote a detailed comment, I think it deserved it's own post as well.
I still have no idea why JIRA is the standard. It's such a complex app to use. They try and do way too much in one app. Every other engineer I speak to hates it.
Do you have any other recommendations for agile apps? I always find myself going back to a traditional kanban board like Trello.
Agile is a bit complex concept to understand as well. Trello is good but then my backlog was increasing to hundreds of items.
Try to see some tutorials on Jira and learn scrum. There is a reason every big company I know of such as google, amazon, facebook etc use agile planning.
I have tried all other tools and nothing compares to JIRA so far. Especially Jira cloud.
What's stopping me from creating project specific boards on Trello though? This could reduce your backlog. But then again, I don't think you should ever have a backlog with hundreds of tickets in the first place haha.
If I was to list out some core tools that are probably most useful, they would be:
Which other parts of JIRA do you use and find useful?
I may be biased here, but I'd much rather lean towards Basecamp's Shape-Up strategy to software development. Especially for startups.
Worth a read: https://basecamp.com/shapeup
I feel like JIRA may work for complex projects where they absolutely need to rely on some of its features. But then again, I feel like every project can be broken down to be less complex.
What's your JIRA workflow like?