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2019 Project Management Buyer’s Guide: Spotlight on 11 Leading Products

September 25th, 2019 8 min read

The promise of project management software – having your whole team collaborating together within one centralized platform that houses all your project materials – sounds like a dream come true. 

Unfortunately, reality doesn’t always live up to this dream. Personally, I’m currently using three different project and task management tools, each serving a slightly different purpose. And according to our research, I’m not alone: 58% of project management users use more than one tool

This simple insight can make finding the right project management software for your team unexpectedly difficult. There are also hundreds of tools to choose from and a wide range of project management methodologies to consider. Though project management software, also called ‘work management’ or ‘collaboration and work management software’, has evolved to meet the needs of today’s workforce, these factors can make searching for a new software solution even more time consuming.

One key trend is that many popular products are now web-based. A few legacy products, like Microsoft Project and JIRA, still offer on-premise deployment options. Web-based project management is definitely a positive development, as it makes it easier to connect remote workers with the rest of their team. Yet this also makes the market more homogeneous. Which in turn, makes differentiating between products more difficult. 

To help ease this burden, we’ve created a free Buyer’s Guide to Project Management Software. It serves as a centralized source of product-specific information for comparisons, feature ratings, and feedback directly from end-users. 

What’s in the Guide? 

The guide highlights 11 of the most-reviewed Project Management solutions on TrustRadius. It provides buyers with an at-a-glance view of each product, including: 

  • user demographics (e.g. company size, industry)
  • most common pros and cons 
  • survey data from over 200 project management software users 
  • direct feedback from product reviews
  • best-fit-for scenarios based on reviewer feedback

Curious to see which products made it into the guide? Here’s the list of the Project Management industry’s top solutions featured in the guide: 

The buyer’s guide also includes a set of product comparison charts. These include product ratings, number of reviews, reviewer demographics, and feature ratings. 

Since there are a wide range of project management methodologies and activities, the guide also includes a breakdown of the most common use cases by tool- to help you find the software that will fit your current needs best. 

Download the guide to find more metrics to compare across products and see what other users think of the tools you’re considering!

Interested in what fellow software users really think of their project management solution? We packed the guide full of insights directly from software buyers and users. Included is a discussion of the most important buying considerations, based on survey responses from project management tool users.

Key Buying Considerations When Evaluating Project Management Software  

Looking for a new project management tool but don’t quite know where to start? Especially with so many options available, it can be hard to figure out where and how to start weeding products out.

To help you narrow down the list of products you’re looking at, we asked our community of software users about their top buying considerations. These 5 attributes were mentioned by 94% of survey takers

  1. Ease of use 
  2. Integration with third-party software
  3. Project reporting 
  4. Flexible configuration 
  5. High-level view of project status 

Unsurprisingly, over 50% of respondents said that ease-of-use was the number one thing that mattered. Along with usability, the rest of these attributes map to challenges software users struggle with. These include ease of adoption, learning curves, surfacing project progress updates to internal and external stakeholders, and being able to configure projects in different ways. 

Taking full advantage of free trials is one great way to see just how user-friendly a product truly is. Setting up realistic projects during the free trial can give you a better understanding of reporting capabilities and the different types of project views available as well. Reading product reviews and talking directly with the vendor about specific features is another good way to help narrow down your shortlist of products. 

Where to find more product research resources

logo for the buyer's guide to project management software, which shares how to buy project management software | trustradius.com

Looking for more resources to use in your product research? Our Buyer’s Guide to Project Management Software is a great place to find more information about specific products, compare products head-to-head, and learn about key buying criteria. 

However, there are a lot of other resources available as well. (And our research shows the average buyer consults 5.2 different sources of information during their software purchase process!)

Reading through product reviews helps provide a more detailed view of the end-user experience with a specific product. Reviews can also help you find advice from fellow project management tool users who work in the same industry, or similar company size. You can find more products and product reviews  at TrustRadius.com

Talking with vendors about their products and services can be another great source of information. And if you consult reviews first, you’ll be ready to read between the lines and ask the hard questions up front. 

Got a tip for your peers based on your own experience with project management software, or want to write a review of solution you helped purchase? We’d love to hear from you.

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