7 Best Project Management Plugins for WordPress
Project management is a set of procedures for ensuring smooth running and timely completion of projects. It is, therefore, easy to see that there is a market for plugins and tools which facilitate organization and help keep up discipline and standards. With a well-chosen plugin, your team leaders and members, as well as other contributors will have an easy time organizing their work, while your clients will have an easier time overviewing projects. There are plenty of WordPress project management plugins out there, and we’re here to help you choose the right one for you.
What you want to be on the lookout for are three things: whether the plugin supports role-based user access, and thus allows your clients to keep tabs on your team without being intrusive and your team to have a full overview of the project; whether the plugin has the tools you need, whether the plugin can accommodate the type of projects you are managing or your preferred style of project management; and, of course, whether the plugin fits your budget. Here are the tools we will be discussing:
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A free project management plugin, WP Project Manager is a comprehensive solution for project and task management. You can use it to manage an unlimited number of projects at any time. Its principal features include to-do lists, of which you can have an unlimited number, complete with individual user assignment, tasks, due date and a progress bar for easy tracking. The messaging feature allows your project workers to coordinate their efforts and discuss the projects, while the plugin also supports file sharing and attachment to both messages and comments.
The pro version is replete with even more useful features such as subtasks, folder management, time trackers, Gantt charts, kanban boards, recurring tasks, and more, depending on the plan you choose.
WordPress Project Management by UpStream is a free plugin which offers a complete answer to your project management needs. It has a front end overview for your clients to stay in the loop on the developing state of the projects they have access to, while each member of the project team can see the tasks which they are assigned. You can assign custom fields to your tasks, and also custom statuses, so you are not limited to “pending”, “complete”, and “late” – you could introduce a percentage-based milestone system, for instance. The plugin also supports file and document upload and in-project discussion, keeping the conversation and all the relevant documentation within the project itself.
The plugin’s premium extensions contain such features as custom fields for project entries, Gantt charts, e-mail notifications, a calendar layout, and more.
Panorama is a free plugin which helps you organize your projects visually for the benefit of your team members and clients alike. You can use Panorama to show your team and clients visual indications of the state of each project individually, without access overlap. Instead of a list of completed tasks which can be meaningless to a client, you can send them a progress bar marked all the way with custom important milestones for an easy overview of the project’s current state. You can also use this plugin to calculate the time to project completion based on the number of tasks left to be completed, with calendars, task lists and tracking functionalities for each individual project.
If you subscribe to the kanban philosophy of project management, Kanban Boards for WordPress may be just up your alley. This simple and clean plugin allows you to manage user access, assign tasks to your team members and follow their work until completion, and track man-hours for each task and project. The plugin stores all your data separately from your WordPress data, for extra security.
With the plugin’s pro version, though, you get additional features such as colour-coding and comments for tasks, e-mail updates, file attachment to tasks, and multiple kanban boards.
With the SP Project & Document Manager’s free version, you get a neat document management system. Your users have role-based access to personal and shared document folders, with unlimited nested folders for a better organization. Each user also needs a password-protected account to access even their own files, while admins retain full control over access, making it easy for your administrators to manage both your team’s work and client reporting. You can also use it to share embedded media, such as YouTube videos. And that’s about it.
But with the premium version and addons, you unlock a truly powerful project management solution. The developers offer a unique pricing plan, too: customize your project and document management plugin using their product builder, and get a tailor-made version of the plugin containing exactly what you need.
Projectopia is a premium WordPress project management plugin which provides you with a comprehensive set of team management and client communication tools: a user-friendly client dashboard, a budgeting tool, a system of tasks with timers, role-based access to tasks and projects for your project contributors, and a system for support tickets. With addons, you can also extend Projectopia’s functionalities to WooCommerce and 2Checkout integration, a bug tracker, reporting and analytics, and more. And the developers are also open to custom new features upon request.
If this description tickles your fancy, you can check out the developers’ demo and see the plugin in action.
Monday.com is a premium project management service – not a plugin – but can be useful to you nonetheless. It integrates with WooCommerce, which allows you to use it to manage your online store’s orders, inventory, and the like. You can use it to create detailed plans for your sales, marketing and other teams and follow their execution. Depending on the modules you use, you can adapt it to work for software development, media production, work-from-home organization and other purposes. You can create an unlimited number of tasks, projects, users and teams, share files, track time spent on tasks and overview each project as a kanban board or through a calendar view.
In Conclusion
This concludes our overview of project management plugins for WordPress. But how to tell which one is the right one for you? The choice is, as always, yours, but some things you know even without perusing each plugin’s feature list or testing the demo version – which we cannot recommend highly enough in any case. If you are looking for a free plugin, you will likely be well served by WP Project Manager or WordPress Project Management by UpStream. If you like working from a kanban board, try Kanban or Monday.com. If you find it easier to keep track of everything using a Gantt chart, find a plugin which includes it, such as WP Project Manager. Finally, if you want an easier way of managing your webstore and already use WooCommerce, a service such as Monday.com or a plugin such as Projectopia, which integrates well with it, may be the choice for you. Whatever your choice, though, we are sure it can be found on this list.
