9 Best Project Management Software in 2026

Motion is a calendar-first, AI-powered project management system that brings your tasks, meetings, documentation, and team workload into one tool.

Previous to using Motion, we used Asana for seven years. It kept us organized enough, but I was spending at least an hour or two every week just "cleaning up" the tool so it wouldn't fall apart. Deadlines would shift, priorities would change, and suddenly half the board was out of date. That's why we switched to Motion five years ago and haven't looked back.

The core thing Motion does differently is it actually schedules your tasks onto your calendar automatically, based on deadlines, priorities, and availability.

And when plans change, which they always do, it updates everything for you. What really got me early on was the deadline visibility. If our team has 5 hours of meetings in a day and 8 hours of work scheduled, Motion flags that we're at risk before it becomes a problem.

We use it to manage our entire YouTube production process, from scripting and filming to editing, reviewing, and distributing.

Recently, Motion has become more of an all-in-one tool. On top of being a calendar and project management tool, you can also store all of your notes and documentation in the app via their AI Docs and meeting recorder. This is especially helpful as you can tie meeting notes to projects, and when asking the Motion AI Assistant it has full context on projects, discussions, and notes.

And they didn't just tack on these features either... their meeting recorder is one of the best we've used (for instance, it creates tasks automatically at the end of each call, allowing you to assign it to team members directly).

So if you want a project management tool that will help your team just focus on getting work done (instead of babysitting your project management tool), give it a shot.

• Pro AI: $19/seat/mo (billed annually). Best for professionals and small teams who want AI-powered project management, scheduling, and task planning.
• Business AI: $29/seat/mo (billed annually). Best for teams that need advanced reporting, capacity planning, time tracking, permissions, and centralized billing.
• AI Credits: Included with each plan. Pro AI includes 7,500 credits/seat/month and Business AI includes 15,000 credits/seat/month.

Asana is tried and true. We used it for seven years before switching to Motion, and the reason it stuck around that long wasn't because it's just really well built. Things don't break, the system holds up as your team grows, and you can trust it to do what it's supposed to do day in and day out.

They've also done a better job layering in AI without it feeling like an afterthought than ClickUp or monday.com When we looked at monday.com's AI features, they felt bolted on and not that useful. Asana's feel like they actually belong in the product more so.

That said, Asana is going through a hard time right now despite executing on AI better than most legacy tools that have been around for a long time. And honestly, part of why we left after seven years captures the core limitation well: Asana is great at organizing work, but Motion was better at helping us actually focus on doing it.

If your team spends more time maintaining the system than benefiting from it, that's a sign it might not be the right fit. It really needs someone who knows what they're doing to set it up properly, and for smaller teams or anyone who wants AI to handle more of the day-to-day heavy lifting, that overhead just isn't worth it.

ClickUp is best categorized as an "all-in-one tool", even though it started off as more of a project manager, and is quite task management focused at the core. ClickUp now offers tasks, docs, whiteboards, time tracking and even chat. They are truly trying to do it all.

ClickUp appeals to folks who want one tool to manage all work-related projects and processes. These folks don't typically need nor want the best project management tool, or best docs, or best of anything, they just appreciate that one tool (ClickUp) bundles all the apps together under one subscription.

The main complaint we've heard about ClickUp is that there is too much configuration and customization. We know this is draw for some, but for most folks, the amount of stuff going on within ClickUp is overwhelming. For instance, many of their features are irrelevant if you're just wanting to use ClickUp for project or task management, making the simple things difficult to find and accomplish.

With that, users of ClickUp report feeling like there is too much clutter that gets in the way, making it difficult to find where things are or you are shown buttons that you have no idea what they're used for. There are SO many options to sift through that you can't find what you're looking for unless you've been using the platform extensively and know it inside and out.

With too much "noise", it's easy for team members to miss being notified in a thread, spending too much time searching for things or wondering about the progress of projects. This steep learning curve for teams makes it difficult to truly adopt and buy-into.

Another complaint we've heard countless of times is that ClickUp is slow to load. While this might not seem like a big deal at first, when you're waiting 3-5 extra seconds for a tool to load, it can certainly get frustrating and slow you down.

• Free Tier: ClickUp has a free forever tier for personal use or hobbyists. It wouldn't work as a free project management tool due to the feature limitations.
• Unlimited: $7/mo per seat on the annual tier. This is an introductory tier for small teams. While ClickUp does offer quite a few features on this tier, like Asana and Monday, ClickUp gate keeps their advanced automations behind the next tier up.
• [BEST 🥇] Business: $12/mo per seat on the annual tier. Comparing Asana and Monday, ClickUp is the least expensive of the bunch for their business tier. Their business tier unlocks all of the features you'd expect, including advanced automations, time tracking and workload management.

Trello is probably a project management tool that most people have heard of. It was one of the first project managers to hit mainstream popularity because it was the first project manager to allow for kanban board view from a web app, bringing with it a super user friendly interface.

This was an incredible feat back in 2011 and what resulted in its rise to popularity, especially in the B2C space (general consumers, not majorly breaking into the B2B space). For example, you'd use Trello to manage your personal tasks, maybe more as a prosumer, and less as a business owner.

We used Trello here at Efficient App for years, before ultimately switching to Asana, when they too added kanban functionality, as we felt that Trello sort of got a bit stuck, while their competitors were evolving and working to further innovate in the project management space.

The main differentiation that Trello had was kanban board functionality, and that's about where it started and ends. Thing is, kanban view is now a staple of any modern project manager on the market in this day and age.

Feature set wise, since Atlassian now owns Trello, they've prioritized integrations within the Atlassian suite.

Shortcut used to be called Clubhouse and they were spiraling as a company, forced to rebrand because the perception around them wasn't great.

The marketing team changed what people thought of them as, but from a tech stack perspective, they are an incredibly old company, over a decade old, built atop a super legacy tech stack.

So if you're looking for a modern project management tool, we'd say avoid this decade-old software product with loads of tech-debt.