Choosing the best project management tool can be a daunting task. There are so many options on the market, and it can be hard to know which one is right for your team. In this article, we will compare five of the most popular project management tools: Motion, Asana, ClickUp, Monday, and Notion.
We have personally used Asana, Motion, and Monday as project management software solutions for our business at some point over the past decade. With that, we wanted to give ClickUp a mention, as we know it is currently pretty popular. After a deep evaluation though, we specifically decided to avoid it (we'll share why later). And finally, since Notion just launched their new "project management tool", we thought it would be a good time to debunk as to why it may not be exactly what it's chalked up to be.
Here, you'll find thoughts that you won't find anywhere else about the most modern tools in project management, so keep reading!
Throughout our article below, we'll use the words overwhelming and overly complex a lot.
Many of the most popular project management tools are designed for large teams and organizations, and they can be overwhelming and complex to set up and use for smaller teams. Here's what to keep in mind:
Most project manager tools that have been on the market to date are separate tools from your calendar that do not take into account you and your teams time to actually get tasks done. This is why we love Motion, because Motion is more than just a calendar, scheduler, or task/project manager—it is a platform for time management.
I mean, at the end of the day, we're all just managing time—sometimes by way of projects and tasks, and at other times meetings and events. Motion understands this fact first-and-foremost, and with a small sprinkle of AI, you're given your perfect day planned out for you, no rescheduling or rearranging necessary.
Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.
After using Asana for 7 years, we decided to finally switch over our team to Motion because we found it did most of what we needed to effectively manage our projects, while introducing a new way for our team to collaborate with a lot less friction.
Before Motion, we had our calendars filled with virtual and in-person meetings. We used Asana to manage work tasks and TickTick for personal tasks. If someone wanted to schedule a meeting, we would use a third-party tool like Calendly to let them book in.
These tools were great but they didn't take into account our limited time or deadlines. We were constantly switching between different apps, trying to figure out what we needed to do next. Can you relate?
Motion solved this problem by letting us put tasks directly onto our calendars. We just set the basic priority/deadline of the task, and Motion automatically schedules it into our day, ensuring that we get it done by the deadline, fitting it around other internal meetings and external appointments.
For example, let's say you have three 1-hour-long meetings along with some tasks scheduled for Monday. Then, something urgent comes up out of nowhere—simply add an ASAP task, and Motion will automatically rearrange your day, pushing back all other (less important) tasks, so that you can focus on what is most important immediately.
We're not joking when we say we used to spend hours at a time re-arranging deadlines for tasks and projects in Asana. We even had a recurring daily Asana task telling us to triage our Asana inbox (that's a real think). With Motion, 90% of this is done for you with AI, and the remaining 10% is more just based on how you're feeling (what you'd like to prioritize throughout the day/week).
So if you're on a team that has say under 20 people that you interact with, most of what you're doing can be easily accomplished right within Motion. What's more is you and everyone on your team has to check their calendar, so it's far more likely that someone will see important work arise in the place they are already checking, versus building up the muscle memory to manually check a standalone project manager on a daily basis.
Start your 7 day free trial of Motion here.
Asana it is a project manager through-and-through, and quite frankly, we love that about it. Unlike other "project managers" like ClickUp and Monday, it doesn't try to be all things to all people. Because of this, the entire Asana team (over 1,700 employees) are literally focused on and working towards giving you a better project management experience.
They aren't getting sidetracked by the lucrative CRM space to grow their TAM (Total Addressable Market)—*cough* Monday *cough*. And what this means for you is that it's a powerful and reliable tool. It has a fantastic API (allowing you to do fun things), along with tons of native integrations. It's also far more stable (less bugs) than that of ClickUp and Monday. They don't release a feature until it's truly production-ready, and this is noticed by their customer-base. In the 7 years we used Asana, I think I've maybe reported 1 or 2 critical bugs? Which is astonishing, especially as compared to the 1–2 bugs that would arise with ClickUp what seemed like every other week when giving it a shot. 😅
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So if you're reading this, it sounds like Asana is fantastic, no? Yeah, I mean we actually used it for 7+ years before finally switching to Motion. Now, that's not because it's bad—Asana is truly great... well, if you actually invest the proper time and resources to set it up well.
Asana has gone the approach of being "less opinionated" in terms of how to use their product. This is what we see companies do as they move away from the startup and SMB space (over to mid-market and enterprise). This is because going this path, allows for more flexibility across the board, so that teams can set it up exactly how they'd like it to work for the specific way they want to work.
What's the harm in that? Well... it quickly becomes a super general project management tool that your team isn't likely to adopt without proper implementation and training:
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Think of Asana like Salesforce or Hubspot—they work great, if you invest the tens of thousands (and in many cases hundreds of thousands) into getting it built out for your specific company needs. If you have the budget to do that, we highly recommend setting it up right, with some help. All we can say is we've seen companies invest the hundreds of hours setting it up themselves—they are almost always a complete mess—we recommend not trying to set it up yourself... 😅
While we did enjoy using it at the time, once we found Motion and started using them for managing tasks, we were able to spend a lot less time "project managing", especially as most of our needs are actually quite simple. We just wanted to get work done and better manage our time and that need was better resolved with Motion's offering.
If deep reporting and layers of management is something that exists at your company though, you're going to be better off using a tool like Asana to manage goals, milestones, and report that information to upper-management.
ClickUp markets itself 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.
While an "all-in-one" tool may sound appealing because it sounds simple, here are the red flags with using any tool that tries to do too many things:
The main complaint we hear with ClickUp is that it's too complicated for its main use, and that it can be easy to get overwhelmed by all the features that are included. And this is the exact problem we have with this category. It does many things well, but it's consistently missing the last 10-15% in every category, which might not seem like a big deal, but I assure you that it'll frustrate the team.
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ClickUp overall is a tool that we have consistently considered on almost a yearly basis (and again with their recent launch of "ClickUp 3.0"). The problem is, is that the promise of what it is, and what it actually is upon using it just doesn't quite meet expectations.
About 20% of our closest friends that run businesses, use ClickUp, so the "why" is a regular discussion that comes up whenever we hang out. The main consensus we've heard is:
"It does a lot but it's also incredibly buggy"
ClickUp does a good job at marketing features and functionality to intrigue you—we've literally signed up to re-evaluate it at least once a year because of exactly that. But when you begin actually using it, you start noticing the drawbacks. They come out in the experience, between slowness, overwhelm of where to find things and how to organize the information at hand.
It's a blank canvas, it claims to be able to do everything for your business, and that's why one of our friends literally runs an agency that just sets up ClickUp for other agencies, and charges mid-5-figures per year to do just that. Being convinced to sign up for ClickUp is easy. Using it well is not.
In general, if you're considering between ClickUp and Asana, we'd say stick with Asana and supplement it with a proper team knowledge base tool like Slite, or give our top pick in the category a shot (Motion) to see if it might work for you. 🤷
Monday is another tool that started as a project manager and is now expanding into the "we're trying to do everything" space. I mean they're even claiming to be a CRM at this point 😱
Monday markets itself as a tool with a wide range of features, and a user friendly interface—they're screaming just use us!
What we've seen is that even those that like the Monday interface, they still prefer using an alternative like Asana. There's even a chrome extension tab management company that you might even know who actually built an internal Chromium extension for their team who's sole purpose is to make Asana's list view look like Monday. 😂
When I asked them why they didn't just use Monday at that point, they replied with:
"Oh, yeah, Monday sucks, we just prefer how it looks!"
Andra actually used Monday for about 6 months with one of her previous clients. Her thoughts:
“The appeal with Monday is most definitely that it's pretty and colorful interface that looks super simple to use. Upon setting it up, you're given endless options of columns you can add to your projects like status by the way of colorful buttons, priority by way of a star rating.
The first time you enter a task, it's like "cool, that was kind fun" but when you actually start using it on a daily basis, you quickly find out that all these buttons are needy for your attention and you start wondering if they are are even needed, since now you're spending more time filling in the Monday task than getting work done.
Adoption of Monday was a struggle with the team. We had to spend a lot of time setting up the right notifications for everyone as team members were left confused as to where they were actually needed or not. We ended up having a dedicated project manager that we decided should just solely update Monday on his own as there was too much confusion otherwise.
This worked better than previously, however it wasn't a scalable solution. Eventually, Monday was phased out of the business.”
In the below reddit post (that has over 1,000 upvotes), a business owner discusses their experience with Monday—even after investing in an agency to help them set it up.
(tl;dr If you are willing to spend the money to hire an agency to setup a tool, go with something more reliable like Asana):
In general, if you're considering Monday as your project manager as compared to alternatives like Asana or ClickUp, we recommend going with Asana or giving our top pick a shot (Motion).
Notion is a knowledge base and note taking tool that tip-toes the line of a flexible no-code platform (for teams of all sizes).
They recently started marketing themselves as a project manager "without the chaos" which is a bit ironic because chaos is probably the word we'd use to describe trying to manage a project in Notion. With Asana, Monday or ClickUp we mentioned that you can likely benefit from working with an agency that specializes in project management setup to help get more use out of it.
With Notion, because of the little guardrails and overwhelming flexibility of the tool, building the project manager tool will become your full-time job.
Think about it, there are dedicated teams at each project management company thinking of the best way millions of people manage projects for productivity. With Notion, you have to be the one coming up with a system for your team. This is incredibly counterproductive and not a good use of your time.
Even worse, if the employee that set up your project management processes in Notion leaves, the whole system will likely fall apart without them managing it.
We hardly wanted to even mention Notion as a part of this comparison as putting it into the project management feels like committing a sin in itself, but due to their recently marketing campaigns now advertising themselves as a project manager we felt we should give it an (un)honorable mention.
Did we not cover one of the tools you were hoping we would? Well, we might have actually... These are just the most common project management tools we've seen come up when working with businesses, so we wanted to put all of our thoughts together in one place.
With that, we have a dedicated Project Management Apps Comparison page where we've covered a few more in addition to the above, like Superlist, Linear, along with others. We're updating it on a weekly bases so be sure to check back! And if there's a modern project management tool that you're hoping we cover, let us know via chat!
Okay, now onto our final thoughts...
The "Project Management" category is one that has been quite underwhelming for a while. If you've been interested in this space for long enough, you probably saw the hype around Monday and ClickUp, only to see them both devolve into an all-in-one tool instead of re-thinking project management.
That's where we have to hand it to Motion. They started out as simply that of a calendar and scheduler tool, and upon perfecting the time management component, moved to task management (individual), perfected that, and then finally moved to the project management space (teams).
They walked before they ran, and focused more on how individuals manage their time, and how that affects the greater team around them.
They've essentially created this over-encompassing category of time management and daily planning, mixed in a bit of AI (for task/event prioritization), and it feels like you have a personal assistant.
So with that, if you're a small–mid (1–100) size team, looking for one of the most modern and innovative project management tools on the market, go for Motion.
On the other hand, if you're more of a large–enterprise (200–1k+) size team, something like Asana might be able to handle some of the more robust use-cases, especially around reporting and customization.
If you're an engineering team looking to better manage your sprints/cycles, while we've definitely seen engineering teams use Motion and Asana to accomplish this, we definitely recommend Linear which has really taken the world by storm in the product/issue tracking category.
And finally, if there's only one thing that you ultimately take from this article, it's that Notion is not a project manager. Please stop trying to make it one 😅
With Motion as our top pick in the project management tooling category, we've also put together some additional comparison write-ups for tools not listed here, and tooling in adjacent categories for you to check out:
Be sure to let us know if there's any other Motion alternatives you'd like to see us compare Motion with!
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We've used all of the best B2B project management software in our own business so that you don't have to!
Watch to learn what we love (and what we don't) about the leaders in the category.
0:00 - 3 Things to Consider
2:04 - Notion as a Project Manager
3:27 - ClickUp as a Project Manager
5:17 - Monday.com as a Project Manager
7:25 - Asana as a Project Manager
8:40 - Motion as a Project Manager
Andra Vomir: so your team has finally decided that it's time to set up a project management software and you're wondering which one's best for you well in this video I'm going to cover notion as a project manager which we don't recommend and then also more popular ones like ClickUp Monday Asana and then our favorite motion choosing the right project management tool for your team can be a very daunting task there's a lot of options out there and in this video I hope to clarify for you which one may be best for your team so here at efficient app we've personally used monday.com Asana and also motion and we've also deeply vetted click up and notion which just recently started marketing themselves as a project management tool so keep watching to find out which one was our favorite as you're watching this video I just want you to keep in mind your team size because a lot of these project management tools were created for larger teams with hundreds of employees so a few caveats that I want to cover before we really deep dive into the different tools available number one setup is no joke prepare to spend up to 50 hours or even more to set up some of these solutions for your team deeply mapping out your processes and your projects and also training your team on how to use them so if you're looking for a solution that you think is going to be set up overnight just want you to take a moment and consider that this is typically a larger project at hand number two adoption can be poor so a study by Reich found out that 35 percent of teams that had 10 or less employees stopped using the project management tool after one year for teams greater than 10 about 28 percent of teams give up on using a project management after the first year the third thing to remember is that using a project management tool is a Daily Commitment not only for yourself but also for your team team members need to update the project management tool every single day they need to update what's been completed or update the status of things so you really need buy-in from the entire team if this is something that you're planning on rolling out now that we've covered that now let's talk about the actual project management tools on the market and which ones we recommend let's start with notion as a project manager so notion recently started marketing themselves as a project manager they're saying on their website that they're a powerful project management tool without the chaos which is kind of ironic and funny because chaos is probably the exact word that I'd use to describe trying to manage any kind of projects in notion the problem with notion is that there's such little guard rails when it comes to the tool there's overwhelming flexibility and initially that can seem a little bit exciting because you're thinking you're going to set up this project manager ideally exactly how you want it for for your business but the problem with little guard rails is that there's no opinionation of how things should work and you end up starting to build a project manager tool instead of really just managing your projects you have to remember that tools like Monday and Asana and click up their whole business is dedicated towards building a solution as a project manager notion is a knowledge base and they're just giving you ideas of different ways that you can use it so maybe if you're a solopreneur or you're working on your own and you really just want a really basic way to manage your tasks you can toy with the idea but even that I wouldn't recommend the truth is we didn't even want to mention notion as a part of this review but because they're starting to Market themselves this way we thought it might be worth mentioning just to hopefully help lessen the confusion out there let's move on to another popular one click up click up markets itself as one app to replace them all they say that they can manage your tasks they can offer you white boards dashboards chat goals and even docs again while this might be appealing because you're thinking you're going to need less tools the problem with an all-in-one tool is that they try to do just way too much the main complaint we hear about click up and the reason why we haven't even tried to implement it in our business is that it's overwhelming to use there's too many features and it's super buggy because instead of focusing on doing one thing well it kind of tries to do everything and then it misses out on the final 10 to 15 percent of really making features as powerful as they could be here's some thoughts we found on Reddit so easy release 8115 says my organization use click up and I hated it I spent more time creating cards and tracking time and reorganizing my space than I did actually working part of the problem is how my boss used click up for micromanaging it's dangerous when it's used by a bad boss I guess that can be true for any project manager someone else said I really dislike click up am I missing something so an organization I work with is moving to click up most of the reviews I've seen are super positive and the rest of my team seems to really like it so far but I really really dislike it I find it buggy confusing complex poorly designed from an information architecture standpoint and more when assessing potential PM tools last year click up was at the bottom of my list along with Asana kinda disagree with you and they are but let's keep going I also think it's odd that people keep talking about efficiency because its efficiency is just so vastly inferior anyway what am I missing I'm really curious because the reviews are so incredibly positive but I find it nearly impossible to use without getting frustrated every few seconds it would be wonderful if I can choke down the Kool-Aid since I'm stuck using click up whether I like it or not another PM tool that we believe is trying to do way too much is monday.com and I have personal experience with Monday because I actually tried to use it for about a year with one of my previous customers Monday has expanded into trying to do everything as well and recently we even saw themselves Market themselves as a CRM which really just made me want to pull my hair out if you're looking for a c CRM just use a proper CRM don't try to use a project manager as a CRM I'll be honest the appeal with monday.com for myself and my team at the time was just how pretty it looked they had all these colorful buttons and we thought how cool would it be to manage everything in here so when you first set it up you're encouraged to have many different statuses you can prioritize things based on a five-star system and that's cool and all but then when you actually start using it every single day you're finding how much work it is to update all these fields that you had set up initially as we went on and used it even more we found that really we didn't need all these fields and we just kept cutting back and there was also a lot of trouble with really making it work for a greater team there was just so many notifications that were firing off everywhere and everybody just kept feeling like confused in terms of when they were actually needed in the tool and when they weren't now granted that problem can happen with other tools and it requires like proper notification setup which we then did and eventually we actually just assigned the tool to be managed by 1 pm and he kind of had you know his run with it we were a team of about 15 people at the time and we totally fit into that Reich study because after I'd say six to eight months it really started phasing out of the business and after a year we stopped using it entirely because it just wasn't scalable for what we were trying to do so overall yes I'll say monday.com looks pretty I really like their marketing but in terms of being an effective tool I don't think it's great I think it's also kind of buggy and if you're looking for a more reliable project manager I think you're going to really benefit from checking out something like Asana that's been around a lot longer so now that you've heard me talk about the tools that we don't recommend let's talk about the tools that we actually like what we like about Asana is that it's just a PM tool through and through they've always been a PM tool and that's all that they're still trying to be till this day last we checked they have about 1700 employees that are working on one thing and that's giving you a better project management experience and solution this means that their tool is reliable it's stable it's not as buggy as the other tools and it has a powerful API with lots of cool types of Integrations and features that come along with it so we actually used Asana here at efficient app for seven years it was RPM tool and that's before we switched to motion which I'll talk about in a second the thing with Asana is we actually do still recommend it if you have say over 200 employees if you have a large team if you are familiar with the Enterprise space and you're familiar with tools like HubSpot or Salesforce that require more of a consultant to set it up that is your Asana version of a PM tool it is great when set up properly and if you have proper team training and you can get that adoption we really think it is the best tool on the market for larger teams so last but not least what's the tool that we currently use about a year ago we switched off of Asana and we started using motion and the reason for that is because motion is the ultimate time platform management tool what I mean by that is prior to motion we had our tasks in Asana that were work related and then we had our personal tasks that we stored in something called tick tick which is another tool and then we had a calendly equivalent called chili Piper that we used to schedule calls and we were using all of these different tools to try to really manage where we needed to be and what we needed to do so with motion initially they were a calendar tool that allowed people to schedule time on your calendar and they did that in a really clever way by allowing you to kind of Chunk your meanings together and free up more time so you can actually get Focus work done then they expanded into being a task management and now a full project management tool what's really cool about it is that we can put all of our our tasks for our different customers and projects within motion and then it puts those specific tasks on our calendar so as you can imagine we have meetings and places that we need to be personal appointments as well on our calendar and around that we have our tasks that we need to do that are work related and also personal related at the end of the day we are just one person we all have the same amount of hours in a day so it kind of seems ridiculous in hindsight now to use all these different tools to manage your time when in reality the only question you should be asking is what do I need to do next and that's what motion helps answer for us really easily motion also uses AI to rearrange our tasks for us so in Asana we would spend a sick amount of time rearranging our deadlines and pushing things backwards when we didn't actually complete a task in a specific deadline which is super common across you know every job in every industry but with motion if you have something that you need to complete for one day and you don't get it done then motion would automatically reschedule that task for you for the next day or your next available time slot again this makes it so much easier because we open up motion and that question of what do I need to do next is mainly answered for us we also have a really cool integration with motion and our slack where say Alex who is my business partner sends me a message I can just hit save on that message and it automatically puts it as a task on my calendar within motion we have a whole video showing that integration off so check it out in the description so if you're a small to mid-sized team so say one to a hundred people you can probably get away with using motion and that setup that I mentioned at the beginning that's 50 plus hours the smaller your team the quicker it's going to be with a tool like motion because like I said you're really just managing your time and then you have tasks and then you can break them up into bigger projects if you need to if you are a solopreneur I would also recommend motion instead of notion that I spoke about in the beginning and that's because it's just really set up for you it's opinionated and all you have to do is go through the prompts and before you know it you really have all your tasks on your calendar in one place you don't have to figure out how to configure it so if you're looking for Simplicity a Sprinkle of AI motion is the way to go if you are a larger team 200 people plus Asana is the way to go and if you're considering click up monday.com or notion we wouldn't recommend it if there's other questions that you have that we haven't covered in this video make sure to leave them down in the comments below we're available to answer anything that can help your decision making process a little bit easier don't normally say this but if you did find this video helpful would definitely appreciate a thumbs up as it lets more people access this information also I'll ask you to subscribe because we have an exciting mini-series coming out shortly that we'd love to share with you.
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