Best Project Management Software 2025? Motion vs Asana vs ClickUp vs Monday vs Notion

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.