Project ManagementProgram & Project Management

7 Top-Rated Agile Project Management Software

Barkha Bali profile picture
By Barkha Bali

Published | Updated on
13 min read

Agile project management enables an iterative, incremental approach to product or software development, unlike traditional sequential or linear project management processes. It allows teams to make changes throughout the project lifecycle. To access this flexibility, you need to invest in a dedicated Agile project management tool.

But how do you know which tool is right for your unique project needs? To help you choose, we've highlighted the top seven Agile project management software, in alphabetical order, based on verified software reviews. Read more.

All the products in this article are dedicated project management solutions that offer features such as project tracking, task assignment, and collaboration to manage sprints, track stakeholder feedback, and enhance team communication for Agile projects.

1. Asana 

Asana is an Agile project management solution that lets you break down complex projects into simpler tasks and subtasks for easier execution. It allows you to plan Agile sprint milestones, set launch dates, and create a backlog of tasks (i.e., a prioritized list of work items). You can choose different project views—list, board, calendar, or timeline—and create custom project rules to automate manual workflows for improved team productivity.

Product features of interest:

  • Kanban and Gantt chart: Visualize and manage tasks with Kanban boards, and track project timelines, dependencies, and critical paths with Gantt charts. These charts simplify project planning, execution, and collaboration.

  • Project reporting: Generate reports to get insights into a project's progress and performance. These reports include metrics such as task completion status, project milestones achieved, resource allocation, and projected vs. actual timelines.

  • Shareable dashboards: Use customizable charts such as bar, donut, and burnup charts to create shareable dashboards that showcase project data, including task and sprint progress and backlog status. You can use these dashboards to check your team's progress, identify bottlenecks, and view real-time project insights.

Customer support options: Live chat, help center, and FAQs

Who should consider Asana?

Asana's ability to handle cross-functional projects makes it a viable option for teams with members from different departments working together on a common goal. Project teams can use Asana's Rules feature to automate manual tasks such as assigning work, adjusting due dates, and notifying stakeholders. By automating workflows across teams, Asana enables members to focus on high-value tasks and streamlines project execution.

Trial/Free Version

  • Free Trial
  • Free Version

Starting price

$10.99 per user, per month (billed annually)

Device compatibility

* Analysis accurate as of July 2023

2. ClickUp

ClickUp offers an Agile project management template with multiple views to visualize tasks, custom statuses to see progress at a glance, and built-in tools to track Agile sprints. Its dynamic project timeline helps organize deadlines, monitor progress, and identify bottlenecks. With color coding options for tasks, you can see who's responsible for what and their work status. You can also use the list and board views to organize tasks, to-do lists, and user stories.

Product features of interest:

  • Time tracking: Track the time your team members spend on various tasks and projects. This feature lets your team log work hours, providing insights into individual and team productivity. 

  • Mind maps: Use mind maps to brainstorm ideas, plan projects, and visualize tasks. This feature allows you to create hierarchical diagrams, representing the relationships between different tasks, assignments, or objectives.

  • Goal tracking: Create specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) project goals, and monitor their progress over time. This feature aligns individual and team objectives with the broader project goal. 

Customer support options: Live chat, help center, and FAQs

Who should consider ClickUp?

Project managers looking for an Agile project management tool with multiple views for project planning and tracking can consider ClickUp. With more than ten views, including list, board, box, calendar, Gantt, Kanban, and roadmap, ClickUp caters to diverse project needs. Additionally, its workload view helps monitor team workload, identify bottlenecks, and check who is under or over-capacity. Also, its mind map view offers a visual mind map that breaks down the different stages of an Agile project into smaller, actionable items.

Trial/Free Version

  • Free Trial
  • Free Version

Starting price

$7 per member, per month (billed annually)

Device compatibility

* Analysis accurate as of July 2023

/ Pro tip

Create a list of "must-have" versus "good-to-have" features based on the unique needs of your project team. For instance, if you have a remote or hybrid team, collaboration capabilities such as a message board, document sharing and co-authoring, live chat, and real-time updates are nonnegotiable. Consider your project's complexity, collaboration frequency, and other unique industry or client requirements to pick the right tool.

3. Hive

As an Agile project management solution, Hive streamlines project activity through sprint planning and Agile scoring. It lets you break down large tasks into smaller tasks, prioritize critical tasks, create action lists, assign a list to a specific member, and track team availability to manage deadlines. It also enables you to customize the project phases and add action items to each phase.

Product features of interest:

  • Flexible project hierarchies: Create separate projects for individual initiatives or group related child projects under a larger parent project. This hierarchical structuring helps organize the tasks and subtasks within each project so everyone is aware of their actions, priorities, and deadlines.

  • HiveMind: Use HiveMind, an AI-powered project planner, that uses collective knowledge from successful projects and project management best practices to help plan future projects. 

  • Feedback management: Upload files and media directly to your tasks or projects, and allow your team to mark up and annotate the files. They can highlight specific areas, add comments, suggest changes, or provide overall feedback.

Customer support options: Live chat, FAQs, videos, and email

Who should consider Hive?

Hive is worth considering for project managers who want to save time on project planning. Its AI-powered project planner, HiveMind, creates an automated project plan by analyzing the historical project data stored in Hive's database. It identifies successful projects and captures best practices to generate an optimized project cycle, including details on action cards, tasks, dependencies, required resources, and timeline. This not only saves time but also improves productivity for project teams.

Trial/Free Version

  • Free Trial
  • Free Version

Starting price

$12 per user, per month (billed annually)

Device compatibility

* Analysis accurate as of July 2023

4. Jira

Jira is a project and issue tracking tool that helps identify, record, and track issues throughout the project lifecycle. It lets you create project tasks and subtasks, set due dates, and track their completion status. You can add relevant task details, including their description, assignee name, and priority level. You can also track campaign deadlines and sync your work calendar with Jira to have all your appointments in one place.

Product features of interest:

  • Kanban board: Leverage Kanban boards to visualize project tasks and timelines. These boards track the cycle time (i.e., time taken to complete a task) and lead time (i.e., time taken from task creation to completion) to help identify bottlenecks and optimize project workflows.

  • Scrum framework: Use a built-in Scrum framework template to ensure iterative, incremental development. This template includes backlog management, sprint planning, burndown charts, and a scrum board to enable project teams to adapt to the changing requirements of Agile projects.

  • Reports: Generate reports to analyze project progress, issues, and timelines. Reports are classified into four categories—Agile, issue analysis, forecast, and others—and the report formats include sprint charts, burndown charts, cumulative flow diagrams, and pie charts. 

Customer support options: Community forum, FAQS, and help center

Who should consider Jira?

Jira is worth considering for project teams that want an Agile tool with issue tracking capabilities. Its issue tracking functionality offers a centralized platform to record, prioritize, and track issues/bugs throughout the project lifecycle. Users can assign issues to specific team members as well as categorize issues into different groups by different criteria, such as by user or by issue type. This feature offers a single view of all issues, ensuring no critical aspect goes unnoticed.

Most affordable

Trial/Free Version

  • Free Trial
  • Free Version

Starting price

$5 per user, per month (billed monthly)

Device compatibility

* Analysis accurate as of July 2023

/ Pro tip

Evaluate project visualization options such as Kanban boards, Scrum boards, Gantt charts, and custom dashboards to match your team's workflow and project requirements. With the right visualization style, your project teams can access a clear and intuitive representation of project data, progress, and tasks. Besides better collaboration, project visualization also enhances decision-making throughout the project lifecycle.

5. Miro

As a whiteboard tool first, Miro differs from traditional purpose-built project management tools. However, it offers the most critical components of an Agile project management solution, including project visualization, task tracking, and dependency mapping. It allows you to share project dashboards with team members and invite them to collaborate on project-related issues. It offers built-in project planning templates to define project goals, outline task schedules, update feedback, and measure project success. It also provides a real-time view of each project task's status, priority, and dependencies.

Product features of interest:

  • Mind mapping: Use AI-generated mind maps to speed up manual tasks such as generating user stories and creating project calendars. This feature offers a canvas to brainstorm project ideas and analyze complex problems.

  • User story mapping: Capture user stories that represent the needs of customers or end-users. You can group related user stories and arrange them sequentially, creating a visual representation of your project's flow and phases. 

  • Shareable prototypes: Use sketches, wireframes, images, and videos to create project design prototypes and invite stakeholders to collaborate on and co-edit the prototypes to get real-time feedback.

Customer support options: Blog, help center, and community

Who should consider Miro? 

Miro's user story mapping feature makes it a suitable option for project managers looking to prioritize customer impact and create customer-centric project development processes. This feature lets project teams collaboratively visualize and organize user stories on a timeline to gain a clear understanding of customer needs and expectations. This process also helps identify crucial features, align project development efforts with customer requirements, and ensure the end product matches customer expectations.

Trial/Free Version

  • Free Trial
  • Free Version

Starting price

$8 per member, per month (billed annually)

Device compatibility

* Analysis accurate as of July 2023

6. monday.com

This Agile project management tool allows you to visualize project tasks, milestones, and dependencies within a defined timeline. It lets you generate real-time reports on project progress, team bandwidth, product backlog, and continuous improvement efforts to help make informed decisions. Additionally, the software streamlines requirements mapping by allowing you to outline the project timeline, budget, and required resources in a unified dashboard.

Product features of interest:

  • Sprint planning: Set up Kanban boards to create and prioritize user stories, assign tasks to team members, estimate effort, and track progress during each sprint. This feature helps project teams focus on short-term goals and adapt quickly to changing needs.

  • Portfolio management: Access a detailed view of all projects and their status for streamlined resource allocation, priority monitoring, and project health management. This feature helps prioritize projects based on strategic goals and business impact, ensuring critical projects receive appropriate attention and resources.

  • Scrum boards: Manage complex projects by breaking them into manageable tasks and organizing the tasks within a sprint framework. Scrum boards visually represent the progress of each task, allowing your team to collaborate effectively and adapt to changing requirements.

Customer support options: Help center, live chat, call, and email

Who should consider monday.com? 

Project managers looking for an Agile tool with a dedicated module or template for requirements mapping can consider monday.com. Its requirements traceability template outlines essential project elements such as the timeline, budget, requested resources, and key features. This template enables Agile teams to capture and organize project needs and deliverables in one place, simplifying the requirements mapping process.

Trial/Free Version

  • Free Trial
  • Free Version

Starting price

$8 per seat, per month (billed annually)

Device compatibility

* Analysis accurate as of July 2023

7. Smartsheet

Smartsheet is a project management tool that automates repetitive workflows such as processing approvals, monitoring status, sending updates, and setting reminders. It allows you to break down large projects into smaller tasks and subtasks, set task relationships, define critical paths, and track milestones. It also integrates with common business tools such as Slack, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365 to bring all project information onto a single platform.

Product features of interest:

  • Resource planning: Assign and track the availability and utilization of various resources, such as staff, equipment, and materials. This feature helps optimize resource allocation and prevent overallocation or underutilization.

  • Budget management: Create and monitor project budgets by categorizing them into three types: time, currency, and expense-related. You can also create a new category to track specific project expenses. 

  • Workflow automation: Set up recurring or condition-based workflows that run automatically at regular intervals. This process saves the time spent on repetitive tasks such as tracking project status and setting deadlines.

Customer support options: Live chat, call, email, FAQs, and knowledge base

Who should consider Smartsheet? 

Agile project teams that want resource planning and management as the core software features could consider Smartsheet. The tool includes heatmaps with color-coding to indicate resource utilization across projects and tasks. The darker or more intense the color, the more resources are allocated, and vice versa. These heatmaps help determine team capacity utilization and allow project managers to make real-time adjustments to balance workloads. The software also offers project-specific and cross-project resource views to monitor and allocate resources across tasks and projects.

Trial/Free Version

  • Free Trial
  • Free Version

Starting price

$7 per user, per month (billed annually)

Device compatibility

* Analysis accurate as of July 2023

/ Pro tip

Prioritize tools that offer customizable dashboards, visualizations, and reports that include data on key metrics such as project completion time, historical data trends, and project team capacity. Data insights enable informed decision-making, bottleneck identification, and workflow optimization, fostering continuous improvement for your projects.

How much does Agile project management software cost?

Agile project management software can cost as low as $5 per user, per month, or more than $149 per month, depending on various factors—features, number of users, number of projects, process requirements, business size/type, integrations, and offered storage. Most project management tools typically offer the following pricing plans:

  • Free trials: No-cost trial plans range from a week to a month, offering access to all or limited software features. These are ideal for businesses that want to try a tool before investing.

  • Free versions: Free plans offer limited access to basic software features. These are ideal for small-business owners on a budget.

  • Entry-level plans: Start at $5 per month and offer limited features. These are suitable for project managers who need basic features such as project tracking and task management.

  • Mid-tier plans: Range from $10 to $30 per month and offer advanced features such as multiple visualization options, unlimited dashboards, and advanced resource management. These are suitable for project teams that have outgrown entry-level project management tools but don't require the full range of functionality offered by enterprise-level tools.

  • High-end plans: Advanced plans can cost more than $149 per month and offer a range of advanced features, including custom training sessions, priority support, and advanced reporting. These plans are suitable for businesses with cross-functional project management teams.

Hidden costs associated with Agile project management software

Besides the software license price, additional costs associated with Agile project management software include data migration, training, hardware and IT maintenance, and software upgrades. Small businesses should budget for these expenses when considering a new Agile tool.

Frequently asked questions when selecting Agile project management software

Does the software align with my Agile processes and workflows?

Choose a tool that aligns with your team's specific Agile methodology—whether it's Scrum, Kanban, or any other framework. This ensures the tool's workflows and features can support your team’s preferred way of working, helping maintain productivity and collaboration and, eventually, ensuring successful project delivery.

How does the software support stakeholder collaboration and communication?

To improve project outcomes, ensure your shortlisted software provides a centralized platform for Agile team collaboration. Look for features such as real-time messaging, notifications, comments, and task assignments to streamline communication with internal as well as external stakeholders.

What project automation tools are available?

When evaluating Agile project management tools, consider automation for workflows such as tracking task dependencies, setting recurring tasks, sending project updates, and tracking task hours. With automation, your team can save time and focus more on productive work, ensuring smoother project execution and better resource utilization.


Methodology

To be considered for this list, products had to:

  • Feature in Capterra Shortlist 2023 for Agile project management software. We selected the top seven products with the highest ratings to include in this article.

  • Include Agile methodologies, collaboration tools, and task management as the core features.

  • Meet our Agile project management software market definition: “Agile project management tools allow developers and project managers to develop products and services using Agile methodologies efficiently.”

The "most affordable" tool is identified based on the lowest pricing a vendor offers on their website regarding the cost to upgrade, as of July 25, 2023.

Read more about our editorial independence.

Products evaluated for the pricing calculation were taken from Capterra's Agile project management software directory. The pricing ranges exclude freemium versions of the products. The features highlighted were identified based on their relevance and the percentage of products in the Capterra directory that offer them. Only products with publicly available pricing information (as of July 26, 2023) were considered for pricing calculation.


Looking for Project Management software? Check out Capterra's list of the best Project Management software solutions.

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About the Author

Barkha Bali profile picture

Barkha Bali is a writer at Capterra, providing expert insights to help small businesses identify the right software for their needs by analyzing user reviews data for the highest rated products in relevant software categories. She has worked in finance, lifestyle, education, and medical. With expertise in marketing and content strategy, Barkha’s work has been featured in Medium and educational websites. When not working, she can be found re-watching “The Office” or “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.”

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