Project workload feeling like a mess? These modern workload planning tools can help you and your team stay on track with everything you need to deliver.
By strategically planning and distributing project tasks to the right people based on their skill set, availability, and utilization, workload planning helps unlock project success, improved deliverables’ quality, and optimal resource utilization
But it’s nearly impossible to effectively plan and manage projects without a workload planning tool.
This is where this guide comes in — bringing you five of the best workload management tools backed by their user rating, key features, strengths, and shortcomings.
Let's jump in.
Between managing resource workload to helping you take multiple projects to the finish line within their defined scope, workload planning tools help in many crucial ways:
Workload management tools help you set project goals, map out the scope, and break projects down into phases and tasks — marked by milestones. This way, you can plan and complete complex projects while keeping checks on potential risks.
The right workload planning tool also helps manage team workload, keeping workplace burnout at bay. It also lets you keep tabs on resource availability, skillsets, and experience so you can assign tasks and projects that match their expertise.
Better project planning, improved resource allocation, and balanced employee workload contribute to efficient workload management and increased productivity. These factors also reduce project risks, which, in turn, lead to cost savings.
When reviewing tools, begin by evaluating the features that the different options offer, as well as elements that will enhance user experience -like a user-friendly UI and a responsive customer support team:
What’s more, by making notes on these essential workload management features, you can improve tool adoption, team productivity, and streamline your management processes.
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Rated 4.5 on G2, Runn is a powerful workload planning tool for complex software projects.
It gives you features to plan, organize, and allocate project work to teams and individuals based on their skill set, experience, seniority, and availability (thanks to its skill inventory and capacity management features).
Runn offers real-time visibility into your current workload (workload view) as well. You can also use it to review how future workload impacts your team’s work capacity.
To boot, with utilization, capacity, and project reports, it helps optimize employee utilization, track progress including how on-budget and on-time track projects are, and improve overall project performance.
Pricing: Runn offers a free forever plan with two premium plans. Of the premium plans, the Pro plan costs $8 per person per month and the Enterprise is custom-priced based on your requirements.
Rated 4.3 on G2, Jira is a popular agile project management tool for product teams. It helps plan, organize, and track projects of different sizes — across teams and within departments. By giving you visibility into project progress and analyzing your project data in real time, Jira gives you insights for improving team performance. It also offers a variety of views including lists, Kanban and Scrum boards, and backlogs.
Pricing: Jira’s base plan starts at $7.16 per user per month (when paid monthly). For teams, Jira offers user-tier pricing, paid annually. When you opt for it, you get user-tier pricing — a specific price for a certain number of seats.
Rated 4.1, Basecamp is a workload planning tool for small teams, freelancers, and small business owners. It gives you a board view, to-do lists, project timelines, and a built-in chat for team collaboration. There’s also an automated check-in feature allowing you to send questions to team members by a regular, pre-defined schedule.
Pricing: Basecamp offers two plans — one for small teams and another for growing teams with unlimited users, plenty of storage space, and the timesheet add-on.
Rated 4.7, Monday.com is a work management tool for sales and marketing teams. It lets you set goals and objectives, plan projects and break them down into tasks and activities.
Views available here include calendar, timeline, cards, form, and Gantt charts. With its task automation, content summarization, and email generation with AI, Monday.com also helps sales teams manage leads and accounts.
Pricing: Monday.com for marketing teams and Monday CRM for sales teams are priced separately. The former offers its basic/starting plan for $9 per user per month and the latter starts at $12 per seat per month (when paid annually).
Monday.com (for marketers) also offers a free plan to test the tool — giving you up to three boards, 8 column types, and 200 templates with its mobile apps.
Rated 4.4, nTask is an end-to-end work planning and management tool for creative agencies.
It gives you Kanban boards (including pre-built board templates for various use cases) to plan projects. It’s here that you can set project/task statuses, allot set planned dates, and assign work to team members.
With its resource allocation and budgeting features, nTask helps plan and manage other aspects of project management as well so that all tasks remain within the defined scope.
Pricing: nTask’s starter plan called Premium costs $3 per user per month when paid annually. It’s for teams just getting started with project management and has a 7-day free trial to let you test and use the tool. The next plan is for advanced teams and costs $8 per user per month.
To recap, the right workload management tool for you is one that:
Review each of your shortlisted tools against these points before making a decision. Brownie points for test-driving the tools and inquiring how they’ll be implemented.
