Workflow

Best Remote Work Software

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You’re managing a remote or hybrid team and things aren’t as efficient as you want them to be. There are a million software programs that claim to make your life easier, but which one actually works for you? After weeks of research and over 65 hours of hands-on testing, we found ClickUp is best for most remote teams. It has customizable remote work features, supercharges work visibility for managers and employees, and gives you unlimited storage space.

The Best Remote Work Software for Most

ClickUp logo

ClickUp

Best for Most

Get a bevy of project management and collaboration features for very little cost with ClickUp. Sporting the most adaptable project views and planning tools, your team can master any project no matter how spread out they may be.

ClickUp is tied for the cheapest option on the list, but has more functionality out of the box than any other provider here. They include eight different project and task views so everyone can visualize work in whatever way makes the most sense. No other provider on the list has better work visibility, scheduling, and planning capability than ClickUp does. 

That generosity extends to the software’s collaborative features. Having a built-in document creator makes it easy to work together on everything from statements of work to company policies. Plus, you get unlimited storage to store finalized and new versions of those docs. And built-in team chat means no one has to leave the platform to stay in the loop.

The Best Remote Software Options to Consider

  1. ClickUp — Best remote work software for most teams
  2. Monday.com — Best for boosting remote team collaboration
  3. Teamwork — Best for remotely managing client work
  4. Trello — Best dummy-proof remote work platform

When it Makes Sense to Invest in Remote Software

Obviously, if you manage remote employees in any capacity, you need a way to stay connected to each other in a way that’s not just the occasional video chat. 

Investing in remote work software helps everyone, everywhere understand what to work on, while providing a central location to access training and project materials, manage timesheets, work with teammates in a collaborative manner, and share the progress of work.

This software is ideal if you have freelancers or contractors you work with, or if you have a distributed or hybrid workforce that has full-time employees doing their jobs from their homes or afar. 

Everyone needs an easy way to stay connected and on the same page if your team can’t rely on the proximity and collaboration that an office provides. 

If you’re thinking, “This sounds nice, but I’m on budget,” then consider this: many of these tools offer a free plan or come in at just a few dollars per month per user. For startups or smaller businesses, having a tight budget isn’t a barrier to using remote work software. 

And if you think you don’t need this right now, be open-minded and try thinking about this another way. 

Implementing remote work software early on sets up your company for success as you grow and gives you room to try out wider-reaching ways of finding talent and bringing it onboard. 

It can feel confusing since there are so many different types of remote work software. But the good news is that you can start with any of the options on our list to get your feet wet with what this category of software can do and expand from there. Especially since so many let you use a limited version of the platform for free.

#1 – ClickUp — The Best Remote Work Software for Most

ClickUp logo

ClickUp

Best for Most

Get a bevy of project management and collaboration features for very little cost with ClickUp. Sporting the most adaptable project views and planning tools, your team can master any project no matter how spread out they may be.

Overall: 4.6/5

You’ll never have to worry about staying productive while managing remote or hybrid teams with ClickUp

With its potent combination of adaptable dashboards and project views, collaborative elements like team chat and whiteboards, and the full array of planning features we tested each product for, you’re getting a well-rounded, scalable platform for remote working that comes at a steal of a price.

Let’s look at the specific details that make ClickUp our top choice. 

  1. Price: 5/5
  2. Collaboration: 5/5
  3. Work Visibility: 4/5
  4. Scheduling and Planning: 5/5
  5. Usability: 3/5

Price: 5/5 – With all the features you get, you’d expect ClickUp to be a lot more expensive.

But their entry-level plan—somewhat strangely called the Unlimited plan—is a great value. You get a ton of bang for your buck in terms of scalability and functionality.

It’s only $7 per user per month when paying annually. For a team of five, that’s an annual bill of just $420 (averaging out to $35 per month—below our list-wide average of $37.80). If you have a smaller team than that, you can pay less since ClickUp has no minimum user requirement.

If you want month-to-month billing, that rate goes up to $10 per user per month.

Most small teams will likely be able to stay on the Unlimited plan for quite some time (if not forever). You get more viewing options than anyone else on our list, including an everything view, 1,000 monthly automation runs, and unlimited storage, dashboards, forms, custom fields, and more. 

There’s plenty of room in this plan to expand as your company and team grows with those generous allotments. 

The takeaway here is that ClickUp gives so much for so little out of your pocket. 

That’s without even mentioning the free plan that you can use that many people use for years before they upgrade to the Unlimited plan once confidence and trust have been established. 

And, more than that, ClickUp is willing to work with you on what you’re willing to pay for your team size. You actually have the option to talk to a ClickUp rep and set custom pricing—something that’s usually only an option for enterprise customers. 

You can’t go wrong. 

Collaboration: 4/5 – ClickUp has a lot of features that make it easy to collaborate in one place. And they do it well, hence the almost perfect score.

When it comes to setting up teams inside the software, ClickUp does fall short. What we mean is you can only set up one team on the unlimited plan. You’re missing out on the ability to assign tasks to a whole team instead of individually assigning members. 

If you have a single team this won’t affect you. But scaling to more than one team, you may feel the need to upgrade. 

Other than that, ClickUp is stellar in this regard.

Built-in chat is something every team with remote workers needs, no matter what. In ClickUp, team chat can happen at the space level for conversations not tied to a specific project, or at the folder and project levels so you can hash out ideas and issues related to specific workflows.

Users can create documents together in ClickUp, helping to keep ideas flowing and making mistakes less likely to be overlooked. 

You can store documents anywhere that makes sense. For example, store SOPs at the company level and research briefs at the project level so there’s no confusion about what topics documents are pertinent to. 

Another way to make collaboration easier with clients, customers, and other departments is to use the forms feature. That way, stakeholders that are not part of your team can deliver information to you. 

Add custom fields or use task fields to help you fill in simple information for tasks you will create later with the data you get from the form. For example, have a form auto-populate the name of the client, a task description, task due date, or even who you want to assign to a task. 

This lets you create a wide variety of forms to get specific and detailed information that you can use to improve relationships. No more email chains. 

You can easily design these forms with ClickUp’s drag-and-drop editor, then preview them before publishing so any mistakes can be fixed. 

After you’re done, share the form to whomever you want with a public URL and they can see and use your form. 

ClickUp’s whiteboard feature is in beta at the moment and free for everyone to use. This freeform, collaborative space takes brainstorming and presenting to a whole new level. 

It’s easy to turn your new ideas into actionable items. You have the freedom to draw with a pen, add shapes and connectors, upload images, and embed ClickUp tasks, documents, or even external websites. 

Let’s move into ClickUp’s other work views that can help you and your team. 

Work Visibility: 5/5 – ClickUp includes a total of eight project views so you and your team can visualize work in more ways than you might ever need. It offers the most ways to view your work out of any other provider on this list. 

ClickUp also includes a dedicated “my work” area so team members have a dedicated space to see all the work assigned to them in one spot. 

The project view options include four views in total, Kanban, calendar, list, and table views. 

Your Kanban boards in ClickUp can break everything on your team’s plate into columns of progress that include tasks in different stages.

Meanwhile, the list view can present that same information in a different way while also highlighting task status and more.

All project views let you filter by just about anything, making it easier to find things. And you can hide and show different task attributes to make displays less cluttered. 

The software also lets you set up separate dashboards that display the data you need front-and-center. You can create as many as you’d like in the software. 

Add ClickUp’s prebuilt widgets to these to display the metrics you want. There are tons to choose from, like a task list, workload by task status reporting, the aforementioned team chat, and an activity feed. 

ClickUp’s portfolio view comes as a dashboard widget that gives you a high-level overview of all of your current projects at a glance. You can choose which projects are included on any instance of the portfolio widget.

There are also native time tracking tools built into this software. Users can start a timer in the app when beginning a task, then stop it when completed. 

You can use this information to better forecast and schedule future tasks and projects, to calculate billable hours to clients, or for determining what you’ll owe hourly contractors. 

ClickUp also includes full time tracking functionality on its mobile app and a Chrome extension to track time on work done outside of the platform with the click of a button.

When using the native timer, your Kanban board’s cards will show the amount of time spent on each task.

Changing gears, use ClickUp’s checklists to slice bigger projects with multiple tasks down into manageable pieces. 

Users can add multiple checklists to any task if they need to. 

We here at Crazy Egg often use separate checklists for preliminary research, active research, and documentation. So that’s how we tested out this feature in ClickUp, as you can see below. 

ClickUp gives you everything you need to see all that’s happening with any project and keep everyone on the same page, no matter where they’re working from.

Scheduling and Planning: 5/5 – Setting goals and tracking progress towards those goals is easy when you have ClickUp at your disposal.

That’s because no other tool on this list comes close in terms of planning out goals. Set a big goal, then break it down into measurable targets and track the progress and status of each target, as well as the overarching goal. 

Adding targets is easy—just click that +Add button you see above. 

Targets can be a quantity, a binary condition (met or unmet), the completion of a certain number of tasks, or a dollar amount. 

Determine what type of target you want, then manually enter the starting value and the target value. 

You can also use a Gantt chart for planning and visualizing your tasks in an interactive and colorful way. 

You can do all of your planning and scheduling right from this view. It’s easy to see what you need to see and make adjustments as necessary.

If you make changes to task dates and timeframes, they’ll be synced to the tasks themselves. This view makes scheduling, rearrange tasks, or planning out upcoming work dead simple. 

Turn any task into a milestone that symbolizes the end of a project phase, the completion of an epic, or just for really important tasks that deserve special attention when completed. 

On Gantt view, milestones are denoted by a diamond shape on the milestone’s due date. 

You can use dependencies to make sure your array of tasks for a given project, milestone, goal, or target are done in the right order. That way items that need to be started only after certain ones are completed can be made dependent on higher priority tasks.

This can get complicated the more dependencies you have in place. Fortunately, you can easily see dependencies for any task in either direction. 

ClickUp will show in a task’s detailed view what parent tasks need to be completed before you can start on that one (and which ones have already been completed) and what tasks are dependent on its own completion.

You can even set up linked tasks that are related but not dependent on one another.

While you can see dependencies in any number of views in ClickUp, the software does a particularly good job of displaying them in Gantt view. 

See the flow of items and their dependencies, with the arrows making it clear what order tasks have to be done in. 

For additional planning control and precision, custom fields can be created for housing custom information you want to keep track of. 

ClickUp has a wide array of custom field types in place, from contact info fields like phone, website, and email to organizing labels, revenue or other money-related quantities, people, and more. 

Hovering over any of these categories gives you more detail on how to use them.

Deploy them in spaces, folders, or lists and then use them to display all the information or details any team member might need.

Usability: 3/5 – Overall, ClickUp has a lot of handy little features that make everyday use easy. 

But, when getting started, there is a lot to learn. All those features to get the hang of can feel overwhelming when you’re first getting started.

The good news for you, however, is once you figure out a game plan, you can enable or disable different ClickApps (the features and widgets within ClickUp) to simplify things until you’re ready for more complexity. 

When first logging in, ClickUp does a decent job at introducing you to the software with a high-level introduction video. It gives you a rundown of setting up hierarchies, tasks, and views, popping up in a sidebar that guides your first steps in the platform.

Any issues you have could be solved by articles in ClickUp’s knowledge base. It’s easy to search through and find guidance on how to use different features and how the features work together. 

That being said, we would like to see a bit more guidance within the software itself at the outset. The broad, short walkthrough video isn’t enough to minimize the learning curve for any and every new user.

The ClickUp platform offers numerous levels of organization, making it super versatile and scalable for use across multiple departments or teams. Their own helpful chart is shown below, showing the levels you can split project work into.

Bottom line, there’s nothing missing here. ClickUp contains all the hierarchy levels we look for in this software, as well as more granular elements like nested subtasks.

Another place where ClickUp shines is in automating tasks. With their Unlimited plan, you get 1,000 runs per month and can create your own custom triggers and actions in the automation builder. 

Not many entry-level plans allow this degree of automation and control. But it is lacking more advanced aspects like conditional triggers or triggers that set into motion multiple actions. You’ll have to upgrade your ClickUp plan from Unlimited to wield these. 

If you don’t want to create your own automations, that’s okay. There are hundreds of prebuilt options already waiting for you in the software for commonly automated actions, like sending an email to a team member when a due date approaches.

ClickUp also offers markdown syntax for formatting task cards and more in the platform. Type symbols into a field to easily make bulleted lists, bold text, and more.

The only convenient feature ClickUp misses out on is language availability. Unlike many others on this list that allow users to set their language of choice from many options, ClickUp only offers English and French. 

That being said, for English-speaking teams ClickUp can’t be beat. They provide incredibly high value through their robust feature set at a rock-bottom price. 

And, there are two no-risk ways to test it out yourself. Try any ClickUp plan on a 15-day free trial or use the limited but still effective Free Forever plan for as long as you’d like. You can’t lose.

It’s time to make working remotely as easy as it should be for your team and project management. ClickUp makes that happen, so get started today.

#2 – Monday.com — Best for Boosting Remote Team Collaboration

Monday.com logo

Monday.com

Best for Better Collaboration

Collaborate better than ever before, no matter how spread out your team is. Monday.com's built-in team chat, document creator, whiteboards, and more remove blockers from working together as a cohesive unit.

It’s tough enough keeping track of everything when you’re all in the same room, let alone when you’re scattered across different time zones. Add in the challenge of trying to manage multiple projects at once and it can feel downright impossible. 

Monday.com offers the most effective suite of collaboration tools on this list.

It’s the one tool that helps teams of all sizes easily manage their projects, collaborate effectively, track and manage sales, and provide a clear path to reach their goals as a team. 

  1. Price: 3/5
  2. Collaboration: 5/5
  3. Work Visibility: 2.5/5
  4. Scheduling and Planning: 2.5/5
  5. Usability: 2.4/5

Price: 3/5 – We tested Monday.com’s Basic plan, which is basically middle-of-the-pack in terms of value and affordability. 

When paying annually, you’re looking at a monthly rate of $9 per user. For a standard team of five, that comes to a yearly outlay of $540.

For that price you’re getting unlimited tasks, projects, documents, and custom fields, plus 5 GB of storage space. You’re also allowed unlimited free viewers, which means you can bring in as many stakeholders or other people as you’d like to have view-only access to your Monday.com data.

You can also choose to pay month-to-month on this plan, but it raises the rate to $12 per user—making it $60 per month for a team of five.

You could pay less with a smaller team, but keep in mind that Monday.com has a three-user minimum for all of its paid plans. That’s because their free forever plan (called the Individual plan) allows for a maximum of two users. It comes with many of the same features as the Basic plan.

But, here’s the big caveat—the Basic plan lacks a few key features for remote work.

First, there’s no Zoom integration (or software integrations of any kind) on this plan. You’ll have to upgrade to the Standard plan at least to unlock that. That’s a real drawback.

Second, the Basic plan is lacking any automations, time tracking features, and multiple useful views like calendar and timeline. You also won’t be able to pull data from multiple boards into a single dashboard on this plan.

Those can each be deal breakers. The Standard plan, which includes most of those missing features (except time tracking), runs you $10 per user per month. If we had scored this section on that plan, Monday.com would be tied for the most expensive option on this list.

One more caveat is that a 14-day free trial can only be had on the Pro plan (the next step up from Standard). So, it’s good that you can try every Monday.com feature risk-free, but we feel it would be better if you could try the actual plan you want to use to see if it’s a good fit.

Collaboration: 5/5 – Monday.com’s claim to fame is fostering and improving team collaboration.

As remote work software, it gives your team a centralized and unified space to work on things together. 

You’re able to set up as many teams as you’d like to match your organization’s structure. 

Once a user has accepted your invite to join Monday.com, you’ll be able to add them to any team. Users can be a part of multiple teams, as well. 

This makes it easy to split users into project teams, teams that regularly work with specific clients, having a team for all of your managers, or accommodating entire departments. 

If you need to assign a task to a team instead of an individual, all you have to do is point and click. It’s the same as assigning it to a single user.

With that task assigned, keep everyone in the loop in real time by adding Monday.com’s internal chat app. This adds another layer of communication for collaboration that doesn’t have to be tied to a specific task.

People you invite to the project can come in and drop a message. For example, stakeholders can weigh in on progress or direction, letting your team make quick, on-the-fly adjustments. 

Users can even create nested threads to centralize communication around specific topics in one place. 

All plans include unlimited document creation. The in-platform document creator is in beta at the time of this writing, but there are a ton of features already at your disposal. 

It’s possible to create public, private, and shareable docs. Then, you can add that document to project folders to keep things organized. Users can comment and have conversations within the document, too. 

It’s pretty robust in terms of formatting, meaning you’re not missing out on much if you use Monday.com’s document creator over, say, Google Docs.

Monday.com has made sure you can easily add forms to any project. Forms can be split among different parts of a project for specific details to be highlighted. Each individual task, board, or project can have multiple forms. 

One quirky part about forms is that you can only add fields that already exist for your task board. 

If you want to add new fields, you first have to add them to your task board, then you can add those fields to your form. 

These custom fields can be added with a few short steps. We’ll go deeper into custom fields in another section. 

Build your form in Monday.com, whose form builder allows you to change background colors, add your logo, include a custom message after its submitted, and mark fields as required or optional.

If you want to make team meetings more engaging, you can use Monday.com’s whiteboard feature. It lets you generate ideas in more of an organic way. 

Opt for Monday.com’s built-in tool, or use their Miro app add-on. The latter is a really powerful whiteboard platform with tons of options. 

Miro provides you with elements, shapes, sticky notes, a freeform drawing tool, image and link embedding, and more. 

There are also pre-built Miro templates that let you build incredible presentations fast. Imagine how easy creating an OKR presentation will be when you don’t have to draw up a whiteboard framework from scratch. 

Strategy sessions, scrum meetings, or other brainstorming events become much more enjoyable with whiteboards and the other collaborative features Monday.com makes available to your remote team. 

Work Visibility: 2.5/5 – We all know how important seeing your team’s workload is. This  becomes an even bigger challenge with remote work.  It’s virtually impossible to be successful if you can’t see what you need to do and what your team is doing.

Monday.com doesn’t do a great job here with their Basic plan. 

You’re stuck with just two project views–the default table view and Kanban boards. 

You can still do a lot of things with the table and Kanban views, but you don’t get the same wide range of options for visualizing your work as you do with other software at a similar (or cheaper) price point. 

Monday.com’s Kanban view lets you choose which information appears on the face of each card, which is nice. Hide or show any columns, as well, depending on what you want users to see at a glance. 

Kanban board view of a project in Monday.com

We’d say the biggest drawback is that you can’t see subtasks from the board view. It presents a major lack of visibility, because there’s no indicator that subtasks exist. You won’t know if there are additional steps to take unless you click a card to open it up.

Table view is the main view for Monday.com. All projects start in this view. 

You can add as many sortable columns as you’d like to keep track of the info that’s most important. And customize what’s visible so the most pertinent information is front-and-center, like start and due dates, logged hours, attached files, and so on.

It’s also very searchable—just enter terms used in your projects or tasks and zoom in on what you’re looking for. 

Users can view a special table that’s specific to their work, as well, showing all of the tasks assigned to them across multiple projects. They can see everything they’re working on in one place. 

A portfolio view lets admins see across all projects in a similar way. It funnels everything you need into this centralized overview.

To avoid setting up a portfolio manually, you can use a template Monday.com provides. Using it helps to speed up the process.

Checklists in Monday.com are basic, but they get the job done.

Inside a task, you can add a checklist as an update or comment. You’re not able to assign them to anyone or give items a due date, but it still works to break down large tasks into more manageable chunks. 

Your checklists appear in table view as a circle next to the task card’s title. It will gradually fill the circle green as items get ticked off. Hover over the task to see exactly how many checklist items have been completed so far. 

Viewing ckecklist progress in Monday.com list view

​​Monday.com provides dashboards on its Basic plan, but you can only pull from one project, not multiple. That means it’s not really functional for company-wide or team-wide stats, metrics, KPIs, and the like, unless you upgrade your plan. 

Luckily, you can create an infinite amount of dashboards. So you can still view all your metrics on each project, you’ll just have to spend more time manually weaving all the info together for broader data and insights. 

Add apps to your dashboard from 53 pre-built widgets like project status across all tasks, workload balance charts, a quote of the day, and more.

Example reports that can be added to a Monday.com dashboard

One big additional drawback, which we mentioned earlier in the pricing section, is that Monday.com’s Basic plan lacks time tracking features. That can be a godsend when managing remote workers or contractors.

The good news is that the ability to track hours worked, overtime, and more is available on an upgraded Monday.com plan. The bad news is that it’s only available on the Pro or Enterprise plans, the two most expensive packages Monday.com offers.

You’re limited in terms of visibility with Monday.com, but it’s still quite functional. It’s just not as robust as some of the other entry-level plans we tested. That also holds true for Monday.com’s scheduling and planning features. 

Scheduling and Planning: 2.5/5 – Monday.com’s entry-level tier is a great option for simple project planning and scheduling for remote teams. They help keep track of items, like contacts, inventory, and sales.

One thing we’ve already mentioned is the lack of view options in this platform. That rears its head again here—the Basic plan lacks a timeline view, so there’s no way to use Gantt charts for planning. You’ll need to upgrade to Standard or higher for that.

Monday.com’s entry-level plan has a goal planning feature that’s tied to a numerical column in your project board. On the entry-level plan we tested, you can only connect one board to this widget, so it’ll only work for project-based goals. 

You can also set up milestones to mark important dates, deliverables, major achievements, periods of review, and more. 

One of the greatest features and differentiators for Monday.com is the ability to set up custom fields, letting you include any data you want. 

They also make it possible to filter and sort your information in more impactful ways, improving the planning and scheduling process tremendously.

There are 36 different field types ready to add to your views in Monday.com, from date and status fields to dropdown menus, last updated dates, attached files, and much more.

With so many different custom field types, the possibilities of what you can include and keep track of inside the software are vast. 

For example, use a long text box to add a detailed task description, use tags to categorize work, or use a link field to connect tasks to additional resources or a client’s website.

This feature really makes up for some of the other visibility issues Monday.com has. 

Now we move into Monday.com’s ease of use, the final piece of the puzzle. 

Usability: 2.4/5 – Monday.com scored second-to-last in this category. It’s not as structured as some other platforms, which can be seen as both a positive and a negative. 

Monday.com is highly customizable which lends to the lower this category’s score. If things are not cookie cutter, there will be a higher learning curve naturally. That’s just the way it works in software. 

It’s a tool you need to make fit your specific needs. Not the other way around. 

You can expect to spend a bit of time learning, playing around with different configurations, testing different templates, and teaching your team how it works. 

Fortunately, the software helps you on your first session with tooltips guiding you through basics like setting up a project and adding tasks.

Monday.com’s board and project templates to help you get going more quickly, simplifying the process of getting started.

The templates have detailed instructions on how to use them so you don’t have to figure everything out entirely on your own. But you still need to put in the work to shape them to match your project work and team needs. 

To further ease the learning curve, you’ll get little walkthrough videos on that introductory interactive tour the first time you log in. 

Example of a pop-up tutorial video in Monday.com

If those don’t cover the information you need, the knowledge base and community forum are also packed with helpful guides and discussions.

For organizing your projects and data, you obviously want a hierarchy in the platform that makes sense. 

In Monday.com, you’re given workspaces, folders, boards, tasks, subtasks, and checklists. Use these different levels to separate departments, store company-wide data, separate projects into smaller tasks and subtasks, and so on.

It’s easy to add any of these items. For instance, add a subtask to a task simply by opening up the dropdown menu next to it and clicking Add subitem.

Remember the built-in document creator and its formatting options similar to Google Docs? Monday.com extends that rich text editor capabilities to many parts of the software, removing the need for markdown language (which is not a part of the software). 

Monday.com is squarely in the middle of the pack in terms of how many languages you can use the software in. The platform supports a dozen languages besides English, including Spanish, Dutch, Traditional Chinese, and Korean.

That main flaw here? No automations whatsoever on Monday.com’s Basic plan. That’s such an important feature to leave out for entry-level users and a huge strike against Monday.com.

You can upgrade to Standard to unlock 250 automation runs per month or the Pro plan for a whopping 25,000 monthly runs. 

Monday.com is a very versatile piece of software that helps remote teams mimic the office space without missing a beat. They have incredible collaboration tools that make teamwork happen as easily virtually as it would in a conference room setting. 

If you want to make light work of coordinating efforts with a hybrid or fully remote team, try Monday.com.

#3 – Teamwork — Best for Remotely Managing Client Work

Teamwork logo

Teamwork

Best for Client Work

Your agency doesn't have to be crammed into an office to win over clients old and new. Teamwork is a robust, all-in-one tool, including features for PM, billing and invoicing, time tracking, and collaboration. That way, your team can deliver quality results from anywhere.

Overall: 2.9/5

Teamwork is a great option for client-based or service-based teams and agencies because it comes with a lot of special features tailored for working with clients.

These exclusive benefits are unique amongst remote working software options and are what makes Teamwork really stand out. 

Let’s look at the details.

  1. Price: 1/5
  2. Collaboration: 3.5/5
  3. Work Visibility: 4/5
  4. Scheduling and Planning: 3/5
  5. Usability: 3.4/5

Price: 1/5 – Teamwork is the most expensive option on our list, but it could potentially replace multiple pieces of software at once. You could use Teamwork to manage billing and invoicing, client onboarding, and document creation while also using it for internal team chat. 

If you do the math, you could end up saving hundreds of dollars per month.

We tested Teamwork’s Deliver plan, its entry-level option that runs $10 per user per month when paying annually. 

For a team of five, that means you’ll pay $600 per year. You could pay less with a smaller team, but Teamwork’s plans require a minimum of three users.

If you opt for monthly billing, you’re looking at $12.50 per user per month, which would end up costing you an extra hundred bucks over the course of a year.

That $50 per month rate (when paying annually) for five users is a good bit over our list-wide average of $37.80 per month.

On the Deliver plan, you’re allowed up to 300 projects and 100 GB of storage, plus you get features for time tracking, billing and invoicing, integrated team chat, and more. That’s quite generous for an entry-level plan.

The big win here is you’re also allowed unlimited client users. These are guest users whose access levels to your platform you can set—great for bringing external stakeholders into your project work and progress reports.

A 30-day free trial comes with any paid Teamwork plan. That says a few things about the confidence Teamwork has in their platform. Try it out for a full month before you decide to dive into a commitment with them—few other platforms give you a trial period this long. 

Let’s move deeper into collaboration features and see what hidden treasures Teamwork has waiting for you. 

Collaboration: 3.5/5 – Teamwork is a great option if you rely a lot on team chat and regularly have people from multiple departments working on projects together—like an agency tends to.

The platform has just about everything you need to facilitate collaboration, work on documents together, and communicate with clients, contractors, and stakeholders. 

Setting up teams is a lot more functional in Teamwork than the other tools on our list. 

You can invite new users to the appropriate team and they’ll automatically join the associated projects and have the correct settings. This is a huge time saver for admins and managers. 

On top of that, you can also have cross-functional project teams. Keep your departments as they are while creating temporary project-based teams that span departments. 

One user could be on the design team but also the social media, website design, and email marketing project teams as well. 

We all know that being able to chat within your project groups is important. Teamwork made sure to bolster this feature within the software for that reason. 

Every project has a separate message board, so conversations pertaining to it are kept together.

Within Teamwork, you also get private messaging, the ability to create channels and group chats, and one-click video conferencing, similar to Slack. 

It’s the only tool on the list that has an actual chat tool with private messaging and channels, instead of something that just mimics it. 

This can replace email threads with clients and employees, as well, especially since you can invite clients to have access to these discussions without paying for extra seats on the software.

Teamwork chat opens up as a widget in the bottom right corner from most project views. 

Another tool you get to wield within Teamwork is its document creator. 

Teamwork documents are called notebooks and you can add them at the project level. Keep in mind, since they’ll be connected to specific projects, this feature is not really suitable for company-wide items (like policies) or documents that contain information across several projects. 

Notebooks feature a familiar rich text editor and you can notify specific users after you add them and set the privacy level to limit who can view them. 

Teamwork's built-in document creator

You also have forms to help with gathering information from clients, other departments, and your employees. 

You can create and deploy an unlimited number of forms. Choose the colors of the header image and add as many fields as you like. You can also set a custom confirmation message after a form has been filled out.

The only real downside is that the Teamwork logo is on all forms unless you’re on the next tier up from the one we tested or higher.

The main collaboration feature missing in this software is a whiteboard. That means no freeform space for virtual brainstorming. But with all the other collaborative tools at your disposal in this software, you may not even miss it.

Work Visibility: 4/5 – Teamwork sports a project health view that can show a high-level overview of the status of all of your projects in one place. This functions as the software’s portfolio view.

Partners you work with can pop in and see progress without needing to interrupt you or your team’s workflow. 

If you want more information, click on the project name to see more detailed analytics. 

What’s nice is how the screen opens up a new pane on the right-hand side, so you can easily come back to the main view when you’re done reviewing metrics. 

You get four different project views on Teamwork’s Deliver plan: list, table, board, and calendar. 

These views let you filter, sort, hide, or show completed tasks. Also you can expand subtasks (except on board view), search, and select specific users in all project views. 

Teamwork’s multiple project views are highly customizable and easy to use. You can see below our table view that contains many useful agency metrics, like columns for due dates, estimated time to complete, logged time, and priority.

At this point you might want to set up some dashboards that pull in the most pertinent data about each project. You can set these to a global view or project-specific view.

The latter zooms in on metrics to tell you the health of a project, the number of tasks by assignee, and any key milestones, among other data.

What’s cool about the project dashboards is that they are prebuilt for every project you create. So you don’t have to put in any work to get critical details you need. 

The trade-off is that you can’t add new widgets to project-based dashboards. 

That’s what the global dashboard is for. It’s much more customizable. 

Each user can create their own dashboards that cover everything across all the projects they’re assigned to, working on, or managing.

Create as many dashboards as you’d like on any Teamwork plan. 

What makes Teamwork perfect for client work besides being able to see all this great data is being able to track time. It’s super easy to track and attach time logs to tasks. 

All you do is use the quick add button in the top left to start the timer or input a manual time log on the task screen.

And that’s not the only way you can do it. You can also navigate to the task and select the timer or manual log option to start logging time for that task. 

Track billable or non-billable hours without any need to integrate another piece of software. It’s entirely built-in to the Teamwork platform. 

Teamwork lacks checklists, but you can use its subtasks and nested tasks to accomplish the same purpose of breaking down action items into smaller tasks and steps.

Scheduling and Planning: 3/5 – You can use Teamwork to make scheduling the most complex projects into a piece of cake. Its planning features give you everything you need to visualize work well into the future.

Teamwork’s workload view is a good way to see a quick overview of all the hours assigned to your team across all of your active projects, so you can judge if anyone is over or under their capacity. 

You can use this tool as much as you’d like on Teamwork’s entry-level plan, something no other provider on our list can claim.

Gantt charts are automatically created for each project. Any task with a due date will show up automatically. You can hide or show weekends, assignees, task names, task durations, and more. 

Inside Gantt charts, you can also move start dates and end dates easily, reschedule tasks, create new tasks and subtasks, and mark items complete. 

Teamwork’s milestones have way more functionality than the other tools on the list. Rather than just turning a task into a diamond shape (indicating a milestone is attached), you can track the progress of individual milestones and even attach task lists to milestones in one click. 

Each milestone can have a due date, a title, an owner, a description, assigned followers, privacy settings, tags, and attached tasks.

Once you’ve created a milestone, you can add comments and updates to it (just like you would for a task), and see the total percentage complete.

Creating milestones lets you keep laser focus on the client work that needs to be most closely tracked.

Dependencies can be added to any task you have in Teamwork. Set dependencies to ensure work will always be done in the right order for your clients.

You’ll see a red notification on dependent tasks letting you know that you can’t start them until others are complete. 

Where Teamwork falls short is with regards to custom fields. It feels like Teamwork is leaving you out in the cold when it comes to giving you the freedom to name specific fields the way you want. 

This makes the tool much less customizable since you can’t track whatever you want with precision. You’re limited to existing fields, which can feel like you’re being squeezed into a certain process. And it makes planning work a bit more challenging since you can’t filter or sort by custom types of information.

Usability: 3.4/5 – Using Teamwork, you may have moments where it’s a bit confusing and challenging to navigate because it’s set up differently from other tools. 

There are multiple navigation menus and seemingly similar features in multiple places. 

Let’s be transparent here. Teamwork is more complex than Monday.com but not quite as complex as ClickUp. 

The best thing for you to know coming into this is that there are a lot of different ways you can set up the software. So, you’ll likely go through some trial and error before landing on something that works perfectly. 

And that’s okay, because the trade off of the steeper learning curve is worth it for you and your clients. 

To help ease the learning curve, you’ll see a short one-minute introductory video the first time you log into the software. This covers what projects are and how to add tasks and leave comments, but that’s it.

Getting started and walkthrough video in Teamwork

Hierarchically, you have projects, tasks, subtasks, and nested tasks in Teamwork. It’s pretty straightforward—you won’t get paralysed by too many options about where things should go. 

Subtasks and nested tasks are made apparent in Teamwork’s project views. If you use the list view, for example, it’s all laid out just the way you’d hope it would be.

Teamwork is the undisputed leader in terms of accommodating global teams. With 48 different languages available, odds are pretty good any team member can use the software in their preferred language. 

If you want to format documents, task descriptions, or comments, it can be done very quickly using markdown language. 

Teamwork is the best at this feature, too, and it’s easy to get the hang of setting up headers or bolded text with just a few keystrokes. 

Using markdown language in Teamwork's document editor

Another thing Teamwork does well is allowing you 2,000 automations per month on the Deliver plan. You get 34 prebuilt options that you can deploy in just a couple of clicks.

In no time at all, you can set it so adding a tag, for example, changes task priority or assigns a different team member.

Prebuilt automation examples in Teamwork

Or, build your own automations within Teamwork. Set a trigger and the project it applies to, then set a desired action. That’s it.

Choose from 11 triggers (such as when a due date approaches or if logged time exceeds a certain amount) and eight actions (like notifying a user or moving the task card) to create your own shortcuts.

Creating a new automation in Teamwork's automation builder

Teamwork is a potent piece of remote work software with its only glaring flaw the slightly higher price point. 

But that price is worth it if you manage client services or your agency needs the collaboration tools to keep everyone connected. And that’s not to mention the potential savings from no longer having to pay for software made redundant by Teamwork. 

Take advantage of their generous 30-day free trial and get started now. It’s time to see how Teamwork can make your agency of remote workers more successful than ever before.

#4 – Trello — Best Dummy-Proof Remote Work Platform

Trello logo

Trello

Easiest to Learn & Use

Get an improved platform for managing remote project work that you can set up and start using in minutes. With virtually no learning curve, Trello makes it a piece of cake to get you and your remote team members working more effectively.

Overall: 2.5/5

Trello is a platform that sports one of the lowest learning curves in the category. In less than 10 minutes, you can set up your first boards, invite your team, and get to work. 

It guides you in the right direction by nature. Plus, Trello is tied for the cheapest on this list, which only adds to its appeal. 

Let’s look closer at what you get. 

  1. Price: 5/5
  2. Collaboration: 0.5/5
  3. Work Visibility: 1.5/5
  4. Scheduling and Planning: 2/5
  5. Usability: 4/5

Price: 5/5 – Trello is the most affordable and lightweight remote work software option on this list. But that doesn’t mean low quality. 

We’ll touch on its features in detail below, but also give you a sneak peak at what you get for just $5 per user per month when paying annually. 

That’s the pricing for the Standard plan, which we tested. For a group of five users, that means you’re paying only $300 per year—just 95 cents per day for another way of looking at it.

Compared to our list-wide average of $37.80 per month for five users, Trello’s $25 monthly cost is a steal. 

Better still, Trello doesn’t gouge you like some other providers if you don’t want to pay for a year upfront. Month-to-month billing raises the per-user price just one dollar to $6 per month.

Either way you slice it, you’re getting a deal.

Trello’s Standard plan doesn’t skimp on key features. You get unlimited workspaces, cards, boards, storage, users and integrations for one thing. That’s amazing on its own, but you can also utilize custom fields, advanced checklists, and much more.

There’s a free plan, too, if you’re not sure what you need yet. Or, you can choose between two different free trials—a 14-day trial without a credit card or a 30-day trial if you enter your payment information. 

Collaboration: 0.5/5 – Before the score makes you run for the hills, hear us out. There are some collaboration tools in this platform, it’s just that Trello’s Standard plan doesn’t have as many collaborative features that we tested for as the other tools on the list. 

That’s all part of Trello being lightweight and easy to learn. 

So you’ll likely still need something like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, Confluence, or some combination of them to handle document creation and team communication.

There’s no way to set up teams in Trello, but you can set up separate workspaces for each team if you’d like. Just keep in mind that each workspace has its own separate billing.

You can’t assign an entire team to a task. If you want to multiple people on a task or card, you’ll have to assign each one individually. 

There is no built-in team chat within Trello. However, you can leave comments and attach files within tasks, and tag or mention users in task descriptions and comments.

We’ve blurred out the names of our research team members below, but you can see the @ symbol where users have been mentioned. They get a notification anytime they’re tagged this way in any part of a Trello card.

If you’re currently using Slack for communication software, you’re in luck—it integrates seamlessly with Trello so Slack conversations can immediately flow into taking action within Trello. 

With no built-in document creator, you’ll also need separate software for that. But, with unlimited storage on every Trello plan, you’ll never have to worry about capacity when adding them as attachments to Trello cards.

Trello also lacks a whiteboard, so there’s no in-platform medium for collaboration brainstorming. That’s another thing where you may need separate software to do what you want (or have been doing).

Creating forms within Trello is possible, it simply relies on adding an app (Trello calls them Power-Ups) that you’ll need to add. It’s easy to do so with one click from the Trello Power-Up marketplace.

You have three options for this that can be used for free, they just have limitations on how many forms you can create or use per month:

  • Jotform limits you to five forms and 100 monthly submissions
  • Typeform limits you to 10 forms and 10 monthly responses
  • Trello Forms by Blue Cat limits you to 25 monthly submissions

If you need more from any of those, you can pay a bit per month to maximize their usefulness.

It can look like you can’t communicate or collaborate with Trello at all as a remote team at all, but that’s not true. We use Trello everyday at Crazy Egg, but we also use Slack, Confluence, and other software as part of our remote working tech stack. 

The same can work for you. 

Now let’s look at how Trello helps you keep your work easy to see and manage. 

Work Visibility: 1.5/5 – Following the theme of simplicity, Trello only has a Kanban board view on its entry-level plan. You also have the option of adding a basic calendar view using a free power-up.

But the other two key views we tested and scored for—list and table—are missing from the software entirely.

With that said, Kanban and a basic calendar view are more than enough for simple projects, ongoing tasks, and various remote work situations. 

Kanban is the core of what Trello does and it does it really well. This is what functions as its project view. 

It’s simple, clean, intuitive, and super easy to manage on a day-to-day basis. That’s likely why so many businesses prefer Trello over other types of project management software. 

With no feature that works as a project portfolio view, you can’t really see a high-level summary of the health of all your projects at once in Trello. And, dashboards to give you similar and deeper analytics and insights are missing from the Standard plan, but are unlocked on the next tier up (Premium).

Even then, the dashboards are limited and honestly not worth the upgrade just for gaining that feature alone. 

Checklists, on the other hand, are something Trello does extremely well. 

They’re super easy to add to any card, and Trello cards support embedding multiple checklists in them. 

In fact, you can give each item in any checklist a separate due date and assignee. 

Examples of checklists in a Trello task card

Plus, Trello’s intuitive Kanban view makes sure that checklist progress is front-and-center on any cards that have them. You can see at a glance how progress is coming along without opening up each individual card. 

Checklist progress icon on Trello card from Kanban board view

Trello is missing built-in features for time tracking and logging billable hours, but there are a few power-ups available that can accomplish this.

Scheduling and Planning: 2/5 – Since Kanban and calendar views are the only views you can get on the Standard plan, there is no Gantt or timeline type of view available unless you upgrade. 

It’s also missing goal-setting and milestone features entirely, but you can use separate cards to keep track of goals and manually update them. With the simplicity of this platform, that takes a couple minutes at most. It just takes some elbow grease.

Trello does offer a free power-up to enhance your planning ability through task dependencies. Card Dependencies by Screenful is completely free to add to your Trello account and use. 

With it, you can choose which tasks rely on others’ completion to start and also link tasks (without needing a dependency), combine duplicate tasks, and create subtasks. 

So, if your project work is simple enough you can probably get away with Trello’s native checklists. But if you get thrown a complex one, you can utilize this power-up to chart the best course to successful completion.

For even more control, you can also set up custom fields inside Trello. Add as many custom fields as you need to, including options for dropdown menus, long text fields, dates, and more. 

There just aren’t as many custom field options as other providers, which has become a running theme in this review. But there are more than enough at your disposal to keep track of the information you care about most.

The scheduling and planning feature set out of the box is not a highlight of Trello, but the available power-ups can make Trello more adaptable to what you need it to do. 

Usability: 4/5 – Trello is the easiest tool on our list both in terms of getting initially set up and using it every day. 

Despite its simplicity and basically non-existent learning curve, you get numerous features to help streamline how you and your team interact with the software on a daily basis.

On your first time entering the platform, there’s a checklist that covers adding your first board, connecting other business tools, exploring other project views, configuring basic settings, and inviting your team.

You’ll also get helpful tips throughout the tool as you click to different areas that help you get to know the terminology. 

Within a few minutes, you’ll know how Trello works and how things are organized just by clicking around.

For more advanced help—for example, on how to add or use automations or power ups—the knowledge base is an easy resource to tap into. Its articles do a great job at showing how to use more advanced features step by step. 

Trello’s hierarchy levels include spaces, boards, tasks, and checklists. It’s intuitive and easy to navigate for any user, even if they are not tech-savvy. 

The main downside is the lack of folders. That makes it challenging to keep your boards organized, particularly if you have dozens or hundreds of them. 

Spaces make it possible to set up different departments within Trello, but it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. If you don’t use boards to split out a single workspace into departments, you’ll need individual plans for each department, since each Trello plan only allows one workspace. 

If you’re using Trello to save money, you can have a set of users that need more advanced features on a paid plan and others who only need to use the basics of Trello on the free plan.

That’s a great workaround on the one hand, but the flip side is if a team member needs to be involved with two departments that are both using paid plans, you’re going to have to pay for this user twice. 

Thus, it’s easier all-around to use individual boards for your departments or your team’s various efforts if you don’t have multiple departments. It’s just that Trello’s lack of hierarchical depth means it can be hard to perfectly map the platform to your organization.

Trello accommodates global teams well with 21 available languages. Users can run Trello in their preferred tongue, including options we haven’t seen on many other platforms like Thai, Polish, Swedish, and Vietnamese. 

Trello allows you to use markdown language in cards’ text fields and comments. Set headers, insert codeblocks, and more with just a few symbols flanking your text. 

Using markdown language in a Trello card's description

Where Trello shines here is their easy automations. They generously offer them on all their plans, even the free one. 

The Standard plan that we tested allows for 1,000 automation runs per month and it’s a breeze to build them in Trello’s tool called Butler.

You can set rules with a trigger, condition, and desired action. For example, when a card is labeled urgent, move it to the top of the list, then add a due date three days from now, mention the whole team, and leave a comment asking if anyone can take it.

You can also create a button that triggers an action or multiple actions, like moving a card to a different column and assigning the next person to work on it.

Or, you can use dates to trigger automations. Do this either by setting a card’s due date as a trigger or have a specific date or cadence trigger a recurring action (like archiving cards in your Done column every Friday at 6 p.m.).

Trello is known for being a lightweight but powerful project management software. They make working with remote teams much easier because you make your team’s workload much easier to manage, talk about, and visualize with Kanban and calendar views. 

While missing some features baked into the platform, Trello Power-Ups often pick up the slack where you need it. Keep Trello as simple as you’d like or add tools to soup it up.

Either way, you can’t find an easier platform for getting your remote teams working in harmony. 

Take advantage of Trello’s free trial period today—thousands of teams all over the world are getting results with Trello and it’s time your team starts getting them, too.

Methodology for Choosing the Best Remote Software

You’re fed up with your team not being able to communicate effectively and the perfect solution seems impossible. That’s because you have a hybrid team which requires even more precision to manage. 

The last thing you want to do is spend money on a system that nobody uses.

That’s what our post here solves for you. Our research focused on the best qualities of the most effective remote work software, which informed our methodology for creating our top list. 

With the right software, your remote or hybrid teams get better results fast, no matter where they are in the world. You’ll start tearing through work at a pace you’ve never seen before, all while minimizing silly and avoidable mistakes. 

We weighed each of our five scoring categories in terms of importance to your purchasing decision:

  1. Price (25%)
  2. Collaboration (25%)
  3. Work visibility (20%)
  4. Scheduling and planning (20%)
  5. Usability (10%)

After price, you’ll see the next three are all facets of project management that become more important when accounting for remote workers. These are crucial elements of finding the right remote work software, with the price you pay and the ability to work together from afar taking the lead.

Usability brings up the rear, but it’s not something to be ignored. Most users can accept a harder learning curve if the other areas of the software do a great job. 

Our process for testing each provider is simple. 

We signed up for the entry-level plan with every provider, set up various types of projects and tasks inside the software, then invited five additional users to simulate a remote work environment similar to our own at Crazy Egg. 

After that, we dug deep into planning and scheduling and explored every possible way to view work inside the software. Then we spent an entire week picking apart communication and collaboration capability for each software from top to bottom.

That helped us identify gaps that we could highlight in the product reviews, so you’ll know what’s missing that you might need from either an employee’s or a manager’s standpoint. If there’s an area where a platform falls short, we know about it—and so will you. 

Through all of those steps, we kept in mind how easy each piece of software was to pick up, learn, and use with little to no training. 

Buying software can be scary. You can spend hours doing research and still feel lost about how to make the right decision. 

Follow this methodology closely to remove all doubts, fears, and misconceptions about what’s really important to focus on in your own search for remote work software. That way you can pick the best option on your very first try. 

Let’s dive into the individual sections to uncover more about how each one is scored.

Getting What You Pay For (25%)

It’s all about getting the right software at the right price. So, with each product, we broke down the annual and monthly pricing for a team of five. 

Most providers have cheaper monthly rates when you pay for a year in advance. And few, if any, of you are looking for a short-term solution for remote work software. 

So, we took the monthly rate for five users when paying annually, then scored each product based on the scale below:

  • 5 points for less than $30
  • 4 points for$30 to $35
  • 3 points for $35 to $40
  • 2 points for $40 to $45
  • 1 point for $45+

The average price across all the tools we tested is $37.80 per month for five users.

The pricing section is easy enough to glance over and see if a provider meets your budget requirements. So, enough dwelling on the obvious—now you’re ready to dive into collaboration. 

Chat, Document Creation, Forms, and More (25%)

This scoring criterion answers two questions. 

The first is, how can users collaborate with each other inside the software? 

And, second, will you need any additional software to facilitate other types of communication to bridge the gap that being a remote or hybrid team creates?

After spending a week with each piece of software, we found there are five main features that rise to the top for collaboration when using remote work software.

We started by examining whether you can assign users in the software to teams. Can you recreate your company structure within your remote work software? 

We also know how important built-in chat is for remote and hybrid teams. Each review discusses whether people on your team can communicate in-platform beyond commenting on tasks. 

The other three factors all zero in on collaborative work.

We wanted to highlight which providers allow you to work on documents together inside the platform. Most users want software that makes it easy to collaboratively create company-wide documents like SOPs, training material, and more. 

The same goes from brainstorming and strategy sessions, so we also looked for whiteboards in each piece of software. Not every type of collaboration is engaging, especially when working from home. A good whiteboard feature encourages better engagement in less structured situations.

Last, we looked for forms baked into each platform that allow non-team members to submit information or requests. That way, clients, stakeholders, or other departments can reach your team with pertinent information without it getting stuck in an email inbox or elsewhere.

Remote work software that checks off all of those boxes provides a well-rounded collaborative environment that gives teams numerous avenues and outlets to work together, despite the physical distance. 

For this section, we assign one point (or half a point if the software got some of the way there) for each feature a platform offers. 

Having these features turn your team into a steam engine plowing through tasks with little effort. And they’ll be happy because they will feel connected as a team, even though they are miles away. 

Clear Views into Workflow Get Better Results (20%)

When employees can’t see what needs to be done, important project tasks can get lost in the shuffle.

So we made sure, when testing this software category, that we selected solutions that help managers and employees track progress and manage tasks inside each platform. 

First, the software should have multiple project view options available for employees to stay on top of tasks and project work. The more ways to visualize project workflows, the better the likelihood that nothing gets overlooked.

Project portfolios let you see all your active projects from one place. It’s like watching from the box seats—you have the full view of the game and all the players. This helps you analyze quickly what’s working and what’s not on a macro level. 

Alongside portfolios, dashboards help you view multiple metrics. Instead of getting a view of the work being done, you should be able to customize these to fit your key performance indicators. A good platform dashboard feature lets you add widgets and customize the look to give you a nice visual display of important statistics. 

Time tracking is often looked at as just a timesheet or tool for preventing overtime. But it’s a crucial part of managing remote workers, too, when a platform allows employees to start a timer or attach time logs to tasks. 

This can go beyond simply logging workers’ hours—it can help you see how long tasks take and set expectations based on that information, making project planning easier for you in the future. 

The last feature we looked into is checklists. Many times, projects are so big they can be paralyzing. We wanted to make sure there was a way for you to break work down into smaller pieces without affecting or cluttering up your overall projects. 

We scored this in two different ways. Project views were judged based on how many of list, table, calendar, and board (or Kanban) views were offered in each platform. Each one present scored a quarter of a point for a maximum of one. 

Then, we judged the rest by giving a whole point each for the existence of dashboards, time tracking, checklists, and portfolios (or, half a point if some aspects were present, but not to the level we’d like to see).

Now let’s move into how scheduling and planning looks for remote work software. 

The GPS of Remote Team Management (20%)

Good visibility isn’t the only thing to make it easier for managers to plan and schedule remote project work. We looked for key features that help chart a course to success in terms of projects and ongoing tasks of varying complexity.

The ability to set goals helps you monitor overarching objectives that may span multiple projects or involve multiple departments working together towards a common outcome. 

When it’s time to execute your goals, we feel the milestones feature is a great way for you to keep track of your results. They work by seeing how close or far from your end result you are, splitting big goals into important checkpoints. They can also be used to mark important dates for deliverables, work celebrations, and more. 

When you need tasks to happen in a specific order, the ability to set task dependencies is crucial. In other words, this lets you set which tasks are reliant on another task or tasks being completed first. 

For planning and scheduling longer, more complex projects, Gantt charts (sometimes known as a timeline view) let you immediately see overlaps, potential conflicts, dependencies, milestones, assignees and more. 

We also looked at the ability to create custom fields in each platform, which let you add unique information to tasks, forms, and other parts of the software. It helps you keep eyes on important information (especially details unique to your team or industry) in a structured way. 

Scoring here is straightforward, with each feature present scoring one point for a provider for a maximum of five. Surprisingly, one only provider scored over a three in this regard (and actually managed a perfect score).

We go into much more detail in each review above. 

Let’s finish up with how we scored usability.

Learning New Software Doesn’t Have to Suck (10%)

We’ve all started using a new software, and within the first five minutes have thought, “Oh boy, this is going to be tough.” 

We know you don’t want software that makes you feel lost just by using it. So we focused on helping you find software that is easy to learn, set up, navigate, and use every day. 

To do this, we break down how easy or challenging it is to get things initially set up in the best way for your team. Our reviews cover the introductory materials provided, including guides and videos to help streamline your first walk through the software.

Most users want to divide their remote work platform into spaces, folders, tasks, and subtasks, so we tested the depth of each piece of software’s hierarchy. That lets you create tiers to organize work in the best possible way. 

With teams scattered around the globe, having support for multiple languages matters. You want a software that doesn’t leave your international users stuck using English if they’re more fluent in another tongue. 

Markdown language is a convenient tool we looked for that helps you format text in task cards and other views in a way that’s easier to read and understand. You may not realize it, but a lot of project-oriented software hasn’t made it easy (or possible) to bold text or insert bulleted lists until recently. 

We know how important automations are in software like this, because it can take busy work off your plate. There are a lot of ways to utilize automations in remote work software, so we looked at which providers offer them, what different types of automations options you have, and if you’re able to build your own.

We scored this category in a few different ways. The ease of getting started was judged on a one-to-five scale where one is the hardest to get the hang of and five is a breeze.

Hierarchy was scored based on how many tiers of organization a platform offers out of five. Language availability and automations were scored similarly, with the tool with the most options getting a five and descending from there.

Last, providers with no support for markdown language scored a one in that regard. Those that offer it scored either four for partial support or five for full-featured markdown language.

As you can see we took a fine tooth comb to this section. Having the confidence that your team will use the software because it’s simple to learn is a huge win. And the extras like automations or a deep hierarchy helps your team use the platform to its fullest potential without headaches.

ClickUp logo

ClickUp

Best for Most

Get a bevy of project management and collaboration features for very little cost with ClickUp. Sporting the most adaptable project views and planning tools, your team can master any project no matter how spread out they may be.

Summary

The world of work today requires a plan for getting things done without an office space. Collaboration, project work organization, and delivering quality outcomes has to happen from anywhere your workers may be.

We think ClickUp is a great remote work software option for just about anybody. They check off so many boxes on just their entry-level plan that we’re confident they’ll have a solution for you, no matter your size, scope, or focus.

But each of the options on our list has compelling virtues. Keep our reviews and methodology handy when making your final decision on remote work software. We’ve done the work so you can make your choice with the utmost confidence.


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