Top Zoho Projects Alternatives & Competitors For 2024

Zoho Projects offers comprehensive solutions for its customers to tackle multiple business needs with ease. Users have full control of their projects as they can manage every stage of project progress, allocate resources, manage tasks, record timesheets and automate workflow processes for standardization. It offers an extensive knowledge base and fosters team collaboration for efficient project completion. However, its UI is clunky and difficult to use, it requires a steep learning curve to make optimal use of its full capabilities, comes with limited features in its basic version and offers sluggish customer support.

Jira is an agile-based project management platform that caters to a vast range of industries thanks to its all-in-one functionality, customization and flexibility. It allows users to fully customize workflows, issue types, fields and automations.After watching a few tutorials, I personally found it quite simple to create my own projects using the templates and modifying it to meet my needs. Although some of the automation actions and issues have some programming language involved, it’s not a huge roadblock and I created and tested multiple automations successfully.Task (or issue) management was on point, with multiple views, custom workflows, task assignment, in-card collaboration and time tracking and custom fields. It offered comprehensive (but not overly advanced) reports and a helpful summary dashboard.Sprints were intuitive and easy to execute, and I especially appreciated the drag-and-drop feature for planning. Some users mentioned a learning curve, and I would agree, as I relied on videos to guide me through some parts of the setup lest this test take weeks not days.Overall, Jira is a match made in heaven for agile enthusiasts and users who want a flexible, customizable project management platform and don’t mind getting into the weeds with learning courses and tutorials.

Quickbase is a user-friendly platform suited to help businesses optimize project management with custom applications, workflow automation and data-driven insights. Its no-code structure and intuitive interfaces to develop applications and reports quickly, even with minimal coding experience, are often mentioned by users. Users can centralize data from multiple sources and access advanced data insights on key project metrics to improve decision-making, save time and optimize resource allocation. Extensive customization options are another reviewer favorite, enabling users to build solutions tailored to their specific needs. Integration with third-party applications adds to Quickbase's appeal by enhancing productivity and streamlining operations. Additionally, reviewers consistently highlight the abundance of training resources and documentation available, including guides, video courses and a supportive user community. Despite high customization and ease-of-use, reviewers note a learning curve to optimize adoption and performance. Quickbase’s “reads”-based cost structures are also a barrier for smaller businesses with limited budgets. Overall, Quickbase is an excellent option for businesses who require extensive customization to optimize their project management, offering ease-of-use with data accessibility and custom apps for task management.

Trello includes robust workflow management and organizational capabilities for users to efficiently manage a project lifecycle. Its intuitive UI and clean dashboards simplify task delegation and monitoring, along with streamlining workflows. Its collaborative tools foster team communication and information sharing, while flexible integration capabilities help complete workflows. However, it lacks enterprise-grade project management abilities and is not suitable to handle large projects that require bulk movements. Additionally, the system provides limited features in its basic plan, and its mobile application lacks several functionalities offered by the desktop version.

Smartsheet is a cloud-based work management platform that helps users streamline and organize processes with a spreadsheet-esque interface, flexible templates, multiple views and team collaboration. Apart from the grid view, you can visualize projects using a Gantt chart, Kanban board, calendar view, card view or timeline view. No-code automations are another note-worthy feature, where you can build from templates or scratch.It streamlines project creation with templates suited to different industries and end goals, so you have a jumping-off point instead of going in blind. Team collaboration is another area where Smartsheet shines, with comments, conversations and file and sheet sharing (even with people outside your organization). It also offers a customizable dashboard view, although I did find some of the chart widgets a little tricky to work, without training.Highlights for me were definitely the familiarity of spreadsheet formatting (but with more views and automations), robust collaboration capabilities and guided explainers throughout the setup. However, user reviews noted limited filters and integrations, lags and expensive add-ons as downsides.Overall, Smartsheet is a great option for teams familiar with spreadsheets but are on the lookout for more visualization and collaboration, along with the budget to spend on advanced features.