8 Project Management Tools You Can Use for Your Personal Projects
It is all too easy for personal projects at home to quickly become a complicated mess. Most major corporations with multiple tasks across various projects normally employ a project management solution to keep things straight. There are numerous benefits you gain through these solutions at home as well.
Not only will it help you build up a portfolio and keep track of your various personal projects, but your familiarity with these pieces of software can also impress potential employers. There are a number of different options for at-home project management solutions, each with its own pros and cons.
Wrike is a highly versatile cloud-based platform designed to help teams or individuals organize their portfolios of projects. It puts a strong emphasis on visual design and project dashboards for data and progress visualization.
The visualization tools in Wrike offer both Kanban-style boards and Gantt charts to help track projects. These integrate with their advanced dashboard system to help you quickly and easily visualize progress across multiple tasks at once.
One of Wrike’s strongest features is its automation and integrations. Their system has native integrations with tons of different apps and sites, which allow you to build out a major professional portfolio across multiple tools.
Wrike offers a free tier that allows you to get started without the need to pay for their service. While it does lack some of its more complex team management features, it is perfect if you’re a lone developer who needs to manage projects at home.
Jira is potentially one of the most well-known project management tools on the market today. Atlassian’s software aims to offer a complete package to track multiple projects with your choice of developmental styles.
With tracking for everything from issues to repositories, it’s easy to see how this software has been so long-lived. If you are in need of a solution for personal projects, Jira’s free tier is one of its greatest advantages.
Jira has a free tier that offers you access for multiple users on both their standard project management software, and their documentation manager Confluence. Full-featured, and cloud-hosted, Jira has earned its reputation.
A newer competitor in the world of project management, Monday offers users a highly modern interface. With great project visualization tools, and an easy-to-use interface, Monday is quickly becoming a leader in the project management industry.
Monday offers you a fully free tier with full platform access. It contains plenty of features to manage multiple projects of variable types, and cloud hosting to help you get set up quickly. As an added bonus, their primary project has plenty of different modules to track repositories, handle CRM, and more.
If your projects grow large enough to require multiple users, you will need to upgrade to a higher tier. Monday charges a relatively low cost per user, so it is easy for you to integrate more people when the time comes.
A fully open-source solution to project management, Redmine has been around for a number of years. Redmine is completely free and tracks your projects with the style of your choice.
Redmine has a focus on software development, with a default setup designed to track branches and releases. There is considerable room for customization, however, and plenty of extensions that will let you track whatever projects you see fit.
The software itself is free of charge, however you will need to bring your own hosting to it. With a little bit of work, however, you can get Redmine to run on your local system. From there, the system is fully extensible. Redmine also comes with its own wiki system to handle documentation.
A fully managed, cloud-hosted, free-to-use solution to all your at-home project management needs, GitHub is most well-known as a software repository host. With its user-friendly online system, you can easily create versioned repositories for software, documentation, and databases that are quick and easy to access.
GitHub’s expansive free tier allows users to host a surprising amount of material. The only downside to the free tier is that projects hosted under the free tier are limited to public access and open-source licenses. For most private users, this won’t pose any major issues, however you should know it before you move any projects online.
Overall, GitHub is a great way to manage your personal projects and grow yourtechnical skills as a project manager. You can create projects of your own and even contribute to other people’s open-source projects.
6.ActiveCollab
ActiveCollab is another piece of software with an impressive track record. It has been around for more than a decade. It takes a more user-oriented approach to project management and includes tools like reports and timecards.
ActiveCollab allows you to track multiple tasks on multiple projects in both list and Kanban styles. It offers a free tier for up to three users with everything that you’ll need to manage your own projects at home.
If you plan to grow your projects at some point in the future, ActiveCollab is a fantasticproject management software for businessesas well. Additionally, some of the tools that they offer allow you to track resources simply and effectively.
Another well-known name in the world of project management, Asana, is a suite of tools that target user communication and collaboration. Asana provides you with functionality that can maximize communications between different teams at work on a single project.
While that might seem like it would make it a counterintuitive choice for personal projects, Asana works as well for individuals as it does for teams. Completely cloud hosted and with a number of visualization tools that allow you to work how you prefer, Asana can help you track multiple projects.
One of Asana’s nicest features for individual projects is its extensive free tier. The free tier provides you with unlimited tasks, projects, and up to 15 users, which makes it an excellent choice for limited-sized teams as well as large ones. Overall, Asana is a great tool to track project progress, and advance and achieve your personal career goals.
8.WorkOtter
Another older entry in the world of project management, WorkOtter, has been around for more than two decades. They offer a straightforward approach to project management and portfolio creation. Their software is designed to work for both big projects and individuals alike.
WorkOtter does offer a free tier for their software, however it is fairly limited. Their basic license, however, is quite affordable, and their software allows license levels to be mixed and matched for multiple users.
WorkOtter offers full project and portfolio management on a cloud platform. It handles multiple projects and can help users build and manage their own portfolios.
Using Project Management Tools at Home Can Be Beneficial
Using professional-level project management software at home can help to keep you organized and on track with personal projects that could otherwise become very complicated. With the number of available options offering free tiers of their software, there is little barrier to using one for your personal project.
Not only will it help you keep your own projects organized, but it is also a great way to show potential employers your skills with the types of management software they already use.
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