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Project management has become a rather hot topic within the realm of business. With good reason. With project management at your side, the workflow of your company can be made exponentially more efficient. Without project management? You know what happens. Chaos.
If that sounds like eventually you’d like to avoid, then a good project management tool is in your future.
If you happen to depend on WordPress and would love to add project management features to the platform, you’re in luck. You can could turn a basic WordPress deployment into a full-fledged project management tool with just a few simple-to-install plugins. Below are four of the best WordPress plugins for project management; even better, most of these plugins are free to use or at least have a free version.
SEE: Hiring kit: Project manager (TechRepublic Premium)
The 4 best project management WordPress plugins
WordPress Project Manager
WordPress Project Manager helps make project management and team collaboration quite simple, while offering plenty of advanced features such as milestones, file sharing, notifications, pusher integration, to-dos, task assignments, due dates, progress bars and comments.
With WP Project Manager, you can create multiple projects and view them all from a handy overview (Figure A). However, the free version of this tool only gives you the basics. It’s not until you upgrade to the Premium version that you can add a calendar, reporting tools and progress indicators.
The company behind WP Project Manager also offers other modules to expand the platform with recurring tasks, kanban boards, Gantt charts and more. But the best thing about WP Project Manager is that it’s user-friendly enough that anyone can get up to speed quickly.
Figure A
Image: Jack Wallen/TechRepublic. The WP Project Manager project overview in action.
The company behind WP Project Manager offers three different plans:
- Personal ($55/year) – All of the features in the free version plus one year of updates & support.
- Professional ($104/year) – Everything in the Personal plan, plus five domains, Gantt charts, invoicing, time tracker and ticket-based support.
- Business ($174/year) – Everything in Professional, plus 10 domains, kanban, WooCommerce integration, Stripe integration, recurring tasks and custom fields.
Project Panorama
Project Panorama takes a full visualization approach to project management so your teams can get a clear picture of project progress. Each team member gets their own dashboard for their assigned projects and tasks.
Project Panorama integrates into WordPress so well that it feels as though you are using a WordPress native feature instead of a third-party tool. You can create projects, assign them to clients, assign automatic progress and phase progress calculations, attach files and media, view kanban boards, use delay tracking, add subtasks and more.
Once you’ve created your project, you then publish it so all of your team members can view the progress (Figure B).
Figure B
Image: Jack Wallen/TechRepublic. Progress of a project as seen from the Project Panorama WordPress plugin.
Project Panorama offers four different paid plan options:
- Personal ($69/year) – Includes core functionality plus official free add-ons, email support and plugin updates.
- Agency ($99/year) – Includes everything in the Personal plan plus five sites.
- Enterprise ($129/year) – iIncludes everything in the Agency plan plus all future paid add-ons and unlimited sites.
- Lifetime ($299) – This one time payment includes everything in Enterprise without the yearly payment.
Business Manager
Business Manager is more than just project management. With this one-stop shop tool, you’ll add HR, CRM, ERP, document management and project management. And although it’s the project management feature that we want to focus on, it’s undeniable that having those extra features make Business Manager a real winner for those who use WordPress as their hub for getting things done.
Business Manager project management includes all the features you need, such as project assignment, special statuses, progress tracking and timelines, drag and drop kanban, notes and even file attachments.
The one thing to keep in mind with Business Manager is that projects are viewed not within published WordPress pages but within the add page or post page (Figure C). Also, to get the most out of Business Manager, you need to add Employees from within the Employees feature of the plugin in order to assign tasks to users.
Figure C
Image: Jack Wallen/TechRepublic. The drag and drop kanban is under the Tasks section.
Business Manager is completely free to use and doesn’t offer paid options.
Kanban for WordPress
If your only project management need is kanban, there’s a WordPress plugin made specifically for you. That plugin is aptly named Kanban for WordPress.
With this plugin, you can define your boards with built-in plugins to serve project management, editorial calendars, job applicants, sales pipeline, and basic or custom kanban boards. What I like the most about Kanban for WordPress is that it looks and functions exactly like a typical Kanban board (Figure D).
Figure D
Image: Jack Wallen/TechRepublic. Kanban for WordPress is a very effective project management tool you can add to WordPress.
You can also customize your statues (columns) and even set them to auto-archive.
Although Kanban Boards for WordPress might not have all the bells and whistles you’ll find in other kanban options, if you’re looking for a very simple kanban addition to your WordPress site, you cannot go wrong with this free add-on.
There is also a Pro version of Kanban for WordPress which gives you more control over your workflow and adds tasks comments, advanced user management, task details & attachments, notifications, task colors and multiple boards. The Pro version costs $149/year or $499 for lifetime access.
How to add more project management plugins to WordPress
If you’re looking to add project management to your WordPress sites, any one of these plugins would be a great option. Whether you’re looking for basic kanban, or something to serve as a single-point-of-entry for management of projects, customers, clients and staff, you’ll find something here to meet your needs.
And if you find this list lacking what you need, make sure to check out other project management plugins for the WordPress platform.
For more WordPress training, have a look at these resources in the TechRepublic Academy:
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