TeamGantt may our favorite project management app for viewing and editing a project in a Gantt chart, a type of bar chart that’s used to track progress on all the part of project simultaneously in a way that shows dependencies between tasks. TeamGantt is a top project management apps because it’s so easy to use, even if you don’t have experience working with Gantt charts. It’s intuitive and well designed, taking mere minutes to set up and maybe an hour to really get rolling. There’s still room for improvement, however, in its communication tools and reports. It also doesn’t offer anything in the way of budgeting or invoicing. Still, for small or medium-sized teams that need project management software that’s dead simple to learn and use, TeamGantt is one of the best you’ll find.
Among project management apps, PCMag has identified three Editors’ Choices winners. One is LiquidPlanner, which is best for large organizations that manage a lot of people and projects at once. It has a wealth of features and reporting tools, as well as support for other apps and services. The other two, Zoho Projects and Teamwork (formerly called Teamwork Projects), are our picks for low-cost and mid-tier options, respectively, and are best for small and medium-sized teams.
What Is a Gantt Chart?
Most project management apps offer Gantt charts, and, as you’d expect, they’re prominently featured in a product called TeamGantt. If you’re unfamiliar with them, Gantt charts are charts that represent tasks on a timeline. They help project managers and project teams see how long each task will take, which tasks will be done at the same time as others, and which tasks must wait until preceding tasks are finished before they can start.
These charts make it easy to see task due dates, how much time is needed for each task, task dependencies, as well as how much time is needed for the whole project. Additionally, if some tasks are running late, anyone looking at the Gantt chart will know what other tasks will be affected by the delay. For more on Gantt charts, you can read my 5 simple tips for getting started with Gantt charts.
Although TeamGantt excels at Gantt charts, they are not the only option for viewing projects and work in the app. You can also view lists of tasks or a calendar view; and there’s a new feature in beta for boards, which are essentially kanban boards.
How Much Does TeamGantt Cost?
TeamGantt offers four tiers of service: Free, Standard Team, Advanced Team, and Enterprise. A Free account supports up to three members and lets you manage just one project. You get all the most important project management features, but you don’t get time tracking, time estimates, an undo button, custom project templates, or baselines, which let you compare the original project timeline to the actual one as it plays out. You also miss out on a few other features.
For paid plans, TeamGantt uses sliding scale pricing. It starts at $24.95 per month for one person on the Standard Team plan, and each additional person costs about $9.95 per month more. For the Advanced Team, it starts at $29.95 per month for one person and costs an additional $14.95 per person per month. A group of 10 costs $114.50 per month for Standard Team and $164.50 per month for Advanced Team. There’s a price calculator on TeamGantt’s site. For enterprise plans, you have to contact the company for a quote.
One big difference separates the Standard and Advanced Team plans: time-tracking. With the Advanced Team plan, everyone on the team can track the hours of work they put into each task with a timer or through manual entry. An early detection system lets you know if the project is in danger of missing deadlines. Additionally, with an Advanced Team plan you can generate reports based on time tracked and make other decisions related to how many hours employees are estimated to work. The Standard plan doesn’t have any of these tools.
How Do TeamGantt’s Prices Compare?
Compared with other services, TeamGantt’s prices are somewhere in the middle. It’s difficult to evaluate costs in this category because project management services calculate their prices differently. When you break it down, however, a ballpark figure for mid-tier services is anywhere from about $20-$40 per person per month. Among the mid-tier options, you often have to see what special tools and services, if any, the app offers to differentiate itself from others.
For example, ProofHub falls into the mid-tier category, and it specializes in giving teams tools for sharing, discussing, and approving visual materials. Paymo is another mid-tier service with excellent tools for time-tracking, budgeting, and invoicing. TeamGantt’s advantage is in its ease of use and at the highest account levels, its time-tracking.
Mid-tier project management apps are good for mid-sized to large businesses and growing teams. Small businesses, however, don’t have to spend nearly as much for a good tool, with options falling into the range of $5-$12 per person per month. At the highest end, very large organizations managing hundreds of projects will likely end up paying $45 per person per month or more.
Getting Started With TeamGantt
Setting up TeamGantt is exceptionally easy. The site is self-explanatory, with sample content provided, helpful video tutorials, and general guidance as you dive into the app. Although there are more powerful Gantt-driven project management tools—LiquidPlanner comes to mind—they can take weeks to set up, learn to use, and get rolling. TeamGantt takes minutes.
You can start a new project from scratch, work from a template, or upload a CSV file. After you’ve used TeamGantt a bit, you also see an option to duplicate one of your own projects. During the project-creation process, you also select which days of the week your team considers workdays.
Next, invite collaborators to help you manage and complete your projects. When you invite new members, you designate a permission level for each of them. Advanced Users can access projects to which they’ve been invited, and they can create new projects for the team. A Basic User can access only their own projects. Guest Users can view only one active project at a time with read-only permission. You can assign colors to team members, too, making your Gantt charts even more visually informative.
In addition to adding people, TeamGantt lets you add resources, such as teams, so that you can assign a task to the programming department rather than choose an individual. Resources can also be color-coded.
Poking around the TeamGantt website, the ease with which anyone can figure out what to do is impressive. The app suggests tutorials and advice quickly at the time you might need it. For example, if you’re trying to figure out how to create dependencies among tasks, a link to a video tutorial on this very subject appears right in front of your eyes. The suggestions are not intrusive, either. With time, you see less of them.
Once your project is populated with assignments and deadlines, a table shows up below the Gantt chart showing how many tasks are assigned to your various team members and resources each day. This table helps project managers and team leads keep an eye out for potential bottlenecks and burnout before they occur.
Features and Interface
Creating tasks and adding details to them, such as due dates and assignees, is simple. The interface supports drag-and-drop functionality, and it’s responsive. A blend of cheery colors and an appropriate amount of white space makes the app easy on the eyes. It’s completely unintimidating, especially compared with LiquidPlanner, which looks serious and buttoned-up.
In addition to creating a single task, you can create groups of tasks, subgroups (essentially subtasks), and milestones. You can collapse groups of tasks to streamline the Gantt chart view when you need to.
Gantt charts are your primary view in TeamGantt, and they are interactive and editable. You can change due dates, descriptions, dependencies, and other task details from the Gantt view. It’s just as easy to reassign tasks, add comments, track time spent on the task, and so forth. You can edit practically anything from the Gantt chart view.
TeamGantt also has a neat “shake” feature that fixes violations in dependent tasks. Say, for example, you have a series of dependencies, and one of the tasks was scheduled out of order. You can grab the topmost task in the chain and jiggle your cursor. All the following tasks automatically reschedule in the proper order.
Time Tracking and Reports
TeamGantt has time tracking tools in its Advanced and Enterprise versions. Team members get two ways to track how much time they spend on each task.
One is an in-app timer. Before the timer launches, you pick a task that’s currently available to you, meaning it’s on your task schedule and it’s available to start according to any scheduled start dates or task dependencies. For example, if today is Thursday and you have a task that is supposed to start Friday, you won’t be able to launch the timer for it today. You run the timer while you work. It keeps track of the minutes and hours. When you’re done, the recorded time gets added to the selected task.
The second method is manual entry. This type of input isn’t prohibited in any way, so you can enter the amount of time you spent working on a task even if it’s out of order or technically too early to start.
TeamGantt includes reports. Compared with some project management apps, they are fairly rudimentary but more useful at the Advanced Team and Enterprise account level where you can run reports of time worked. You can create a custom report using three variables: people, project, and time. For example, you can spit out a report of the number of hours Carolyn worked this week. Paid accounts also have baseline views/reports, which show you how far off schedule your team is compared to where you thought you expected to be.
Another report you can run is Project Health, which is designed for project managers or whoever oversees projects. It’s more of a dashboard view than a report, really, because it shows how close to completion each project is. It also shows three statuses and the number of tasks for each one: Ok (on track to meet deadlines), Behind (behind schedule), and Overdue (already missed deadlines).
There’s also a Workloads report, which is essentially a resource management tool. It shows how many tasks are assigned to a particular person or resource, like a department or team. This report appears on a calendar view with color coding to show any person or resource that’s overloaded.
If you need a project management tool with more reporting features, LiquidPlanner is strong in this area. It offers a rich array of reports and other analytics, including roll-up reports (hours logged and hours remaining), Change Histories, and Date Drifts (aka Slip Reports).
Collaboration
TeamGantt has a lot of the collaboration tools you’d expect to see in a project management app, but not all, and some work better than others.
You can comment on any task and use @ symbols to direct a comment at a particular team member. There aren’t any options for audio tones or otherwise customizing notifications, however. It’s easy to miss important messages when they first arrive because you don’t get much more than a red dot to indicate that there are new comments to review. We do like that inside every comment section for each task, managers have a quick link to request an update on the task.
Overall, tracking where discussions are taking place becomes difficult the more discussions there are. Each one is attached to a task, and you have to scroll up to the beginning of the discussion to see which task it is. Moreover, there isn’t a central place to have team-level discussions or communicate effectively with the entire organization. Some other project management apps have discussion boards at the project level or a spot to put company-wide announcements.
That said, with the rise of team messaging apps, such as Slack, plenty of co-workers already have a place for real-time communication with adequately customized notifications.
If your team uses Slack or another messaging app, you might want to make sure you choose a project management app that can integrate with it. Here’s how such an integration might play out: A colleague asks you via Slack if you’ve remembered to do X. If the apps integrate, you can turn that Slack message into a task in your project management app. TeamGantt offers integration with Slack and Trello, but not other apps. That means you can’t connect to billing and invoicing software, for example, which a lot of project management apps for small to mid-sized businesses offer. TeamGantt does have an open API if your team wants to create custom integrations.
In TeamGantt you can upload documents for collaboration and discuss them in the discussion areas. What you cannot do is mark them up in the app with arrows and circles to show where you are making your comment. Nor can you look at the file and add comments about it from a single window because when you open an uploaded file, it appears in a new browser window without any tools. For many teams, that may be fine, but it’s less than ideal when your team collaborates heavily on visual materials.
If you’re looking for that sort of feature, you might consider buying proofing software instead. Or there are a few project management apps that have slightly more advanced proofing tools, including ProofHub, Mavenlink, and Volerro.
TeamGantt Makes Gantt Charts Easy
TeamGantt hits all the high notes in making Gantt charts accessible, easy to understand, and fluid to work with. The charts contain a rich amount of detail without being cumbersome or intimidating. TeamGantt is clearly one of the best project management apps you can find, and I recommend it for small to mid-sized teams that need to get moving quickly with a reliable project management app. Bear in mind that TeamGantt doesn’t have invoicing and billing tools, nor rich reports. For many teams, however, everything that it does offer is more than adequate.
If you need more reports and resource management tools, LiquidPlanner is the way to go. If TeamGantt sounds like it is overkill for your needs, take a look at Zoho Projects or Teamwork instead.
