Toggl Plan markets itself as “simple team project planning software”—not project management software. So what does that description mean, and is Toggl Plan the right tool for you and your team? This app helps small teams plan, manage, and track work using timeline views and board views (kanban style). In other words, it’s a collaboration app in which everyone on a team writes down the tasks they’re planning to do or receives assignments for tasks they should do, giving greater transparency into the progress of work. Toggl Plan is more lightweight than most project management software, but it may offer the right balance of simplicity and work management tools for some small teams, especially those who already use the related time tracking app Toggl Track. Toggl Plan is a solid service, but it doesn’t beat out our Editors’ Choice winner for work-management apps, Asana.
How Much Does Toggl Plan Cost?
Toggl Plan is available in three tiers of service: Solo (free), Team ($9 per person per month), and Business ($15 per person per month). You get a 10% discount on paid plans if you pay annually instead of monthly. You can get a 14-day trial of Toggl Plan Business, no credit or debit card required.
The free Solo plan is for solo workers who just want to track and manage their own projects. There’s no limit on the number of tasks, milestones, or plan timelines (i.e., projects) you can create with this plan, although it doesn’t come with any team or collaboration features. You also don’t get recurring tasks, integration with Toggl Track for time tracking, custom colors, and a few other features that could be of use to someone working alone. Uploaded files are limited to 10MB in the free plan.
The Team plan gives you everything in Solo, plus everything we mentioned as missing from Solo. The file upload limit increases to 100MB with this plan.
The Business plan includes everything in Team, plus the ability to manage Workplace guests, meaning you can grant and revoke access to your account to guest users. Upon request, you can implement single sign-on for your team. You also get priority support and the ability to export data to CSV files.
How Do Toggl Plan’s Prices Compare?
At $9–$15 per person per month, Toggl Plan’s prices are in line with the market rate for work management tools as well as project management apps aimed at small to medium-sized businesses.
Asana has a generous free plan that you can use collaboratively. Its paid plans start at $13.49 per person per month, with a discount for paying annually.
Trello is another work-management app, and it’s super intuitive to use. Like Asana, it has a generous free version and plans from $6–$12.50 per person per month that are suitable for small, medium, and even fairly large businesses.
Paymo reaches out to a similar market as Toggl Plan, but Paymo is a proper project management app. It includes billing and invoicing and runs $11.95–$18.95 per person per month for its Small Office and Business plans, respectively.
The Editors’ Choice winner for budget picks among project management software is Zoho Projects. It costs as little as $3 per person per month, and no more than $6 per person per month.
Getting Started With Toggl Plan
You use Toggl Plan primarily as a web app. It’s fast and responsive. The service offers Android and iOS apps as well.
You can create an account with an email address and password. As mentioned, you don’t need to enter the details of a credit or debit card to get a free trial with a paid account.
Once you have an account set up, you can begin by inviting your colleagues to join you or by diving straight into planning tasks. You can invite more people at any time.
The first time you use Toggl Plan, a series of pop-up tutorials appear. I found these to be confusing enough during testing to be unhelpful overall. A better approach is to watch a few short video tutorials that Toggl Plan offers on its YouTube channel or to learn by trial and error.
It’s worth noting that Toggl Plan, while related to Toggl Track is a different piece of software altogether. The two apps share branding but are run by two related yet independent companies. (There’s a third product under the same branding, hiring app Toggl Hire, which is also run independently.) Toggl Plan can integrate quite smoothly with Toggl Track, but they’re separate tools.
Getting Down to Work
To set up Toggl Plan to manage your work, you have to understand the various views you can see. A left rail shows Teams and Plans. Teams is a view that shows a list of all the people who are on a team and what tasks are assigned to them. In other words, across the top of the interface (or what would be the X axis) you see a list of dates, and along the Y axis you see each team member. In this view, you see all the tasks assigned to each person regardless of what project that task belongs to. In more robust project management apps, this view of all work across all projects is sometimes restricted to project managers and other management-level users.
Plans are essentially projects or groups of tasks by theme. When managing tasks in a Plan, you have two view options: Timeline and Board. Asana also offers these same views.
Timeline and Board Views
The Timeline view of the Plan shows the same list of dates across the top that you see in the Team view. The Y axis, however, is for Segments. You can think of Segments as being either phases or types of work. For example, let’s say you create a Plan to organize all the work that goes into writing and sending an email newsletter. You might create a Segment for tracking tasks related to writing and editing the letter and a different Segment for managing when the newsletter is sent out, plus everything else related to distribution.
The Board view of the Plan shows a kanban-style board with tasks appearing as cards you can drag and drop around the board. By default, the columns you get in this view are To-Do, In Progress, Done, and Blocked. You can customize them to be whatever you want. You can also add more columns.
Your Plans can be color-coded, a common feature in work-management and project-management apps. Colors make it easier to parse who’s working on what when you look at the Team view.
Tools and Features
When you create a task in Toggl Plan, you can add plenty of detail, including estimates for how long the work should take, tags, a checklist (subtasks), and so forth. You can assign multiple people to one task, and there’s room to add comments on any task. During testing, I found it was a little too easy to create an erroneous entry for tags from within the task pane. That area of the interface is cramped. Selecting the option to edit a tag requires very precise mousing, if, for example, you want to change the tag’s color.
To create a task, there’s a +Add Task button in the upper right. You can click and drag your cursor horizontally across the timeline to make a new task that spans those dates. This second method is better than the first because the task pane that opens when using the +Add Task button is so large it blocks you from viewing the rest of the timeline. If you want to schedule the task for the appropriate days based on when other tasks are scheduled, you need to be able to see them on the timeline.
Once you create a task and it’s on the Timeline, you can adjust its dates by dragging and dropping it or dragging one of its edges to make the total amount of time longer or shorter. That’s excessive work, though. You ought to be able to see the Timeline clearly when adding a new task in the +Add Task pane.
Hitting Your Milestones
Milestones are completely different from tasks not only in their function but also their display. To add a milestone, you must click on the appropriate date in the Timeline view, which is highly unintuitive. The milestone then shows up as a vertical line on the Timeline.
A line is fine for indicating when one phase of a project ends, but it seems insufficient if you mark milestones with a related task or event, like a major meeting—in which case you’d have to create a task to indicate the meeting on top of marking the milestone.
Many project management apps handle milestones by making them look similar to tasks on the project timeline, but turning them into a diamond or another shape instead of the standard rectangle to help them stand out.
No Task Dependencies Here
As mentioned, there are no task dependencies in Toggl Plan, which seriously inhibits a team’s ability to use workflows effectively. It makes managing certain kinds of work impossible. Let’s say you have work where task A must be done before task B. Imagine, for example, your team is making a cake. Task A is baking the cake and task B is decorating it. Task B simply cannot happen until task A is done.
If you were to manage this type of work in Toggl Plan, the person doing task B has to watch for updates on task A to know when it’s done. In other project management apps, you could mark a dependency between tasks A and B, and then the system would automatically update the start time and due date of task B if task A is running late.
Using Toggl Plan, if you were responsible for task B, the best you could do is become a follower of task A so that you would receive a notification when it was done. That means you’d have to figure out all your task dependencies and manually add yourself as a follower of those tasks.
For certain kinds of work with a lot of dependencies, you really need task dependencies as a built-in feature to stay up to date on the status of the whole project. If it’s a deal-breaker for you, don’t use Toggl Plan.
Toggling Your Collaboration
The main way people collaborate using Toggl Plan is by creating transparency. Everyone logs into the same system to track their tasks, update progress on tasks, receive assignments from others, and stay informed about other work people are doing. You can also mark when you will be unavailable—taking time off work, for example. In the settings you can choose the country where you live and have the schedule indicate national holidays for your location. The options don’t cover every country, but many are included.
You can also use Toggl Plan to schedule work, meaning assigning tasks to available workers. You can pull up a view of all unassigned tasks, look at the schedule, and dole out the work to people who have availability. Each person on your team can set the number of hours per day they’re available. What isn’t offered is a way to look up who’s available on certain dates and narrow down the options to people with a particular skill.
If you’re managing a large team, you might not know off the top of your head who has the right skills to do a certain task. With small teams where you know people well and can assess the schedule at a glance, it’s not a problem. With very large teams, however, a project manager will want a system that can do a lot of this work for them. LiquidPlanner, an Editors’ Choice winner, is one example of a robust project management app that offers this level of resource management.
You can collaborate with people outside your team as well by sharing a view of a timeline in a read-only fashion. For example, if you want to give a client a peek at all the tasks on your timeline, you can generate a view of the timeline the client cannot edit or change. An option lets you customize this view to include milestones or not. The person viewing the timeline can open tasks to see details inside them, but because it’s a read-only view, they cannot edit or add anything.
It’s possible to cut off access to a shared link, but doing so isn’t intuitive. Instead of setting a time limit when the link should expire or manually deactivating links, you have to generate a new link for the same timeline, which wipes out the old one.
App Integrations
Toggl Plan is light on integrations overall. The most significant integration is with Toggl Track. This app lets you track and record the amount of time you spend working on tasks without leaving the Toggl Plan interface. If you right-click on a task, there’s an option to start recording time.
A simple calendar integration allows you to see assignments from Toggl Plan appear in another calendar, such as Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or for paid plans, Outlook Calendar.
There’s a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that lets you quickly create a task, no matter what website you’re on. In addition, the browser extension has direct integration options with Asana, Bitbucket, Jira, Github, Podio, and Trello, meaning when you’re logged into one of those apps and you open a task or a ticket, a button for Toggl Plan will appear inside it and offer to duplicate some of the details into a Toggl Plan task. The tasks are not linked or synced with one another, however, so if you make changes to one task, they don’t show up in the duplicated task.
You can integrate directly with Slack, too, to receive notifications about activity from Toggl Plan or get a daily list of tasks assigned to you. A developer API lets your team make different custom integrations with Slack.
Compared with many other project management apps, this list of integrations is short. There are no options for integrating with billing and invoicing or budgeting software, for example, much less office suites or other commonly used business tools.
A Lightweight Task Management App for Small Teams
Toggl Plan might be a fine tool for managing tasks if you have a small team, know all your colleagues personally, and don’t need help managing dependencies among tasks. Overall, we find Editors’ Choice winner Asana better for this use case. Asana has grown in recent years to be both a work management app and a project management app, depending on how you use it. Asana’s flexibility is hard to beat. If you’re already ausing Toggl Track, however, and want a work-management tool that integrates with it seamlessly, then Toggl Plan might be a fine option.
