Best Scrum Project Management Tools

After testing the top software with scrum management tools, they found monday.com to have the best range of features and customization options for scrum teams, including Agile project templates.

More so than any other competitor, monday.com can do a little bit of everything, and do it really well — whether that's setting up your project smoothly, visualizing data, managing complex workflows, or compiling and implementing post-project feedback. Plus, it has a free plan and 14-day free trial for you to test out, so you can easily decide if it's right for you without spending a cent.

At Tech.co, they put all of the products, services, and providers they write about through rigorous testing processes. Their team of researchers works in tandem with their writers to provide reviews and product ratings that are arrived at using carefully selected metrics and scoring criteria.

Just underneath this paragraph, we've created a table listing their top project management software providers and the scrum management tools they provide (don't worry — they discuss these all in detail too — just scroll on down).

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A great task management system due to strong customizability and support team, with a generous free trial.

A management tool with a complex functionality.

Slick, simple software with a powerful core, plus a genuinely usable free tier for individuals, and great value plans for teams.

A solid project management solution with an attractive free tier for small teams, as well as great automations that can help speed up workflows

All-around great software, thanks to ease of use and a scalable pricing scheme.

The providers we’ve chosen to include in this article were chosen because they performed extremely well when they tested them, as well as the fact they have all the right features to facilitate projects being carried out by scrum teams. These include:

There is software out there that provides an entirely scrum-specific experience, but the downside to these kinds of programs is that they offer a more limited remit of features. And with providers like Zoho Projects available for such low prices, it’s difficult to see what advantage dedicated scrum software has.

On top of this, because Agile methodologies (including scrum) are now so common across a variety of industries, cutting-edge project management software is now specifically designed to facilitate teams working within these frameworks.

Plus, there might be projects in the future that you’d like to organize around a different management methodology — or you may have teams within your business that want to use different frameworks at the same time. Investing in project management software now means you'll have a one-stop shop whether you want to manage scrum teams, run projects using a waterfall framework, or simply organize a little better!

Scrum tools on Free Plan? YesBest for? Collaboration and customization

Pros

Cons

Overall, monday.com is the best project management software we've reviewed — it has all the bells and whistles you could possibly need to manage a team utilizing a scrum framework, as well as other Agile methodologies like Waterfall.

monday.com is great for highly communicative teams that like to collaborate and is packed full of features to make this process as smooth as possible. The customization options are more numerous than almost all its competitors offer.

monday.com's main advantage is that there isn't really any area of project management that it struggles with or lags behind on — whether it's setting up your project or compiling post-project feedback once it is completed. A jack of all trades — and one that's easy to use too — it'll be difficult to end up disappointed with monday.com.

monday.com doesn't have a very expansive free offering — which is perhaps its only downside. However, it does have a 14-day free trial so you'll be able to take its fully-featured packages for a spin before you hand over any hard-earned cash. This will let you try out all the scrum management tools included in the software too.

With monday.com, it's really easy to plan in sprints and the provider offers a number of Agile project templates, which illustrates how well designed it is for scrum management. monday.com's project progress tracking tools will allow you to keep track of how individual team members are getting on with their project duties, monitor your product backlog, and focus on Kaizen (continuous improvement), which is one of the key principles of scrum — something progress data is essential for.

Quite importantly, monday.com also facilitates customer collaboration and feedback and has a read-only feature that project stakeholders could easily use to view your project. You'll also have the ability to report and track bugs in the product, which is a particularly useful feature for software development teams for which Agile methodologies were originally designed.

monday.com has a limited plan that won't cost you anything. You'll be able to plan a perfectly good project with it (there are Kanban boards, widget builders, custom fields, and more) but there's a maximum of two users allowed, which makes it unsuitable for most scrum teams working on software or other projects. You'll also be able to access agile project templates on the free plan.

monday.com's Basic Plan is available for $9/user/month (billed annually). This plan doesn't set any user limits, so the collaboration tools really come into a world of their own and are incredibly useful if you're a highly communicative scrum team that likes to regularly update each other on project progress. You'll also get 10 times the storage you'll have available on the free plan (500MB) if you go for the Basic Plan (5GB).

Next up is the Standard Plan, available for ($12/user/month, billed annually) Included is absolutely everything you'll get on the Basic Plan, but with some nice extra add-ons. Guest Access, for instance, will allow you to bring in other people who aren't necessarily part of the core team but have a stake in the project nonetheless. This is the first plan Gantt charts are available on, so if you want software with Gantt charts for your scrum team, then this is the plan to go for. There's also the Pro plan ($20 user/month, billed annually), which has resource management tools, features you can use to manage budgets, and a custom chart builder.

monday.com does provide Enterprise Plans as an option for large businesses with hundreds or even thousands of employees, with enlarged storage space and onboarding assistance. Apart from that, it's much the same as the Pro Plan.

Scrum tools on Free Plan? YesBest for? Project templates & Scrum board

Pros

Cons

Wrike is one of the project management programs in this article that advertises itself as a specifically Agile project management program — so it has dedicated features you'll find useful if you're working within or leading a scrum team.

Wrike is packed full of useful task management features, including Gantt Charts and Kanban boards, as well as a useful spreadsheet-type view that simplifies the process of making changes to projects. This is particularly effective in the context of task reallocation because it cuts out a lot of menu diving that other competitors often require.

Just like monday.com, Wrike has Agile project templates available on its free plan, as well as all of its paid plans (bar the marketing teams plans), including one of the best scrum boards available in the project management space. With 400+ tools to integrate with too, you'll save time during sprints.

There's also a variety of task management tools to use to organize your project, and custom charts and widgets to display data and track the progress of the current sprint. Wrike has a good number of preset options available for you to use instead if you prefer (and this is slightly easier).

On Wrike's paid plans, you'll get access to resource management features that can help you understand what and when you should assign things based on the availability and skills of each team member.

The mixture of guest access is available on all plans and collaboration features such as dashboards and automatic status reports will ensure project stakeholders are always kept in the loop. This is also useful for scrum masters who like to have the most updated project progress info readily available for all the team.

First off, Wrike has two plans targeted at professional sales and marketing teams respectively, but as these do not include Agile project templates. we'll leave them alone for now. Both plans will require you to contact Wrike for a pricing quote.

Wrike has a free plan that doesn't set any project or user limits, which is quite unusual (in a good way) — and the storage space (2GB) is the same as the Professional Plan, Wrike's cheapest paid plan. However, the free plan doesn't offer key features such as a Gantt chart and task dependencies (which let you link tasks together so one can't be started before another is finished).

The Professional Plan ($9.80 user/month) has both of these, as well as dashboards, custom widgets, and preset widgets. The Business Plan ($24.80 user/month), on the other hand, offers custom fields and custom workflows, lets you imprint your own brand on the workspace, and has other useful features including time-tracking, timesheets, user groups and permissions, file and video proofing.

There are also Enterprise and Pinnacle packages that are geared towards very large businesses, but both of these plans will require you to contact Wrike. They have increased storage, two-factor authentication options, and the capacity to create more automations (1,000 and 1,500 per user/month respectively) than any of Wrike's other plans.

Scrum Tools on Free Plan? YesBest for? Preset Charts for visualizing data

Pros

Cons

If being able to get help with troubleshooting is important to you, Teamwork is a fantastic option as it has live chat support available on all its plans, as well as the ability to phone or email Teamwork — something providers like monday.com and ClickUp don't provide.

Strangely, Teamwork didn't previously provide the capacity to create automation — but now, it's available on all its plans, including the free plan. All in all, Teamwork's free plan is pretty good compared to other free offerings from other project management software providers.

Teamwork, like monday.com & ClickUp, has scrum tools available. There are, for instance, Agile project templates allowed on every plan that Teamwork offers. There are dedicated templates for different scrum teams too, such as event planning templates, software implementation templates, and product launch templates, which other providers on this list don't offer.

There are also resource management features that Scrum teams will find handy when managing a product backlog (available on free plan but limited), although these are limited on Teamwork's Free and Deliver plans. There's also Time tracking available on all plans, something Wrike doesn't offer on its free or first paid plan.

Teamwork has excellent collaboration features, but it'll definitely lose marks from Scrum teams for not having a great mechanism for compiling post-project feedback. As you can tell, however, it does have other features Scrum teams will like, such as burndown charts.

Although Teamwork has a free plan, it's quite limited. There's a maximum project limit of just two, a user limit of five, and a storage capacity of just 100MB. However, if you're only completing one project with a small team — and you don't need access to things like a team messenger app and billing & invoicing features, it represents a strong option.

Teamwork also offers four paid plans — Starter Deliver, Grow, and Scale. the Starter plan ($5.99 per user, per month) will allow you to create 10 projects and has an automation limit of 500 actions per month. The storage is ramped up to 50GB as well, and there are more customer support options, including phone support.

Deliver ($9.99 per user, per month) has a project limit of 300 and there's no limit to how many users you can have working on the same project. You'll have 100GB of storage to play with and a Guest access function (so stakeholders will be able to view the project). The Grow Plan ($17.99 per user, per month) offers burndown charts — one of the key components of the methodologies like Scrum — as well as integration with Hubspot CRM and budget management features.

Scale is Teamwork's final plan, and you'll need to contact them for a quote on prices (much like Wrike and monday.com's enterprise plans). This plan sets no limit to how many projects you can make (the Gow package allows up to 600) and is only really appropriate for extremely large businesses that will be running multiple projects all at the same time. 

Scrum tools on Free Plan? YesBest for? Fully featured Free Plan

Pros

Cons

ClickUp is a solid project management software choice if you're looking for a provider that has a wide variety of features that can accommodate scrum teams. Although there's a five-project limit on ClickUp's free plan – it's still one of the best free plans on offer for scrum management.

ClickUp does limit how many times you can ‘use' certain features, but these are often features that aren't included on other free plans. monday.com doesn't offer resource management features on its free plan, whereas ClickUp does (but you can only use it 100 times). The same can be said or Wrike's free plan and project dashboards, which are available with ClickUp and you won't have to pay anything.

However, ClickUp's Unlimited plan – which removes those few limits placed on features on the free plan – is just $7 per user, per month so undercuts most other paid project management software, including all of monday.com's paid plans.

Another big plus in ClickUp's favor is minimal menu-diving. As project management software goes, setting up is pretty speedy — so if you want your scrum team off and flying as quickly as possible, ClickUp's a good shout.  ClickUp unfortunately doesn't have any budget management features or feasible workarounds, whereas other providers like Teamwork do offer these features (albeit on the most expensive plans).

ClickUp has all the contemporary scrum management tools you'll need to properly organize and track the progress of your scrum team. For instance, Agile project templates will mean you won't have to shoehorn your project framework into a non-Agile template.

ClickUp has a list of additional features you can ‘add' to your project management space called Clickapps. One of these is a Clickapp called Sprints, which is available for get in all places and will allow you to create springs as Lists to track the progress of your production cycle. Additionally, Sprint Automations and Sprint Dashboard Widgets are available on the Business Plan and upwards.

ClickUp does lose marks in the context of scrum management for having loads of useful features on its free plan, but no burndown charts are available — You'll have to go for one of ClickUp's paid plans if you'd like to track project progress like a true scrum master.

ClickUp's Free plan offers round-the-clock customer support, although as was mentioned above, this comes with some limitations on features like Gantt Charts and Dashboards. The Unlimited Plan ($7 per user, per month)  is the initial paid plan that has no ceiling on the amount of time you can use certain features (as well as those handy burndown charts that aren't listed on the free plan).

ClickUp's pricier offerings include the Business Plan ($12 per user, per month), which has dashboard functionality you don't get on the Unlimited plan plus the increased capacity to create automations (10,000 compared to 1,000) on the Unlimited plan. None of ClickUp's plans have any storage limits so the typical increase here you may find with others isn't present.

The Enterprise will only really suit the largest of businesses — it's effectively the Business Plus plan but with additional onboarding assistance so you won't run into any issues whilst setting up.

Scrum tools on Free Plan? NoBest for? Value for money

Pros

Cons

Zoho's suite of business software is an excellent collection of programs to become acquainted with because they've got one for almost everything. There's a Zoho service for CRM, invoices, email,  recruitment software, and much, much more.

Zoho Projects is usually the program we'd recommend for project management, but Zoho now has a dedicated scrum team management platform called Zoho Sprints — and you can't say many other competitors have dedicated software for a specific project management methodology.

Zoho Projects will be best suited to businesses that want to deploy waterfall methodologies or just want a general organizing program for their projects. Zoho sprints, on the other hand, would be more suited to scrum teams because it's built for the short, iterative bursts of work that scrum teams perform.

Although Zoho Projects can't easily be used to facilitate the Scrum framework, it's got a lot of additional features that are helpful for managing projects of all kinds. It's got two really useful automation builders and a good range of collaboration features, as well as a dedicated budgeting feature that other providers do not offer.

Zoho Sprints has basically everything you need for managing a scrum team. This includes backlog management, release management, scrum board, Work in Progress (WIP) limits, Agile reports, features that facilitate scrum meetings, a project and sprint dashboard, client and vendor portal, custom roles and profiles, and various other useful features.

Zoho Projects has a great free plan — and a number of useful collaboration features that aren't hard to get to grips with. However, as with most free plans, it is quite limited — in the sense that you won't be able to work on a project with any more than three people.

The Premium package ($5 per user, per month) ups the user limit to 50, so this will be suitable for most teams. Guest access is available on this plan (but it will cost you extra per guest) so stakeholders and other parties involved can view the project progress. The Enterprise package ($10 per user, per month) is the final Zoho Projects plan and offers much the same as the Premium package but with no user limit and custom fields.

Zoho Sprints is $5 per user per month for any company looking to purchase up to 100 seats. 101-300 users will bring that price per user down to $4.17, whereas 301-400 will bring it down to just $3.34. For larger businesses of 401-500 employees, it drops to just $2.50 each. Companies with more than 500 employees that need access to Zoho's Sprint software will have to contact Zoho directly for a customized quote.

Scrum tools on Free Plan? YesBest for? Large business & enterprises

Pros

Cons

Jira is a software program created by Atlassian, and there are few companies that understand Agile methods of managing workflows more than they do. To take one example, ‘tasks' are called ‘issues' — a nod to how Jira can — and is often — used for bug tracking.

Teams deploying the scrum framework will be right at home here, but Jira can also be applied to lots of other different types of teams, since it's quite an intuitive, flexible piece of software that doesn't exactly take long to use and subsequently master.

Although Jira doesn't necessarily excel in specific areas, it's more of an all-rounder that is particularly well suited to scrum teams. it'll be ideal for large businesses with a large number of ‘tasks' (or issues) to complete.

Jira was built with bug tracking in mind, so you can already see how useful it would be to a software development team working in sprints to produce updates. Once you create a Jira account, you'll be asked to select a template from the library — and there is a Scrum template located here for you to use. You can also choose a kanban board at this stage if you're deploying Scrumban over Kanban.

You can then create sprints in Jira, organize a sprint planning meeting, and set your scrum team off to do their work. Jira has a handy left-hand menu with sections for active sprints, backlog, reports, releases, and a scrum board.

One of Jira's big strengths in the context of Scrum is its Agile Coach page (on the Atlassian website) — it'll take you through every single basic and advanced aspect of scrums, from the first sprint planning meeting to using epics (Jira's version of what is called milestones in other project management software) in your backlog.

Jira has a pretty stellar free with useful charts and Widgets, however,  you've only got 2GB of storage to work with — although project limits are absent (unlike Zoho Projects). Jira's Standard plan doesn't have a whole load more to sing and dance about. However, it has much, much more storage — over 100 times as much storage, in fact — this is ideal if you're planning to upload a significant number of files and documents relating to the development of products or software.

Jira's premium plan unlocks resource management tools for you, which is great for managing the product backlog. This plan also allows you to create a lot of automations — 1,000 actions per user per month, to be exact. The Enterprise plan, on the other hand, has slightly better support options, including live chat and the ability to phone Atlassian for help. There are no limits set on storage or projects on this plan,

Project Management Software can Help

There are a variety of different ways organizing your team around scrum can help you save both time and subsequently money by improving efficiency and getting jobs done faster. It's an Agile framework, which effectively means it's designed to boost production without losing quality.

The whole point of the scrum methodology is to break tasks up into smaller iterations and enforce short time periods (called sprints) within which to complete them. The time-boxing element of scrum ensures maximum focus is given to a single task, and iterative planning means it is completed and rolled out before the next one starts.

As tasks are ordered by how much value they will bring to clients/customers/users, this ensures the most important aspects of a given project are prioritized. The result? Time is used as efficiently as it can be, and monetary investments are used to create maximum value immediately.

We take their impartial research and analysis seriously, so you can have complete confidence that we're giving you the clearest, most useful recommendations.

After conducting an initial exploration to identify the most relevant, popular, and established tools in the market, they put them through their paces with hands-on testing to see their real strengths and weaknesses. In this case, they put 14 project management systems to the test across 51 areas of investigation.

Based on years of market and user needs research, we've established a project management testing methodology that scores each product in five main categories and nine subcategories.

Usability — They assess a platform's user experience when completing basic project management tasks. They test how each project management tool fares when it comes to common tasks, such as resource and budget management, and get a feel for how easy it is to set up a project by navigating the various parts of the user interface.

Pricing — Affordability and value are essential factors to understanding whether you should invest in any software. They look at the various plans and base costs for each project management platform and dissect exactly what is offered at each level. For example, does a plan place certain limits on user accounts, features, projects, or other aspects of the software? Providers offering lots of features for lower costs will have better pricing scores than those that lock them away on higher-tier plans.

Customer Support — Because life isn't all smooth sailing, they assess the ways you can contact your project management software provider if something goes wrong. Providers offering 24/7 live support, as well as phone-based support and onboarding assistance, get the best scores. However, points are also awarded for useful knowledge bases that prove helpful for DIY troubleshooting.

Features — They assess the full feature set that each product provides, including 4 key subcategories of investigation which are:

Customer Score — Finally, they assess customer review scores to reflect the satisfaction of current users of each project management tool. An average rating is arrived at by combining users' exams from a variety of sources.

When it comes to calculating a product's final score, not all testing areas are weighted evenly, as they know some aspects matter more to their readers than others. For example, certain features are fundamental to a product's usability, while others are "nice to have." After hundreds of hours of testing, their process is complete, and the results should ensure you can find the best solution for your needs.

At Tech.co, they have a number of full time in-house researchers, who re-run this testing process regularly, to ensure their results remain reflective of the present day.

Learn more about their research.

Exploring the tenets of Scrum

Organizations looking to get started with agile software development often turn to Scrum as a place to start because of its simplicity. It is a framework for creating a development process but does not prescribe engineering practices. And, as Certified ScrumMaster Joseph Little put it, “That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”

Before putting Scrum into place in an organization, Little said it’s critical to understand the values and principles behind the steps, or you won’t get the desired result. It’s like dancing, he added: “If you’re not feeling the music, you can do the steps, but it won’t be pretty.”

The Scrum Alliance lists four core principles based on 2001’s Agile Manifesto:

1)    Individuals and interactions over processes and tools2)    Completed functionality over comprehensive documentation3)    Customer collaboration over contract negotiation4)    Responding to change over following a plan

Scrum itself is made up three roles, four ceremonies and three artifacts, according to the alliance.

The roles are product owner, ScrumMaster and team. The product owner is responsible for the business value of the project. The ScrumMaster ensures the team is functional and productive. The team self-organizes to get the work done.

The ceremonies are:

1)    Sprint planning: The team meets with the product owner to prioritize the work to be delivered during a sprint2)    Daily scrum: The team meets each day to share struggles and progress3)    Sprint reviews: The team demonstrates to the product owner what it has completed during the sprint4)    Sprint retrospectives: The team looks for ways to Boost the product and process

The artifacts are the product backlog, the sprint backlog and the burndown chart.

The product backlog is a list of items that can be added or deleted from the project at any time. The backlog is prioritized, with highest-priority items worked on first. The lower-priority items are loosely defined but are revisited and refined as they work their way up the priority list.

The sprint backlog is the set of items from the product backlog that the team commits to completing during the timeframe of the sprint.

The burndown chart is an at-a-glance look at the work remaining in the overall project. Some organizations maintain two burndown charts: one for each sprint, and one for the overall project.

“The key is getting results: making customers’ lives better, making workers’ lives better and having more fun,” Little said. “It’s not a religious, dogmatic thing.”

Scrum Master

We’re looking for a Scrum Master to join their team! As a consultant, you will work at their client, a leader in financial services. Ideally, they are looking for someone with a solid background within the finance sector. You will have the opportunity to own the delivery of numerous Agile projects on an end-to-end basis in customer environments.

What you’ll be doing:

Qualification required:

Your expertise:

Johannesburg – Hybrid Work Model

Desired Skills:

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