Best Visual Project Management Tools in 2024

Project management tools are one of the most diverse IT categories in the market, and it encompasses hundreds (if not thousands) of project governance methodologies. The sudden emergence and rapid development of quality solutions forced developers to look for one distinct advantage that would take them out of the box, which is pretty much how they came across visual project management. In essence, they invested in thinking and self-initiative. 

Visual project management is by far the most advanced PM discipline, as its design rests on the particular idea of taking real-time analysis to the most functional and business-suitable level. Pipeline insight is where software tends to be most useful, which makes such online assets in the toolkit the best thing that ever happened to your company.

The problem, however, is that visual project managers can be either head-spinning or a chip on your shoulder, and choosing the first won’t always depend on you.

To choose the best Visual Project Management Tools for enterprises or SMBs, it is a good idea to sign up for the free trial plans or demo offered by leading visual project management software providers. The free trial period gives you enough time to check out the software’s features and understand how it can boost your employees’ productivity. You can start by registering for the free trials of programs that have received high SmartScore rankings in our visual project management software reviews, for instance, AtTask reviews.

Visual management tools highlight the importance of graphical representation of data, which makes it suitable for every project management subcategory, the same as any team/individual wishing to follow milestones, task hierarchies, WIP, etc.

To start, visual managers are ideal for traditional CEO Managers and teams, dealing with wide frameworks, and balancing risks between various projects at the same time. Gantts and burndown charts will prove critical to their need for dedicated, fully-enabled, and deep visualization of data compared to traditional methodologies and solutions.

The IT teams (CTOs, for instance) also find visual project management tools invaluable to their software procurement, together with the fact that they are always interested in upgrading features as much as possible, and to discover a tool which can respond to their complex development and demands, especially testing and bug-tracking.

Generally speaking, the best Visual Project Management tool will be welcomed by any agile team in a company, as long as the iterative management and collaboration require top marketing tasks to be performed without complex IT knowledge.

Moreover, it is also being employed by many remote-working teams. They range from smaller divisions in global companies to small consultancy firms with loose connections. Furthermore, individual consultants use these tools to keep in touch with their clients and monitor projects with them.

• Kanbanize: Kanbanize is a fresh and modern project management app that uses the Kanban concept to help you easily manage all your projects at once.
• RationalPlan: It is a project management software for small business and big firms that emphasize fast learning, simplified use, and improving productivity.
• SwiftKanban: SwiftKanban is a web-based enterprise/portfolio Kanban and visual management application for enterprises and both co-located and distributed teams.
• LeanKit: LeanKit is a flexible solution designed for the practical and effective implementation of Kanban.
• ToDo: It is a simple software that is easy to implement and use. You can use ToDo to organize your business work, collaborate with your team members, and more.

• Kanban boards (manual or online) – Kanban software can be used by distributed teams to manage complex projects that involve multiple responsibilities and roles.
• Online project management software – This type of app can be used by project managers and teams to collaborate, communicate, and prioritize their work to ensure successful project completion.
• Whiteboards/sticky notes/ task boards – This is a basic yet popular visual management tool that can be used to conduct status meetings and provide a glance at work-in-progress to company managers.

• Beautiful and usable design: The trouble is that these two rarely go together. You will either love the looks or the productivity, and the idea is to love both of them. Therefore, look for a simple, intuitive solution that inspires you to work by just looking at it.
• Impeccable integration: You should consider the attributes of your current workflow, and look for a solution that will blend in, instead of standing out. Having to import/export data manually won’t make the system useful to you, so look backward, and choose an ideal one.
• A breakdown structure: Visualization of tasks and subtasks is the most distinct advantage of visual project managers, so accept nothing less than that.
• Graphic reporting: All project managers employ a different performance-monitoring methodology, but the things they all should have are graph charts and key performance indicators. The more details on productivity trends they deliver, the better, but keep in mind that you need a tool that has a display that you can understand.
• Dashboards and Kanban: As a user in the system, you will have your own role and will see/perform activities based on your permissions. Kanban, on the other hand, is the card-based system that will allow you to move and store repetitive tasks and activities.
• Timelines and calendars: Basic lists are no longer enough, and you need a proper timeline to plan future activities based on current tasks. The ideal visual manager should offer drag-and-drop roadmaps, boards, and individual progress lists.
• Customization: Don’t settle for programs without dynamic visualization, but ones where your hands are completely untied to customize items and to sort them in a way that suits your business needs.
• Security: These tools provide you with security measures for your files and communication. Hence, you can rest assured that your company and customer data will be safe from harm or loss.

Productivity in the digital world is a sphere where almost everything has already been thought of. As a creative and visual right-brainer, you won’t find the limitations too practical, because you like to take transformation notes down, rather than simply monitoring your business processes. And that’s where visual project management becomes most useful.

Our detailed comparisons show that the following is the list of benefits of using quality visual project management tools:

Staying ahead of time

The time devoted to every project/task is critical for a manager to understand how his employees are performing, and to distinguish practices that can be re-applied in the future. The concept sounds simple, but there is nothing simple about it when you try to put all indicators under one roof.

Visual managers contain advanced project management tools, which “capture” periods, and summarize them into comprehensive timesheets that allow for tracking functionality. Most of the time, they inject those directly into your management plan and minimize the manual work you’re usually doing.

Managing bugs

Where we stand nowadays, it is absolutely not enough to follow a task, as such–you need to be aware of every single component, line, difficulty, and priority in order to label your work as efficient. Technical problems are the ones that mess with efficiency the most and lead to lasting disruptions, open questions, and hiring expensive issue managers to pull them away.

Luckily, bug-tracking is an integrated feature of open-source, visual managers, meaning that they are enabled to maintain themselves and to provide improved technical organization. At the same time, they are empowered with practical reporting, testing, and easy-to-use interfaces.

Advanced planning and management

Visual project managers reveal the specific interconnection between tasks and offer a variety of flexible mapping advantages compared to their conventional counterparts. For instance, you get to break tasks down to assignments level, to identify who is responsible for each assignment, and to estimate the time necessary for the accomplishment of each task.

Collaboration

VM systems also bring up a whole new level of collaboration: centralized databases are no longer only common storage locations, but also collaborative dashboards for geographically remote teams. They are packed with numerous tools for sharing and asynchronous editing, both for advanced and non-technical audiences.

Business intelligence

In order to enable you to turn raw data into intelligence resources, visual managers incorporate a multitude of analytic tools, often in the form of graphic performance reports with key indicators, and forecasts based on resource utilization.

Before jumping on any numbers or calculations, we are glad to inform you that many open-source managers come for free. Using one, however, puts you on the edge of the knife, as capacity is limited (add-ons may be required), support is lacking, and security is nowhere close to guaranteed. Yet, trying won’t harm, so make a comparison and see whether you can find one that is suitable for you.

The good news is that transition from a free to a paid version is often painless: visual software prices start for as low as $10 per month/user and depend on the features and reputation of the vendor whose services you intend to use. A decisive criterion is deployment, as certain VPMs are SaaS, while others are on-premise.

Visual project management tools have often different deployment types. Here they are below.

• On-Premise. For users to be able to employ these solutions, they either have to install them via a physical drive or download the installers from the provider’s server. These tools can usually run on LAN and you can manage projects without an internet connection. This means it can be safer. However, pure on-premise tools are quite rare nowadays. Also, some of these tools are offered via one-time license payments.
• Cloud-Based. This type is the most popular deployment method for visual project management tools. You can access these programs via their web-based portal. Also, these are either offered via monthly or yearly subscriptions. For long-term use, annual plans are recommended as they are cheaper.
• Hybrid. Some solutions have hybrid deployments. Meaning, they have both an on-premise client and a web-based portal. Also, these access points can sync up to save you the trouble of importing and exporting data. Like on-premise types, you can use them offline. And like cloud-based types, you can access them remotely. However, these might be more costly.

Choosing a visual project management tool is hard. It’s because you don’t really have to choose the top-rated platform. You have to choose the one that fits your business needs. Also, with different types of visual project management tools, its hard to pinpoint which one or ones that you should give a go.

This is why you should always remember the bottom line. And, that is to choose which one/ones come with the greatest ROI. Also, measuring an ROI for software adoption is a little complex to do. Thus, it is really a sensitive job and you may need outside consultants to help you do this if you are a large company.

For smaller outfits, a trial and error approach is the only way to go. So, this takes more leadership and teamwork effort. You don’t only have to deal with the technical details of the software. Your team must also design their workflows around the capabilities of the software. And, extend their capabilities with the help of the software.

This is no simple task. It takes several and many people to make it all work. So, good luck with your software hunting.