Updated: Mar 25, 2025 By: Marios
Completing a project depends on the successful fulfillment of many small tasks.
If these tasks are spread out among several teams, managing them becomes time-consuming and tedious.
It is possible to manually track the progress of every individual task from every team member, but it is laborious.
This is where task management software can be an asset. Below, we lay out why task tracking is so helpful and how to choose the right task tracker for your team.
What is a task tracker?
A task tracker is a digital management tool. It allows you to build seamless workflows individually or across teams and stay organized throughout a project.
It can be helpful to think of task trackers as glorified to-do lists. The simplest task trackers are a comprehensive way to track your progress through a project.
You can manage your project in one place by breaking it into smaller pieces managed by different teams, assigning due dates, answering questions, and keeping your timeline moving seamlessly.
Why do you need a task tracker?
To put it simply, task trackers keep you organized. This is beneficial for individual contributors or Project Managers of large projects with many moving parts.
The larger the scope of your team or project, the more crucial good organization becomes.
It’s true that in the ever-present hustle to stand out, some task-tracking software offers more bells and whistles than you need. This can have the opposite effect of what you want — simplicity. Too many features app can muddy your process and make you less organized than you were before.
This is why choosing the right task tracker for you and your team is essential. Let’s look at how to choose the best.
How to choose the right task tracker
Take a moment to evaluate a few key elements before choosing a task tracker.
Evaluate your current team
How big is your current team? Is it a mighty army of one? Do you primarily use freelancers as opposed to in-house talent? Are you planning on expanding your team soon?
These are essential questions to answer as you consider a task-tracking tool. You want to be able to set and complete tasks with ease and manage teams and deadlines without much project planning hassle.
Understanding your team’s structure will help you determine the number of paid seats you need and which features app to focus on.
Assess your current process
Does your current process allow for a smooth work experience? How many personnel hours a week are you losing to manually tracking progress on apps like Google Sheets?
Are you happy with your current workflow efficiency, or do you want an entirely different structure?
If you’re making the purchasing decision but not the project manager, ask your PM where your processes can be improved and what her dream setup is.
You don’t want to break a system that’s already working seamlessly. However, you don’t want to throw away dozens of work hours a week on task management that can easily be digitized or automated.
Clear communication with the current task owners and project managers is the best path forward. Ensure you clearly understand what’s working well and their pain points.
Determine wants vs. needs
Lots of task tracker software offers many features app you may or may not need.
For instance, you may not need analytics visualization or dozens of integration capabilities. You may need deadline tracking and simple workflows.
Knowing your current process helps with this. If you have a flow that is already working well, you’ll learn the features app that will support you the best, as well as the superfluous ones.
Don’t get bogged down with extra features app, but don’t disregard how some tools can help.
For instance, text-to-speech capabilities allow you and your team to listen to task descriptions, comments, and updates without reading through lengthy text. It’s beneficial for quickly catching up on project progress during commutes or while multitasking, saving time.
For client work that depends on billable hours, a clock in and out app can accurately monitor the time spent on each task, providing insights into productivity patterns and potential bottlenecks.
This functionality enhances accountability and aids in resource allocation and project planning. Accurate time logs allow you to make data-driven decisions to improve productivity, ultimately leading to better project outcomes.
Try before you buy
You don’t have to commit to a task tracker tool right away. Many platforms will allow you to sign up for a free trial to see how it fits into your team and workflow.
Take advantage of this. Narrow down your selection to 2-3 tools you think are the best. Have your team use them for the duration of the free trial. Have your users take note of what they like and don’t like about each tool during the process.
After your team has demoed all the tools, have a group meeting where everyone can share their thoughts. This allows the people using the software daily to have a say in which features app are the most beneficial for them and which are not necessary. This should make choosing the right task-tracking tool for your team much more accessible.
5 task tracker tools to explore
If you’re unsure where to start your search, here are five awesome task tracker tools to explore.
Asana
Asana is free for individuals and small teams, supporting up to 10 collaborations and unlimited tasks, projects, and messages. Its features app include everything you need to manage a project from start to finish, including task dependencies, categorizing, and due dates.
Quickly move cards around, add tasks to cards, and color-code by task or team to stay organized.
Trello
Trello is a very visually focused task tracker that operates like a digital bulletin board. It is popular for being simple and flexible, with a drag-and-drop interface that is easy to learn and use.
Easily collaborate with team members, attach files, select due dates, and move tasks around seamlessly within your workflow.
Trello’s free option is also valuable, and paid tiers are affordable if you want to add more features app.
Airtable
Airtable is a versatile tool that combines the features app of a spreadsheet and a database, making it ideal for task tracking. Users can create customized tables to manage tasks, with fields for task names, descriptions, due dates, assignees, priority levels, and status.
Airtable’s user-friendly interface allows for multiple views such as grid, calendar, Kanban, and gallery, providing flexibility in visualizing and managing tasks.
Learning can initially be confusing since Airtable uses a different vocabulary to describe its features app. For instance, a “board” on Trello and Asana is referred to as a “base” in Airtable. But once you find your way around the vernacular, Airtable can be used to significant effect for a wide array of projects, however complex.
Like the other tools on the list, Airtable’s free plan includes everything a small team needs to organize and complete projects.
Monday.com
Monday.com is easy to set up and includes nifty features app like time tracking and advanced reporting. Its notification system alerts the next person in the pipeline that they can start their work whenever a dependent task is complete.
Additionally, it has 200+ pre-made task management templates that simplify creating and automating workflows.
Monday.com’s free plan allows up to 3 boards, unlimited documents, and 200+ templates.
Notion
Primarily intended to be a note-taking app, Notion appears to be deceptively simple. But once you start digging, the sky’s the limit to what you can build with this tool using templates.
Some teams enjoy using Notion because it can be built as an all-in-one tool for storing documentation, workflows, KPIs, progress reports, and all other internal communications.
As magical as that sounds, Notion can quickly become overly complex, with pathways to pages and subpages going on to infinity. Ease of navigation can be lost pretty quickly, and simplicity—its intended purpose—gets positively stampeded in the rush of creating a bigger and bigger infrastructure.
Used simply and with restraint, Notion can be a robust task tracker tool with helpful integrations like Google Drive and Slack. You can also integrate preexisting Asana and Trello boards, which can be helpful for cross-departmental collaboration.
Wrapping up
Digital task trackers allow you to stay organized and on track, especially when more than one collaborator is involved. Make sure you understand your team’s structure and current workflow before trying out several free trials of task-tracking tools that may be right for you. Once you find the right fit, all of your projects will be smooth sailing.
