One of the most important needs of any business is to have a efficient task tracking or project management system. Over the years, many kinds of systems have come up which help an organization track project progress, most ERP systems have a part of their system dedicated for this specific purpose. Today, we will have a look at various open source and closed source system that can be used as an project management tool for your startup !
Open source
- Codendi – From the Xerox garage, focus on software project management.
- Redmine – Built in rails, good tool which lets you do integrated version control and ticket tracking.
- ProjectPier – Very generic project management tool in PHP, handles fairly complex cases.
- Trac – Ticket tracking + wiki in python which is very effective on top of available version systems[SVN,git].
- Project HQ – Another smart PHP collaborative tool !
- Collabtive – A basecamp clone !
- eGroupWare – A fairly interesting open source ERP attempt, also lets you mange projects
- KForge – A KDE based collaboration tool.
- OpenGoo
- ClockingIT
Recommendation !
For people who use Rails, Redmine is a really useful ticket tracking and collaboration tool. If you are the PHP guy thne you can surely try out project pier ! In any given situation, it is important to remember that you need the right tool for the problem … given the options above you will be able to locate a relevant open source solution.
Closed source / SaaS
- Assembla – A very cool collaborative tool, it is also used by oDesk to manage projects.
- Basecamp – Set of disconnected tools which allows effective communication in any project. Useful for remote teams.
- Central desktop – Desktop based collaboration tool.
- JIRA – Very comprehensive tracking application ! Must try.
- FogBugz – Detailed time-based project tracking, very applicable to software service companies
- Microsoft Project – From Microsoft, its been around the longest !