Too many project management tools - what do startups use?

It is 2 am and Avneesh is about to sleep. As he sets his alarm on his smartphone, he takes a last-minute look at his mails and finds a few urgent ones that require his attention. He replies to one and decides to take care of the rest in the morning. He re-sets the alarm for an earlier time.

His phone alarm sets off at six in the morning and he wakes up to check his email. The email threads have swelled - an urgent one is a problem with finances, another is related to design, yet another is about bugs to be fixed and a few more. He is drowned in the deluge.

Avneesh runs an early stage startup and there are too many things he has to take care of. He goes to his office and decides to start using a project management tool, involving his team of seven.

Everyone has heard of project management tools and there are a number of them available to make an entrepreneur’s life simple. But where should you start? The most popular with Indian companies seems to be Asana. “We use Asana which is more of a task management tool and has a very easy to use UI and easy to add external collaborators. We haven't hunted for other tools since we started. Asana also doubles up for tracking bugs,” says Naman Sarawagi, founder of FindYogi. “We use Asana for everything related to product management. We love it for its simplicity, keyboard short cuts and the design,” says Krish, founder of ChargeBee. The marketing and business development team at ChargeBee uses Trello, another popular project management tool.

We found most startups use Asana, Trello and Basecamp. There are many others as well and a startup tries out a handful before deciding on one. Sahil Parikh, founder of a project management tool himself, writes on a Quora thread, “Every project management tool is going to be giving you a different experience depending on your workflow and needs. There is no one size fits all. You would need to take three to five tools for a spin.” Shephertz is another growth stage company based in NCR which has its own project management tool, App Hawk.

This Quora thread is a gold mine if you're looking to discover many more tools but finally it comes down to what works for your startup. “We tried multiple products and gave up on all of them when we realized that most of our time was spent in managing the project and less in doing it,” says Kulin, co-founder at Wishberg. He says they used project management tools along with email. “From November, we decided on two things: no emails, and work on max two features at a time. For all official communication we now use HipChat and do an all hands weekly discussion,” adds Kulin.

Meanwhile, let’s hope that Avneesh will find some takeaways from here. It is not necessary to have a project management tool but it is best if you can give a spin to some and see if it sticks.

The poll below lists some tools you can start using. Do tell us what has worked best for you.

Which Project Management Tool has worked best for you? Take this poll or share your experiences in the comments.