What's the best project management tool you have ever used?

The best one is the one that enables a team of developers to flow and get their work done. It will depend on what the company builds and for what market. You have given no indication of what your company does, the team size, etc. so the best answer is really the useless: It Depends.

If you are building command and control software for an energy power plant, or medical software, you probably have a lot of regulatory requirements to meet so it may require a more intensive PM tool for tracking of work, sign-offs, etc.

If you are building time tracking software for managing a staff of retail employees, precision and regulations are very different than a power plant.

My suggestion is the most minimalist set of features to help the team stay organized and get things done. All the extra features packed in claiming to make things easier never really do. There is no silver bullet to make projects go better than a team that gels together well and a PM tool, or any software, isn't going to be the key thing that makes that happen.

Laugh at me if you want, but for a 1-man team, about a year and half ago I started using post-its on my window. First I did it as a semi-joke. But about a month later I just loved it, and I'm still using it when I'm on my own. Left window is todo and in-progress, right window is "done". Not only code related tasks, but everything work related non-trivial task. I clear the right window about once a week.

The left window shows a good estimation of my current workload and progress, and the right one shows my velocity (beside other things).

My only problem is that it doesn't really scale for bigger teams:(

The brain is the most powerful tool, so whatever you need to do to minimize data entry and data management is the best thing.

A room set aside for the purpose, with lots of marker boards. Add sticky notes. It doesn't get any simpler or smoother than that.

For digital, I've found gitlab and redmine to have far simpler and smoother tooling than anything from Atlassian (jira, confluence, ...), but initial setup and ensuring everything is smooth is key.

For digital, be lazy about data entry. Instead of making a ticket for every little thing, try to capture clumps of things on a wiki page, jumbo ticket, or something, deferring ticket creation until you have to. The more tickets you have, the more time you'll spend managing them. A wiki page with a bulletized list is way easier to manage than a ticket for each bullet on that list.

Jira, but that's not saying much... somehow in 2024 the world's most popular ticketing system doesn't have all the bugs ironed out of its editor. I'm constantly running into little issues with the formatting in descriptions and comments

Has anyone heard of Meegle? I just bumped into their website and the concept of visualized workflow sounds kinda cool.

Personaly, I am sick of the term "workflow" since it has been overused by literally every SasS platform. But this Meegle thing seems to truly link all the tasks in a mind-map like diagram looking intuitive. No one has ever done that.

Just wondering if this approach could be a real change for cross-function collaboration. Any thoughts?

I do miss metas internal version of phorge/phabricator.

The task manament system was great and that it was integrated with everything. I could also just be that it was that everyone was forced to used the same system so there wasn't the bs of each department having their own system.

I've been using the free version of Plane. I tried Jira for the first time and right from the start they spammed me with upsells. All I needed to see was their unsubscribe page with 20+ checkboxes to run as fast as I could from them.

I loved Merlin (discontinued Web-based tool from a Hamburg, Germany, based small company) and have often used OmniPlan on the Mac, which has great usability.

Microsoft Project sucks, but it useful as an "industry standard" file interchange format.

We developed one in-house... later management would want an off-the-shelf solution... they never found a good replacement, went from one vendor to another and still stuck with jira here sharepoint there replicon timesheets yonder...a mess

"Best" is subjective. Different teams have different needs. What problems are you guys hitting that is driving the need for a tool? Answer that, and maybe we all can tell you which tools solve your specific pains.

For simple projects, I really like Linear.app. It's a basic kanban workflow without the Jira bloat.

For medium size projects, my team used Airtable to good effect, customizing it to suit our needs while still maintaining ease of use.

We‘re using Azure DevOps Boards, it’s pretty decent. Does lack some things like timesheets but for simple basic things it’s great.

Currently we are comparing Jira and Monday.com, but haven't decided yet.

A whiteboard and post-its.

Not being sarcastic.