Best Project Management Apps for Freelance Writers

One aspect of my life I’ve always been obsessed with is organisation, and I knew this obsession would spill over into my professional life — but it’s definitely something I enjoy and have embraced! So in a seemingly never-ending quest to optimise my freelance writing workflow, I’ve dived deep into several popular project management apps in my spare time.

As a result, I feel like I can confidently review several of these top tools through the specific lens of a freelance writer, or team of one. Each of the tools I review below I have personally used or I’m currently using to manage my freelance writing business — i.e. client workload planning and tracking, time tracking, and business admin tasks.

Before my reviews, I will add two disclaimers:

First — while Bonsai does offer invoicing and tax management features (for U.S. customers), that’s not the focus of this post. I’ll write a separate review roundup for business finance management software products (because I’ve also tried several of those).

Second — this post contains affiliate links, which means if you sign up for any of the services through my links I may receive a small cash commission or bonus (such as product/service credits) at no extra cost to you. However, that doesn’t influence my reviews as they all have their pros and cons. Plus, these are all just my subjective opinions.

Without further ado, let’s jump in!

Top of my list is my current daily driver — ClickUp.

Full review: Coming soon

Best features:

Pricing:

My experience:

I first came into contact with ClickUp about 2 years ago (at the time of writing) as a guest at a client’s workspace and I must admit, it was a bit confusing at first. But after trying all the other tools on this list I came back to ClickUp and found my experience the second time around, where I was able to control the spaces myself, was much better.

One of the best benefits for me, other than slick task management (which is a minimum requirement), was being able to add custom columns/fields — for me at the moment, this is only adding how much I’m invoicing for the task. However, I can track this field across my whole workspace and create a dashboard widget that tells me how much I’ll be invoicing at the end of the month (and plan my finances accordingly).

Another important feature for me was calendar integration (iCal in particular). My calendar is basically my source of truth for day-to-day living and I absolutely must be able to see my client work coming up in my calendar. ClickUp does this super easily, and it syncs really quickly when I make changes.

Overall, ClickUp is my top vote for having the features I need (and some I didn’t know I wanted) and affordable pricing.

My close second for similar features and workflow as ClickUp

Full review: Coming soon

Best features:

Pricing:

My experience:

Asana is my close second recommendation for project/task management for freelance writers. I heard a lot about Asana through others (mainly on Twitter and in Peak Freelance) and had to try it out. I also still use Asana for content management as a guest in one of my client’s workspaces.

In essence, Asana has a lot of the same features ClickUp has, and even the design is quite similar, with one main exception that you can filter the content you see through “saved searches” such as “tasks I’ve created” and “recently completed tasks”.

The main reason I’ve now chosen ClickUp over Asana as my daily driver is pricing — ClickUp is simply more value for money. However, if you have multiple clients who use Asana for their content management, keeping everything under one roof is probably the better approach.

Full review: Coming soon

Best features:

Pricing:

My experience:

It’s got to be said, I do adore Notion. Any time I can, I promote Notion as it can do almost everything you can think of when it comes to project management (I also use it to manage projects in my personal life, such as language learning, and to build my websites with Super).

Plus, with Notion AI now available, I can shortcut several manual tasks by asking the AI to configure things like tables and databases for me.

That being said — it’s very hands-on. I love it precisely because it’s so customisable and adaptable to my needs. But (and this is a big but), it doesn’t have some of the features I find necessary for managing client work. For example, while I can create uber-sophisticated pages with relational databases and such, my tasks don’t sync with my iCal (or GCal), at least not natively. Another feature I miss when I’ve used Notion to manage my freelance writing is time-tracking, which it also doesn’t do natively. As a workaround, I had to use Zapier to figure out task syncing with my calendar and that got a bit messy.

Overall, I love Notion and I’d absolutely recommend it for personal projects (and as an alternative website host), but I wouldn’t stick with it for managing my freelance business.

Full review: Coming soon

Best features:

Pricing:

My experience:

Similar to Asana, I still use Trello as a guest in another client’s workspace. It’s a great tool and I used it for a really long time for one main reason — it’s incredibly simple to use.

Trello has a really easy and intuitive learning curve, and if you want to get smarter with it, you can. For example, I like to add just a couple of simple automation triggers to make life a little easier — e.g. automatically assigning myself to new tasks on the “to-do” board, and assigning my client to the task when I’ve moved it to “ready for review”. The card labelling system in Trello is also really great, both aesthetically and for ease of use.

Trello is easy to recommend, especially if you want a no-frills solution, and you only really need the free plan as a team of one (or fewer than 3).

Full review: Coming soon

Best features:

Pricing:

My experience:

I came to Toggl primarily for its time-tracking product “Toggl Track” which I’ve used on and off for a few years now (not so much now I use ClickUp which has native time tracking). But later found its project management counterpart Toggl Plan.

I will say this off the bat — I didn’t continue after using its free trial. Its main USP for me is its easy integration with other Toggl products i.e. Track. However, since these are separate services, each with its own web app, it’s not as intuitive as I’d like. Don’t get me wrong, it has a lot of the basic features anyone would want for project management, I just didn’t vibe with it. That’s probably a lot to do with the fact that “timeline” is the default view, and I really don’t like timeline views.

Plus, it doesn’t offer a free plan. The only reason I’d really recommend Toggl Plan is for its “time-off” tracking, if you work with subcontractors (which I don’t, at least not at the time of writing) then it would be useful to see their availability in the same place as assigning tasks.

Full review: Coming soon

Best features:

Pricing:

My experience:

Bonsai is an interesting software, in that it pretty much offers an all-in-one solution for freelancers and small business owners — for that reason, I used it for several months early on in my freelancing journey.

For business management, Bonsai offers the ability to track expenses and create clients, for which you can create invoices, proposals, contracts, and client-specific project spaces. For U.S.-based customers, they can also help you with managing your taxes.

However, in terms of project management specifically, it’s really helpful to be able to see everything you’ve done in relation to a specific client — e.g. they have client overview pages which show all the time you’ve tracked for that client, invoices sent and paid, contracts, forms, proposals, client-specific expenses, and a “recent activity” feed.

Bonsai has also recently released a calendar scheduling feature which helps you and your clients’ book appointments/meetings based on your availability (if you’re into that sort of thing, personally I’m async all the way).

Overall, I would easily recommend Bonsai specifically for anyone based in the U.S. as you can make the most use of what the software offers, but as a U.K. freelancer, some of the business management features weren’t for me and I couldn’t keep justifying the cost.

Full review: Coming Soon

Best features:

Pricing:

My experience:

I came across Harlow when they did a quick partnership with Peak Freelance (offering sign-up discounts to members of the PF community) and noticed the similarity of features compared to Bonsai.

Harlow is another all-in-one freelance business solution, built by freelancers for freelancers, that has fewer features than Bonsai but is simpler to use because of that. It’s also built by a very small and super-attentive team that does actually take suggestions and feedback on board, which is what kept me with Harlow for at least a few months. For example, early on I suggested I really needed the ability to invoice in multiple currencies and assign client-specific currencies, which they implemented really quickly.

However, I eventually ran into the same issue as I did with Bonsai in that the business management features are currently geared towards U.S.-based freelancers, and as such I couldn’t quite justify the pricing beyond wanting to support a small, fellow freelance-based business.

That being said, I am keeping a close eye on Harlow to see if it implements more U.K.-centric options. But if you’re already based in the U.S. and would love to support a small business I’d definitely recommend giving Harlow a try (especially if you’re a fan of pastel aesthetics).

To conclude this roundup, I’d say ClickUp is my current top project management software recommendation for freelance writers. It has all the basic features, it’s easy to use (after getting over the initial learning curve) and has a super slick mobile and desktop app with calendar integration — crucially, at an affordable price.

However, if you’re looking for a more all-in-one solution to manage the business, I’d recommend checking out either Bonsai or Harlow if you’re U.S. based. At the time of writing, I’m unaware of any similar all-in-on solutions geared towards the U.K. or the rest of the world.

There are other project management software products available that I haven’t tried yet (e.g. Airtable and Monday.com), if you think they’re worth a try, let me know! You can reach me on Twitter @alexbboswell.