Well, in this video, I'm going to cover Notion as a project manager, which we don't recommend, and then also more popular ones like ClickUp, Monday, Asana, and then our favorite Motion.

Choosing the right project management tool for your team can be a very daunting task.

There's a lot of options out there and in this video, I hope to clarify for you which one may be best for your team.

So here at EfficientApp, we've personally used Monday.com, Asana, and also Motion.

And we've also deeply vetted ClickUp and Notion, which just recently started marketing themselves as a project management tool.

So keep watching to find out which one was our favorite.

As you're watching this video, I just want you to keep in mind your team size because a lot of these project management tools were created for larger teams with hundreds of employees.

So a few caveats that I want to cover before we really deep dive into the different tools available.

Prepare to spend up to 50 hours or even more to set up some of these solutions for your team, deeply mapping out your processes and your projects, and also training your team on how to use them.

So if you're looking for a solution that you think is going to be set up overnight, just want you to take a moment and consider that this is typically a larger project at hand.

So a study by Wrike found out that 35% of teams that had 10 or less employees stopped using their project management tool after one year.

For teams greater than 10, about 28% of teams give up on using a project management after the first year.

The third thing to remember is that using a project management tool is a daily commitment, not only for yourself, but also for your team.

Team members need to update the project management tool every single day.

They need to update what's been completed or update the status of things.

So you really need buy-in from the entire team if this is something that you're planning on rolling out.

Now that we've covered that, now let's talk about the actual project management tools on the market and which ones we recommend.

Let's start with Notion as a project manager.

So Notion recently started marketing themselves as a project manager.

They're saying on their website that they're a powerful project management tool without the chaos, which is kind of ironic and funny because chaos is probably the exact word that I'd use to describe trying to manage any kind of projects in Notion.

The problem with Notion is that there's such little guardrails when it comes to the tool.

There's overwhelming flexibility, and initially that can seem a little bit exciting because you're thinking you're going to set up this project manager ideally exactly how you want it for your business, but the problem with little guardrails is that there's no opinionation of how things should work, and you end up starting to build a project manager tool instead of really just managing your projects.

You have to remember that tools like Monday and Asana and ClickUp, their whole business is dedicated towards building a solution as a project manager.

Notion is a knowledge base, and they're just giving you ideas of different ways that you can use it.

So maybe if you're a solopreneur or you're working on your own and you really just want a really basic way to manage your tasks, you can toy with the idea, but even that I wouldn't recommend.

The truth is we didn't even want to mention Notion as a part of this review, but because they're starting to market themselves this way, we thought it might be worth mentioning just to hopefully help lessen the confusion out there.

Let's move on to another popular one, ClickUp.

ClickUp markets itself as one app to replace them all.

They say that they can manage your tasks, they can offer you whiteboards, dashboards, chat, goals, and even docs.

Again, while this might be appealing because you're thinking you're going to need less tools, the problem with an all-in-one tool is that they try to do just way too much.

The main complaint we hear about ClickUp and the reason why we haven't even tried to implement it in our business is that it's overwhelming to use, there's too many features, and it's super buggy because instead of focusing on doing one thing well, it kind of tries to do everything and then it misses out on the final 10% to 15% of really making features as powerful as they could be.

Here's some thoughts we found on Reddit.

EasyRelease8115 says, My organization used ClickUp and I hated it.

I spent more time creating cards and tracking time and reorganizing my space than I did actually working.

Part of the problem is how my boss used ClickUp for micromanaging.

It's dangerous when it's used by a bad boss.

I guess that can be true for any project manager.

Someone else said, I really dislike ClickUp.

Am I missing something?

An organization I work with is moving to ClickUp.

Most of the reviews I've seen are super positive and the rest of my team seems to really like it so far, but I really, really dislike it.

I find it buggy, confusing, complex, poorly designed from an information architecture standpoint, and more.

When assessing potential PM tools last year, ClickUp was at the bottom of my list along with Asana.

Kind of disagree with you there, but let's keep going.

I also think it's odd that people keep talking about efficiency because its efficiency is just so vastly inferior.

Anyway, what am I missing?

I'm really curious because the reviews are so incredibly positive, but I find it nearly impossible to use without getting frustrated every few seconds.

It would be wonderful if I can choke down the Kool-Aid since I'm stuck using ClickUp, whether I like it or not.

Another PM tool that we believe is trying to do way too much is Monday.com.

And I have personal experience with Monday because I actually tried to use it for about a year with one of my previous customers.

Monday has expanded into trying to do everything as well.

And recently, we even saw themselves marketing themselves as a CRM, which really just made me want to pull my hair out.

If you're looking for a CRM, just use a proper CRM.

Don't try to use a project manager as a CRM.

I'll be honest, the appeal with Monday.com for myself and my team at the time was just how pretty it looked.

They had all these colorful buttons, and we thought, how cool would it be to manage everything in here?

So when you first set it up, you're encouraged to have many different statuses.

You can prioritize things based on a five-star system, and that's cool and all.

But then when you actually start using it every single day, you're finding how much work it is to update all these fields that you had set up initially.

As we went on and used it even more, we found that really, we didn't need all these fields, and we just kept cutting back.

And there was also a lot of trouble with really making it work for a greater team.

There was just so many notifications that were firing off everywhere, and everybody just kept feeling confused in terms of when they were actually needed in the tool and when they weren't.

Now, granted, that problem can happen with other tools, and it requires proper notification setup, which we then did.

And eventually, we actually just assigned the tool to be managed by 1 p.m., and he kind of had his run with it.

We were a team of about 15 people at the time, and we totally fit into that Wrike study because after, I'd say, six to eight months, it really started phasing out of the business.

And after a year, we stopped using it entirely because it just wasn't scalable for what we were trying to do.

So overall, yes, I'll say monday.com looks pretty.

I really like their marketing, but in terms of being an effective tool, I don't think it's great.

I think it's also kind of buggy.

And if you're looking for a more reliable project manager, I think you're going to really benefit from checking out something like Asana that's been around a lot longer.

So now that you've heard me talk about the tools that we don't recommend, let's talk about the tools that we actually like.

What we like about Asana is that it's just a p.m. tool through and through.

They've always been a p.m. tool, and that's all that they're still trying to be till this day.

Last we checked, they have about 1,700 employees that are working on one thing, and that's giving you a better project management experience and solution.

This means that their tool is reliable, it's stable, it's not as buggy as the other tools, and it has a powerful API with lots of cool types of integrations and features that come along with it.

So we actually used Asana here at Efficient App for seven years.

It was our p.m. tool, and that's before we switched to Motion, which I'll talk about in a second.

The thing with Asana is we actually do still recommend it if you have, say, over 200 employees, if you have a large team, if you are familiar with the enterprise space and you're familiar with tools like HubSpot or Salesforce that require more of a consultant to set it up, that is your Asana version of a p.m. tool.

It is great when set up properly, and if you have proper team training and you can get that adoption, we really think it is the best tool on the market for larger teams.

So last but not least, what's the tool that we currently use?

About a year ago, we switched off of Asana and we started using Motion, and the reason for that is because Motion is the ultimate time platform management tool.

What I mean by that is prior to Motion, we had our tasks in Asana that were work-related, and then we had our personal tasks that we stored in something called TickTick, which is another tool, and then we had a Calendly equivalent called Chili Piper that we used to schedule calls, and we were using all of these different tools to try to really manage where we needed to be and what we needed to do.

So with Motion, initially, they were a calendar tool that allowed people to schedule time on your calendar, and they did that in a really clever way by allowing you to kind of chunk your meetings together and free up more time so you can actually get focus work done.

Then they expanded into being a task management and now a full project management tool.

What's really cool about it is that we can put all of our tasks for our different customers and projects within Motion, and then it puts those specific tasks on our calendar.

So as you can imagine, we have meetings and places that we need to be, personal appointments as well on our calendar, and around that, we have our tasks that we need to do that are work-related and also personal-related.

At the end of the day, we are just one person.

We all have the same amount of hours in a day, so it kind of seems ridiculous in hindsight now to use all these different tools to manage your time when in reality, the only question you should be asking is what do I need to do next, and that's what Motion helps answer for us really easily.

Motion also uses AI to rearrange our tasks for us.

So in Asana, we would spend a sick amount of time rearranging our deadlines and pushing things backwards when we didn't actually complete a task in a specific deadline, which is super common across every job and every industry.

But with Motion, if you have something that you need to complete for one day and you don't get it done, then Motion would automatically reschedule that task for you for the next day or your next available time slot.

Again, this makes it so much easier because we open up Motion and that question of what do I need to do next is mainly answered for us.

We also have a really cool integration with Motion and our Slack where say Alex, who is my business partner, sends me a message, I can just hit save on that message and it automatically puts it as a task on my calendar within Motion.

We have a whole video showing that integration off, so check it out in the description.

So if you're a small to mid-sized team, so say one to a hundred people, you can probably get away with using Motion and that setup that I mentioned at the beginning, that's 50 plus hours.

The smaller your team, the quicker it's going to be with a tool like Motion because like I said, you're really just managing your time and then you have tasks and then you can break them up into bigger projects if you need to.

If you are a solopreneur, I would also recommend Motion instead of Notion that I spoke about in the beginning and that's because it's just really set up for you, it's opinionated and all you have to do is go through the prompts and before you know it, you really have all your tasks on your calendar in one place.

You don't have to figure out how to configure it.

So if you're looking for simplicity, a sprinkle of AI, Motion is the way to go.

If you are a larger team, 200 people plus, Asana is the way to go.

And if you're considering ClickUpMonday.com or Notion, we wouldn't recommend it.

If there's other questions that you have that we haven't covered in this video, make sure to leave them down in the comments below.

We're available to answer anything that can help your decision-making process a little bit easier.

Don't normally say this, but if you did find this video helpful, we'd definitely appreciate a thumbs up as it lets more people access this information.

Also, I'll ask you to subscribe because we have an exciting mini-series coming out shortly that we'd love to share with you.