One of the best key points about WordPress is the ease which you can add more features and increase usability by using plugins. The integration of a WordPress plugin won’t affect the core of your site but will manage to make it more worthwhile.

One of the ways bloggers and content managers like to use some WordPress plugins is to manage their projects. Being organised is essential for optimising productivity. If you skip the organisation, then everything will be a mess.

Thankfully to the large popularity of WordPress, and a large community of users and developers who builds new plugins every single day.

If you are in the need to find a WordPress plugin solely for project management purposes, then you will surely be met with the predicament of picking from thousands of options.

This WordPress Wednesday I’ve provided a short list of project management plugins for WordPress. All of these free plugins can handle most, if not all, of your needs.

1. UpStream

UpStream is a free WordPress project management plugin that allows you to easily manage any type of project, right from your WordPress website and your clients can track the progress of their project via the front-end project view.

Some features of UpStream:

• Milestones and tasks (these can be linked)
• Upload files and documents
• Bug tracking
• Automatic progress tracking
• Discussion threads
• Client users with contact details and custom fields
• Built-in roles for managers and users
• Customisable front end templates
• Developer friendly

Price: Free

2. WP Project Manager

Developed by weDevs, WP Project Manager plugin is here for you to help you manage your projects within your WordPress system, WP Project Manager allows you to move your management functions in-house as opposed to having to log in to an external site multiple times a day.

Some features of WP Project Manager:

• Easily add projects to manage from inside WordPress
• Collaborate with team members
• Get an overview of your project list with a calendar function
• Control user-roles, assigning managers, co-workers and clients
• Assign creators and limit project visibility
• See current project statuses
• Track milestones and archive completed projects
• See all files associated with a single project in one place

Price: Free

3. Panorama

Project Panorama is a project management by communication plugin designed to keep both your clients and team in the loop. Visualisation is one of the most outstanding features of this plugin. The overall look of the projects can make your tasks easily trackable and visible, the wonderful and easy charts showing the progress will help you follow up on your deadlines.

Along with this plugin, it also has an extensive premium version which is available, this premium version allows you to assign phases, upload and store documents, protect projects with passwords, and set security protocols.

Some features of Panorama:

• Assign start and finish dates
• Embed projects into your WordPress theme
• Add milestones to all of your projects and set milestone frequency
• Fine-tune the categorisation of your projects,
• Discuss your projects with relevant parties
• It has a cloning tool, where you can easily copy an existing project.

Price: Free

4. Smarty Pants

Smarty Pants is another project management plugin with many features. Developers can divide the features into administrator features and client features then you can add premium features on top of those.

As an admin, you have complete control over user-access and you can upload files to each client and project page and get an overview of the last fifty client uploads.

Also, you can add staff, suppliers, vendors, sub-contractors and partners. Users at all levels can create projects according to your permission parameters and clients can upload multiple files, delete files, and search for files by name.

Price: Free

5. Kanban Boards for WP

Kanban for WordPress is one of the best project management systems, this plugin is powerful enough to help you build a full-fledged project management system directly inside your WordPress site and you can even use this plugin as a CRM.

Some features of Kanban Boards:

• Multi-site support
• Tasks can be assigned to team members
• Ability to group tasks by projects
• User permission management
• Multi-language support
• “Edit in place,” just like Trello
• Custom views for bookmarking

Price: Free