The short version: when you work alone, project management software isn’t for managing other people, it’s for managing your own attention span, so pick the tool that stops you losing track of things, not the one with the most features. Most solo workers over-buy on complexity and under-buy on the one thing that matters, which is whether you’ll open it every morning without being nagged. I’ve used four different systems in five years of running my business solo, and the one that stuck was the least impressive one on paper.
Related reading: How Women Can Find Flexible Work From Home Jobs in 2026.
The question you’re asking is the wrong one
When people ask me “which project management software should I use”, what they mean is “which software will make me feel organised”. Those are not the same thing. Asana, ClickUp, Monday, Notion, Trello, they’ll all make you feel organised for about three weeks. Then the novelty wears off, the setup you built on a Sunday afternoon stops matching how you think, and you’re back to a Google Doc and a panic at 4pm on a Thursday.
I know this because I did it. In 2021, rebuilding my business after five brutal years, I spent an entire weekend building out a Notion workspace with databases, relations, a content calendar linked to a client tracker linked to an invoicing table. It looked beautiful. I used it for eleven days. Then I went back to a paper notebook and a spreadsheet, because the Notion setup required me to think about the system before I could think about the work, and when you’re solo, every extra layer of admin is a tax you’re paying yourself for no reason.
Start with what breaks, not what impresses
Before you look at a single tool, write down the actual moment things go wrong for you. Not in theory, in reality. For most solo workers it’s one of these:
- You forget a deadline because it lived in an email thread from three weeks ago
- You double-book yourself because your task list and your calendar don’t talk to each other
- You lose track of which client you promised what to, because it’s all in your head or scattered across WhatsApp, email, and a notebook
- You start five things and finish none of them because nothing shows you what’s due today versus what’s just sitting there
Each of those points to a different fix. If it’s deadlines slipping through email, you need something with reminders that interrupt you, not a quiet badge notification you’ll ignore. If it’s the calendar clash, you need a tool that syncs both ways with Google Calendar or Outlook, not one that just lets you attach a date. If it’s client chaos, you need a simple client-by-client view, not a company-wide dashboard designed for a twelve-person marketing team.
The contrarian bit nobody tells solo workers
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most project management software is built for teams, and when you’re solo, half its value proposition doesn’t apply to you. Assigning tasks to teammates, tracking who’s blocked on what, approval workflows, none of that matters when the only person on the project is you. You already know who’s responsible. It’s you. Every time.
This means the software comparison articles ranking Asana against Monday against ClickUp on “collaboration features” are answering a question you didn’t ask. You’re not choosing collaboration software. You’re choosing a memory prosthetic. The best tool for that job is often the cheapest, plainest one in the list, not the one with the most integrations. I’ve watched freelancers pay £19 a month for a project management tool with Gantt charts and workload views they’ve never once opened, because the marketing convinced them a “proper” business needs a “proper” system. It doesn’t. It needs a system that gets used.
What matters when there’s no team to answer to
When you’re solo, three things separate a tool you’ll keep using from one you’ll abandon by March.
Speed of capture. If it takes more than ten seconds to add a task from your phone while you’re on a call, you won’t do it, and the task will vanish. This is why apps like Todoist and TickTick still beat heavier tools for solo capture, you can add a task with a quick voice note or a natural-language type (“call Sarah Tuesday 2pm”) and it slots itself in.
One view of “today”. Not a board with six columns. Not a matrix of priorities. One list that says what’s due today and tomorrow. Everything else is noise you’ll scroll past. Trello’s board view is bad for this reason when used solo, it’s built to show status across people, and when there’s only one person, all it shows you is a wall of cards with no urgency signal.
Low setup cost when you change your mind. Your business will change shape in six months, it always does. If restructuring your project categories takes an afternoon of dragging things between databases, you’ll avoid doing it, and your system will slowly stop matching your actual work. This is the real argument against building anything too custom in Notion or Airtable when you’re a one-person operation: flexibility is only useful if you’ll use the flexibility, and most solo workers don’t have the spare hours.
A short, honest comparison
I’m not going to pretend I’ve used every tool on the market, nobody has, and anyone who tells you they’ve deeply tested nine different platforms in a weekend is exaggerating. Here’s what I know from running a solo business on these:
- Todoist: best for pure task capture and daily “what’s due” clarity. Free tier is usable. Weak on anything visual, no real project overview if you’re managing multiple clients with different phases.
- Trello: good if you think in stages (idea, in progress, done) and you’re mostly managing content or a pipeline. Falls apart once you have more than about fifteen active cards, becomes a scroll-fest.
- Notion: powerful, flexible, and a genuine time sink to set up. Works brilliantly if you enjoy tinkering with your system as much as doing the work it’s meant to organise. Most solo workers don’t, and shouldn’t pretend they do.
- ClickUp: the most feature-dense of the lot, built for teams, and honestly overkill for one person unless you’re running very complex multi-client operations with recurring processes you want automated.
- A plain spreadsheet: unfashionable, free, and still what I fall back on for client tracking because it never needs an update, never nags me to upgrade, and does exactly what I tell it to.
The five-minute test before you commit
Before signing up for anything paid, run this test. Pick your three worst weeks from the last six months, the ones where something slipped through the cracks. For each one, ask: would this tool, set up the way I’d realistically set it up (not the ideal way, the realistic way, at 9pm on a Tuesday), have caught that specific failure? If the answer’s no for all three, the tool isn’t solving your actual problem, it’s solving a problem you don’t have.
This matters more than any feature comparison. I once nearly signed up for a project management tool because a friend running a seven-person agency swore by it. Her problem was coordinating handoffs between a designer, a copywriter, and a client. My problem was remembering to invoice on time and not double-booking a Tuesday. Same category of software, completely different job to do. I didn’t buy it, and I was right not to.
Where AI helps here, and where it doesn’t
A lot of these tools now bolt on AI features, auto-summarising tasks, generating subtasks from a one-line brief, drafting status updates. For solo workers, some of this saves time, particularly auto-generating subtasks from a rough brief when you’re planning a new project and don’t want to sit and list every step by hand. I’ve covered which of these tools are worth paying for versus which are just marketing dressing in my guide to AI tools for freelancers, and the short version is: pay for the AI feature only if it replaces a task you currently do manually every single week, not because it looks clever in a demo.
What AI won’t fix is the underlying discipline problem. No tool, however smart, will make you open it every morning if you’ve picked one that doesn’t match how your brain works. That part is on you, not the software.
If you’re solo but growing (or thinking about hiring help)
If part of the reason you’re shopping for project management software is that you’re about to bring someone in, even part-time, that changes the calculation. A tool that only needs to serve your brain is different from one that needs to hand off tasks clearly to someone else. This comes up a lot with people bringing in their first virtual assistant, where suddenly you need shared visibility, not just personal capture. If that’s on the horizon in the next six months, it’s worth building slightly more structure now than your current one-person self strictly needs, rather than migrating everything twice.
And if the whole reason you’re setting up better systems is that you’re trying to build a business that runs without you glued to it every hour, that’s a bigger conversation than software. I’ve written about the realistic version of that in my piece on building income that doesn’t depend on you clocking in constantly, and the software question is a small piece of a much larger picture about how you structure the work itself.
My actual setup, for what it’s worth
Right now I use Todoist for daily tasks, a plain spreadsheet for client and project tracking, and Google Calendar as the single source of truth for anything time-bound. Three tools, none of them glamorous, all of them free or nearly free, and none of them requiring more than two minutes of admin a day. It took me five years of expensive detours through prettier systems to get back to something this plain. If you’re just starting out and trying to avoid that detour, that’s the entire lesson: boring and used beats impressive and abandoned, every time.
If you’re building any of this alongside other early-stage work, like taking on your first remote work with no experience or exploring legitimate work from home jobs while you figure out your main thing, keep the system even simpler than you think you need. You can always add complexity later. You almost never remove it once it’s there.
Frequently asked questions
Do solo freelancers need project management software, or is a to-do list enough?
For most solo freelancers with one or two active clients, a good to-do list app like Todoist is enough. You need proper project management software once you’re juggling several clients with different phases and deadlines at the same time, or once you’re about to bring in a virtual assistant or contractor who needs shared visibility into what’s happening.
What’s the cheapest project management software worth paying for when working alone?
Todoist’s paid tier is around £4 a month and covers most solo needs, including reminders, labels, and recurring tasks. A plain spreadsheet costs nothing and works just as well for tracking clients and projects if you don’t need mobile task reminders throughout the day.
Is Notion good for solo project management?
Notion is powerful but it’s a time investment, not a quick fix. It suits people who enjoy building and refining their own systems. If you’d rather spend that time doing client work, a simpler tool like Todoist or Trello will get used more consistently.
Should I choose the same project management tool my clients use?
Not automatically. Your internal system, the one that tracks your own tasks and deadlines, doesn’t need to match what a client uses for shared project boards. It’s fine, and often simpler, to keep those separate: use the client’s tool for anything they need visibility into, and your own plain system for everything else.
Related reading: What Is an AI Agent, and How Do You Build a Simple One? and How Do You Start a Blog From Scratch as a Complete Beginner?.
For the bigger picture, see my full guide to productivity.
