The battle over project management software is getting personal

Used to set goals and timelines and track progress on everything from developing software applications to running marketing campaigns, project management tools may lack the cachet of a new AI chatbot. But what they lack in buzz, they more than make up for in customer loyalty.

“It’s an eternal problem," said Mansoor Basha, chief technology officer of software marketing company Stagwell Marketing Cloud, about separating employees from their favorite project management software. “If you go to any organization, you will find at least five or six different project management tools being used at the same time," he said.

With pressure building on corporate IT budgets, CIOs are looking to cut costs where they can, starting with the number of software-as-a-service vendors in their portfolios, whose subscription prices have ballooned in recent years. The cost of project management software, sometimes provided free to small enough teams, can ramp up as more users are added. That can cost individual purchasers anywhere from $12 to $45 per seat a month depending on the features used—although enterprise pricing varies from company to company.

Tapping fewer vendors, and using each more broadly, can help companies reduce cyberattack surfaces, negotiate better discounts, develop deeper expertise in the systems they use and avoid high integration costs of stitching disparate systems together, CIOs say.

But unifying a company behind one project management tool is proving to be difficult, according to CIOs who cite Asana, Airtable, Monday.com and Atlassian’s Jira products among the more popular tools.

Part of the challenge lies in the nature of how project management tools are used and acquired. They are unlike a customer relationship management tool, in which the enterprise typically coalesces around one main vendor. Project management tools, whose functionality cuts across all job functions, often are purchased piecemeal by individual teams or individual users.

Teams within organizations often unite behind their favorite tools, CIOs say.

Stagwell’s Basha said he’s seen people forming “sub-sects and cults" around particular tools. With one project manager, Basha said, “I always tell him: get out of Airtable. I don’t want to keep spending money on it…And then he shows me something and I’ll be like, yes, it looks really good here. Fine. Just use that."

“Yeah, I’m very bullish on Airtable," said Ian Liang, the project manager in question. He added it can be difficult selling leadership on the benefits of particular tools if they haven’t used them or aren’t already familiar.

Adding to the complexity is that not one project management tool does everything.

“I empathize with our teams…with these tools, people have different levels of familiarity, they’re very passionate about choosing different ones," said Jeff Sippel, CIO at Northwestern Mutual, adding that different tools have different strengths and weaknesses. The insurer currently hosts two to three main project management tools.

Travis Harris, director of global procurement at dental software provider Henry Schein One, said the company had 13 different project management tools when he joined two and a half years ago. Over the course of a year, Harris said, the company whittled that down to three main tools.

But during that process, an internal review committee fielded requests for exceptions to use a different tool of an employee’s choosing. Some exceptions were granted, he said.

Vendors say differentiation is part of the selling point, a message CIOs might not like to hear. The market for project management software was worth a total of about $4.6 billion in end-user spending last year according to research firm Gartner.

At Airtable, CEO Howie Liu said he was approached by one customer who wanted to purchase Airtable for all of its 50,000 employees, who were using a different project management software. He turned down that offer because he felt Airtable was better used for more specific use cases, rather than across the whole company without those uses already in mind.

“That literally cheapens our value prop and our perception of value," Liu said.

Jason Miller, senior director at Monday.com said there is rarely going to be one project management tool that fulfills 100% of an organizations’ needs.

“When you look at just what SaaS has done to the overall software industry, you can make very, very, very pointed solutions. And I think that’s part of the struggle for IT and CIOs."

Belle Lin contributed to this article.