For example, if your company's database administrators are based in Berlin while your front-end developers are located in Buenos Aires and product managers log in from Austin, it makes the cost of a misaligned sprint exponentially greater.
The process of getting work done does not just involve the tools used to track tickets, it also entails working with all of the tools that form the basis of an asynchronous operational nervous system for your business.
Unfortunately, with an overwhelming array of vendors claiming to optimize workflows and increase productivity, the reality of this situation is not nearly as exciting as what vendors would like you to believe.
To grow or scale a remote engineering team forces many businesses to contend with the hidden add-on administrative costs associated with using various vendors—the more you grow, the more tools that you need to use.
Therefore, when searching for the right solution, seek to see beyond the generic marketing materials. Evaluate how these platforms perform when the pressure is on and under circumstances such as different time zones, multiple repositories on GitHub and CI/CD, etc.
TL;DR: What Does It Mean to Be the Best Project Management SaaS Software for Remote Engineering Teams?
When evaluating the tools that engineers will use, most reviews simply take a look at the number of features provided by the various platforms rather than evaluate the operational drag caused by those features.
For example, if you are simply comparing the tools based on their ability to show either Gantt charts or Kanban boards, you have not grasped the whole reason that these tools were created.
As regards the key characteristics that represent top-tier software for distributed teams, one must look at three fundamental attributes: integration depth; asynchronous visibility; and transparent TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).
At this point, Jira remains the de facto industry standard for agile planning; however, there is a shift occurring within fast-moving product teams who are adopting more opinionated and keyboard-centric approaches to project management (e.g., Linear).
Enterprise organizations with significant compliance requirements continue to use structured tools, such as Microsoft Project and Smartsheet, to maintain strong audit trails. Your decision about which tool will best suit your needs will depend on what type of engineering archetype you are developing.
For example, if you are a 12-member product team trying to eliminate daily standups or a large platform engineering organization managing cross-squad dependencies, you may have very different needs.
Establishing Operational Constraints
Before analyzing vendor-specific solutions, the technical leadership of an organization must establish its operational constraints. Tools alone cannot fix bad processes; therefore, the platform that is selected must support how the teams communicate with one another.
For example, when working in a distributed manner with other product teams, close alignment between issues and commits is important along with asynchronous status updates.
In addition, platform teams must have a better understanding of the way in which they are relying on multiple products to coordinate their releases, so some sort of connection for there being a link between different product releases is also necessary.
In addition to this, engineering management teams must have access to budget and capacity planning tools and financial services companies must have access to strict permissions, as well as well-defined submission reviews.
All these different use cases cannot be combined into a single checklist, and attempting to do so will result in rapidly declining adoption of your process or methodology. The product you are purchasing is a workflow engine and not a feature list.
Below are the top eight platforms for distributed development. Each of these platforms represents the best solutions available in today's market. Each vendor has been stripped of its generic marketing claims to focus on how they serve the distributed development environment.
1. Jira
The flagship product of Atlassian, Jira is the uncontested heavyweight champion of software engineering project management tools. No other tool compares to Jira in terms of functionality and there are competing vendors that advertise themselves as "Jira alternatives" because they acknowledge that it is the gold standard in software project management.
Jira's greatest strength is workflow flexibility, advanced roadmap capabilities, and an incredible ecosystem of tools and platforms designed to integrate with Jira. If you require a system that provides a direct link between issue tracking and GitHub, Bitbucket, and complex release planning, Jira satisfies that need.
Jira requires significant administrative responsibilities, as customizing Jira for a specific remote workflow typically will require at least one dedicated internal administrator. The pricing for Jira is very tiered and must be closely monitored. The Free tier supports up to 10 users, and the Standard tier starts at $8.15 per user/month, with automation limited to 1,700 rule runs per month.
Scaling quickly will put remote teams in the Premium tier at $15.25 per user/month to have access to a 99.9% uptime SLA and advanced dependency management features.
2. Linear
Linear is the favored tool of modern remote product teams that are moving quickly. It is extremely opinionated. Linear insists on a specific streamlined way of working that eliminates the chaotic customization options of older platforms. Linear has a consistently fast interface, is built around keyboard shortcuts, and is designed specifically to keep developers in a state of flow.
Asynchronous teams are able to use Linear to eliminate unnecessary noise. Linear provides issue tracking, sprint cycles, and fully automated roadmaps linked to Git only. Linear does not pretend to be an all-purpose project manager for marketing or HR. It is probably the most efficient way for a geographically distributed team wanting to build quickly without having to navigate complex configuration menus.
3. Shortcut
Shortcut (formerly known as Clubhouse) positions itself as the ideal intermediary solution, offering all of the essential engineering tools of Jira (epics, milestones, iterations, and a direct integration with version control) and eliminating the need for a large enterprise configuration.
The ease of identifying bottlenecks allows people to use Shortcut effectively. Shortcut allows teams to quickly identify issues regardless of what time zone they're working in and it removes the need to hold constant status update meetings. Since Shortcut was designed specifically for software development, its data models mirror the way software developers think about epics and stories, so it works well with the developer's mental model.
4. ClickUp
ClickUp is basically the catchall for all work management. The main concept behind ClickUp is that one single platform could completely replace all of your other applications by offering a combination of things all at once.
ClickUp includes wikis, whiteboards, sprint planning, and time tracking all in one browser tab, making it very easy for remote engineering teams who are accessing these applications simultaneously.
The flexibility offered by ClickUp can be both a blessing and a curse. Since ClickUp supports cross-functional collaboration between engineering, design, and marketing, there needs to be a very strict internal governance system to support that kind of collaboration. Without a strong manager to oversee and maintain how spaces, folders, and lists are organized, ClickUp can easily turn into a chaotic mess.
ClickUp is an extremely robust tool; however, users must provide their own personal discipline to maximize its capabilities.
5. Asana
Asana is designed for the non-technical stakeholders and is visually beautiful. If your engineering team operates in a hybrid work environment with frequent interaction with marketing and executive leaders, Asana offers good cross-functional visibility of your engineering team's tasks.
Although Asana is a general-purpose tool, as it is designed to work for a wide variety of users, it has some limitations when it comes to performing engineering-specific functions such as advanced code-level dependency mapping and CI/CD triggers. Therefore, while it may be possible to use Asana as an engineering-specific platform through third-party integrations and the creation of custom fields, it takes a lot of effort to replicate the native feel that other software-specific tools offer.
6. Wrike
Wrike is focused on managing the team's resources in addition to managing tasks. Engineering managers typically use Wrike to monitor budgets, planned capacity, and timelines for multiple-year roadmaps for engineering teams.
For remote teams, Wrike has the ability for precise time tracking and visibility of resources across multiple projects, thereby balancing the resources across different locations and time zones. While it provides the capability for traditional project management methodology, Wrike is better suited for managing engineering organizations that have rigid milestones, defined deliverables, and specific allocations for resources.
7. Smartsheet
Smartsheet has become a great work execution tool but started as a spreadsheet-like tool. Smartsheet isn't the best choice for agile software development teams that typically utilize two-week sprints but is popular among, and the preferred tool of, teams that execute infrastructure projects, organizations with strict compliance requirements, and organizations that build both hardware and software.
If your remote engineering project requires critical path scheduling, earned value measurement (CPI/SPI), and audit logs for products or services subject to regulations, Smartsheet has no equal. Smartsheet gives you precision control over the timeline of your project, but has not evolved to provide the user experience that is expected by modern-day software developers who track daily issues.
8. Monday.com
Monday.com has made a strong push to meet the needs of the software development industry. Its modular, visually appealing interface has made it so easy for organizations to adopt that most new remote employees can learn how to use it in under an hour.
Like ClickUp, the primary strength of Monday.com is its adaptability; you can create a board to manage a sprint, you can create a form to capture bugs, and you can set up a Slack notification that sends you alerts when certain conditions exist in minutes. As projects grow beyond the confines of a few developers, often into the dozens or hundreds of development teams working concurrently, it becomes ever more difficult for project management saas software such as Monday.com to handle complex code dependencies and reports at a level of specificity that truly serves developers.
In contrast to developer-specific tools tailored to meet these challenges directly, project management saas platforms lack this integration and scalability process for developers.
Calculating Total Cost of Ownership
Here’s what to look for when selecting project management saas software and calculating your total cost of ownership. In addition to how much you’ll pay for your software, consider how the pricing structure and fees of your SaaS platform will impact the overall cost of a service.
Many SaaS vendors will advertise a low entry price (e.g., $8/month) on their website for their software. What they do not disclose is that most SaaS vendors charge a significant premium for large organizations. For example:
User Threshold
For many SaaS vendor solutions, a free version (or free tier) of the software exists until user number eleven, at which point an organization must upgrade their service for additional users.
Automation Gating
Many SaaS vendors will put a cap on the number of automated actions that you can create with their software in each month on their standard level of service. For remote teams that rely heavily on automatic Slack notifications, automatic GitHub workflow updates, and automatic transition of tickets, those limits are exhausted within days after an initial setup.
Marketplace Tax
Most tiered solutions will add the cost of additional functionalities to their pricing structures based on what other SaaS terms are available on a discrete marketplace (for example, time-tracking modules).
Therefore, if you require time-tracking functionality within your project management solution, be sure to evaluate the overall cost of your complete workflow (including the fees associated with third-party products) before selecting a standalone product.
If you operate a fast-paced remote-first product team and want to eliminate the overhead of managing administrative work, you should consider using Linear. For teams that want a balanced, yet highly capable agile platform with no configuration nightmares, Shortcut is an option.
The success of any platform ultimately comes down to aligning it with your actual constraints of operation, rather than having your developers conform to arbitrary vendor-defined designs.
Market Insight and Technical Questions & Answers
What is the first thing to break when scaling project management saas software across time zones?
Asynchronous visibility is often the first casualty of poorly configured project management tools for remote engineering teams. Engineers in Europe wake up to find they have been blocked from progressing on their pull requests (PR's) and are missing design assets from their California-based colleagues.
Without automated dependency notifications and centralised context for project-related discussions that are only found within the ticket, and not hidden away in discussions within Slack, project velocity will drop immediately. Additionally, the tool's architecture will spawn further tool sprawl as isolated teams create their own shadow IT for managing local workloads.
How do tier-based pricing structures have an impact on remote teams?
Typically, tier jumps restrict a number of critical practices used to enable remote collaboration to enterprise pricing; these are things like advanced permissions, audit logs and cross-project reporting.
For remote engineering managers, being unable to run portfolio level reports when using standard tiers is akin to flying blind when doing capacity planning. Additionally, lower tiered pricing structures often restrict API access and often limit the number of automation runs which severely limits the automated workflows that replace manual status meetings.
Are generic work management platforms suitable for a heavy GitHub/CI environment?
They are, but they require lots of manual scaffolding. Generalist work platforms do not provide native functionality that understands the relationships between an epic, sprint, PR and deployment cycle.
As a result, you will spend excessive engineering time writing your own custom web hooks and configuring third-party integration platforms to simply achieve the basic connectivity that dedicated engineering tools provide out of the box.
How do platform engineering teams effectively track their cross-team dependencies?
Platform engineering teams must use tools that provide advanced relational database capabilities and do not merely provide flat lists. They require advanced roadmap views that indicate visually where there are blocking tasks associated with completely different teams.
Effective tracking of cross-team dependencies requires robust tagging; automated alerts when blocking tickets are delayed; and visibility to all the scheduling elements associated with release trains.
