How to Choose a Project Management Tool (or Whether You Need One at All)
.webp)
Everyone works on a team, probably multiple teams. Some teams have formal processes for managing their work, and sometimes that includes a shared task list. But for a lot of the work we do, there's no formal process and everyone's responsible for keeping track of their own tasks.
There are a lot of ways to run teams and projects, and too often there isn't much thought put into the decision of how to operate. When choosing a way to work together, team leaders tend to go with the first thing that comes to mind, or whatever they liked in the past, without considering how the particular attributes of this team and this work will shape what works best.
This post is a framework for how to choose a project management tool — or no tool at all — for your team or a new project you have coming up. It won't do detailed walkthroughs of any one approach; there's already plenty of good material for that, like this guide to using Slack for project management. The point here is the step before that: thinking about your goals, your team, and the work you'll be doing before you dive into the details of a specific system.
One thing to clarify first: "project management" here means managing the workflow of any group of people working together. It doesn't need to be a project with a start and end date — a team doing ongoing work together counts just as much.
The four approaches
Most teams land on one of four ways of managing shared work:
- Traditional project management tools — Asana, Monday, Notion, or even a Google Doc.
- Slack-native AI agents — Slackbot, Viktor.
- Slack-native project management — Slack Lists, Chaser.
- No shared tool at all.
Each one trades power against how much adoption it demands from the team. Here's what each looks like in practice, and the risk that comes with it.
Traditional project management tools
This is what most people picture: you set up projects or boards, fill them with tasks, and ask everyone to keep them up to date — or dedicate one person to doing exactly that. These tools have the most powerful visualizations of any approach: timelines, Gantt charts, cross-project reporting. If you're weighing tools in this category against each other, this comparison of Asana and Trello for Slack-heavy teams covers two of the most common picks.
The risk is that the tool lives outside the conversation. It only works as long as everyone keeps updating it, and that's often a challenge when the board sits in one place and the work gets discussed somewhere else.
Slack-native AI agents
This is the newest category, and the appeal is that there's no onboarding and no adoption required. You ask the agent for the status of something, and it scans your Slack conversations and pulls an answer together for you. Slack's own Slackbot can already do a version of this — Slack's guide to its AI features covers what it can summarize and answer. Tools like Viktor go further and let you set up things like repeating reports that get pushed to you.
Two limits to know about. None of these tools are designed to follow up with assignees to make sure work gets done — they report on the work rather than managing it. And AI isn't perfect: it will misinterpret conversations sometimes, and some conversations aren't captured in Slack in the first place.
Slack-native project management
Light onboarding, light adoption. Tasks are created in Slack and fully live there — assigned, updated, and completed inside the conversation where the work came up. Slack Lists is the basic free option; Slack's documentation covers the setup, and this guide to Slack Lists and checklists goes into where it works well and where it runs out. Chaser is the more powerful paid option: it follows up with assignees automatically and adds a project management dashboard for when you need a bird's-eye view.
Both are extremely lightweight, and easier to adopt than traditional tools because they fully live in your conversations. The risk is the mirror image of that: they're not built for complex roadmaps, Gantt charts, or dependency modeling.
No shared tool
This one is more common than anyone admits. Communication happens in Slack, email, and meetings, but everyone tracks their own work in their own siloed tool. Standups are often used to keep the team in sync.
The risk: a task can be missed silently, and you find out when it's already late. The only visibility is asking people, or making standups longer — and there's a limit to how well that scales; this survey of 200 managers on status-update meetings puts numbers on it.
How to choose a project management tool for your team
There's no deterministic formula for this, because there's no perfect solution for any team or any project. That said, by looking at your team's particular attributes and preferences, you can get a pretty strong idea of what will work best for you, and go into it clear-eyed about the downsides and risks to watch out for.
Below is a list of the relevant factors of your project and your team. Each factor leans toward one or more approaches. Go through the list, mark what's true for your team and your work, and tally the letters:
- T = traditional PM tool
- S = Slack-native project management
- A = AI agent in Slack
- N = no shared tool
Project factors
One caution on dependency tracking: it adds real overhead. For most teams, formal dependency tracking isn't worth the effort, so before you mark it as critical, ask whether things have actually fallen apart without it.
Team factors
Team size and location usually get considered. The factors at the bottom of this list are the ones that too often get ignored: whether the team prefers structure or flexibility, what happened to the tools you tried before, and whether anyone actually wants to own the process.
Reading your tally
Your highest count is your starting point, not a verdict. One warning: if T won your tally but you also marked "past tools died" and "nobody owns the process," believe those two answers. That combination is how tool graveyards happen, and it's the signal to look at the Slack-native options instead.
Final thoughts
There's no perfect way to run a team or a project, but you get much better results by taking the time to think about what your team needs. Your team's attributes and preferences give you a pretty strong idea of what will work best, and they tell you which downsides to watch out for once you've picked. The next time you spin up a new project or inherit a new team, spend five minutes running through the list above before you commit to a system. Five minutes up front beats three months of a tool nobody updates.
If your tally pointed toward Slack-native and you want to see what that looks like in practice, you can try Chaser for free and see how it fits the way your team already works in Slack. Get started and add Chaser to Slack, for free, or book a demo for a live walkthrough.
