7 Best Work OS Platforms

Without a central platform to collaborate and manage work, your employees will feel frustrated and disengaged. You’ll have to deal with duplicate work, missed deadlines, and poor decisions due to miscommunication and disorganization.

You can save yourself and your team the headache with a work operating system (Work OS) platform that lets you:

• Manage tasks efficiently
• Plan and execute projects
• Create and manage teams
• Collaborate with members in real-time
• Connect with other business tools

After testing some of the most popular work operating systems online, I’ve come up with a list of the best options.

Here’s what I considered:

• Team size
• Types of Projects
• Workflow automation
• Budget
• Customization
• Scalability

In this guide, I’ll walk you through my top choices for best work OS platforms.

What is a Work OS?

A Work OS platform is a digital platform that combines the functionalities of project management, communication, and collaboration tools into a single interface. It allows businesses to optimize their workflows, increase productivity, and foster effective teamwork. With a Work OS platform, teams can collaborate, manage tasks, track progress, and communicate seamlessly.

Best Work OS Platforms at a Glance

What are the best Work OS Platforms?

#1. ClickUp: Highly Customizable

ClickUp is a cloud-based project management platform for businesses to streamline their processes, saving time and boosting productivity. The platform allows you to bring your tasks, projects, chats, and team goals all in one place.

Teams can brainstorm ideas with whiteboards, draft plans with collaborative docs, and automate tasks with powerful no-code automation. This way, members will communicate and collaborate better, boosting your business performance.

The platform has a user-friendly interface and an intuitive dashboard that provides a bird-eye view of all your projects and tasks. You can customize it to display more relevant information, like upcoming deadlines, assigned tasks, and overdue projects.

With ClickUp, your team can plan, organize, and collaborate on any project to ensure you complete projects on time and beat deadlines.

You can even break down big projects into various subtask levels to reduce bottlenecks.

ClickUp also lets you build Docs for any type of work and edit them in real-time alongside your team, allowing you to centralize all your work in one place.

Instead of switching between different apps for project management, documentation, and communication, you can do them all on ClickUp, saving you a lot of time.

ClickUp Pricing

Here’s a breakdown of ClickUp pricing:

• Free: $0 
• Unlimited: $10 member/month
• Business: $19 member/month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

ClickUp Pros and Cons

#2. Monday.com: Best Work OS Platform for Workflow Automation

Monday.com lets you customize your workflow your way to fit your team’s needs for maximum productivity. You can create reports and visualizations for your team with customizable no-code dashboards, making them accessible to members without technical expertise. 

Additionally, Monday lets you add widgets like charts and timelines to help you better visualize data and monitor progress on dashboards, 

For example, you can add a chat to show trends in your sales data or a timeline to track the progress of an ongoing project.

The platform also offers 200+ integrations with popular tools like Slack, Google Drive, and GitHub, so you work seamlessly without switching tools back and forth. And the best part is that you can set up all your integrations in seconds without code or disrupting your work.

Repetitive tasks like email processing, scheduling, assigning tasks, and reporting updates can be tedious and mind-numbing for your team. That’s why Monday.com provides code-free automation to handle these duties so you can focus on what matters most: completing projects.

You can further streamline your workflow with the Kanban software—a workflow management tool for teams to visualize their work, track progress, and identify bottlenecks. Members can create boards with custom columns and stages, drag and drop tasks between columns, and improve collaboration with real-time updates, comments, and notifications.

When you want to track your projects using a visual and flexible platform, Monday.com lets you create Gantt charts for your tasks and milestones. Your team will be able to identify and mitigate potential risks to a project using these charts.

For example, if a task is delayed or overdue, the Gantt chart will show how it will impact the overall project schedule. This way, your team will be able to make quick corrective action that will minimize the impact of delays.

Monday.com Pricing

Monday.com has fixed rates on all their plans for teams with up to 40 members. If you have more than 50+ employees, you can get custom pricing plans to suit your team’s size. 

Here’s a breakdown of Minday.com pricing: 

• Free: $0 (Up to 2 seats)
• Basic: $10 seat/month
• Standard: $12 seat/month
• Pro:  $20 seat/month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Monday.com Pros and Cons

#3. Smartsheet: Best for User-Friendliness

If you need to manage complex projects or workflows, Smartsheet can help you plan, capture, automate, and report on work at scale. It can handle project management, work collaboration, resource management, and reporting.

The platform’s admin tools will help you manage users, change security settings and user types, and automate user provisioning easily. This way, only the right people will access your Smartsheet account and data, ensuring your team is set up for success. 

But admins also have many responsibilities, some of which are repetitive and mind-draining. That’s why Smartsheet lets you create and manage automated workflows to streamline these recurring tasks and processes. 

For example, you can leverage pre-built workflow templates or create custom workflows to automate the following tasks:

• Sending weekly status requests and due date reminders
• Assigning tasks to team members
• Requesting updates and approvals
• Locking and unlocking rows
• Recording dates
• Changing cell values

You can customize dashboards to centralize, organize, and present essential data and resources from sheets, reports, charts, forms, and other sources. Members won’t waste time searching for information, improving the team’s efficiency.

With real-time visibility into project statuses, performance, and other key metrics on your dashboards, you’ll be able to keep stakeholders informed. This way, everyone will be on the same page, and decisions will be made based on the most recent data.

Smartsheet reports let you combine data from multiple sheets into a single view to highlight what’s important, manage and update work, and make status updates. If you’re managing complex projects or portfolios, the reports will give you a comprehensive view of your data.

You can even apply filters by sheet metadata or column values, group and summarize data by common values, and feed dashboard charts to get more specific insights. This way, you’ll be able to identify trends, track progress, or surface potential risks before they become real threats.

Smartsheet goes beyond dashboards and reports to create custom apps that streamline workflows, simplify collaboration, and provide tailored experiences for each stakeholder. With WorkApps, you can build and manage custom apps without code directly from sheets, forms, reports, dashboards, and external content like files, web links, and videos.

For example, your IT team can use WorkApps to create custom apps for managing service tickets, tracking assets, and onboarding new employees. You’ll streamline your workflows, improve efficiency, and provide better service to customers. 

Smartsheet Pricing

Smartsheet has multiple pricing plans to accommodate a wide range of customers, from solopreneurs to large enterprises. 

Check out their pricing plans below:

• Free: $0 (1 user, up to 2 editors)
• Pro: $9 per user/month (Max of 10 users)
• Business: $32 per user/ month (Min 3 users)
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Smartsheet Pros and Cons

#4. Trello: Best for Task Management

Trello is a great way to get organized and track your progress, no matter what you’re working on. With flexible and customizable boards, you can handle personal projects and complex team workflows in the same place.

The platform has a simple interface made of boards, cards, and lists, making it easy for teams to visualize and manage their work. Trello lists and cards give you a simple and visual way to see what needs to be done, who’s responsible for each task, and how far along each task is.

Every Trello board comes with powerful no-code automation called Butler that lets you create rules, buttons, and commands to automate any action. 

For example, you can create a rule to move a card to the “Done” list when all its checklists are completed. You can also create a button to automatically assign a card to a certain team member or create a new task in another project management tool. 

Butler can also send email notifications when a card is moved to a new list or when members complete tasks. This way, users can stay updated on the progress of different projects. 

In a content marketing team, for instance, editors will be notified when writers complete tasks, allowing them to start working on the delivered assignments.

To better enhance collaboration between your team members, you can enable Trello Power-Ups to link your employees’ favorite tools. Google Drive, Slack, Jira, and Voting are some of the many power-ups that’ll make it easier to share information and keep track of your projects.

With over 100 power-up options, you can customize Trello to make it work better for you and your team, boosting morale and productivity among members. 

Trello Pricing

Here’s a breakdown of Trello’s pricing plan:

• Free: $0 per user/month
• Standard: $5 per user/month
• Premium: $10 per user/month
• Enterprise: $17.50 per user/month 

Trello Pros and Cons

#5. Notion: Highly Versatile Work OS Platform

Notion combines note-taking, project management, data organization, and team collaboration to get work done faster on a single platform. 

Notion’s powerful project management features let you stay organized and on track from start to finish. You can view projects as a timeline to see the bigger picture and resolve dependencies, and capture every detail in a table to track the progress of your projects..

For complex projects, Notion lets you break them down into manageable pieces and see every deadline plotted on a calendar. You can even create your own priority labels, status tags, and more to track the exact info you need and craft the perfect workflow for your team.

With Notion Docs, you can mix and match text, images, tables, and code blocks, to create custom documents for your team. You can also store your documents in a central location for easier retrieval, collaborate on them in real time, and get notified when someone mentions you.

Notion recently introduced its own AI to help teams work faster, write better, and think bigger. It can automate tedious tasks like summarizing notes and extracting insights from data, freeing up your time to focus on more important activities.

Notion AI can also boost your writing by fixing spelling and grammar errors and translating text into other languages. You can even edit your content for voice and tone, making it more concise or longer, depending on your needs. 

When you need new ideas to overcome writer’s block, the AI will generate first drafts to give you a headstart.

Notion Pricing

Here’s a breakdown of Notion’s pricing:

• Free: $0 per user/month
• Plus: $8 per user/month
• Business: $15 per user/month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Notion Pros and Cons

#6. Asana: Best for Cross-Functional Work

Asana helps you organize complex projects across teams so you deliver quality work faster.

Workflows and automation on Asana allow you to create and automate processes without code, so you can focus on more strategic work. For example, you can create a simple onboarding process and automate sending welcome emails to every new member added to the system. This saves your HR team a lot of time, allowing them to focus on other essential tasks like training and development. 

Asana also offers 80 ready-made templates for common workflows like product development lifecycles, which involve design, development, testing, and deployment. You can even design your processes with the platform’s template builder and then reuse them over and over again. 

When your work needs organizing, Asana’s Kanban board, list, timeline, calendar, and Gantt chart create custom views to surface the most important information for your team. 

You can also drag and drop tasks to instantly update your project timeline, saving you the time to manually enter new dates or adjust existing ones.

Discover the state of your team’s progress with Asana’s reporting dashboards. You can build custom dashboards with real time data to monitor progress, track spending, and see the big picture. 

You can even find underlying goals, projects, or tasks by clicking on data points and sharing your dashboards with team members to keep everyone informed. 

Asana Pricing

Here’s what it would cost you to use Asana:

• Basic: $0
• Premium: $13.49 per user/month
• Business: $24 per user/month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Asana Pros and Cons

#7. Wrike: Best for Diverse Workflows

Wrike streamlines work processes with features like Kanban boards, project resource planning, and over 400 integrations, empowering teams to achieve their goals.

Wrike’s dashboards give you a real-time overview of project and team progress, allowing you to build custom workflows to fit your processes. With Kanban boards, you can manage tasks, plan with timelines, schedule projects with shared calendars, and share updates using tables. 

The dashboard tools can help you measure key performance indicators and import data from over 50 digital marketing tools under one interface. You’ll save a lot of time and effort switching between different tools and make better data-driven decisions about resource allocation. 

Wrike’s cross-tagging feature lets you view tasks in the context of your team’s project and the company goals. You can add tags like project or department names to any task, subtask, folder, milestone, and phase.

When launching a new product, for example, you can create a “Product Launch Campaign” tag and add it to the related tasks, folders, and milestones. You’ll be able to see all the work in one place, regardless of which team or department is responsible for it. 

The platform has resource management software that optimizes performance by assigning the right people to the right projects, enabling efficient, quality work. With everyone on the same page and aligned with organizational goals, you can easily plan, schedule, and allocate your resources, hitting your goals quickly.

Wrike Pricing

Here’s the breakdown of Wrike’s pricing plans:

• Free: $0
• Team: $9.80 per user/month
• Business: $24.80 per user/month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing
• Pinnacle: Custom pricing

Wrike Pros and Cons

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some of the challenges teams face on Work OS Platforms?

Teams face a number of challenges, including:

• Difficulty in managing and scaling complex workflows as teams grow
• Compliance with security regulations when storing large amounts of sensitive data
• Adoption and change management of new platforms, especially for large teams
• Rigid platforms with limited customization options
• High cost of running a large team on work OS platforms

How do I integrate my Work OS Platforms with other tools and software?

Most work OS platforms have native integrations with popular tools like CRM systems, project management tools, and communication tools. They’re usually built and maintained by the platforms, seamlessly connecting your accounts for easier data sharing. 

If your work OS platform lacks native integration with your desired tool, you can use third-party integration to connect any applications. Here are some examples:

• Zapier
• Integromat
• Microsoft Power Automate

How do I train my team on using a work OS platform? 

Here are some tips for training your team on a Work OS Platform:

• Start by getting everyone on board with the idea.
• Choose the right training materials
• Tailor the training to your team’s needs
• Make the training interactive
• Provide ongoing support