Monday.com
We're tried Asana, Wrike, Basecamp, Airtable etc.
Presently quite happy with Monday.com
but it's not just a matter of what software tool you use, but how your company communications. You have to get people communicating in the right place to make it work. Great article on how tools like Slack can fuck things up https://basecamp.com/guides/group-chat-problems
It's quite a sophisticated and refined product . It has a great notification system which is very important. It's very flexible and malleable, like Airtable but with a sidebar panel for each row where you can have a discussion--complete with rich formatting (tables), images and files, GIFs, @mentions, and reminders. There's a lot of sophisticated UI features, like how you can customize the columns of your boards, move items between boards and groups, and pin updates. I could share some screenshots if these stupid Capiche forums ran on Discourse. The forums systems here sucks so hard.
LiquidPlanner
It's not really an "app" as your question asks, it's a web application. After using many (simplistic) project management tools we always ended up at the same place: initial euphoria when discovering a nice clean simple PM tool - a period of learning and mastery of the new tool - then a final phase feeling frustrated that the once simple tool became kludgey and not powerful enough for our needs. Finally, we found LiquidPlanner, which does so many things differently, it was refreshing (albeit a little daunting at first). The BIG benefit is the sheer power of the tool. You can use it simply or embrace more of it as you learn and become a power-user. The prediction engine that determines when your project is likely to finish is fantastic. But warning, it's only as good as the data you capture - like updating task completion status as well as remaining hours on a task. One thing it could improve is their phone apps.
awork
We've been trying different productivity tools for years and while most tools start off simple enough, they tend to become more and more complex. The thing is: Most people working on projects are not professional project managers. So simplicity always beats pure functionality when it comes to tool adoption (we're around 35, partly remote, very project oriented, both client projects and internal ones).
We found awork.io to be beautifully simple but still comprehensive enough to manage a larger number of projects across different parts of our business.
That's a really great point about why simplicity is needed. Feels like Jira, for instance, needs a dedicated project manager to make it work well for teams.
Looking for a better way to plan remote meetings across time zones, and keep up with events. What software is doing that best today?
Totally agree that the protocols are more important than the tools for this type of thing. Are there specific things in Monday.com that made you happier with it than the others? It's one of the few that I haven't tried before.