nTask Review
nTask is a relatively new project management tool that seems hell-bent on storming the top echelons of our rankings. In this full nTask review, we’re going to see how it succeeds.
Founded in 2015, nTask is a relatively new kid on the block among the rest of our best project management software. However, it seems intent on bagging itself a top spot, offering a solid, user-friendly tool at low prices. Whether that is enough to give it that coveted high ranking, we’ll see by the end of this full nTask review.
Key Takeaways:
- nTask has a solid free plan for up to five team members that should have you running simple operations without any real trouble; the only real problem with the free version is that it has no kanban board.
- It is a bargain. Of all the project management software we’ve reviewed, nTask is among the very cheapest, and probably offers some of the best value for money.
- nTask has most features you need and has implemented them to a high standard. It offers kanban boards, Gantt charts, time-tracking, meeting management, you name it.
In short, nTask is attractive for people and businesses looking for a solid, versatile project and task management tool (see the difference between task management vs project management). Rather than build a sprawling piece of software that does everything more or less decently, it focuses on just a few features and pulls them off well. If that sounds like you, we recommend you give it a shot.
However, thanks to some minor niggles, it falls slightly short of industry leaders like monday.com or Asana, which can simply do more and do it a little better. Also, the free plan is less complete than that of others, meaning nTask won’t make it to the top spot in our best free project management software roundup. Still, though, there’s a lot to like, so let’s get started.
nTask is a project and task management tool from the United States. It will help you manage tasks and projects, so you and your team can get more done.
nTask integrates with a number of task management tools, including Asana and Jira, as well as other services like Google Calendar. It also integrates with Slack, for easy communication.
Yes, nTask is very good. Though not perfect, it’s definitely one of our favorite project management software solutions out there, and we recommend anybody in the market for a new tool to try out the free plan and 14-day trial of the Premium plan.
Top Alternatives for Ntask
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
Strengths & Weaknesses
Pros:
- Cheap
- Comprehensive feature set
- Very easy to use
- Multiple handy views
Cons:
- Privacy is a bit iffy
- Self-hosted option only on top-tier plan
- Navigation can be a clickfest at times
Features
As we mentioned in the introduction, when compared to our other project management software reviews, nTask is a solid contender in what it can do. It possesses most basic functions, plus a few advanced ones. We’ll break down its features by plan.
nTask Free Plan Features
nTask’s free plan is aimed at teams of five people or fewer and offers a few basic functions that will probably suit a team of that size very well. You can create and manage tasks in a list (read our monday.com review for another service that uses the list as a basis), with a calendar and a unique grid as alternative views.
The grid is a one-of-a-kind way of looking at your tasks. It‘s very limited in that you can only really use it to get an overview of things; cards can’t be moved around like in a kanban board. That said, we ended up liking it well enough, as you can see things easily at a glance. There’s no peering at lists of cards, trying to glimpse the one you need.
On top of these two views, you also get access to a meeting planner, which is fairly unique among most project management tools. It has a built-in note-taking tool, giving you and your team a centralized spot to look up all salient discussion points. We also like how you can connect a task to it, eliminating any vagueness about a meeting’s purpose.
Agile Project Management
nTask also fancies itself an Agile tool and, as such, offers issue-tracking abilities. This is handled through the “issues” tab and works really well. Though we have a feeling hardened Agile veterans will prefer Jira, the winner of our best scrum software roundup (read our Jira review to find out why).
Last but not least of the free plan’s features is the built-in time-tracking, making nTask a rival to Asana or Wrike. Unlike Wrike, though, it offers time-tracking as a free feature, and you don’t have to add it on separately, like with Asana.
All kept time is collected on the “timesheets” page in orderly rows, making nTask ideal for anybody that bills by the hour but doesn’t want to spend too much money on it.
Overall, nTask’s free plan is excellent. The only thing we feel is missing is a kanban board. Though you could always do without or maybe use Trello separately (read our Trello review) and integrate the two using Zapier or IFTTT. Alternatively, you could upgrade to the Premium plan, which we’ll look at next.
nTask Premium Features
The Premium plan is where nTask really starts to shine. While the free version is a perfectly fine task manager, the paid tiers are where it becomes a fully fledged project management tool. The first hint of this is the added “projects” tab, which allows for the management of different projects at the same time, advanced project planning and distribution of tasks.
Besides this, the other main attraction of the Premium plan is kanban boards. Every project you create automatically has a kanban board assigned to it with some premade columns. We like the kanban boards, though they feel a bit crowded. However, the drag-and-drop functionality works as it should, and we like how you can see subtasks on the front of cards.
We probably won’t be nominating nTask as the best kanban-based project management tool — it has too much competition in Trello and Wrike — but it’s pretty solid. The last big add to the Premium plan is the Gantt chart, which is pretty decent. You access it through the “projects” page.
Unlike most competitors that advertise Gantt charts, nTask’s is actually good. It even could replace TeamGantt in some ways. Though as you can read in our TeamGantt review, we like its zoom abilities and a few other little touches that nTask doesn’t have. You can set dependencies by clicking and dragging, though subtasks won’t show up, which is a shame.
Features for the Business and Enterprise Plans
The free and Premium plans cover most of nTask’s basic functionality, meaning the Business and Enterprise plans are there mostly for advanced functions. The Business plan provides you the ability to assign team members custom roles and permission, effectively giving you the power to decide who sees what, as well as allowing you to customize statuses and set risks (possible obstructions down the line).
The biggest advantage of the Enterprise plan is that you can self-host nTask and that you get extra options when starting out with it. We see how this could be invaluable to larger corporations, but if it’s just you and a few others, it may not be a great option. If the self-hosted option is critical for you, check out Jira, as it’s included for free there.
The really juicy stuff is all in the free and Premium plans, meaning nTask has one of the best feature distributions we’ve seen so far. That’s the good part; the even better bit is its price, which we’ll discuss next.
nTask Features Overview
Management Views
- : No
- : No
- : No
Management Features
- : No
- : No
General Features
- : 14 days
- : No
- : No
Support
- : No
- : No
Pricing
nTask is downright cheap. It even beats out Jira’s pricing by a country mile, making it the best deal on the market, especially if you’re running a small business. Let’s take a look at the numbers.
- Maximum 5 team members.
- Minimum 3 team members. First three users are only $36 per year for all three.
- No minimum or maximum team members.
- Self-hosted option. 50 team members minimum.
We’ve gone over the free plan’s features in the previous section. While we feel there are better free options out there, the jump from free to Premium is so small that it barely matters. In fact, it’s probably a marketing tactic, and a smart one: with prices so low, you’re more likely to produce the company credit card.
nTask Review: Paid Plans
The Premium plan is the cheapest paid option out there for project management tools, at only $2.99 per user per month if paid annually. However, the first three users cost only $1 each per user per month, with those three being the minimum (we couldn’t select fewer than that during checkout).
That means that the Premium plan costs only $36 per year for three users, with each successive user costing an additional $35.88 each per year. To break it down monthly, three users would cost $3 per month annually, while four users would cost $5.99 per month annually.
The Business plan is also a pretty good deal, though maybe not to the same extent as the Premium plan. While, say, monday.com is priced a little higher (and Asana’s pricing is double), you do get more advanced features when using either, so we would recommend that. However, if it’s just a role assignment that you want, it’s still a good deal.
The Enterprise plan’s main draw is the ability to self-host nTask. Whether its other features are worth whatever you’re quoted, we daren’t say, as nTask didn’t get back to us when we asked what the Enterprise plan would cost.
nTask Storage Allotment
| Plan: | Free | Premium | Business |
| Storage: | 100MB | 5GB | 10GB |
User-Friendliness
When it comes to ease of use, nTask is one of the better options out there. Everything is laid out in front of you, without having to go back and forth, like with Wrike (read our Wrike review to find out what we mean by that). However, there are a few niggles that keep nTask from winning us over completely; read our Asana review for one provider that does a little better.
Signing up to nTask is as easy as going to the website and clicking the button in the top right of the screen. From there, all you need to do is enter your work email address and you’re subscribed to the free plan.
The rest of the signup process is extremely streamlined. Just enter some personal details and with a few clicks, you’re on nTask’s main screen, ready to do some project and task management.
If you want to fire ahead and go for the 14-day trial of either the Premium or Business plans, all you need to do is hit the blue “upgrade now” button at the bottom left of the screen, no credit card required.
nTask Organization
We like how nTask is organized: the left-hand bar is a personal view of the tasks assigned to you, which is a great overview. The top part of the main screen is your navigation, with the large area below it serving as your work area. This setup never changes between different screens and areas, meaning you can go from any screen to any other, which is great.
As we mentioned in the features section, the list is where you do all your task management, which is the bread and butter of nTask. Once you’ve created a task, click on it to get the back of the card (like with most project management tools). From there, you can do all kinds of interesting things, like set recurring tasks or schedule a management meeting concerning the task.
The back of the card is also where you assign tasks to different team members. You also have some nice team collaboration options here, too, like the ability to start a discussion chain regarding the task (great for remote teams).
Meetings, projects and issues work much the same way: go to the corresponding tab, create a new meeting, issue or project, then click on it for the details. In most tabs, you can choose between viewing items in either a list or a grid, and often a calendar as well. Overall, other services could learn from nTask’s amazing overview and ease of use.
Room for Improvement
However, there’s one thing we didn’t like: in any given tab, you can only manipulate the details of the items associated with it. Under projects, you can only fiddle with projects, under issues only with issues; you get the picture.
This can be annoying if you want to make a quick change to a task while in the project view. Thankfully, the top bar allows for rapid navigation, but it can still be a bit frustrating.
Security & Privacy
nTask is less impressive when it comes to security and privacy, but then again, so very little project management software is (read our Airtable review for one of the very few exceptions).
Privacy is a little iffy, while security is a little better, but it hosts files using AWS, which comes with some issues (read our what is AWS guide for more information).
Plenty of companies make use of AWS, and we understand why, but it does often lead to the problem of leaky buckets. Generally speaking, they’re easy to avoid, but all it takes is one panicky intern or an admin with a coffee deficit, and your data is potentially exposed. Take that out of consideration, though, and security is solid, with high-level encryption both when sending and storing your files.
The privacy policy has less to defend it. While nTask does make clear it won’t sell your data on, it does gather a whole lot of information about you; some of which will be used for marketing purposes. That said, it doesn’t seem to sell any data, so we’ll give nTask the benefit of the doubt here.
Customer Support
nTask offers great customer support and tutorials. It comes with handy little pop-up tips when you start, has a large knowledgebase and friendly, supportive staff. Email support is a little slow, but that’s the worst we have to say about it.
Generally, we find that pop-up tips can be a bit hit-and-miss. However, we like how nTask implements them, and we like even more how you can get rid of them with a single click, never to be seen again.
If you’re not a fan of pop-ups, you can always consult the massive archive of helpful articles, plus the tutorial videos on the YouTube channel. We found all of these to be helpful, though the videos miss some of the depth you’ll find with TeamGantt or Asana, while the articles can be a bit short on details.
If you get stuck, there’s always support, through either chat or email. Chat can be summoned with the text bubble at the bottom-right of the screen and is probably the best option for small problems: replies are usually within 10 minutes or so. Email is reserved for more complicated issues but takes longer. In both cases, we got clear replies that solved our issues.
The Verdict
Overall, we think nTask is one of the better project management tools out there today, especially for anybody looking for a more generalist tool. It tries to do a little bit of everything, which usually is a pretty precarious strategy, but it pulls it off with a pleasant interface and smooth workflows.
On top of that, it’s definitely the cheapest, good project management software out there, which may be reason enough to make it work for you, even if a feature isn’t to your taste. We definitely recommend anybody who is shopping to try out the free plan or the 14-day trial of the Premium plan, as it may be the perfect fit for you.
What do you think of nTask? Promising newcomer or annoying upstart? Is the price right for you? Let us know your questions and thoughts in the comments below, and, as always, thank you for reading.
