Best Gantt Chart Software for Small Businesses 2025
If you’ve just started your small business, chances are, project and task management isn’t a priority for you right now. Most probably, tasks get completed as they come, and often without a clearly defined project. That’s no surprise, since your primary goal at this moment is to keep the business moving forward.
However, once the essential issues are settled, you’ll likely start thinking about how to optimise your processes, improve efficiency, and increase profits. That’s where Gantt chart software can help. It can increase your small business’s efficiency by enabling better planning and project control, helping you meet deadlines, coordinating team efforts, and distributing resources effectively.
In this article, you’ll find the best Gantt chart software options for 2025, to integrate them seamlessly into your business processes and make your business operations smoother.
What is a Gantt chart?
Before we actually review the solutions, let’s quickly clarify what is a Gantt chart (for those who have never heard of it).
In layman’s terms, Gantt charts are so-called roadmaps that show a project on a timeline. What exactly do they show?
- What is to be done
- Who’s responsible for doing that
- Start and end dates of each task
- Relationships between tasks
Basically, it’s all the information you’d usually have in spreadsheets, documents, notes, or even in your head, but combined visually in one place so as not to miss anything.
Why does your small business actually need Gantt Chart software?
As a small business owner, your first concern is to spend wisely. Therefore, you might wonder if project management software is worth the investment at all. The short answer is yes.
First of all, modern Gantt chart software improves the planning and management process, automates the workflow, and saves tons of time and money by increasing efficiency and performance. It also reduces miscommunications within the team, which can be quite expensive. Missed deadlines, unnecessary efforts and reworks, and desynchronisation mean more spending. Gantt chart software adds clarity and structure to what everyone in the team is working on right now, when someone’s interference is required or when the team is tight on deadlines.
You can just log in and immediately see if someone’s overloaded or if there’s an unplanned gap in the schedule. All of that without the need to wait for the next team sync and meeting. You can identify potential delays in advance and proactively adjust rather than try to fix things in panic at the last minute.
So, let’s see what the best options are that you can adjust to the needs of your small business.
1.GanttPRO
Price: 14-day free trial and $8 per user monthly with annual billing. Note that the price per member goes down as the team grows.
GanttPRO will appeal to small business owners who need comprehensive features without the complexity of long and tedious setups and onboarding. A clean and intuitive interface is one of the most frequently mentioned characteristics of this app in any forum or review platform. You won’t need to spend weeks figuring out the value of the app and how it works.
What makes it a fit for small businesses?
The first thing you have to try is its resource management capabilities. You can determine at a glance a resource’s overload or availability, and distribute tasks more evenly in a team. This helps to avoid situations when everything depends on one or two burned-out team members, while the rest are just doing time.
GanttPRO can also improve collaboration in your small business environment. Team members can comment on tasks, add relevant files, and get prompt notifications when something changes in a task. Forget about “quick update” emails and searching for particular information in endless message threads. Everything will be under a particular task.
Within other useful GanttPRO’s features, small business owners often mention advanced planning tools and neat Gantt charts that let them keep tabs on every task and project, budget management, time tracking, and sharing possibilities.
2. Microsoft Project
Price: 30-day free trial and at $10 per user per month for a cloud-based Planner Plan 1 with an annual subscription. Although it’s not the cheapest one, it is still affordable for small businesses that need highly professional project management capabilities.
You might think “Why would a small business use Microsoft Project?” Well, don’t scroll past just yet. We are used to thinking about a traditional, overly complicated Microsoft Project desktop version. However, Microsoft keeps up with modern requirements and has worked to make their powerful tool more accessible to smaller teams with a simplified web-based version.
What makes it a fit for small businesses?
If your team operates within the Microsoft ecosystem, the familiarity factor alone can be a good reason to consider Project. The learning curve is not steep if you need to create plans and visualise them on a Gantt chart. For more advanced features, you may need a bit of training, though. So, if that’s not an option, and you want to find alternatives to Microsoft Project, in this article, you can find easier solutions with similar features.
For small businesses that communicate with clients on an ongoing basis, Microsoft Project provides professional reporting and detailed analytics that can present your operations and activities at the highest level. And not only this. These reports and budget analytics also help you make data-driven decisions and help invest your limited resources with higher returns.
3. Teamhood
Price: a free tier for small teams and limited features, and $9+ per user per month with annual billing for bigger teams and expanded capabilities. This can be an excellent option for a very small emerging business to start with.
Teamhood is a project management solution that combines Kanban and Gantt visualisation approaches. The main reason behind it is to make the app adaptable to the constant changes that small businesses may face. Your projects and processes may evolve, but the tool will keep up with it so that you don’t switch platforms every now and then.
What makes it a fit for small businesses?
The ability to view the same project in different ways is perfect for small, dynamic teams with frequent changes of priorities and directions, and different preferences for work visualisation. A project manager can work with the Gantt view to see the entire project in perspective, while the team focuses on daily tasks within the Kanban board.
Small business owners particularly love Teamhood’s customisation possibilities. Instead of making your work style fit the technology, you tailor the technology to match your business work model. This is crucial for small teams that are still defining their optimal workflow.
Time tracking features within each task help small businesses with client billing and provide insights into how time is actually spent. This visibility is pivotal for optimizing operations and increasing profits.
4. Hive
Price: free forever for basic operations and $5 per user monthly with annual billing.
Small businesses may sometimes assume that since they are not a big corporation, they don’t need any tool for communication apart from a group chat or email. However, that’s not true. Small teams also struggle with communication silos, and they often encounter misunderstandings, miscommunication and desynchronisation. Well, Hive creates a single workspace where both projects’ operations and effective communication live together.
What makes it a fit for small businesses?
Hive offers an action cards approach where team members can view their backlog and current tasks in a way that makes the most sense to them. These include Gantt charts, Kanban cards, calendars, or just task lists. This flexibility is truly handy to address diverse workflows.
Integrated messaging in Hive can potentially replace your team chats dispersed in apps, emails, and meetings, and reduce the number of tools, distractions, and monitoring efforts. The key point here is that conversations happen in the context of a particular project plan, so that nothing gets lost in the way.
Small businesses that work with requests will also love Hive’s forms. Managers can create custom intake forms for projects involving clients, support tickets, or specific internal requests. This will automatically generate tasks in a project workflow, and save valuable time that small businesses often cannot afford wasting.
5.GanttProject
Price: good news here as the price of this Gantt chart software is zero dollars. You can pay for a cloud-based solution, but the main version is free.
Not every small business is ready to commit to a monthly or yearly subscription. If you’re just getting started with your business or with project management, or just operate with extremely tight margins, GanttProject can be a lifesaver. It offers a completely free, open-source space to plan and manage tasks.
What makes it a fit for small businesses?
It costs absolutely nothing, but provides you with the core Gantt chart functionality. Despite being free, GanttProject offers all the fundamentals required to arrange and structure the operations within a small team. You can list tasks, connect them with dependencies, allocate basic resources, and even track progress. In brief, that’s all you need for basic project management. And it works offline too, which is often a deal-breaker for many teams
The main drawback lies in its collaboration features. A free desktop application doesn’t allow for standard collaboration procedures that other apps do. And as we’ve mentioned, this can often be a deal-breaker for business efficiency and profits.
6. Instagantt
Price: starts at $8.33 per user per month with annual billing and a minimum of 3 users. Individual accounts start at $10t.
Instagantt can become a perfect complement if you’re already subscribed to Asana for task management and need a dedicated Gantt chart software. It can be connected to Asana (and was originally created for that) while offering powerful Gantt charts.
What makes it a fit for small businesses?
You can enhance your workflow by combining the benefits of Asana and advanced Gantt chart visualisation. Changes in one app become instantly visible in the other. So, in essence, you get the best of both worlds without overwhelming yourself.
Instagantt’s workload management section gives small business owners a sneak peek of team capacity in the planning phase and during the execution. As a result, you get fewer burnouts and more balanced task distribution. By assigning colors to projects, clients, or priority levels, you can also discern information quickly.
Additionally, the integrated dependency management feature helps small teams and businesses prevent conflicts within the schedule. When something changes or shifts in the timeline, you can see exactly how one particular task will affect everything else and fix it quickly.
7. Office Timeline Online
Price: starts at $6.99 monthly for individual users and at $9.99 for team users.
For small businesses that use Gantt charts to present project plans and update their clients or executives, this software is a real catch. Its specialisation narrows down to presentation-ready Gantt charts that assist businesses with the creation of polished graphics.
What makes it a fit for small businesses?
Direct integration with PowerPoint lets you create and update Gantt charts right in the presentation software. If some project details change (which happens quite often), the update will be automatically seen in the presentation as well. You don’t have to jump back and forth, adjusting and checking these details manually.
Small businesses may also take advantage of the extensive template library that covers different industries and use cases. A professionally designed template saves some extra hours you can spend on more important tasks and makes the project timeline look consistent and coherent.
Overall, Office Timeline will help you visualise plans and projects professionally without any complexities and distractions offered by other tools, with additional project management functionality.
How to choose?
After exploring all 7 options, you might still be wondering which one to include in your small business toolkit. Indeed, there’s no perfect solution that will miraculously tick all the boxes. You just need to find an option that will match your needs, team size, and work style.
Here are some questions that may lead you to find that perfect match.
- What’s your most significant project management pain point? If you have problems with team coordination, look at Hive. If it’s the presentation of project progress, opt for Office Timeline. To combine task management and high-quality visualisation, implement GanttPRO.
- Are you ready to invest time in learning and configuration? If the answer is no, don’t settle on MS Project or Teamhood.
- How much are you able to spend? GanttProject is a go-to free solution if money is an issue. Just as some other options from the list that offer free plans.
Another advice would be to try all the options and see how they work in real life. Most of the options offer several weeks of free usage. This will be enough to find out if you go well together. If possible, think about scalability as well. The tool that works fine now for 5 people might become limiting as it grows. Migrating projects is often tedious and costly. Thus, having an eye on the future may save your money and headaches.
