Do any of you use or have any experience with any free or relatively inexpensive project management tools?
I'm looking for something that's easy to use and aesthetically pleasing, with the ability to give a good visual overview of tasks and timelines, store relevant files for each task, and pref. integrate with various calendars (google, outlook, etc). Cross-platform, obviously.
I don't want something that's basically a vertical to-do list.
What kind of project? Azure Dev Ops's free version is plenty if it's a small team, and it does everything you asked for, but it's focused on software development.
For small tasks I would still stick to excel sheet. *cough* ;-)
Maybe try out Slack. If you are considering Trello you should probably look at Jira instead.
Most places use confluence, Jira (ticket system integrates well with bitbucket), Bitbucket/Git combination for sub-repos - main/final storage is usually something more fancy, Jenkins for integration-tests and usually an over developed build pipeline (indoors-made).
If you are lucky there will be some sort of try to CI as well that can actually load the software for you on target.
Slack is for communication, not project management right?
For small tasks I've used excel, which isn't ideal but it works. If you're good with excel you can make it as visually pleasing as you want, and automate a lot of things.
Our project managers here mainly use Microsoft projects, I'm not a huge fan and I don't think it's free.
MS Project does cost money, I think $10USD a month if you buy a standalone O365 copy. It's an MS Office product though, so there's a chance that Aimless will have access to it already from some bundle somewhere.
edit: nevermind, apparently even though it's an office product, it's never part of any office bundles.
Lot of good recs for various use-cases :up: the Atlassian ecosystem isn't right for the projects I'm working on r n, but will be worth another look when I get back to wrestling with development projects. Will try using Trello first, and then Basecamp, and see which I and my colleagues prefer.
Going with Trello for now. Basecamp looks excellent for projects involving coordination of teams of people working fairly independently, but Trello seems easier to get started with quickly, and gives a more useful overview of everything. Basecamp has better communication features (both message-board and "campfire" chat module) and possibly more convenient approach to hoarding files, but Trello organizes files better (I think?). Trello is more aesthetically pleasing to me. Cost is a problem - basic functionality is free with Trello, but for most useful addons you need to upgrade to business license - $9.99/user/mo. Basecamp is free for personal use with 3 projects & 1GB limit, and $99/mo to upgrade. All in all, it looks like it's going to be faster, easier, cheaper and more useful for me to try Trello for a while. But I'm gonna check out MS Project as well just in case :o