Best Project Management for Solopreneurs

The Solopreneur's PM Problem Is Different

You're the CEO, developer, marketer, designer, customer support, and accountant. You wear every hat. And someone just suggested you add "project manager" to the list by setting up a Jira instance.

You're not just a developer. You're customer support at 7am, marketing at lunch, accounting on Friday afternoon, and a product builder in whatever time is left. When people recommend project management software, they usually mean "a tool for tracking engineering work." That's maybe 30% of what a solopreneur does. The other 70% is running a business, and most PM tools pretend that part doesn't exist.

If you're searching for the best project management for solopreneurs, you've probably already tried a few tools. Maybe you set up a Trello board, used it for two weeks, and watched it turn into a graveyard of cards nobody will ever move. Maybe you built an elaborate Notion workspace and spent more time maintaining it than building your actual product. That's not a you problem. That's a tool problem. These tools were built for teams, and a team of one has fundamentally different needs.

The core issue is this: solopreneur project management isn't about coordinating people. It's about protecting your focus when everything is competing for your attention. Product work is the thing that grows your business, but it's also the thing that's easiest to postpone. A customer email feels urgent. A tweet needs a reply. Your bookkeeper needs a receipt. All of that pushes product work to tomorrow, and tomorrow has its own fires.

So we evaluated seven tools against criteria that actually matter for one person business tools. Not feature counts. Not how pretty the UI is. Whether the tool helps you ship product work when the rest of your business is screaming for attention.

What solopreneurs actually need from a PM tool

Before the reviews, let's be specific about the criteria. These come from running one person businesses ourselves and watching hundreds of solopreneurs in communities talk about what's working and what isn't.

1. Zero-config setup

You don't have a spare weekend to configure your productivity system. Solopreneur tools need to work out of the box. If a tool requires you to design custom databases, set up automations, or watch a tutorial series before you can add your first task, it's already costing you more than it's worth. Five minutes from signup to tracking real work. That's the bar.

2. Focus enforcement

This is the big one. Solopreneurs are pulled in every direction, and the temptation to work on three projects simultaneously is constant. "I'll just do a little bit on each one." You know how that ends. Nothing ships.

Your PM tool should make it obvious when you're spreading too thin. Ideally, it should make working on one thing at a time the default behavior rather than something you have to force yourself into.

3. Shipping accountability

When you work alone, there's no standup. No sprint review. No manager asking for a status update. That freedom is why you became a solopreneur, but it's also why projects stall. You need something external that makes the cost of not shipping visible to you. Not a guilt trip, just a mirror.

4. Idea filtering

Solopreneurs have too many ideas. Every conversation with a customer sparks a feature request. Every competitor launch triggers a reaction. Every shower produces a "what if" that feels brilliant for about forty-eight hours. Without a system for filtering ideas before they become projects, you end up with a dozen half-built things and nothing generating revenue.

5. Simple, honest pricing

Per-seat pricing is irrelevant when there's one seat. But some tools charge solopreneur prices for hobbyist features and enterprise prices for the features you actually need. No hidden upsells, no artificial limits that force upgrades. You're running a business with real margins, and your tools should respect that.

The best project management for solopreneurs, reviewed honestly

We used each of these for solopreneur project management. Some of them are good tools that don't fit this use case. Some are genuinely helpful. Here's what we found.

1. FoundStep

FoundStep was built specifically for solo builders who struggle to finish what they start. That includes solopreneurs, indie hackers, and solo developers. It's not a team tool with a free solo tier. Every feature assumes one person trying to get a product out the door.

For solopreneurs specifically, two things stand out. First, the One Project Focus model. FoundStep pushes you to work on one project at a time. You can have other projects in your account, but the tool is structured around completing what you started before moving to the next thing. If you're the solopreneur with four "almost done" products and zero revenue, this constraint is exactly what you need.

Second, the Validation Framework. Before you invest weeks into building something, FoundStep makes you score the idea against practical criteria. Market demand. Your ability to execute. Monetization potential. Competition. It takes maybe ten minutes, and it's saved us from multiple bad ideas that felt exciting but had no market. This is where solopreneur project management diverges from regular PM. You can't afford to build the wrong thing when you're the entire company.

Scope Locking prevents the classic solopreneur trap of "just one more feature before launch." You define your scope, commit to it, and any additions get flagged. You can still add things, but you have to consciously decide to expand rather than drifting into it.

The honest downside: FoundStep tells you how to work. It has a specific methodology, and if you deviate from it, the tool pushes back. Some solopreneurs will love this structure. Others will find it rigid, especially if they already have strong work habits and just want a clean task list.

Best for: Solopreneurs who know they should be shipping faster but keep getting pulled into new ideas, scope expansion, or busywork. If you need discipline more than flexibility, FoundStep is built for your exact problem. Read more about staying accountable as a solo developer and see too many side projects how to focus if juggling multiple ideas is your core problem.

2. Notion

Notion is the default workspace for a huge portion of the solopreneur community. And for good reason. It does a lot of things well. Documentation, SOPs, knowledge bases, CRM, content calendars. You can build almost anything in Notion, and that's both its strength and its weakness.

The problem with Notion as a solopreneur PM tool is that building your system becomes the project. You'll find a template on Reddit, customize it for two days, realize it doesn't quite fit, find another template, rebuild. Three weeks later you have a beautiful workspace and no product progress. We've watched this happen to dozens of solopreneurs in online communities, and it happens because Notion gives you infinite flexibility with zero guidance.

Notion doesn't have opinions. It won't tell you that your project list is too long. It won't flag that you haven't touched a project in a month. It won't question whether your latest feature idea is scope creep or genuine necessity. It's a blank canvas, and blank canvases are procrastination traps for people who already have too many things competing for their attention.

Where Notion genuinely works: storing your SOPs, customer research notes, content plans, and business documentation. If you're a solopreneur who has their shipping discipline handled and needs a knowledge base, Notion is hard to beat. Just don't make it your PM system too.

Best for: Documentation and knowledge management alongside a dedicated PM tool. Risky as your only system for tracking product work.

3. Todoist

Todoist is the simplest tool on this list, and for some solopreneurs, that simplicity is the point. It's a task list. You add tasks, set due dates, check them off. Projects are just groups of tasks. Labels and filters let you slice things by context. That's it.

For solopreneur productivity, Todoist has a real advantage: it gets out of your way. There's no board to maintain, no database to design, no workflow to configure. You open it, add what you need to do, and close it. The daily view shows you what's due today. The karma system gives you a small dopamine hit for completing tasks. It's a simple loop that works.

The limitation is that Todoist treats every task as equal. A task to "Fix login bug" sits next to "Launch product" with no sense of relative importance beyond what you manually assign. There's no concept of project phases, no scope control, no idea validation. It's a to-do list, and a good one, but managing a one-person business needs more than a to-do list when you're juggling product development, marketing, sales, and operations.

Todoist also caps features on its free tier in ways that matter. Reminders, which are genuinely useful for solopreneurs managing multiple responsibilities, require the Pro plan at $4/month. That's reasonable, but worth knowing.

Best for: Solopreneurs who want the lightest possible tool and already have strong self-direction. If your problem is remembering what to do rather than deciding what to do, Todoist works well.

4. Trello

Trello is the kanban board that launched a thousand solopreneur workflows. Three columns, drag and drop, done. The visual simplicity is appealing, and for small projects with clear scope, it works fine.

The problem shows up at scale, and "scale" for a solopreneur just means running a real business. Your board grows. The To Do column fills up with cards from three different contexts: product features, marketing tasks, admin work. You add labels to distinguish them, which helps for about a week until you stop applying labels consistently. Cards age in place, and there's no signal that distinguishes "I chose to defer this" from "I forgot this existed."

Trello's Power-Ups add capabilities like calendar views and automation, but each one adds complexity. The whole value proposition of Trello is simplicity. Once you bolt on five Power-Ups to make it work for solo product management, you've rebuilt a worse version of a tool that was designed for this from the start.

Trello also has no concept of project validation, scope management, or shipping accountability. It's a board with cards. You put things on the board, you move them around, and the board never asks whether any of it matters.

Best for: Short-term projects with a fixed, small scope. A hackathon project, a quick client deliverable, a content launch. Not enough for ongoing solopreneur product management.

5. Basecamp (Personal)

Basecamp comes with a strong philosophy about work. The Shape Up methodology, the "calm company" approach, fixed timelines with variable scope. If you've read any of the Basecamp team's writing, a lot of it applies directly to solopreneur work. Ship in cycles. Don't let projects drag on indefinitely. Bet on ideas rather than planning them to death.

The personal tier gives you a simplified version of the full product. To-do lists, a schedule, document storage, a message board. For a solo user, the message board is useless (who are you messaging?), and the hill chart feature, which is actually interesting for tracking progress, requires manual updates that solo users typically abandon within two weeks.

The philosophy is better than the tool for solopreneur use. If you read Shape Up and apply its principles, you'll ship faster regardless of what tool you use. But the Basecamp tool itself doesn't enforce those principles for a one-person team. It's still a team tool with a solo mode, and the solo mode is a stripped-down experience that doesn't justify choosing it over simpler options.

Best for: Solopreneurs who align with the Basecamp philosophy and want a tool from the same team. The methodology is worth learning even if you choose a different tool.

6. ClickUp

ClickUp tries to be everything. Tasks, docs, whiteboards, goals, time tracking, dashboards, chat, automation, custom fields, multiple views. The feature list is enormous, and that's the problem for solopreneurs.

Setting up ClickUp for a one person business takes real time. You'll choose between List, Board, Calendar, Gantt, Timeline, Table, and Map views. You'll configure custom statuses, priority levels, and task types. You'll set up Spaces, Folders, and Lists to organize your work. Before you've tracked a single task, you've made fifty decisions about how to structure your workspace.

Some solopreneurs love this level of control. If you're the type who gets energy from building systems, ClickUp gives you more knobs to turn than any other tool on this list. But if you're the type who needs to stop building systems and start building products, ClickUp is quicksand. It's one of those tools that can absorb unlimited setup time without ever reaching a point where it feels "done."

ClickUp's free tier is generous. You get most features with some usage limits. The performance can be sluggish, though, especially with complex views. And the learning curve is steep enough that you'll find yourself watching ClickUp tutorials when you should be doing customer research.

For a deeper look at how ClickUp compares for solo use, see our ClickUp alternative for solo developers comparison.

Best for: Solopreneurs who genuinely need a complex system because their business operations are complex. If you're running a productized service with multiple client workflows, ClickUp can model that. For product solopreneurs building a SaaS or digital product, it's overkill.

7. Monday.com

Monday.com is an enterprise work management platform that markets to everyone, including solopreneurs. The core product is powerful. Custom workflows, automations, integrations, dashboards, time tracking, resource management. For a team of twenty coordinating across departments, Monday.com makes sense.

For a solopreneur, it's like driving a bus to get groceries. The tool works. You can create boards, add items, track progress. But everything about the interface assumes collaboration. Mentions, assignments, team capacity, workload views. Using Monday.com solo means ignoring about 60% of the interface.

Pricing is the other issue. Monday.com's individual plan is limited. To get the features that make the tool worth using (automations, integrations, dashboards), you need the Standard plan, which starts at $12/seat/month. For a one person business, paying team prices for solo use doesn't make sense when tools built for solopreneurs exist at lower price points.

The automations are the standout feature if you're willing to pay. "When status changes to Done, move to Archive and send me a summary email." That kind of workflow automation saves time. But you can get similar functionality from cheaper, simpler tools.

Check our Monday.com alternative for solo developers comparison for a detailed breakdown.

Best for: Solopreneurs who plan to hire soon and want their PM tool to grow with them. If you're staying solo, the overhead isn't justified.

Comparison table

Here's how each tool performs against the five criteria that matter for running a one-person business.

Tool	Zero-Config Setup	Focus Enforcement	Shipping Accountability	Idea Filtering	Simple Pricing
FoundStep	Yes (minutes)	Strong (one project focus)	Strong (progress tracking)	Yes (Validation Framework)	Solo-friendly
Notion	No (heavy setup)	None	None	None	Free tier available
Todoist	Yes (minutes)	None	Weak (karma only)	None	Free / $4 mo
Trello	Yes (minutes)	None	None	None	Free tier available
Basecamp	Moderate	None	Weak	None	Free (personal)
ClickUp	No (heavy setup)	None	Weak (goals feature)	None	Free tier available
Monday.com	Moderate	None	Weak (dashboards)	None	Expensive for solo

The pattern is clear. Most of these are team tools with solo tiers, not solopreneur tools. They solve coordination problems that don't exist when there's one person. The things that actually matter for solopreneur productivity, like focus enforcement, idea filtering, and shipping accountability, are missing from almost every option.

Our pick

FoundStep is the best project management for solopreneurs who struggle with the completion side of their business. We built it, so take this recommendation with appropriate skepticism. But we built it because we were solopreneurs using these other tools and none of them solved the real problem.

The real problem is not task tracking. It's the gap between "I know what I should work on" and "I actually work on it consistently until it ships." Solopreneurs have too many responsibilities pulling their attention away from product work, too many ideas competing for their time, and too little external accountability to keep them on track. A scope-locked, validation-first system targets all three of those problems directly.

But here's the honest caveat. If task tracking is genuinely your bottleneck, meaning you have strong discipline but just need a place to organize work, Todoist or Linear will serve you well with less friction. If you need a knowledge base and documentation system, Notion is better for that. If you're planning to hire within six months, a team tool like ClickUp or Monday.com might make sense as an investment in future workflow.

The worst choice is using nothing. Any serious search for the best project management for solopreneurs should start with that truth. If you've fallen into the trap of spending more time configuring your PM system than using it, project management setup fatigue is worth reading before you pick a tool. Solopreneurs who keep their task list in their head, or in a text file, or scattered across Slack messages and email drafts, lose hours every week to context recovery. You sit down to work, spend twenty minutes figuring out where you left off, get interrupted, and repeat. Any tool on this list is better than that.

The second worst choice is a tool that creates more overhead than it eliminates. If you're spending more time managing your PM system than it's saving you, switch to something simpler.

Pick the tool that fixes your weakest point. For most solopreneurs, the weakest point is finishing, not organizing. A purpose-built solopreneur productivity tool addresses that specific problem.

Frequently asked questions

What's the best PM tool for a one-person business?

Depends on your bottleneck. If you struggle to finish products, a discipline-enforced PM tool helps. If you need flexible note-taking, Notion. If you want simple task lists, Todoist. The best tool is the one that matches your biggest problem. One person business tools should reduce overhead, not add it.

Do solopreneurs need project management software?

You need a system. Solopreneurs juggle so many roles that without something tracking your product work, it gets lost in the noise of marketing, support, and admin. Whether that system is software or a notebook is less important than having one at all.

What tools do successful solopreneurs use?

Most successful solopreneurs use simple tools. The common thread isn't the specific tool but the discipline behind it: shipping fast, validating ideas, and not over-building. You'll see people succeeding with Notion, Todoist, pen and paper, or purpose-built one person business tools. The tool matters less than the habit.

Is Notion good for solopreneurs?

Notion works well for documentation, SOPs, and knowledge management. For product development discipline, you need something more opinionated that prevents scope creep and enforces shipping. Notion as a knowledge base paired with a shipping-focused PM tool is a strong combination.

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Running a one-person business and tired of tools built for teams? Try FoundStep and get a PM system designed for how solopreneurs actually work.