Your Guide to Choosing the Right Project Management Tool

When I first wrote this guide in March 2024, I compared Notion, Mirro and ClickUp and offered to help you pick one. Two and a half years on, the tools have changed, the prices have changed, and so has my advice. Here is where each one stands today. Prices were checked on each vendor's own page on 6 October 2026 and are in US dollars.

Notion: one flexible workspace

Notion is still the most flexible of the three: pages, databases, boards and calendars you shape around your own way of working. Its pricing page lists a Free plan, Plus at $10 per member a month billed yearly ($12 monthly) and Business at $20 billed yearly ($24 monthly).

The big change since 2024 is AI. Free and Plus only get a trial of Notion's AI agent and AI meeting notes; Business includes them in full. Custom agents that carry out tasks on their own cost $10 per 1,000 monthly credits after a free trial. Free accounts get buttons, and database automations start on Plus.

Best for: people who like to design their own system and will keep it tidy.

ClickUp: task management with everything attached

ClickUp is built around tasks, and it shows. The Free Forever plan already includes unlimited tasks, Kanban boards and a calendar view. Unlimited ($7 per user a month, billed yearly) adds Gantt charts, native time tracking and unlimited integrations. Business ($12, billed yearly) adds timeline views, webhooks and 5,000 automations a month. Its AI, ClickUp Brain, is a paid add-on at $9 per user a month.

Best for: teams who live in task lists and want deadlines, owners and time tracking in one place.

Mirro: now an HR and performance platform

In 2024 I described Mirro as an OKR tool for setting objectives and key results. It still includes OKRs, but its plans today are built around HR: an automated HR system, performance check-ins and a combined package covering staff from hiring onwards. The page does not publish prices, though there is a 14-day free trial.

If you are a team of one to ten looking for somewhere to run projects, Mirro is no longer the comparison to make. If you are a growing firm that needs goals and performance reviews for staff, it is worth a look.

A quick way to choose

• You want one place for notes, documents and projects: Notion.
• You manage lots of tasks with deadlines and owners: ClickUp.
• You need goals and performance reviews for a team: Mirro.

Whichever you pick, run one real project on the free tier for a fortnight before you pay for seats.

The tool is the easy part

Back in 2024, Ignite Drive offered virtual assistant support to set up and run these tools for you. We no longer offer that, because most of what a VA did inside a project tool can now run by itself.

In small firms, the hours rarely go on the project board. They go on the jobs around it: building the onboarding pack when a client signs, copying details into the CRM, chasing an invoice, writing the weekly report. Those jobs follow the same steps every time, which is exactly what makes them easy to automate.

That is the idea behind what I call 10 Hours to 10 Seconds. A new client signs, and their folder, welcome pack, project, first invoice and CRM record appear without anyone touching them. It all runs on systems you own.

If you want to know which of your weekly jobs could go the same way, the 10-Hour Audit maps where your time goes and what to automate first.