Running a business solo means wearing many hats, and over the years, I've tried numerous tools to keep everything organized. Here are the top seven project management tools that have significantly impacted my ability to manage projects, maintain productivity, and grow my business.

1. Bizway – My Personal AI Assistant

My Experience: Bizway is my go-to for an all-encompassing platform. The AI-powered assistants and KPI dashboard have been game-changers for handling my business tasks (though of course, I'm biased).

• Customized Assistance: It's like having a virtual team member who can handle specific tasks.
• All-in-one-hub: The combination of KPIs, Projects, Business Model and Assistants to actually fulfil tasks has been the bird's eye view I always needed for my solo buisness.

2. Trello – The Visual Organizer

My Experience: Early on while I was freelancing, Trello's visual way of tracking my freelancing tasks was really neat and I loved how its simplicity kept me focused.

• Easy Customization: Very easy to customize the boards to exactly what I needed.
• Mobile-Friendly: The app kept me connected with my work no matter where I went.

3. Notion – The All-In-One Workspace

My Experience: Notion was frankly a gamechanger for me, and is a tool I still use to this day. I even created a business around Notion templates, that's how much I enjoyed it as a tool for creating precisely the business setup I wanted!

• True customization: For the first time, I felt like I could build my very own apps and workspaces, just the way I wanted to.
• Ready-Made Templates: A supportive community offering templates meant I could start with a little inspiration.

4. Asana – My Project Roadmapper

My Experience: Asana really is a delightful design experience, and offers really need variety for visualizing my project's journey. The ability to set up task dependencies and automated workflows ensured nothing fell through the cracks.

• Aligning Goals: It helped me stay on track with my long-term objectives.
• Inspiring Interface: The bright and user-friendly interface made daily planning something I looked forward to.

5. Monday.com – A Simple Platform

My Experience: At first I was really excited by Monday, but (and this was over a year ago) I found it in the end to be a bit of a less powerful version of Asana and other tools.

• Customization: I liked how simple it was to create and customize.

6. ClickUp – The Modern, Friendly Platform

My Experience: Coming from Notion, Clickup did at first admittedly seem like another version of Notion. But after giving it a chance, I appreciated the added structure it gave with more 'persistent' pages, and it still had a lot of the functionality I liked about Notion.

• Views for Any Need: Whether I wanted calendar views or lists, ClickUp had it covered.
• Task Automation: At the time, Clickup was one of the early tools that really embraced and allowed for simple automations, which were very exciting to try out.

7. Airtable – The Spreadsheet Meets Database

My Experience: Airtable was where I first went for a backend to experiment building my own no-code web apps. It really is a great nocode solution for managing large amounts of data with the intuitiveness of a spreadsheet, perfect when I dipped into more data-intensive projects.

• Powerful Data Management: Its robust features turned data management from a headache into a pleasure.
• Functional Blocks: Still lets you create more user-friendly views and visualizations than a traditional spreadsheet.
• Nocode Friendly: As one of the earlier players in the space, Airtable has done a great job of integrating with other nocode tools and builder platforms.

To be perfectly candid, as a solo business owner I feel nothing but gratitude that all of these platforms exist--and that many of them are free to use on the solo plan.

They're incredibly flexible, and served different purposes at different stages of my solo career.

But, while I am biased, none of them were really tailor made for managing a solo business (other that Bizway). It was always a matter of trying to shape the tool to meet my needs, and while I did enjoy customizing each of them, it came time to build my own proper solo business management hub.

If you are looking for a tailor-made solution to run your solo business, with a little help from some AI Assistants, I really would recommend trying Bizway.

But if you're just looking to explore what's out there, every tool on this list is a great place to start.