Give MeisterTask a try. I am using it for a 3-people project, it has very nice usability so far. It launched a few weeks ago and has a free plan.
In case you use mind maps for brainstorming, it integrates with the company's mind mapping tool, nice if your team is not in one place.
IMHO, while tools like JIRA are nice for larger-scale teams (used it at my last employer with 300+ people), smaller and easy-to-use tools are better suited for small teams.
I really like Trello, Easy to use, good UI, has all the options I need, and it's free.
And available as an app on mobile!
Heres a list of product management tools + marketing tools and many others. Adding this here because Tom asked me to.
Just seeing this post - I wanted to add that I have experience using trello and it is great for tracking personal projects, as well as communicating progress/project specs across teams. I have never used DropBox personally so I don't have comparative feedback between the two. I would recommend sign up on trello since it's free and check it out. It has a lot of capability, just as a quick example in particular you can import google docs and sheets quickly.
I've used Jira, spreadsheets, Trello, Asana, and YouTrack. All of them are capable of running large teams. All of them have needs in order to use them effectively. Here they are:
Jira, Asana, and YouTrack are all highly structured, and frustrating to set up workflow tools. The forced structure is useful when having to do the minimal work necessary to keep users from messing up the flow. It takes a lot of time to set up the way you would like it, and it causes a team to conform to the way it functions. For some, this is perfect. It tells you how to organize. It forces users to do it the way it wants. It's cumbersome to change it. It's constraining.
Trello is a blank canvas. It provides you the tools to create an organized work flow. It's flexible, it highly graphical, it's easily broken. While I prefer Trello due to its lack of constraints, it's also its Achilles' heel. Without strong organization, and persistent upkeep, Trello can very quickly go awry. This becomes more difficult as it scales, and more users can use it incorrectly. This requires team commitment, and a person designated to maintain the boards. When its working, its wonderful. When bad management sneaks into it, its horrible. '
Choose wisely.
I like Upwork because it's free for up to 10 users and works well on cheap 5$ digital ocean instance. And it has built in support for agile board, time tracking and simple reports.
