Every project has 3 aspects which require tracking: budget, timeline/progression and communications. In other words, you need to be aware who, what, when. For budget I usually use Google Docs, which allow pretty complex calculations and even collaboration. The original PM tool has always been MS Project, which can actually do all of the above. Recently Basecamp has become very popular, I personally prefer Trello due to it's more visual way of handling tasks. For software related project, you would want to know Jira, which is a bug reporting tool.