How to control the development time of the project?

Question

Task Management

I do project management of a couple of projects in my free time. As you work on a project, you constantly need to take into account the development time and see how many days were actually spent. It is not profitable for me to buy expensive and heavy applications for this.
What tools are available to help control deadlines? Does anyone have an excel spreadsheet template?

Answer 1

redmine open source, if it’s not fate to install it yourself, you can get a ready-made image on AWS

Answer 2

1. ms project, oddly enough
2. azure tfs (a team of up to 5 developers for free), integrates with item 1.
and so - redmine, jira as examples of large and not bad in terms of functionality.
rtracker yet

Answer 3

I won’t give you an Excel template, but I suggest this option . For a
complete description, look for the book "Joel on Programming" by Joel Spolsky, Chapter 9.
A simple and understandable option, checked.