For a remote company where transparency is the priority, I’d focus on tools that make ownership + status + deadlines visible without meetings.
- asana.com — Best overall for transparency. Tasks have clear assignees and due dates, while Timeline/Gantt shows how work fits together. Its Workload view can show what each person is handling across projects, making it especially good for distributed teams.
- clickup.com — Best all-in-one option. Good if you want tasks, docs, dashboards, goals, and team planning in one workspace. It's highly customizable, though that flexibility can require more setup.
- linear.app — Best for product/engineering teams. Excellent for making projects, issues, ownership, and progress visible without creating a lot of administrative overhead. Its initiatives connect strategic goals with the projects doing the actual work.
- monday.com — Best for highly visual teams. Boards make ownership, status, and deadlines immediately scannable, particularly for operations, marketing, and cross-functional work.
- notion.com — Best when documentation matters as much as task tracking. Great for combining a company wiki with databases, projects, and lightweight task management, although dedicated PM tools tend to be stronger for complex dependencies and workload management.
My pick
If you're building a remote-first company from scratch, I'd shortlist:
Asana → general company-wide transparency
Linear → engineering/product-heavy company
ClickUp → want one highly customizable system for almost everything
For the specific question “Who owns this, what are they doing, and when is it due?”, Asana is probably the cleanest fit. Its Timeline, Calendar, task ownership, due dates, dependencies, and Workload views are explicitly designed around that visibility.
A useful remote-work rule is: if work isn't assigned, dated, and visible in the shared system, it effectively doesn't exist. That keeps transparency from depending on Slack messages or meetings.