Key takeaway
The right tool at this size is the one nobody has to be trained to use, not the one with the longest feature list.
Search for how to choose a project management tool and most of what comes back is written for someone evaluating a dozen enterprise vendors against a scoring matrix: integration depth, single sign-on, portfolio rollups, admin controls at scale. None of that is wrong, it is just written for a buyer a small team is not. A five- or ten-person team choosing its first real tool has a much narrower, more practical question in front of it, and most of the enterprise checklist is noise until the team is a lot bigger.
The three things that actually matter at this size
First: does it put scope, milestones, tasks, risks and who owns what in one place, instead of splitting them across a task app, a shared doc and a chat thread. That consolidation is most of the actual value a small team gets from adopting a tool at all. Second: can everyone on the team use it without training, the same afternoon it is set up. A tool that needs a rollout plan for a ten-person team has already lost more time than it will save in month one. Third: does it grow with the team without forcing a migration later, meaning it should work fine for one project today and still make sense with five projects and a few new hires next year, on the same account.
What to safely ignore for now
Enterprise-style portfolio dashboards, elaborate custom permission schemes, and resource capacity planning across dozens of concurrent projects are all real features, and all genuinely unnecessary at ten people. Paying attention to them now, or picking a tool because it has them, usually means picking something heavier and more expensive than the team actually needs. ClearPMO's Base plan is free on every project specifically because a small team's first real need, one connected record instead of five scattered ones, should not have a price tag attached to it at all.