Collaborative project management tools (CPMT) are very similar to collaborative management tools (CMT) except that CMT may only facilitate and manage a certain group activities for a part of a bigger project or task, while CPMT covers all detailed aspects of collaboration activities and management of the overall project and its related knowledge areas.

Another major difference is that CMT may include social software, Document Management System (DMS) and Unified Communication (UC) while CPMT mostly considers business or corporate related goals with some kind of social boundaries most commonly used for project management.