When you need a Gantt chart
A Gantt chart earns its place when the order of work decides the deadline: launches with a fixed date, client projects with handoffs between teams, construction and moves, and anything with approvals that hold up later steps.
If your work arrives as a steady flow of independent tasks, a board or a list will serve you better. A Gantt chart that nobody keeps current is worse than no chart, because people make decisions from it.
Gantt features that separate the tools
Almost every tool can draw bars on a calendar. The differences appear when plans change. Check whether the tool supports all four dependency types: finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish and start-to-finish. Finish-to-start covers simple sequences; the others matter for overlapping phases.
Then check what happens when you move a task. Tools with automatic rescheduling shift every dependent task for you. Without it, you fix each later date by hand, and charts drift out of date quickly.
A critical path shows which chain of tasks controls the finish date, so you know which delays matter. Baselines save a copy of the original plan so you can compare it with reality later. Lead and lag time, milestones and the ability to share a read-only view with stakeholders round out the list.
Also check the difference between a timeline and a Gantt view in each tool. Some vendors offer both, with the timeline as a simpler overview and the Gantt view as the place to manage dependencies.
Plan tiers matter more here than elsewhere
Gantt and dependency features are among the most commonly gated features in project software. In some tools the Gantt view itself starts on a paid plan, and in others the view is available but dependencies or cross-project links need a higher tier. A few offer limited trial uses on the free plan.
Before you commit, find the exact tier where Gantt view, dependencies and baselines all become available, and price that tier for your team. The tool reviews on this site list where each of these starts, based on the vendor's pricing page on the date we checked.