Alternatives to Basecamp for Project Management
April 7th, 2007 (4:08pm) Anne Zelenka 107 CommentsTweet This (2)
Basecamp is arguably the most well-known and well-used of online project and team management web apps, but with attention and use comes criticism and complaint. Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare finds it’s not keeping up with her team’s needs. Emily Chang, founder of eHub, recently expressed her frustration with the lack of Basecamp-Highrise integration. And Douglas Karr canceled his Basecamp account today (though more because he disagreed with the 37Signals’ blog than because of his issues with the software).
Basecamp provides to do lists, messages, milestones, collaborative documents, chat, time tracking, and a shared file repository — so it seems to offer nearly everything a smallish team needs for project management and knowledge capture. It’s simple to use, but sometimes too inflexible. For example, I use Writeboards (collaborative wiki-type documents) to manage Web Worker Daily’s weekly conference call agendas but cannot reorder them or sort them by date. They are always ordered alphabetically, leaving the current agenda often buried amongst other Writeboards.
Rashmi suggests that Basecamp demonstrates little “findability.” You have to go to a separate page to search and then it doesn’t even search everything (to dos, for instance, aren’t included). Basecamp doesn’t support tagging or sub-categories or search within categories.
Rashmi wonders what might serve as a better alternative. Here are a few ideas.
Online project management apps. That is, direct competitors to Basecamp. Offerings include Goplan from Webreakstuff, newly launched Lighthouse, activeCollab available as a download that you host yourself or hosted at collab.ws, and Atlassian’s Jira. The main benefit of using a dedicated project management system, besides the dashboards and notifications that keep your project on track, is the structured data and process it provides. You don’t have to define how to dos, tickets, and milestones work; it’s already defined for you. But this can be their greatest drawback as well, because these applications may force you to work in ways that don’t suit you, your project, or your team.
Wikis. You can choose from hosted services like PBWiki, Wetpaint, and Wikispaces or host your own with free downloadable wiki software such as MediaWiki or Socialtext Open. Wikis are great for capturing and archiving team knowledge. However, they’re not designed with specific support for task management, issue tracking, or scheduling — so if you need extensive structured support in that arena, you might want to consider another option, or use wikis in tandem with some more structured project management application.
Online office suite. Take GMail, GCal, plus Google Docs & Spreadsheets and you could manage a project reasonably well. On the pro side, you could keep the information pretty well structured using the calendar and spreadsheets. You could capture knowledge in online documents. It wouldn’t force you into any particular project management processes, but wouldn’t give you the benefits of those either. If you wanted dashboard or notification-type features, you’d probably have to custom-build them yourself, though, and that’s a serious undertaking.
Concoct your own. Stowe Boyd has described how he’d like to use Stikkit’s semi-structured information capture with Zoho document editing capabilities and Box.net file storage and file access control to create an interpersonal organizer. This may be the way of the future: taking discrete tools and combining them (or using integration the toolmakers build) to put together a system that suits your needs and your team’s needs better than anything anyone else designed with their own needs in mind. Again, you’re not going to get a detailed dashboard or complex workflow with notifications if you go this route, at least not without some fancy programming of your own. But you might come up with something that fluidly and frictionlessly encourages project success.
What’s best for your team and your projects? Of course it depends on what kind of work you’re doing, with whom you’re working, how many people are on the team, and numerous other variables. While you’re deciding, check out these tips for getting your virtual team started on the path to productivity.
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
activecollab is great and preferable, in my opinion, to basecamp. i’ve been using it with my clients for a while now and it serves my needs rather well.
on the hosted wiki front, i find stikipad to have the best options with the lowest barrier for entry.
One other option that you did not mention is the project management feature in Jotspot (now owned by Google).
Rashmi nails it — findability is the achilles heel of Basecamp. Poor search experience; no headlines-only view of messages; no filter-by-author view of activity within a project; inflexibility with respect to sorting message, writeboards etc.
I live with these things because of the things that Basecamp does well, but many of the people I work with absolutely hate the program, and their reluctance to use it is frustrating me nearly to the point of jumping ship.
The thing is, none of these findability problems seem hard to fix to me, from either a technical or design standpoint, and I can’t see how solving them would run afoul of the 37signals creed, either.
Here’s hoping Jason and crew get on the stick and continue to improve their bread-and-butter offering.
It’s easy to complain about anything. I defend Basecamp because of its ease of use and the low price. And unlike more robust project management software apps like MS Project, its not a project in itself to use. You just use it.
A new project management site I already like better than any of the above mentioned, and it’s free to boot:
ClockingIT.
From their about page:
“We’re keeping it free, as we’re hosting on our own server, out of our apartment. We already had the internet link and server in place from other projects so we have no running costs, other than our time.”
I just thought I’d mention that ClockingIT is open source as well, so it’s quite possible to grab a copy and host it on your own server.
Since Jotspot isn’t taking new registrations, it doesn’t seem like a viable alternative right now. I’m really interested to see how it looks once it’s googlified though.
Ian: I agree, the findability problems don’t seem technically hard to fix. On their forums, Jason Fried mentions they’ll be working on search this year, so perhaps enhancements are on the way.
Yes, Figgy, it’s easy to complain about anything — and Basecamp does a lot of things right. It’s really easy to get started using it. It does a ton for you that a wiki or office suite wouldn’t do. Certainly it’s easier to use than MS Project though it’s not a substitute for that, lacking as it is in advanced project management features like resource scheduling, PERT charts and Gantt charts.
Thanks for the pointer to ClockingIT, Bjorn and Erlend. I’ll check it out.
I agree on Basecamp no being flexible enough, it’s the reason I dropped it as well. I’ve looked at all of these (except Lighthouse), and run activecollab myself twice now on trial runs. As a freelancer, I’m not usually needing collaboration, and many of my clients don’t or won’t even look at these methods. Most prefer email and phone calls, so the software ends up having to be for me.
I’ve decided to try building my own, using ExpressionEngine as a backend. Since I use EE for most of my clients and my own site, I’m already familiar with it, and it’s ability to flex into whatever situation I throw at it makes things easier. The only problem is that it takes time to do this, so it’s a work in progress.
Here’s a blog post from our blog comparing Basecamp to other web-based alternatives (including our own offering).
http://www.vertabase.com/blog/comparing-basecamp-to-vertabase-pro-web-based-project-management-software/
Describes many of the issues discussed above.
One piece missing from a lot of the popular “item tracking” (to-do’s, notes, etc.) tools is that some challenges in running projects are a little more complicated than just having a central place to store things with an easy user interface. Take scheduling for example. If you have a team of 5 or 10 people working on a project that is made up of hundreds of work-items (tasks, features, whatever), how do you figure out when you’ll be done? or prioritize? or manage risk of schedule slippage?
One alternative (for software projects) tool not listed already in the comments here is Devshop.
The best tool I’ve seen and has not been mentioned here is Hiveminder
Please check our product – TrackStudio (http://www.trackstudio.com). It’s very flexible, you can configure almost any workflows, e-mail notification rules, issue categories, etc for your projects.
This is the best there is – Trac:
http://trac.edgewall.org/
It’s especially well suited for software development projects. Everything is done thru tickets and a ticket can be either a defect, enhancement or a task. You can tie tickets to milestones and print out a decent roadmap (albeit not a pretty GANTT but who cares) What’s really nice is the tie to the Subversion code repository.
I played with Basecamp and yes it’s super easy to use but I feel it reduces the complexities of PM to mickey mouse levels – a real PM will need something beefier. I would use Basecamp to collaborate on a small college project.
To get the best from Trac, it helps to have some developers on hand who know Python to customize it to your needs but even without, I’ve found it’s the pot of gold I was looking for.
You left off the obvious alternative to Basecamp…….
http://www.centraldesktop.com
Its a wiki with project management combined.
Basecamp is not for everyone. Our architectural firm is using a brand new product called . Tangentworks was written for the AEC (architects, engineers and contractors) but it’s VERY suitable for any person who works for clients and produces something (projects, art, graphics, etc). 550 has all the basic collaboration tools such as calendars, announcements and to-do’s but also has AEC industry specific lists. But if you find that you want a list that’s not there you can create your own Custom List of any type. We’ve found it to be a great use to collaborating with our clients and project team members.
Tangentworks 550 is affordable and charged by the project plus storage cost. There are no additional charges for users.
There are a lot of alternatives to basecamp on http://www.whybasecampsux.org/ … the author challenges Jason Fried’s mindset of half-a-piece-of-software (how about a whole piece of software, please?) and I am starting to agree.
Jason’s philosophy is almost like a pschological defense mechanism, creating his own reality distortion field that keeps him and his team “on the cutting edge”, basically because they just dont address hard problems. Still gotta give it to ‘em for Rails.
For a more robust management solution that goes beyond just projects, and lets you manage any process-based business, check out Qfile by Qonsort which can manage more than just projects. We come from a background of simplicity and usability, but instead of telling our customers ‘no’, we intelligently extend the application to support our customers needs.
… or use XWiki (http://xwiki.org). It’s an open source (LGPL) Java platform offering a strong API for building wikis and collaborative web applications in general. See some samples of what users are doing with it: http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/References/
I work for XWiki…
-Vincent
You should also take a look at SantexQ a Online Project Management Tool and Task Management Software.
Have you tried Celoxis. It is one of the better project management tools out there. They are comprehensive and have great collaboration features.
Anne, my company, Axosoft, makes a product called OnTime 2007. It’s by far the fastest growing bug tracking software on the market and has a tremendous amount of project management features allowing users to collborate to track bugs, feature requests (requirements) as well as help desk.
We offer our solution as a Windows or Web application and as a Hosted solution. The entire suite is free for individual users (even the hosted version). You can learn more or signup for a free account at http://www.axosoft.com.
Here is another solution: . Simple Project/Task hierarchy, time tracking, attachments, email notifications, reports, hidden projects and groups. And pretty flexible – you can create tasks that don’t belong to projects, add team members to individual task, without adding them to the whole project and so on.
Hosted version is not available yet.
We recognized pretty early on that basecamp was not going to work for us long-term. After trying what seems like every project management tool available, we settled on OnStage. I imagine it is very difficult for these companies to develop a piece of software that they can sell as a one-size-fits all tool and yet make all of their customers happy.
Once my company hit around 30 people, we outgrew Basecamp and have switched to Intuit’s Quickbase. I definitely still use Basecamp for personal projects though, Quickbase is both overly complicated and too expensive for smaller projects :)
I landed on this article while looking around for web based project management apps.
Surprised to see that nobody suggested Zoho Projects — I have formally “committed” to it yet, but I believe I’ll be suggesting we use it at the day job soon.
Shameless Plug Follows
At SharedPlan, we’ve produced a hybrid solution – desktop app for what desktop apps are best at and web services where they are most appropriate.
And, our entry level product OpenPlanning Lite is free (projects limited to 20 tasks) and has access to the and hundreds of user contributed plans.
Customers have access to a hosted project server with browser reports and issue tracking.
A good article, thanks!
We’ve also tried using BaseCamp, ClearQuest, TRAC and many other products :(
But none of them satisfied enough linkage between
* enterprise wiki
* tasks & project management
* CRM
* unstructured discussions & blogs
so we developed our own – see http://www.comindwork.com
Basecamp seemed alright at first. However, it turned out to be “not for us” for a number of reasons. There were many drawbacks, e.g. it lacked a function that allows us to see the progress of our work. Finally, it seemed to be more of a communication tool, than a real project management application. We tried many other tools and finally settled with on wrike.com. We use it to manage multiple projects in one place under personal accounts. I love its simplicity and functionality. All I need is just to create a task via e-mail to one of my team members by adding wrike@wrike.com to the CC field. And it has Gantt chart feature, which helps to show an overview all our projects. We tried the basic free subscription, but soon decided on paying for the pro-version for the whole team of 14. It’s really worth it!
Cameron is right. Wrike is a cool tool!
I tried Basecamp and some other tools; they were too inflexible for me and my team. That alphabetical order of whiteboards was really killing me. Wrike, on the contrary, is easily customized. You name the groups and arrange them the way you prefer. Assigning tasks in Wrike by just sending e-mails is really great! Another very useful feature is the built-in notifications about over due tasks. It helps a lot sometimes.
People,
This post is to plainly invite you all for a beta test of OUR project management tool (based on the look and feel of basecamp). That simple …
Please go to the website, sign up for a golden ticket and I will send you an url so you have your own account and can play with it
Cheers,
Bart
Laura,
After trying what seems like every project management tool available, we settled on OnStage.
I saw your comment about OnStage. I too just recently signed up and I think this system is a hidden gem. I wasn’t interested in trying yet another PM tool but their free version caught my attention.
Hi All:
You might want to take a look at a company Vertabase (http://www.vertabase.com/) a web-based project management tool. Interestingly they have integrated ubiquitous tools – PDFs, Excel and Google spreadsheets. Lets teams collaborate smoothly.
Very smart interface, powered by AJAX + Flash – finally an application that uses the full screen width to the maximum. I have a widescreen monitor and it work out great. Plus the whole interface is customizable – you can resize the panels, hide/resize columns and adjust it to your needs and likes.
The mix of features is also right. I like the tasks visual timeline. It’s like a light Gannt diagram.
You might also want to check out http://www.deskaway.com – a pm tool for small creative/design firms etc.
Funny you mention “Alternatives to Basecamp” as I have a growing list of Basecamp Alternatives on my Basecamp bitch site as both vendors and people fed up with 37 Signals continue to send them to me.
For all the time tracking needed and setting the priorities straight from the beginning re: your projects management; Intervals has proved to be superb.
For small businesses, it helps streamline tasks by projects and track every second of work.
Also, you can run reports, keep control of the budgets, generate invoices for clients, produce and calculate time sheets- among other great features -
This is a great tool for people who charge by the hour. It really makes it easier.
You can take a tour of the application at: http://www.myintervals.com/tour.php
I highly recommend it.
http://myintervals.com
http://www.5pmweb.com
this is just much better, IMHO
Here’s a helpful blog post talking about how schedules are used in tools like Basecamp or tools like MS Project or Vertabase.
http://www.vertabase.com/blog/comparison-of-project-management-software-schedules/
Check out ProjectOffice.net, an online project management tool that provides all-in-one functionality: managing projects and tasks, time management, issue tracking system and increased team collaboration through wikis.
ProjectOffice.net is a web-based solution that offers basic project management functionality and enhanced collaboration for its users and their teams.It is completely free of charge and can be used after the one-step registration has been completed. With ProjectOffice.net, individuals and teams can create projects and tasks, can assign tasks to project members, can track time, expenses and issues and can use wikis to boost collaboration and knowledge sharing.
All everyone;
Our company developed Joint Contact (www.jointcontact.com) as an online project collaboration solution that allows allow groups to manage and share content for multiple projects quickly and easily.
A lot project management solutions have become rigid and limiting in how they segment project information. Joint Contact introduces a fresh approach that allows you to see content such as documents, contacts, tasks and discussions for multiple projects in a single view.
Hi there,
My name is Nick Matteucci and I co-founded http://www.VCSonline.com 9+ years ago because I was frustrated with project management software. It was too complex, expensive, and cumbersome for the people who were trying to collaborate, manage portfolios, and get their hands around resource capacity planning (and NOT just satisfy ridiculous management reporting requirements).
Sadly, our competitors (like Basecamp) came out with “PM for dummies” that really is nothing more then a mash up web-based Excel spreadsheet. IMO they are more interested in their exist strategy (heavily bought into by Jeff Bezos / Amazon VC) then fixing simple things their software should do easily and other things their software should never do.
For example – it was uncovered that everyone’s Basecamp passwords can be seen in plain text across the internet when the people page is viewed by any admin.
Their response to such an unforgivable breach? See for yourself: http://forum.37signals.com/basecamp/forums/5/topics/4104
If you want simple, sensible, and supportable web-based project management software, I would welcome you to try the VPMi Express ($5/user/month) at http://www.VCSOnline.com . For most companies, VPMi Express is cheaper then Open Source hosting and very capable (unlimited documents, projects, real workplans, issues, timesheets, and status reports).
Both versions are free for first 30 days and we have an extensive video training collection to help you get started.
We started in 1998 and this has been our life’s work and have over 30,000 happy customers all over the world.
I wish you luck in whatever you land on and you can feel free to write us with any questions you might have.
Best Regards,
Nick Matteucci
nmatteucci@vcsonline.com
Partner and Co-Founder VCSonline.com
VPMi = Simple + Sensible + Supportable Web 2.0 Project Management
http://www.VCSonline.com
I see Alex already wrote here about Comindwork…
I’d like to add that integrating all management tools into one powerful but still easy-to-use and flexible tool (especially in the mind of users) is still rarely achieved.
Are are invited to check Comindwork – project blog, project wiki, milestones, ticketing, file storage and time tracking are linked together for managing projects online. This is human-centric solution which builds work around people and their fun, not around abstract to-dos or tasks!
Although we’re biased, we’d suggest ProjectSpaces
as a good alternative for groups that have less sophisticated users who just need a basic collaboration feature set. ProjectSpaces doesn’t have as many bells and whistles as some of the other tools, but it does what it does extremely well in an intuitive way. It’s also lightweight and fast. It’s not wiki-based, which is a good thing for some groups who need more structure.
I’m using 5pm (www.5pmweb.com) and it’s great. I don’t think any interface beats them. Plus they are actively developing it – the email integration was introduced while I was using it. So I enjoy now the fact that I can create tasks from emails. Plus the iCal support was a nice addition too.
Their Timeline is also very nice. Though I would like the zoom function there.
I recommend giving it a try. They have like a two week free trial.
You know, it consistently surprises me that the best PM tool out there against basecamp – being Copper Project – is rarely mentioned in these reviews.
I’ve used both tools and while Basecamp is brilliant for the simple stuff, Copper just extends it that much further while still keeping the KISS philosophy in mind. Just thought I’d chime in for those folks looking for a genuine alternative with some heavy hitting features.
Check it out at http://www.copperproject.com
I have been spending the last weeks looking for a software suiting our needs. It is a really hard choice. Groupware, PM, ERP etc…
In the end the best choice for us, running a smaller development company with outsource accounting, and working on apple computers will be a groupware/project management tool.
I’m now pending between http://www.copperproject.com or http://www.projectplace.com. Where perhaps project place is stronger, but Copper have a nicer UI.
Some other tips if you also would like erp features…
http://www.tinyerp.com
http://www.enterprisegroupwaresystem.org
I have to say 5pmweb.com
I have tried all of the above sites and for simplicity with va-va-voom, this supercedes everthing
Hi,
great overview!
by the way, to find alternatives you can try http://dooblet.com
it is quite a new service, but it usually manages to give a hint about alternatives to all things that make sense :)
have a nice day!
What do you guys think would make a perfect online Project Management software? Can anyone point me to such an article?
Thanks!
hyperoffice is a good option. comprehensive project management functionality and many other integerated tools – complete intranet solution
I’ll have to agree with Imran:
http://www.5pmweb.com
It doesn’t take too long to realize how nicely 5pm works.
Basecamp lacks good visuals.
As far as I’ve seen this is the first click and drag project scheduling system.
Scheduling, Forecasting, Progress etc all on one visual calendar just like it should always have been.
http://www.teameffect.com
If you are looking for a simple and free solution, you may enjoy http://www.taskado.com
I especially like the tag cloud view that gives a lot of freedom for organizing your team or individual work.
It seems like more and more people are getting frustrated with BaseCamp. Our company just made the switch from BC to
Clarizen Project Software and it’s like day and night. It has given us all of the pluses of Ms project (yes there are pluses to Ms Project)with a much easier interface. Looking back at our time using BC we wonder how we actually functioned.
I wonder if there is a project management app that allows to copy the format of a project to have the same to-do´s, files, calendar and other info than the first. Can someone tell me if there is such a tool?
of all these mentioned i would say the best alternative would be a similar online project management tool called SantexQ
All mentioned cases remind me my not so good experience with Basecump. I ve tested a bunch of products and my choice is BUGtrack http://www.bugtrack.net
I can strongly recommend it to those, who is looking for simple workflow,and good functionality.
We recently outgrew BaseCamp and moved to SharedPlan Central. They have online tools (project editor, reporting, issue tracking) and a free desktop client (Mac OS X and Windows) for offline access.
So far, we like SharedPlan better. They still have work to do but they are responsive and on the right track.
https://www.sharedplan.net
I think Deskaway was just in the inception stages when this post was written – its come up to be one of the most competitive packages in my eyes and i think more will be seen of it considering the drastic development they are undertaking. As a user, im super happy.
We just moved from Basecamp to SharedPlan. SharedPlan focuses more on the planning aspect which is exactly what we found missing in Basecamp.
I talked to one of the people at SharedPlan today and they mentioned they were considering adding support for importing projects from Basecamp to SharedPlan Central. That would be really handy for us.
Our product is getting a lot of Basecamp converts thanks to the extra features we have (dates on tasks, a calendar, advanced permissions etc.).
I’d love it if some of ye would check it out – Teamwork Project Manager.
And we actually listen to our customers. :D
Check out
http://www.manymoon.com
A secure to do list and project management application that works with Google Apps! Manymoon is like Basecamp and Sharepoint for Google Docs.
* Private and Shared To Do List
* Turn emails into tasks, receive daily reminders
* Projects and milestones
* Easy to use.
* Facebook like features
* FREE
hi all,
We have leaved Basecamp to Teamwork (http://www.twproject.com/) just because it has more functionality like bug tracking. This is fundamental for our company. Using Teamwork we also discover with pleasure a lot of helpful feature, for example in task management or timesheets management.
I recommend it.
sorry,
I haven’t seen the html format :-).
you find Teamwork here:
http://www.twproject.com/
Hi all
I would like to suggest PlanningForce
( http://www.planningforce.com/ )
Moved to http://www.5pmweb.com and never looked back.
Check out http://www.teamworkpm.net – They have a Basecamp importer and these guys just ROCK! They took Basecamp and finally added in all the stuff we’ve been asking for.
Im also in process of moving to 5pm web lol. I need the timeline gantt view. grrrrr
basecamp alternatives here i bookmark the 5pmweb, its really good service, thanks for the article
5pm – thumbs up!
We left basecamp when one of my guys recommended Goalkeeper. I tried it and it looks pretty impressive. I think basecamp simplicity finally gets on your way and you simply need something more advanced. I have like 60 projects going and it’s very easy to use and comfortable.
Checkout http://www.rockclimbr.com/
Its basecamp implementation using Drupal.
I am planning to use this one on our server. Drupal is a well known CMS and can have any feature needed to match all these current and upcoming project management systems.
will post more when ready :)
I used to think Basecamp was a strong collaboration tool and that was the ONE thing that it could do well, but I’m starting to realize even that can get messy when you are trying to search for important details and are sifting through a pile of posts for what you need.
My company uses Basecamp mainly for collaboration but I use LiquidPlanner for my REAL project management. I have not tried many of the other systems mentioned in these comments, but something I still have not seen that LP has is flexible scheduling with tasks that can be estimated in ranges. LiquidPlanner is critical for me when I need to see what my resources are doing and who is overloaded, and how that will affect the other tasks.
I wrote my own blog post about why I love LP so much, I just couldn’t hold it in any longer :)
Orchestrate was designed from scratch as a resource scheduling app, it focuses on scheduling people to perform tasks at locations based on their qualifications. It may not suit everyone, and it doesn’t have Gantt charts.
Disclaimer: This is my company’s app
There are some nice project management tools mentioned above. But IMHO many have
a significant flaw: they have been concieved by developers.
OK developers are smart people. But they have a limited range of project management
needs. (Sorry guys but software development is only a minority sport ie "real
world" projects have different needs).
Our take on this is Dooster an organising
tool for small businesses and individuals.
Hope you like it ;-))
Ed, I agree. It takes people who really understand what it’s like to manage a project to build an effective project management tool. This is another reason I was drawn to LiquidPlanner, I took a look at their team and saw Steve McConnell on their Advisory Board:
http://www.liquidplanner.com/team
This was after I had read some of Steve’s books:
Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art, Rapid Development, Software Project Survival Guide
and really enjoyed them. Not to mention their Executive team is top notch.
Now the basecamp crew…that’s another story.
Basecamp is at the top right now because of its simplicity but alternatives always give a new era in the current working mode and some alternative may be future best. 37signals has had an almost religiously held notion of “less software” which in many ways it is a brilliant philosophy and the actual thing is that Basecamp add-ons are typically an additional cost on top of the monthly fee for Basecamp, are usually not as well-integrated as native features would be and they come with the risk of being discontinued as was ExtraReports, the reporting add-on for Basecamp. But for the alternatives the thing is that every alternative is running for providing new and complex features which are not even useful for evry1 but to showcase them they forget the real story. Huddle is one of the aternatives i liked activecollab also provides good service but the payment option of $249 and $399 makes you think a 100 times before paying.
WE actually want a system which provides simplicity as basecamp provides and features that just don’t prove to be additional weight on the product rather would prove to be actually useful. I heard of a product called Proofhub from a friend of mine though i couldnt find much on the internet but what i came to know was that the product provides some really good features with simplicity and at much cheaper price. Lets hope for the best and maybe we get a better product soon. Thnx for the post
hey Shane,
i think u r right. I really like how such applications collaborating with fulfill almost every possible need of a basecamp user though am not
that satisfied with the costing one has to spend so as to get these small functionalities.
I saw an addon called proofhq and even the Micro account costs $17 per month and just 30 proofs a month!! around 5 proofs would just be wasted knowing the functionality itself. i think its way too overpriced. Though i would really like some product with similar functionalities to come up at an effective cost where thing can be inbuilt, ofcource we need some gud updates so many years basecamp providing this service but we cant see much big time updates or big time functionalities though u may count some small ones.
But i really appreciate the simplicity basecamp provides that is much
better in comparison of various other alternatives. I tried to find the product called Proofhub (www.proofhub.com). even i didn’t got much about it but if the product gives what we need then surely its going to be a hit. Yea lets hope for the best.
hey Shane,
i think u r right. I really like how such applications collaborating with fulfill almost every possible need of a basecamp user though am not
that satisfied with the costing one has to spend so as to get these small functionalities.
I saw an addon called proofhq and even the Micro account costs $17 per month and just 30 proofs a month!! around 5 proofs would just be wasted knowing the functionality itself. i think its way too overpriced. Though i would really like some product with similar functionalities to come up at an effective cost where thing can be inbuilt, ofcource we need some gud updates so many years basecamp providing this service but we cant see much big time updates or big time functionalities though u may count some small ones.
But i really appreciate the simplicity basecamp provides that is much
better in comparison of various other alternatives. I tried to find the product called Proofhub. Even i didn’t got much about it but if the product gives what we need then surely its going to be a hit. Yea lets hope for the best.
Zoho Projects 2.0 just got launched with a revamped UI, Twitter-like project stream, an integrated wiki/chat and more. Check it out.
We use Celoxis (http://www.celoxis.com) and it’s been working out quite nicely for us. We are about 50 people and use their hosted service for the last 2 years now. The software is quite robust and support is exceptional. Their latest release (4.5) added some great features. Overall a great choice if you are looking for something more than those simplistic apps like Basecamp, Wrike, etc.
There’s so much corporate spam in all those comments here, awful.
Wow! I am amazed at the number of posts here… most of them look fake. Anyway… we used to use Basecamp and we liked it because we were moving from Excel. But our demands increased quickly and we had to pick another solution. We searched a lot and we decided to go with Celoxis… simply because it looked complete and price was good. Now it’s been a year since we have moved to Celoxis and I think it is a product worth considering for anybody looking to move out of Basecamp. Their web site is http://www.celoxis.com
There are many tools because people have many different requirements.
We built our product first of all to help us run our web software company. So we looked at what we ‘really’ needed to be able to deal with multiple people in multiple locations, with comments, tasks, documents and images etc.
We are not sales led so we do not need Lead Tracking (a New Bus Project suffices for that), we have an accountant so do not need online accounting and we never collaboratively edit documents online. We do use online whiteboards but for that we use a dedicated tool like dimdim.com.
What we do need is described below – for us it works wonderfully. If you business is similar to ours it’ll probably also work for you.
Glasnost21 is different in four ways: First, it is specifically designed for collaboration outside the firewall, with clients and suppliers as well as colleagues. Secondly, as an Adobe Flex application it provides an exceptional user experience and makes information remarkably accessible. Thirdly a dedicated Image Management module means vastly superior handling of digital assets. And lastly, the Contact Management Module provides ‘lite’ but powerful CRM functionality as well as email campaign management.
Zen (http://agilezen.com) is a web-based project management tool that could be thought of as an alternative to Basecamp also.