No doubt basecamp is the original player in the project management space. However the world is different from then they started and there are incredible alternatives in the market.
Basecamp is a feature-rich tool that supports different types of projects. For example, you can view data by moving from task to task or you can view larger projects from the perspective of the team as a whole. Comparatively, other tools are less flexible with the ways in which you can manage your data.
Our research makes it simple for you to decide the right one for your needs.
Here's 6 different project management tools we tested for you, along with their pros and cons
Here are the tools we checked out:
Clickup
Trello
Asana
Jira
Monday
Notion
ClickUp
Clickup is a platform that allows your business to gain insights into how your team is operating. It integrates with all the other tools you use, making it easy for you to coordinate between your business tools.
Pros:
There are three types of users that can benefit from Clickup, teams, individuals, and solo users. All of them have features in common, such as the 2.0 version which has a great user interface. Integrations help save a lot of time.
Another way that Clickup optimises your user experience is by providing you with a well-designed dashboard. You can see your tasks on the Task List view, calendar view, or Kanban view.
Powerful even the free version. Free versions are expected to be less powerful and sometimes even lack features. Fortunately, this is not true with Clickup because it still supports many features that are otherwise only found in paid versions of other software. For example, it has email notifications, Android/OS app, task dependencies, file attachments for tasks, and more.
Customer-centric. Clickup's main concern is to make sure their product is tailormade to match the customers' needs. This is evident in the fact that their main concern is to update their platform frequently to make their software one of the best in the industry.
Clickup provides an excellent support service to its customers. They are easily accessible and always do their best to help any issues customers may have.
Clickup's design is user-friendly and accessible. Users with dyslexia expressed that they appreciated Clickup's structured layout, which was easy to navigate.
Cons:
Lack of features. Some users report that they miss certain features like automatically moving updates in social networks or the ability to sort what is shared where.
Clickup has a lot of features available. This can be a positive and a negative. For example, it has a lot of features, but this means there are a lot of things for you to consider when setting up Clickup. Some Clickup users say that there is too much to configure. Some recommend that a simple ‘done’ or ‘not done’ approach would be enough.
Users find the calendar lacking in several ways. There are numerous buttons users have to click, which is distracting. The ‘done’ button is in the wrong place, users have to move their hands to click it. The users also dislike that they have to put the date each time they use it.
The UI needs improvement. Our tagline for our product is 'one app to replace them all' which has sometimes led to confusion among users. The text size is very small and the colors are hard to distinguish.
Gmail users can't directly send tasks to Clickup. This is a highly requested feature for a lot of users, and we're working on getting it to you.
Quick Conclusion:
Clickup may not be as popular as software like Asana, Trello, Basecamp, and other tools but it's definitely impressing users. Though it has disadvantages, the developers are constantly upgrading the platform to provide great user experience. It's worth a try for both team users and solo users.
Trello
It's a project management tool that requires little setup. It helps you apply a projectboard strategy to all of your projects. The idea of a projectboard is to have a card to represent each project, and to have a list for each task. You can organize your cards however you like. Lists of tasks can be archived and moved around to create a workflow.
Pros:
You can now access your projects across all devices.
Trello’s pricing is simple, with more advanced features for those who need them.
Trello does not disappoint when it comes to notifications. You will receive notifications when someone comments on or removes a task, or when you receive a push notification.
Working as intended – Did you know that the average person spends 20+ hours per week on work related things? Trello will solve this problem for you by organising your work and making it accessible whenever you need it.
Our system is real-time; if multiple members are working on projects at the same time, you get real-time updates to your changes.
Follows The Kanban System – Kanban was founded by Toyota in the 1950s and has been used in the scheduling of tasks in the correct order by using cards and boards."
Cons:
Not always online? – Trello requires data connection to use, so you can't always use it when not connected. Luckily, our platform has a solution for this.
Storage is limited at Trello. However, you can get around this limitation by being a Gold member. This will allow you to upload up to 5000MB of documents at once. Otherwise, if you are a Basic member, you can only upload 10MB of documents at once.
As a bug, Trello doesn't let you edit comments
When managing smaller projects, Trello works just fine. However, if you’re managing a larger project, Trello might not be the best tool for the job.
Quick Conclusion:
For businesses, entrepreneurs and pretty much anybody with daily tasks or projects to manage, Trello is an excellent piece of software that can help you get those essential jobs done.
Asana
Asana is a cloud-based project management tool that is intuitive, easy-to-use, and versatile. It enables team members to collaborate for the completion of a project, and enables managers to create, assign and track tasks with a variety of options for tracking progress.
Pros:
It offers a free plan. Project management software is important to small and medium-sized businesses. It can be complex and expensive to set up an enterprise system, but Asana's free plan removes the cost barrier to setting up an in-house system for small teams.
Asana has a wealth of integrations for third party technologies, but this is more than made up for by the lack of certain features.
Asana gives your business the ability to prioritise tasks. You can assign tasks within the app and add files from your device or dropbox or google.
Security measures increase the confidentiality of your data.
Our product is configurable, as different teams use different systems for different needs. Asana allows users to tweak their dashboard to suit their needs.
Our platform allows you to collaborate on projects with people in your organisation. You can create a project that everyone can see and collaborate on.
Cons:
Not too approachable for new users. While experienced project managers find Asana useful and advantageous, new users feel intimidated and find the software challenging to use because its interface is too intimidating and graphics too complex.
Too many features. In a nutshell, Asana has too many features and options for a very basic project that doesn’t need all these features. This can become overwhelming for a very basic project and many users have complained of having decision fatigue.
Asana believe that only one person should be given responsibility for a task. Despite other software allowing for several people to share responsibility for a project, Asana only want to assign one person to a task. This may be risky because if that person becomes unavailable, it could create a problem.
No time tracking. Asana is ideal for tracking projects and tasks. However, its drawback is that it cannot track the time spent by the members working on their tasks. If teams need to bill different clients and categorize their work into billable and non-billable, they would need to use third-party tracking software.
The PDF and Excel exporting feature is available in the JSON and CSV formats but not in the PDF and Excel formats.
Quick Conclusion:
Users have found Asana extremely useful for many years. Although there are more pros than cons, it is still up to the individual to evaluate whether Asana is suitable for their business.
Jira
Pros:
You can plan your work out in advance and see how it fits into your project’s bigger goals.
Whether you're running a traditional workplace agile process, or scrum of scrums, the software allows you to work quickly and efficiently.
Many integrations are available with third-party software. For example, integration with Hipchat and Slack means you can communicate issues and respond to notifications in different ways. There are more than 3000 apps available at the Atlassian Marketplace to extend the features of the software.
It's highly customisable. Users can create any type of issue and can edit them to fit any requirement of a particular company. Jira gives the ability to edit various elements such as, issue tables, forms, timelines, reports, fields, and so on.
Cons:
Not the best mobile app. The Jira mobile app is popularly known to its users as clunky, inefficient, and buggy.
Complex integration from other application lifecycle management (ALM) systems. Moving a project from Microsoft Team Foundation Server to Jira requires too much manual work.
Reports are not reusable. Downloading Jira reports as images alters their resolution. We recommend using our rephrases instead.
Users are limited to uploading files that are less than 10MB. This means that they are unable to upload a photo, video, or document that is more than 10MB in size
interface is a bit cluttered and filtering tools aren't super easy to use, but we're constantly improving the software
Quick Conclusion:
As a popular customer experience management solution, it is also a great tool for scaling agile. It also offers an on-premise version for companies wanting to stick with the tried and tested Jira.
Monday
Monday is a smart project management and collaboration tool that helps teams plan, manage and track their work. It's highly visual, with users able to add team members, assign tasks, create workflows, and track progress from a central view. Monday helps teams stay on top of all their work, no matter the size and complexity of their projects and tasks, and organizes work and projects that are relevant to their business. The software improves the visibility of work, allowing everyone involved to work closely together to overcome challenges and create a synergy that improves team performance.
Pros:
Built for multiple users, teams enjoy changes being made to a list in real-time.
Monday's great at tracking. Whether you're monitoring task progress or the status of issues Monday's user interface gives you the information you need quickly. The visual boards and colour-coding help you quickly focus on what matters most
It provides alternative views that suit different needs. The Timeline view is particularly suitable for some users. It still gives the people the information they need to track progress and stay aware of upcoming deadlines. Other views include Kanban board and a calendar view.
Our tool helps centralize communication within any company. This makes it easy for anyone to view live board data and chat conversations.
We have developed a way to make organizations and managing projects easier. You can centralize all the information, resources, and communication needed to run your projects into one place. You will not have to deal with tedious tasks or notifications.
Cons:
Pricing based on the number of users helps you avoid an over-spend. Monday's pricing model is based on your monthly user count. You can start with the basic plan and add users as you need them, but if you're going to set permissions for a team of people, you'll need to move up to a paid plan to do so.
Having trouble keeping track of your time? It can be difficult to track time against each task and the cost for all the related tasks for a particular client.
A few customers feel that it’s a little too overwhelming at first, and that there are a few small features that are a little too buried. However, i would say that getting started is a smooth process
A lot of users have been disappointed that the mobile app is not as rich as their native apps. They want things like control surface and more panels in the mobile app.
Monday currently integrates with Dropbox, Excel, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Slack, Trello, and a few others, but there are many features they could implement in the future. One of these features would be an expanded API.
Quick Conclusion:
Notion
We've created Notion to allow teams to better collaborate on ideas, create a shared knowledge base for their teams, and to organise projects effectively. We've built Notion to accommodate a variety of different projects, and we're working to add even more functionality, including more Kanban boards and a calendar view. We're also making it easier to collaborate with teammates on tasks and build your own wiki
Pros:
The software is easy to use. Many users find the software easy to navigate even though the set up can take some time. There are clear instructions and users report that the technical support is superb
Our tagline, ‘the all-in-one workspace’ is a good choice because it hints that one app can be used to create all the content you’d need. For example, you can use Notion to create a table of contents for your ebook, write down your blog post, create a catchy presentation for your talk, and much more
Notion can be used across several different devices. You can use Notion on a desktop, web, and mobile device. This makes it easier and more convenient for you to access your work anywhere.
Notion offers a free trial so users can decide if it's the right tool for them. Building a free trial into Notion was a strategic move to encourage trial and prevent people from buying something that turns out not to work for them.
Notion is a company that focuses on making you more productive. It does this by making it easy to organise your data and allowing you to do so with a clean and uncluttered user interface.
Cons:
Setting up Notion is time-consuming. It was a feature that was of major concern for many users who gave us feedback. They reported it was tedious and challenging to set up.
Some users have optimised their experience using Notion by connecting it to different apps on their platforms. However, we know there's still more we can do and we're constantly looking for ways to add features to make our users more effective. We want to help our users collaborate by making it easy to annotate PDF's. One feature we're working on is the ability to lock pages of a document so no one can edit them.
The free version of Notion is limited. It is limited to 1000 blocks, but this is enough for students.
"Notion Notification" does not always work. "Notion Notification" is a feature that tags users to assign them tasks and due dates. Unfortunately, if their Notion is not up on their end, the notification does not go through. Notion also has an option to turn off email notifications which hinder notifications from being received.
Quick Conclusion:
A wealth of satisfied users have attested to the fact that Notion makes their jobs easier. Notion also has a positive impact on group productivity. It's not perfect yet, but the development team is hard at work to make it better.
I'm the Founder of BugReporting. I've helped build multiple multi-million dollar companies and I love approaching Start Ups through product-lead growth
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