| Functionality | 3 <p>Caters to key functionalities for small businesses, allowing users to create and manage projects and tasks through to-do lists, a kanban adjacent board, timelines, project specific-shared docs and a unified, transparent team message thread.</p><p>However, in the essence of being simple and intuitive, it lacks components that other tools provide like OKR/goal setting, workflow automation or simply adding custom fields to your tasks.</p> | 6 <p>ProjectManager has most of the functionality that any team will need. More importantly, these features are done well. Reporting, automations and task management are all strong and easy to use. However, none of ProjectManager's features are exceptional - they do the basics and they do them well - that's it. For example, automations are only offer 12 action and 7 trigger functions and no integrations with email, slack etc.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 5 <p>Learning Curve = 3</p><p>User-Friendliness = 8</p><p>Basecamp has quite an intuitive UI and it's easy to locate where all the important features are after you've done their basic tour. They have a lot of resources to help a user get to grasps with the tool. However, there are some features you may have to search for a bit but it's a small set.</p> | 8 <p>The learning curve here is not steep at all - the product is usable right from the word go. We estimate that a start-up employee would require about 1 hour and some guidance to be comfortable using all key functionalities.</p><p><br></p><p>Most key functionalities are very intuitively located. However some are hidden. For example, automations are not well-labelled on the UI.</p> |
| Look and feel | 6 <p>Going back to Basecamp's implicit motto of 'no-fluff, gets the job done', it has a minimalistic UI which is acceptable and is fast to load. Other tools have a more attractive look and feel and could provide a more appealing layout/colour combination.</p> | 6 <p>ProjectManager has some colour customisation available. That being said, it could do with a touch more finesse in places. It is by no means an unattractive piece of software but it's nothing special.</p><p><br></p><p>Loading times are fast at ~ 1 second per page.</p> |
| Customisability | 2 <p>Basecamp allows you to have custom project views but that's pretty much it. Unfortunately you won't be able to access some of the key features that the other tools provide like custom workflows, reports, tags, fields.</p> | 5 <p>ProjectManager could do better here, but still has some good customisation. You cannot create a custom report in ProjectManager - there are only self-serve reports available. However, the level of filtering available when choosing which projects, tasks, tags etc. should be measured when creating these self-serve reports is extensive. Automations, on the other hand, could do more customisation wise. They offer basic automations - but no email templates or integrations with 3rd parties, e.g. sending a message in Slack.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 6 <p>Offers a self-serve free trial and allows purchase without needing to talk to sales. Getting started and setting up a few tasks and subtasks should take 20-30 minutes, but it lacks a rich library of templates. Full setup should take less than a day.</p> | 7 <p>Offers a self-serve free trial and allows purchase without needing to talk to sales. Getting started and setting up a few tasks and subtasks should take 20-30 minutes, but it lacks a rich library of templates. Full setup should take less than a day.</p> |
| Customer Support | 9 <p>Amazing responsive customer support via an in-app live chat bot. You should be able to get a detailed response from a person quite quickly. To complement this, they have curated a wealth of resources, youtube videos and FAQs to get you going.</p> | 7 <p>Personalised support is not available via in-app chat but is available on email and and over the phone. Responses are fast and helpful.</p><p><br></p><p>Self-serve materials are of great depth and quality. In particular, their onboarding materials essentially tell you all you need to know to use the ley functionality and leaves you feeling in control of the product.</p> |
| Integratability | 4 <p>An API is available and it natively integrates with Zapier and a host of cloud resources but it missed out on quite a few useful tools like Github, Zendesk and Freedesk which other tools would be able to accommodate. However, you could use Zapier to connect to a variety of third party tools and Basecamp does link up with a few useful mobile-apps which is a bonus, but this is just something which doesn't happen natively. Someone would need to add those further integrations on your end.</p> | 5 <p>ProjectManager integrates with some tools natively but relies heavily of Zapier for most integrations. For example, Salesforce, Jira, onedrive, dropbox are all available only through Zapier.</p><p><br></p><p>However, ProjectManager offers an API to build custom integrations where necessary. </p> |
| Ease of Migration | 9 <p>Can export data easily via adminland if you have the permissions for it in the organisation.</p> | 8 <p>Exports of all key data, reports and dashboards are available to PDF and/or excel.</p> |
