Finding the right project management software for any service or business is a real challenge. There are a lot of SASS products out there that claim to solve all of your problems, but it’s hard to know for sure until you get past all the fancy design and marketing.
Basecamp vs Teamwork Projects
Both platforms are equally impressive and look pretty (read: they care about design and UX). That’s a big one for us. All the companies that embrace modern design and UX tend to rise to top. For instance, this is why Hubspot has the edge over a lot of their competitors, in that they are obsessively focused on making the experience easy to understand and natural to interface with. It’s also why I would keep an on their free (for now) CRM that they just rolled out in 2013.
This is all to say that some people need a similar experience for communicating remotely with various clients and keeping things organized when it comes to the projects that they have. I actually have previous experience with Basecamp, so it was naturally the front-runner for us as I already knew how to use it. However, we’ve been intrigued by Teamwork Projects and decided to give it a free trial. In minutes we were able to set up test projects, a few dummy tasks, edit our profile, and get a good feel for it. Based on that, it was already on par with Basecamp, which is also pretty easy to jump into. However, there were three key things that set Teamwork Projects above Basecamp:
1. Pricing Plan Variations
Teamwork Projects was smart enough to create to pricing points that fall just below, and just above, Basecamp’s entry point which starts at $20/Month for 10 projects and 3GB of space. By comparison, Teamwork’s lowest plan is only $12/Month for 5 projects and 1GB of space. So if you’re really looking for a comparable software at the cheapest pricing point, Teamwork has the lowest. Their next plan is just above Bascamp’s entry point at $25/month for 15 projects and 5 GB of storage. So for only $5 more, you get more value in project allowances and storage. As a small company starting out, every dollar matters and this factored into our decision. It should also be noted that finding Basecamp’s pricing is more difficult to locate than Teamwork Projects, which also kind of irked us.
2. Reusable templates were a breeze to make
Any business owner will tell you that time = money and whatever you can do to be more efficient goes a long way. One obvious way to do that in Project Management Software is to create templates that you can reuse to set up projects quicker. While both Basecamp and Teamwork have these options, we found that Teamwork’s set up and the ability to find the templates, was much more streamlined and simple to get going. Basecamp’s is a little more cumbersome with how you find templates and get them in place project-to-project. It’s not a huge difference, but to my earlier point about UX, it matters to us.
3. Gant Charts
This is something that is built into Teamwork and works fantastically. Basecamp requires you to find a plugin or resort to a 3rd party (last time I checked in early 2014) to use gant charts for your projects. Teamwork allows you to move tasks when things get delayed and to visually see how it impacts the project timeline. You can also tie tasks to each other so that one change in a task impacts all the others, which is usually the case but often requires a Project Manager to do a lot of manual work to update it. This really helped put me over the edge to pull the trigger on Teamwork.
In closing, Basecamp is a fine Project Management tool and this article isn’t meant to be a negative review on them. We just found that Teamwork Projects had a slight edge over them based on the stated reasons above.
What Project Management Software are you using? Are you currently looking to make a switch? We know there are a ton of options and varied experiences out there, so we’d love to hear from you about yours in the comments below.
