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Recently here at LearnItFirst.com, due to our growth, I had to decide on a few things: (1) project management software, (2) help desk software, and (3) knowledge base management software. I wanted to post my notes/thoughts on the project management software here so that it can hopefully save someone else some time in the future.

What I Need

As a startup on a budget and with only a single founder with multiple employees, I needed about as simple of a project management tool as possible. For the past year or so, I've used John Wood's Priorganizer for my own use - and I still will since it is just so fast and awesome for a one-person to-do list. It's cheap too - $29.95 one time - and I recommend it as an add-on to Microsoft Outlook (Outlook's Tasks/Events just don't do what I need). So why don't I use Priorganizer for my team? Because it's really not intended to be used for assignment or with teams - it's a personal to-do list manager.

What I Had to Have:

• Web-based
• Milestones complete with Task Lists and Tasks
  • I wanted a hierarchy in the Tasks (hence the Task List)
  • Milestones and tasks should be able to have notes/comments
  • Tasks should be able to be organized in a hierarchy
• Whiteboard/Forum in which we could write articles/posts/comments and have discussions
• Great search feature
• Emailing capabilities on each item if needed (i.e., If I make a comment, I want the option to check a box to email the members of this or that team)
• Reporting about activity and open items
• Cheap or free version to try out for 30 days
• Pricing information had to be on the website or I left the site
  • If I had to give up my email to demo or view pricing, I left the site immediately
• Had to be hosted for me or, if I purchased/used it, it had to have the option for unlimited domains/sites
  • I don't want to pay $399 for LearnItFirst.com and have to pay another $399 for VideoBooks.com
• 10MB+ of storage space for documents
• Easy to remember URL for my workspace

That's all I really needed - and, since that's such a simple list of requirements, I didn't want to pay much (if anything) for it initially.

What I Would Consider Lagniappe:

• Time sheet management and/or hours-worked functionality (replete with reports)
• Knowledge base
• Easy re-sorting
• AJAX-based interface
• Windows client for faster adding of tasks
• SSL

Deal Killers

• Completely free hosted-only options like http://www.OfficeZilla.com/, ClockingIT,  and SideJobTrack
  • Those sites have their niche but that isn't what I wanted
• A site required my email to demo or view prices. Also, if I couldn't find pricing links/info within the first 30 seconds of looking, I figured the product would suffer the same design flaws
• Total cost was more than $500 in a two year period for everything I wanted for 5 users
• No custom URL

What I Chose

I chose, for the time being, to go with Zoho Projects ("ZP"). It isn't the best interface and it isn't the cheapest but, overall, I felt it gave me the best features for the price. It handled all of my "Have to Have" items and most of my "Would Like to Have" items. ZP also is cheap and gives you good value for your freebie one-project. Once you want more stuff, it's only $5 per month to have 3 projects - no per-user fees and your $5 per month includes 500MB of document storage. Also, Zoho's "Basic Plan" is $12 and that includes SSL, Time-Tracking, and 2GB storage!

Here are the sites that I went through in detail:

• Basecamp - rejected due to price and the feature set wasn't exactly what I wanted
• Zoho Projects - I choose this one
• Joint Contact - My second choice due to the Outlook 2007 integration features
• activeCollab - too "new" for me
• WhatWhat Status - Too silly of a name to even consider
• DevShop - rejected due to price (most expensive of all)
• GoPlan - My third choice (would've been my second choice since it has so many features for the price but I liked the Outlook integration of Joint Contact)

There are tons more PM software/site packages (check out this posting on the Basecamp forums for links/reviews of others) and I didn't have time to review them all so I just went with the ones that came up in Google when I searched for "Basecamp alternative".

Anyway, I hope this helps someone else save time and money when researching project management software for startups. Let me know if I missed one too!

# posted by Scott Whigham @ 11:55 AM