Unfuddle is a crisp looking new software development project management service. The look and feel will be familiar to anyone who has used Basecamp for project management, but it’s specifically tailored for software developers. It’s a hosted service with basic features including messaging, milestones, tickets, permissions and source storage via Subversion. While many developers currently use project management services that are wiki based, Unfuddle is based on a blog model.
The company behind the site is called Subventurate LLC and consists of two developers in Hawii named Joshua Frappier and David Croswell.
Free accounts for single users with 15MB of storage and limited features or paid accounts ranging from $24 to $99 for up to 5GB and 50 users with advanced features like time tracking and SSL connectivity.
Yawn….
nice looking app. this must be one of the hardest markets to go after in a commercial fashion - anyone knowledgeable in writing code can setup a bugzilla/collaboa/trac in a few minutes..even if they needed hosting for that, it would be roughly 1/5th the price of the cheapest plan here with one of the larger commercial hosts..and have much higher quotas
I’ve been looking for something like this, haven’t really found anything I really like yet.
I don’t have the time to set up Bugzilla, I don’t know what collaboa or trac is and don’t really have the time to go looking for it so this kind of tool is good for me.
I dont like the jump from free (1 user) to the cheapest paid ($24/mo., 5 users). In that sense its not much like Backpack at all, in that it is not that accessible. I asked Unfuddle about the lack of a happy medium — say $9/mo. with 2-3 users — and they did not seem to care. In fact, they referred me to sourceforge and Google Code. So, I recommend that folks take their advice and turn to Google Code. I did, and am very happy so far.
I looked at it a couple of weeks ago and it really looks nice, but who would trust a unknown company with no contact information such as address or a phone number for hosting valuable IP such as software? If they were selling the software though, I would probably buy it.
Nikolay, I actually thought the same thing. Hopefully Joshua Frappier and David Croswell will put some more info on there asap.
Hopefully, as it looks so nice! If Unfuddle manages to earn trust and make their pricing more flexible, it will be very successful despite the fact that most dev shops would still prefer to host version control and tracker themselves and keep all this behind firewalls.
Gosh, it looks good because some of their screens are direct ripoffs of Basecamp. The Milestones screen is a good example. It is lifted directly from Basecamp. Big chunks of their dashboard and time tracking data entry interface widgets are lifted too. They even directly copied some significant UI layouts from Trac the bug tracking software.
It would be nice if respected sites like Techcrunch called companies out on this rather than blindly praising their design. I wonder if Techcrunch would praise a site that directly and clearly ripped off the Techcrunch design. Would they even cover such a copy or do they only cover copies of other products?
As is it right now all you have to do is rip off some screens from someone else, slap on your own name, call it a product, send out an email, and it gets written up on techcrunch. That rewards duplication not innovation. Thats the wrong thing to reward. Why doesnt Techcrunch break some news by calling out copycats instead of rewarding them? Use your position to encourage responsible bahavior so we all see and benefit from more innovation, not less.
I saw that WorkHappy pulled their review of unfuddled recently. I assume it was because they realized the rip. Good for Workhappy. It would be nice to see Techcrunch follow that example of responsible reporting.
We still like Assembla (http://www.assembla.com/) as the best free set of tools for these tasks. The community there is growing as well.
I happen to like that it rips off Basecamp, it makes it easier to switch. I use Basecamp right now for a simple task list, and I’m considering switching to this for the added free features of the tickets and source management. They should really consider adding a subscription option for $120/year or something rather than just the $25 a month gouging, but if their site works as nicely as it looks at first glance, I think they have a shot of doing fairly well in the space. These types of sites aren’t that hard to make or maintain, so a two person company probably has a nice chance to make a fair living from it with low risk on the downside.
Check out activeCollab: http://www.activecollab.com/. It’s a young open source PM but is very stable. They are planning a plugin architecture in the next few months and one of the first plugins is a Bug Tracker. Only down side is PHP5 only. But if you have a DreamHost account, you can one click install and you are off and away. And you get the source code to do whatever you want with it
“I wonder if Techcrunch would praise a site that directly and clearly ripped off the Techcrunch design. Would they even cover such a copy or do they only cover copies of other products?”
Considering how Techcrunch’s Crunchboard jobboard itself is a direct ripoff of the 37signals jobboard, I dont think he cares who rips off what.
DevjaVu?
Basecamp is a piece of shit.
If you’re looking for competing web-based project management software, you might want to check out our product, Vertabase Pro http://www.vertabase.com. Tons of robust features -homegrown and original.
We’ve been using Unfuddle for a while now. It’s feature rich but SLOW SLOW SLOW to the point there are periods of inaccessibility. I can’t wait to get off this thing. Call me when it’s reliable.