Web design and programming firm WeBreakStuff just released a new project planning suite, GoPlan, similar to Basecamp and ActiveCollab. You use this stuff when you want to get a team organized around accomplishing project milestones – a lightweight Microsoft Project with collaboration built right in.
The products have a lot of similarities. They’re all web based applications for managing your team projects. Both GoPlan and BaseCamp are hosted pay services made by staunch Ruby evangelists, while the more basic ActiveCollab is an open source PHP installation. GoPlan and BaseCamp prices range from free plans up to beefier pay plans (BaseCamp’s unlimited maxes out at $150/month, while GoPlan tops off at $100/month). Derek over at 5ThirtyOne has a detailed feature comparison of the three.
GoPlan’s project management tool offers modules for note-taking, calendaring (with iCal export), task management, issue tracking, file management and online real-time chat (optional SSL). BaseCamp has a lot of the same features, minus bug tracking and a public project blog. GoPlan has also approached project tracking with a different design methodology. GoPlan not only lets you choose features based on plan levels, but also turn them on and off as needed to keep navigation free of feature clutter.
GoPlan has also shot for a lower price point than BaseCamp (basic $20/$24; premium $100/$150), but with less file storage (GoPlan tops out at 8GB). Their free account gets you everything except calendaring and chat. However, for the paid accounts, GoPlan unlocks features faster. $10/month gives you all of GoPlan’s features for 12 projects of 8 people each. For an extra $20/month you get unlimited users, and 30 projects (twice BaseCamp).
For readers interested in real-time project collaboration, check out our comparison coverage of ConceptShare and Thinkature.
GoPlan seems to be much better than Basecamp — in terms of prices, features as well as interface. Nice.
Fred Oliveira, who runs webreakstuff, is a really talented designer as well. He designed techcrunch before this current design. It’s still live at mobilecrunch.
@Michael: He sure is. The GoPlan Web site looks quite superb. MobileCrunch is quite cool as well.
Much nicer than basecamp and a very nice design. I think it takes custom icons for a design to become excellent though; the famfamfam icons have become somewhat of a pun in the web 2.0 world.
There is http://lighthouseapp.com/ coming into this space to very shortly.
We are doing a show(web20show) on it so I got a sneaky peak and have to say its a lot more useful for developing web applications than those mentioned above barring GoPlan because I have not used it.
I think this space is getting crowded, I use 37 signals products daily and its going to take something to get people to change. There are a lot of people using their products that are fans of them so its going to take something to get them to switch. My only gripe with 37 signals is the separate billing for each product.
I shall check this out later as it looks pretty neat.
I use TeamWork Live myself: http://www.teamworklive.com
Much better functionality than Basecamp and just as easy to use. I’ll take a look at GoPlan and see how they compare. It is getting to be a crowded space with Central Desktop and Zoho Projects also in this space.
This looks really good! I’ve been using Basecamp but have become frustrated at it’s lack of flexibility and found it difficult to apply to real-world scenarios for a lot of projec work.
GoPlan seems better than basecamp…
I took a look. While it’s pretty, it is very lacking in functionality. I don’t think Basecamp has anything to fear from this one.
You’ve not reported the launch of http://www.highrisehq.com yet. Just to be controversial, I don’t think Techcrunch like 37signals that much. Perhaps they didn’t give Techcrunch a golden ticket to preview their product or they prefer to target PR from traditional media sources and newspapers?
#9, We’d love to know where you found functionality lacking – feedback is really important to us. We don’t have time-tracking as basecamp does (because it doesn’t make sense to implement that so soon while we believe the real “project management” problem isn’t figured out by anyone), but we have issue tracking and flexible access controls on top of their feature set.
That being said, it is important to clarify that I think both products are serving different kinds of people. We built Goplan because other solutions didn’t fit our needs, not to compete with anyone else. They have a pretty compelling product and many satisfied customers. We do too, and we’re happy about that.
There’s also my little hosted application, http://www.clockingit.com – which is absolutely free to use.
Source will be release a bit later, just need to remove some old cruft.
I signed up for a Free account with Goplan and wasn’t over impressed by the usability. There are way too many icons. Very pretty, but never visually clear at a glance what is going on. Whilst there is space for another collaboration tool, some of the 37signals interface conventions could still be used eg. all Create links should be clear buttons rather than grouped with other navigation, View All links could be next to the list Title not underneath the list, AJAX regions to change Ticket or Task status, more compact descriptive (plain english) of Recent Activity.
I think the neatest thing about Goplan launching is that there *is* competition in the web 2.0 project management software arena. I’m glad that other projects have posted here in the Comments section because while Basecamp is great (we use it), there’s a lot that can be improved and Basecamp gets a little steep once you start having to upgrade.
Fred – Why Soap4r rather than going more RESTful than basecamp’s API?
I like the fact that you can add a task/todo item and in the same sweep, post a due date to it! With basecamp, you need to create the todo and then mark it with a totally different process of making it a Milestone.
Interface looks nice. However, basecamp has some nice AJAX functionality that speeds things up (like checking / unchecking the tasks completed, and the fade burst they use to show that it actually happened).
Unfuddle is a pretty cool proj management app but I think I like it because it feels aimed more for developers, although it looks and feels like basecamp.
I haven’t used goplan yet but I tried using basecamp for my developer team and it was lacking. Also, you can’t tie tasks to milestones was a daily annoyance (maybe you can now but you couldn’t in the past).
I do think they may have something in HighRise though – great idea. And you have to give it to them – they have a nice suite of tools which gives them a nice edge when it comes to companies selecting a product to invest in.
15, Daniel, good question: I’m all for RESTful APIs but for architectural reasons it was easier to go the SOAP way (we started Goplan before REST support was fully underway with Ruby on Rails) – plus, it saves some developers work. We’ll be thinking about it for sure, though (quite a lot of the REST work is done, it’s just not published yet).
16, Joel: Good point, although we didn’t include highlighting in order not to distract the user from the tasks at hand. It is a one-line change to make it “highlight” showing what changed, but fading it to gray seemed to be a less obtrusive option. But you are definitely right when you hint that some things might be even clearer.
Cool SaaS gets smarter by the Day.
http://www.tekn...ld.blogspot.com
I found the system lacking in two details.
The chat room and calendar are unavailable in the free version.
I think it should be vital all the major key points and pushing points are available for the user to try in the free version. With only 2 projects and 4 users, how many people can he have in the chat room anyways? It is more for him to see how it functions without spending money, and same goes for the calendar.
I would love to see how the calendar interacts with the milestones and tasks without having to put down money to test such interaction. Your competitors do such, I think you should follow if you have confidence in a strong product.
Its a good product, but just needs to be reworked with its direction a bit to be more effective, a viable competitor against base camp.
Or have a demo setup. You need something where the use can do a demo run of all features. Otherwise your conversion rate will be extremely low.
We do have a demo account account available, see:
http://blog.gop...2/demo-account/
No offense but to me, all these are open-source’able and users should be able to deploy ‘em in their own environment,customized to their needs.
I used basecamp, may be for a month or so, then left it. These are not just practical, simply wont work unless somebody comes up with completely out of the box idea. Just having a nicer look and couple of small new features, will not work.
my$0.02
TechCrunch (and the TechCrunch audience) has never liked 37signals or their products because 37signals doesn’t play the Web 2.0 game or kiss TechCrunch’s ass. TechCrunch takes money from Zoho and doesn’t compare other products to Zoho. Why not say “Go Plan takes on Zoho Projects?” Oh, because Zoho is a TechCrunch advertiser. Zoho bows to TechCrunch, 37signals doesn’t. It’s so obvious.
How is Fred Oliveira’s comments coming out green ? I thought that was reserved for real TechCrunch editors ?
I found myself scanning the comments for the green ones, because I like to see what was important enough to warrant a response from TechCrunch.
I don’t really want to see what was important enough to get a response from the company/site being reviewed !
The SMB project management market is up for grabs and there’s no real market leader in sight.
My experience is that consumer task management tools are irrelevant for managing real-life business projects that may contain hundreds of tasks, dependencies and more. Initial enthusiasm wears off rather quickly and you find yourself back to MS Project, Excel, email and the white board.
I’ve been looking for a SaaS project management application for quite some time now, an application that would allow our team to have the power of MS project with web 2.0 ease of use and collaboration.
We evaluated several tools like eProject, @Task, SmartSheet and even tried out Google Spreadsheets for a while. None of these tools was what we’re looking for.
A friend had mentioned his company joined a design partner program by Clarizen and that responses were quite positive. From what I understand, they’re service combines project-like power features with strong collaboration and nifty UI.
This niche is hot and many upstarts are trying to grab their share. I wonder whether Microsoft, Google or maybe even Cisco are planning to enter this market, too.
Fred – Any plans to support importing project data?
It looks _exactly_ like basecamp. Yawn.
I’ve been checking out GoPlan off and on for the last couple of months. They have been consistent on rolling out good, usable features and I like the way their design has evolved since they initially started posting about the project. I have used Basecamp with the rest of the world for some time, but I am considering making the switch to GoPlan for two reasons. First, bug tracking is infinitely useful as a developer/consultant. Second, the interface provides a more enjoyable experience for me. My guess is that as they build their user base and are able to focus even more resources on this product, then we should expect even better things. Best of luck to these guys.
Eric, who wrote at March 20th, 2007 at 7:09 am, I’d like you to contact me about your SMB project management.
I think it would profit both of us!
Contact me at martin [at] martinbittner.com
Thanks
GoPlan looks nice, but go ahead and sign up. I kept bumping into a wide variety of very basic issues with the interface. For example, trying to set up a project I added a name, description, etc. Then selected all the features for the project (calendars, notes, etc). Apparently, with a free account, all of these are not available. It doesn’t say so up front. It just throws a form error on submit and then clears the form of all the data you just entered. Thanks but no thanks.
25) That’s because I used to be a Techcrunch editor – and I didn’t logout before posting my comments, which was unfortunate. My apologies for that. I tried to fix that but unfortunately Wordpress doesn’t allow previous highlighted comments to be “unflagged”.
27) We’re already done developing a small tool to import projects from competing solutions (and we also allow going back if you’re unhappy about our product). We’ll release that tool very soon.
31) That has been fixed pre-launch, so the behavior you are describing is actually from last week. If instead you’ve signed up only today do let us know, because that’s probably a javascript problem – is it on on your machine?
@Brandon why not “GoPlan takes on Zoho Projects” – come on, do you realize what a great thing that would be for Zoho? “GoPlan takes on 37Signals” makes 37Signals the leader to take on – a characterization I would agree with about online project management, by the way, though our own Zoho Projects is coming along very nicely.
This is the first time someone has complained that the absence of Zoho in a news item is an example of bias towards Zoho
What I want is something open source that’s *not* in PHP…
It’s oh so tedious when you say these things are like a “lightweight” Microsoft Project. They are nowhere near being lightweight.
Project allows nested tasks, easy re-assignment of tasks, updating of timescales and recalculation of project duration based on a number of factors.
None of these task management systems (which is all they are) allow one to manage a serious project.
The clue to their ambition is in the hints that they give (”for example if you’re planning a wedding”…..).
Please get real with your hyperbole
they should let you export your info, i know with basecamp i couldn’t and they said they were offering that in the future.. yada yada
but love basecamp smartcats:)
Fred, nice work -
Gave it a try and since you said feedback is imporant, here’s some observations from playing with goplan for 5 minutes:
1. Inline edit is available for task category names, but not task names
2. Task/subtask checkbox logic (if all subtasks appear completed, the parent task should, etc) doesn’t work for me
3. On “Tasks” page, ajax calls to modify completion status are slow to the point that if I check/uncheck a few times, the app sometimes drops me off in a wrong status. I realize speed is a side effect of being techcrunched, but still – probably need something a little more transactional
4. Can’t change order of subtasks
5. Input validation errors are not communicated – took me some time to figure out that task wasn’t being created because I haven’t picked a category
6. Minor css inconsistencies – I don’t see it saying “Beta” anywhere ))
Suggestion – it would be cool to be able to enter hours along side due-dates; I can’t be the only one who’s constantly being asked to provide level of effort estimations.
We were originally using basecamp, but then moved to unfuddle (www.unfuddle.com) because we wanted a bit more project depth than basecamp and it also appears GoPlan offered – comprehensive bug tracking and source control hooks that turned our project repository into an completely valuable place for everyone to communicate development, project management, communication and milestones. It just made no sense to use Basecamp and then another Source Control system AND THEN a good bug tracker when we felt they all should really live together.
I haven’t tried the product (wish there was something I could watch without signing up) but I love that, from the screenshots I saw, that they’re at least attempting to integrate a ticketing system (although it looks rudimentary). Fixing bugs is part of my work too, why would I need two systems (ex. Basecamp and Trac) to manage them? So- kudos.
I’d love to learn more about your file management. A timestamped/version-controlled document repository is a must have for any small business. Again, being able to use the same system for that would be great.
A couple people have mentioned that this space is getting crowded. I’d tend to disagree. “Crowded” means there are non-trivial barriers to entry and companies like WeBreakStuff and 37 Signals haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of small business SAAS. They’re making some solid applications, but they’re not exploiting their first mover advantages, leaving room for new entrants to grab market share. More at my blog http://foroobar...ighrise-launch/
I’ve been playing around with Goplan, and I’m extremely impressed. I’ve toyed with Basecamp for years — even tried writing my own PHP-based competitor a few years back when Basecamp was still new and shiny — and nothing’s ever really worked for me.
Somehow, Goplan’s pretty much nailed it (whatever “it” is). I like it. I think I’ll hand over my cash pretty soon here.
i love the zoho suite of programs, they work very well and don’t cost me a penny.
I stopped using Basecamp because it didn’t fulfill my needs (primarily no bug tracking and no nested task lists). I was going to just develop my own version but Goplan looks like it does most of the things that Basecamp is missing so I’ll check it out.
Space? I am surprised this is actually considered as space. I dont see any out of the box idea. Only handful of folks are using these most of them leave after the initial honeymoon is over. That is the reality.
I like it alot. I’d love to use it, but, like Basecamp… it’s lacking a privacy policy.
It’s difficult to store secret details on a hosted web application not knowing who might be looking at it. Do developers/administrators have the view private information? Of course they always could, but it’d be nice if one of these companies could at least give their word they wouldn’t.
That aside, GoPlan looks like a winner. Write a privacy policy so I can begin using it, please!
Scratch that, I found their privacy policy: https://goplan....rg/help/privacy
Nonetheless, it still doesn’t address some of the core privacy concerns. But at least they’re trying. :thumbsup:
I use Base camp and do not like it… nor do I like anything out here yet. I would love to find that tool that really gives the developer some control.
basecamp alternatives
I recommend to check this one web based project management tools from 5pmweb.com they are really cheaper and effective service
Been using Goplan for a while & pretty happy with them so far
Lots of nice little AJAX features that make reorganising tasks a breeze.