Basecamp vs Zoho Projects - A comparison to help you decide which project management service to choose

Basecamp and Zoho Projects are project management services that are rich in features. However, which one of these should be your pick, the one that would help with managing your specific project? Read on to find out. 

Zoho Projects

Zoho Projects provides all the run-of-the-mill functions that make a project management software useful- including the ones to create tasks, assign them to team members, set end dates for them and also create budgets for the tasks that you created. These functions run smoothly as well- without significant crashes or other problems that plague some competing services.

But if you were to ask what’s unique about this project management service that differentiates it from other tools, it should be the automation option. Simply put, you can automate all your document processes using it- including access control and revision tracking. It also provides a document management feature.

Using this, team members could easily share documents amongst themselves. Other useful features include those for issue management. As the name makes clear, these help you resolve issues or errors in a task. What's more, you could also make use of the reporting module to easily prepare business reports and management summaries.

To ensure detailed project management, Zoho Projects lets you create not just tasks but also sub-tasks for each milestone. These, of course, can be assigned to different team members. If you have ever been involved in a complex project, you would know how crucial incorporating subtasks in a project management plan is.

Team members can communicate efficiently with each other, thanks to the different channels of communication available in Zoho Projects. These include stream, feeds, wiki, chats and forum, with each channel providing a distinct use. For instance, feeds help you stay updated about the latest announcements or when new tasks are created. Chat rooms, meanwhile, can be created to exclusively discuss upon a topic.

Team members can also share knowledge easily using the project management service, thanks to the fact that they could create a page where useful documents and other types of information could be shared- the other members of the team could access the contents of this page as and when they require.

Basecamp

Basecamp brings a plethora of features that help you manage projects efficiently, not least of which are the to-do lists. With these, you could split tasks down into different projects, split up projects into various phases, set due dates, assign tasks to team members and even add notes. And that’s not all there is to it either. If performing a task requires access to certain information, you can attach the relevant files to each entry.

These lists also support collaboration. For instance, if an entry becomes overdue, all team members involved in the same can be notified of the fact. Managers could take a look at the activity view to get an overview of the tasks that are done for the day, and which are overdue. Individual team members can view all their different tasks in a single place, thanks to the “my stuff” menu.

Another significant advantage of this workflow management software is that it supports real-time communication. In fact, it brings multiple ways to do the same- including group chats, pings and message boards.

While group chats can be used for internal communication amongst a team, message boards could be used for communicating to a larger number of people, like when you need to share an announcement. The ping feature is handy when it comes to virtual one-to-one conversations, and conversations among a small number of team members. The presence of such tools eliminates the need to switch to third-party services for communication, thereby saving time.

Talking about saving time, Basecamp also provides Automatic check-ins so that you can schedule posts that will be shared with team members automatically; this will free you from attending redundant status meetings. This workflow management tool also provides you space to share documents and other relevant information with team members.

Should you choose Basecamp or Zoho Projects?

Now that you have seen what the two workflow management tools bring you, you probably can judge which will suit your project’s requirements better. Having said that, Basecamp does offer a better interface plus some useful features for real-time communication and project tracking that make life easier for project managers and team leaders. That nudges us towards recommending it. 

What Basecamp and Zoho Projects lack

While both project management tools come loaded with features, they don’t provide a way to accurately measure the time duration team members spend on a task. This in turn makes calculating the prospective time when you could deliver the project impossible.

I’m Productive is a workflow management tool that helps you do this. In fact, the service even incorporates an AI which helps you predict the project delivery time so that you could have predictable revenue. You don’t have to perform any complex calculations to get the estimate either. You just click on a button and the AI will deliver the result for you.

 Please visit the I’m Productive website to learn more about the service.