At edgeofmyseat.com we do most of our work without meeting, and for a lot of the time without out physically talking to our clients. Certainly once a project’s underway, day to day interaction occurs online. With multiple projects in some stage of active development at any one time, and lots of messages being fired off between multiple team members, if we tried to do this by email it would quickly become unmanageable.
Enter Basecamp
As a solution to this we use Basecamp as a project management and collaboration tool between us and the client. There are pretty much just two things it does well for us: keeping conversations organised and archived, and maintaining a centralised collection of project files (such as design files, specs, and so on).
Just recently we hit up against our account limit for active projects and so have been faced with the option to close down some projects (which isn’t really an option) or upgrade the account. We use Basecamp pretty much all day every day, so we’re quite happy to pay for that, but it did cause us to stop a look to see if we’re really happy with the way it’s working for us.
As an aside, from a business perspective, account limits like Basecamp has for the number of active projects can be a double-edged sword. On one hand it’s an opportunity to upgrade customers and have them pay you more money each month. On the other hand, it forces customers to revise their position, and if you’re not doing a really great job, it can prompt them to question the value of an account they may have otherwise carried on using for years.
Feeling the neglect
Basecamp was the first product from 37signals, and I’ve been using it in one capacity or another pretty much since launch. Following Basecamp, 37signals have gone on to launch Backpack, Ta-da lists, Writeboard, Campfire, Highrise, a job board, and recently Sortfolio, and it doesn’t take much to see that this is a small company spread pretty thin. Unfortunately, this really shows in the products – at least in Basecamp. Updates of any significance only really seem to show up in the form of features from other products clumsily bolted on.
The 37signals mantra is “less software”, and so I’m sure they’d argue that Basecamp has the features needed to do want most people want and they don’t want to bloat the product with loads of features. There’s sense it that, but also if this is a tool designed to help you manage projects and there are things it could be doing to help you manage projects better, then if it’s not doing them you have to question the its usefulness as a tool.
As it stands, Basecamp feels neglected. From the little annoyances like treating winmail.dat as a valid file attachment on incoming emails, to major issues like the search never returning useful results (or content which you’ve know is there) and the painfully, painfully slow response times once the US comes online, we’ve begun to feel that Basecamp could be doing a better job. It’s going an okay job, but it could be lots better.
Time to shop around
So we began to look around at alternatives. There are dozens of online project management tools, but one which quickly stood out was ActiveCollab. I can’t comment on how it works yet, as we’ve only just got it up and running, and aren’t planning on moving client projects away from Basecamp until we’re really settled with it (we want to be 100% sure before messing clients around with a change of software). However, here’s what has attracted us to it.
It’s self hosted. Rather than pay a monthly fee, there’s a one off license fee plus an optional support fee from Year 2 onwards. The key thing here is not about paying less money – although that’s always a bonus – it’s that we’re back in control of our data and crucially in control of the hosting. If the site’s running slow we can do something about it. That lack of ability to do something is a big frustration with Basecamp. Online services like to pitch the self-hosted competition as being a big hassle, but installing and configuring ActiveCollab was easy and took about 10 minutes. I don’t see it really demanding anything from me in term of maintenance – it should just run.
It has subversion integration. This is a great feature for us, as all our source code is stored in subversion, and having our project management tool and source control integrated makes a lot of sense. Being able to include something like “Completes Task #1234” in a commit message and have it not only create a link between the two but also mark the task complete is a real timesaver.
It has tickets. We’ve been through a few different bug tracking systems over the years, including one of our own. One thing we’ve found is that we don’t really need anything fancy – having a simple ticket system integrated with our projects and source control sounds about perfect to me.
It’s PHP and MySQL and has a plugin architecture and an API. As a web development company working primarily in PHP and MySQL, we’ve got all the skills we need to extend this to do what we like in the future.
It’s a slow process
We’re going to start using ActiveCollab on our internal projects (like Perch) initially until we find our feet with it. If all goes well, chances are we’ll start putting new client projects there rather than on Basecamp and slowly transition away. I’m quite looking forward to it.
Comments
Interesting discussion, Drew. Many have discussed this move before, but with AC2 out now, perhaps the move makes more sense.
I haven’t read any reviews of AC2, but would love to hear how things go with the transition.
Sometimes it seems the best feature of BC is the OpenID, but even then…
Active Collab is a decent piece of software, but when I had to use it in the past, found it difficult to integrate with other bits of software. You had to work around the woefully lacking API to do some basic stuff.
Of course, you can work around it, so it isn’t the end of the world. There isn’t much out there that is better, so choices are limited. My advice is if you are wanting to integrate AC with another web app, be ready for headaches.
We went through this exact same process (and with the same results!) but it took less than the 30 day trial period of Basecamp to realize that it was not going to work. No ability to change things, no real support, and a dogged point of view of “never upgrade, keep it simple” is quite simply misguided. Aren’t we all trying to continually improve our products?
But the self-hosted aspect was what really turned us on to ActiveCollab. It really started off as a Basecamp clone that you can install, but they have been doing well with new feature development and 3rd party plugins. And if you don’t like something, you can just up and change it!
I’ve noticed a few UI issues here and there, not everything is shown where it’s relevant, but the product continually improves and it pretty slick right out of the box. Just about the only substantive gripe I have is the strange “pay $200 to remove the ActiveCollab logo” licensing option. I can’t put my finger on it, but something about that puts me off.
Enjoy it and good luck!
Co-incidentally I’ve been giving ActiveCollab a try this weekend too as an alternative to Basecamp. I tried it a while ago back when it was in it’s open source days but it’s grown a fair bit since then.
The recent additions of subversion integration and invoicing are very useful but I use Git for my version control so I’m hoping to see this including in future releases. They do offer a Beanstalk integration module though which now support Git so hopefully this wont be too far away.
I can totally agree with your comments on how Basecamp is starting to feel neglected. Things don’t seem to have moved forward in a long while and the same small irritations persist. The only thing that does seem to have changed recently is a annoying account change forcing me to pick a new username.
ActiveCollab being self-hosted is also a big selling point for me. I also like to feel in control of my data and the performance of the application itself. Being able to project manage from my own domain is definitely a plus point. The ticketing system is useful if you don’t need anything too powerful and the invoicing module could also prove to be useful. I think for the moment though the lack of invoice customisation to style my own is a no-go for me. Being able to theme the admin interface would also be nice.
The initial payment is quite steep but in the long run I think it’ll be worth it. I’d be interested in hearing how you get on with ActiveCollab as you use it for your in-house projects over the coming weeks.
Please keep us updated as you go. I would love to find a decent alternative to Basecamp.
My company has been using activeCollab since it was open source back at version 0.7. There were a couple of hiccups as the platform went commercial, but it’s maturing into a very polished system. Sure, there are a few things we’d change about it, but the developers are very open to communication and super responsive. We’re currently only using the Small Biz license, but the Corporate license (and associated features) are looking more attractive every day. All in all, we’re super happy with activeCollab, and equally happy with the monthly fees we’ve saved over the past 2-3 years. Best of luck!
I’ve moved from Basecamp to ActiveCollab too. But that was about 2yrs ago. At that time, ActiveCollab wasn’t that great of an improvement. We ended up going with Unfuddle (http://www.unfuddle.com) for our project management and have loved it every since. I like Unfuddle more because it’s like basecamp but more focused on software/web development and includes things SVN/Git support (but no Chat).
Ah, Drew, if I only knew you were looking for an alternative, I’d have thrown you a free account of Goplan. I think we solve most of your problems, and we’re definitely not as expensive as ActiveCollab (and if you don’t mind the bluntness, we do better than Basecamp too). Do let me know if you ever want to move to a hosted solution again!
Have any of you tried OpenAtrium? It’s a very powerful (open-source) system built on top of Drupal. If you know Drupal, you’ll find it very easy to hack and extend as needed.
http://openatrium.com/
I’ve been using Basecamp since it first came out (2004?) and have also owned a copy of ActiveCollab for several years now. While we dig the self-hosted feature of ActiveCollab, what keeps bringing us back to Basecamp is the superior usability and interaction design. For example, what takes a single click in Basecamp – that is, marking a milestone as “complete” from the dashboard – takes three clicks in ActiveCollab (click > view > edit). If you have a lot of milestones in a week, those clicks really add up.
ActiveCollab has come a long way since it was released, but the product still has a lot of frustrating navigation quirks. ActiveCollab would really benefit from the integration of some more modern JavaScript behaviours instead of sticking with the screen > click > screen model that they’ve got in place.
@Geoff:
“ActiveCollab has come a long way since it was released, but the product still has a lot of frustrating navigation quirks. ActiveCollab would really benefit from the integration of some more modern JavaScript behaviours instead of sticking with the screen > click > screen model that they’ve got in place.”
I’ve seen this improve in nearly every version, so I think they are aware.
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I use AC at work and I think it’s awesome. I have the utmost of respect for 37s and their product line but there’s some realities at work:
* I can’t deal with a service that I don’t host myself since I have no control over the speed * The subscription model gets really expensive when you have 150 projects that you want to separate from each other. The UI doesn’t scale to accommodate for this # of projects.I’d like to recommend a Cork company (and not just because I know them and they’re local to me) — TeamWorkPM (http://teamworkpm.net) is, imho, quite like Basecamp but with most of the major annoyances removed. And they’ll listen and act quickly if your suggestion for the app is likely to be of use to not-just-you. Certainly snappy enough, too.
There’s nothing like Basecamp. We purchased ActiveCollab and had our projects there for about a year and it was a disaster. If you like a simple and intuitive environment, I do not recommend ActiveCollab at all. Their system is not at all intuitive and it’s not worth the renewal every year.
It’s also important to think about the clients. My clients absolutely hated it. They were not happy with it and so that’s one of the reasons we moved over to Basecamp. Our clients are really happy with it and they use it a lot more.
That’s my two cents.
We were recently confronted with a need to for a project management tool and selected ActivCollab over the competition with self hosting and source code being two of the primary drivers. The ability to buy OTS plugins and develop our own is a huge bonus. We’re a consulting firm and as such, many of the tools optimized for web development aren’t terribly useful, but ActivCollab has a more generic approach that you can tune to your workflow. The only thing I don’t like is that out of the box it’s not immediately clear how best to use the different object types (milestones vs tickets vs checklists etc.). The feedback from our clients has been overwhelmingly positive.
Basecamp is definitely one of the best task management apps, but when the projects grow sooner or later you need more. Drew you might want to take a look at our pm tool http://www.comnidwork.com as an option. Pricing is crystal clear and you can also host it on your own servers, not to mention you can import all your projects from Basecamp with ease and lots of features that you can enable/disable as needed. Good luck finding the best solution that works for you!
I ’ve been using Basecamp since it first came out (2006) and have also used ActiveCollab for 2 years now. But again same story repeated with Active Collb . Now i have moved from both and start using ProofHub now. Frankly speaking. for 1st instant it look better then both . The main advantage is with ease you can manage projects. Resemble like Google wave but bug free.
I think time has come from moving out from basecamp, active collb and wrike. Proofhub is really a next generation project management software
We are an ad agency in Phoenix and are making the same move from Basecamp to AC this week. Actually they are internally testing a Basecamp import plug-in for us, so we will see how that goes.
Pricing really was the issue as well as being able to get really deep control over permissions with the different types of accounts. Being able to restrict a client’s account to the point where you’re not having to mark everything private that you don’t want them to see is going to make life a lot easier!
Do post up on your thoughts with the move!