10-second breakdown:
Low on cost but just right on features, Zoho offers a great online solution with a straightforward and clean interface that’s marketed towards small to medium sized companies. With Zoho Marketplace your options for integrations are always expanding.
Zoho is used in small (0-50 employees), and medium companies (51-1,000 employees).
The good:
Extensive integration with all Google apps makes this an easy choice for your business if you are already using Drive, Gmail, or Calendar. Gamescope is a gamification option on the dashboard which allows users to create contests and compete in “games” based on sales or productivity metrics. Has good customer support available via live chat.
The bad:
Slow to get started. Has a bit of a learning curve and requires a lot of customization at setup. No notifications on redundant data, which may cause multiple users to contact the same clients by mistake.
How it works:
Zoho offers a wide variety of services, the project management suite is called ‘Zoho Projects.’ The company’s offerings boil down to 4 main modules, the first is ‘Tasks and Milestones.’ This module provides you with task dependency views, task management and project milestones. You can also view a Gantt chart here or check up on the status of your tasks with a handy report. The report can show you how many tasks each person has, if any tasks are unassigned as well as completion rates.
Tasks and Milestones recently introduced a new feature that lets you add both start and end dates to tasks. That way you can estimate how long an employee or team will be busy instead of just assigning a due date.
Next up is ‘Documents.’ Using the Zoho Office Suite, you can create new documents, presentations and spreadsheets and store them in the cloud. If you prefer the Microsoft Office you can still import all of the standard MS file types into Zoho Projects and the program will be able to read or modify them. Once you have documents in the system you can attach them to tasks and projects.
The ‘Calendar’ module organizes anything you might have scheduled – appointments, meetings etc and gathers them up into one place. You can share out your calendar or specific events with any other users on the project.
The cool part about using Zoho Projects is the integrations it has with other systems, most notably the entire Google Apps suite including Gmail, Drive, and Google Calendar. They also have robust integrations set up with Box and Zapier.
Last but not least is ‘Forums.’ Anyone in the project can set up forum threads for others to comment and collaborate on. You can attach files to forum replies as well.
Zoho Project’s user interface is clean and easy to work with. Each of the modules has a button on the left side that you can access from any page in the system. If you don’t like the looks they also offer a few different color schemes to make it your own. There’s a home page on the upper left that displays all activity happening in that project in real time, very similar to a FaceBook feed.
The system even prompts users to set up 2-factor authentication to make your data more secure.
Most of Zoho’s products work in conjunction with each other, so it’s incredibly easy to link together Zoho Projects and Zoho CRM if you want to import projects or users. They also offer easy integrations with Zoho Invoice to set up a budget or invoice for your projects and Zoho Reports to get in-depth reporting on your projects and tasks.
There are a few pricing options if you decide to pursue Zoho. First up is their ‘Free’ tier, it comes with everything we mentioned above except the invoices integration, you can have unlimited users and you’re limited to 10MB online storage. The downside is that you can only have 1 project at a time. On the bright side, free does offer a basic Gantt chart.
Next up is the ‘Express’ package, it comes with all of the free benefits but they boost the number of projects to 20 a month and give you 10GB storage instead of megabytes. Zoho also added in invoices & expenses, project budget and time tracking. Express is a flat rate $25 a month or $249 for an entire year. Zoho’s pricing scheme isn’t dependent on the number of users or projects, it’s always just a flat rate!
Zoho’s most popular tier is ‘Premium.’ You get everything from the other two, it boosts the storage up to 100GB and you get a much larger 50 projects every month. At the premium level, you get Dropbox integration, strict project management, recurrence & reminders, timesheet approval and sub-tasks. Zoho Projects Premium will set you back $50 a month or $499 a year. The Gantt chart is upgraded too, you have a few customization options.
The most expensive package Zoho offers is ‘Enterprise.’ It gets all of the features from the other packages, keeps the same 100GB from Premium, but allows unlimited projects a month. It comes to $80 a month or $799 a year and you get the added functionally of creating custom fields in your projects and highly customizable Gantt charts across all of your projects.
The price will vary depending on the package you chose, but Zoho also offers ‘Bug Tracking’ as an add on to any of the tiers. The more expensive the tier, the more features they’ll give you.
Zoho is a great budget-friendly option for startups who are looking for a feature-rich project management system. Zoho Projects has a lot more to offer through tight integrations with their own internal products and popular online services to give you a complete package.
For complete rankings of all project management software, go here.
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