Basecamp vs Zoho Projects

As one of the Enterprise 2.0 classics said: "If I had more time, I would have created a simpler application". That's how 37Signals (the company behind the project management app Basecamp) is spending its time. Basecamp was launched about eight years ago and since then it remained almost unchanged. Every new feature was added only if it was really necessary. Due to this, Basecamp has retained its simplicity and effectiveness. But it turned out that the Basecamp developers during all these years not only defended the app from the complications, but also have been inventing more perfect and simple structure. And this year they decided to roll it out. It's hard to believe, but the new version of Basecamp is even easier and more effective.

37Signals decided to market a combined package of its key SaaS services for business - 37signals Suite, similar to how Google sells its services as Google Apps. 37signals Suite includes Basecamp (project management system), Highrise (CRM system), Campfire (group chat, which can be used as communication tool in this bundle) and Backpack (group organizer+wiki, which can be considered as an intranet portal in this bundle). The integration between applications in the package doesn't rock for now, but at least the user base will be unified. 37signals Suite is prices so that in most cases it's cheaper to buy the whole suite than two separate services. Price starts at $99 per month - for 35Gb of memory, 35 projects in Basecamp, 20000 contacts in Highrise, 5000 pages in Backpack, 50 simultaneous chats in Campfire. Though it seems much more expensive than the cost of Google Apps (50$/year), but you shouldn't forget that Google charges this fee for each user, and in 37Signals Suite the number of users is unlimited.

Let's start from what happened last week. Without any announcements 37Signals dropped a low end plan from the Basecamp sign-up page ($24/month for 15 projects and 5GB of disk space). Now, the cheapest option on this page is $49 for 35 projects and 15 GB. Of course, this caused a loud reaction of bloggers and competitors. Bloggers started speculating that Basecamp feels so confident that has lost interest in small business. Competitors started pitching their alternative services and Zoho even pushed the promotion for customers switching from Basecamp to Zoho Projects. 37Signals co-founder Jason Fried has clarified the situation. "In fact, Basecamp hasn't raised prices. Existing users continue to pay the same price for the same subscription plans. The company is just experimenting with the sign-up page design. The $24 plan is still available (inside) for those who sign-up for free account and then wants to upgrade". Nevertheless, the idea of the experiment is clear: Basecamp focuses on the more "expensive" clients. Here's why:

Jason Fried, 37Signals co-founder, exactly knows how to create beautiful systems. Basecamp users and Ruby on Rails developers know this. Recently he published the video with his vision of how to create a beautiful workspace (on the example of 37Signals) and how online tools can help. Jason started with the fact that in most companies collaboration is organized absolutely wrong. It's based on the constant interruptions. Employee just turns on the computer, and the interruptions begin: instant messages, email notifications, phone calls and of course, co-workers that come and ask something. No one can work productively in such environment. And, often collaboration software (especially messengers and microblogs) doesn't help to mute this noise, but increase it.

37Signals, the developer of online project management service Basecamp, according to the recent investment round, has become the most expensive company in the Internet services market. The group of investors, led by Yardstick Capital and Institutionalized Venture Partners purchased 0.000000001% of the company for $1. So, the potential 37Signals' market price has increased to about $100 billions. This was officially  announced in the company blog. During the company-wide meeting, dedicated to this event, Jason Fried (37Signals founder), announced, that all SaaS applications, developed by 37Signals, including Basecamp, will become free in order to attract more users and to reach the estimated userbase already in 2013.

About a year ago Zoho added the bug-tracking module to its project-management service Zoho Projects. But the trouble with this module was that it was available only in the most expensive version of the service, which costs $699/year. Now Zoho launches a separate service Zoho BugTracker. "Finally, they wake up!" - most developers will say now and start testing the service. They will be even more delighted when find out that Zoho BugTracker provides the interface on their native language (16 languages supported), integrated with the popular free project hosting GitHub, integrated with Google Docs, fully integrated with Email (for notifications, and adding bugs), contains forum, file storage, activity streams, custom workflows, custom fields, custom views and reports. However, the positive will be finished when the developers take a look at the price.

The online project management and project collaboration service Zoho Projects becomes interesting for software companies, as it gets quite functional bug tracker. It allows you to add bugs, assign owners, collaborate on bugs and control their statuses. There are flexible options for email-notifications of various actions in the system. You can set the individual processes and rules for the automation of certain operations - for example, when issue status changed, it can automatically be assigned to another owner (for example, to tester) and change its priority. Unfortunately, the bug tracker is included only in the most expensive Zoho Projects subscription plan ($ 699 per year for 30 GB and unlimited number of users). But for these money you get the most featured online project management system on the market, which includes: project plan, calendar, tasks, file sharing, forum, chat, wiki, time tracker, billing, bug tracker, reports. In addition, Zoho Projects is seamlessly integrated with other Zoho services and Google Apps.

As you know, Google Apps has no specialized project management solution, and this is very disappointing, as there are many other useful utilities for online workgroups there. However, there are three tools that can be used to solve this problem. And the first of them is Google Sites. You can use Google Sites to manage one large project, or create a site for each small project in it (there are even some templates for project sites). Since Google Sites is, in fact, a wiki, you can easily work with the project documentation there. In addition, Google Sites allows you to embed group calendar (Google Calendar), task list (Google Tasks) and documents from Google Docs. All these elements are very useful for project management, but of course, task collaboration in this solution - is the weakness.

Zoho continues to integrate its products with competitors. At that time the online project management service, Zoho Projects, was integrated with Google Apps. And it makes sense, as Google Apps don't provide own project and task management tools. So what has been done? First, customers can now login to Zoho Projects with the same username and password they use for Google Apps. Second, from now users can link their documents from Goolge Docs to the projects inside Zoho Projects (its interesting that Google still doesn't provide similar function in GMail and Google Sites, where it could be useful).