Basecamp is an online collaboration software that allows individuals to organize and interact with one another’s work. It is used to keep records of all the tasks, milestones, files, debates, and notifications that occur at work.
Collaboration is an important aspect of any organization. If multiple teams in your office can’t work together or don’t have the tools at their disposal to work well together, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Collaboration is a part of most major project management tools, but none of them really focus on it as Basecamp does.
Looking for a project management tool with amazing collaboration tools? Here’s our Basecamp review, an advanced management, and collaboration tool.
Basecamp completely changes the way employees collaborate. So, here’s our brief Basecamp review to talk about everything this app does better than its competitors.
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Basecamp is a project management/collaboration tool that allows teams to work together on projects seamlessly. As we discussed earlier, Basecamp is unique because of its advanced collaboration tools.
Other project management tools focus on general personal stuff that you need to do. Meanwhile, Basecamp allows your organization to blend in well together and work like a well-oiled machine.
Basecamp pricing is cut to the point and very straightforward. There are only two main packages. The first one is meant more as a personal solution. It’s suitable for students, freelancers, families, etc. It does have limited functionality, but it’s completely free. The paid package of the app is Basecamp Business which has a flat fee of $99 per month. This covers your entire organization with unlimited user accounts and all the features of Basecamp laid out at your disposal.
Knowing what a software can do is the most important thing. Find out in this Basecamp review what this project management software can do.
Message Boards
The first part of the whole collaboration hype is Basecamp’s Message Boards feature. This is a great tool for managers and business executives that want to directly communicate with their employees without any hassle. You can post announcements, progress updates, ideas, etc., and keep everyone updated about all that’s going on within your projects.
Message boards might not seem like much, but they add an amazing amount of clarity to your communication and eliminate the need for most progress report meetings. No employee will be able to make the typical excuse, “I wasn’t CC’d on that email.”
Individual Campfires
A company works on multiple projects simultaneously, and keeping track of everything in a centralized location full of messages can get pretty hectic. If everyone is talking on the same message board and you miss a message for an hour, you’ll end up with 500 pending conversations that you won’t have the time to go through. Therefore, to prevent such situations, Basecamp divides everything into multiple campfires. Each project/team can continue their separate conversations in campfires.
Basecamp also provides a type of HQ where you can continue communication across the whole company.
To-Dos
Talking a bit more about the project management aspect of the app, we have something called To-Dos. The name of this feature is pretty self-explanatory. You can create tasks for all the work you have pending and assign due dates. Basecamp will remind you as the deadline for each task draws closer.
Shared Schedules
If your business holds frequent meetings every now and then, it’s important that the timings are clear to everyone. You shouldn’t need to send emails and reminders every day counting down to the meeting. It should be visible to everyone when the meetings take place without having to give constant reminders. Shared schedules allow you to create full transparency about all incoming, company-wide deadlines.
Document Hub
Does your company have to exchange documents back and forth constantly? Sending documents in a chat isn’t much of an issue. But it’s really annoying when you have to scroll up to find that one document you’re looking for. Basecamp solves this problem by giving you a centralized hub where you can place all your project-related documents, files, and images. The app indeed makes sure that your important files don’t get lost amongst all the mess from text messages in chats.
Automatic Status Updates
If you have to constantly keep track of your employees and pester them about project updates, Basecamp can make your job much easier. Instead of having to text them manually, you can program Basecamp to ask these questions automatically. You can use the Automatic Check-ins option to ask things like, “How is the campaign going?”, “Do you have an update for me?”.
Hill Charts
In a world where most project management apps are stuck with traditional deadline viewing methodologies like Gantt charts, Basecamp changes things up with Hill Charts. The problem with Gantt charts is that they display information in a very linear method. It tells you that you have completed 4/5 tasks. However, the last task could take you weeks, and the Gantt chart doesn’t account for that. It gives you a moment of accomplishment knowing that you’ve completed most of the work, but there’s a chance that the might not even be 20% of what you have to do next.
This is where Hill Charts come in. Hill Charts suggest that each project has two main phases; figuring out what to do and then doing it. Hill charts are designed by converting all your to-do tasks into a convenient graph of sorts. This helps you visually see exactly how much work you have left until you’re done with the pending projects.
Conclusion
Basecamp review: Why you should use it?
Is Basecamp worth a purchase? Definitely. The app is, hands down, one of the best team management and collaboration apps on the market. It’s extremely convenient and has all the tools you could ever ask for. Its major benefit does end up being a bit of a disadvantage as well. But, if you can overlook that slight con, Basecamp will be an amazing investment for your company.
Pros
Amazing at Collaboration: Theoretically speaking, Basecamp is a project management tool. However, its collaboration features make it a much better tool if you want to bring the office together. Cross-team collaboration is a piece of cake with Basecamp.
User-Friendly Design: Project management apps tend to get really cluttered at times. These apps are made to offer a ton of functionality. And, in an effort to do that, some developers end up making the UI extremely confusing. When you start using Basecamp, you’ll notice that the developers put in some serious time to make the app easy to use. Your staff won’t require any extensive onboarding lessons to learn Basecamp. After a few minutes of messing around, and they’ll know everything there is to know about Basecamp.
Affordable Pricing: The $99 per month pricing may seem like a lot to some, but we’d like to give you a reminder that this price includes every single feature that the company has to offer. They aren’t putting anything in reserve and giving you Basecamp at its finest. The best part is that you’re getting an unlimited number of users in that $99 price range. You could load up to 1000 users on the platform, and it won’t cost a dime above $99.
Cons
It wouldn’t be a proper Basecamp review without the cons, would it? There’s a lot of right with the app, but there are things that the app can improve.
Isolated Communication:As we talked about earlier, Basecamp wants to separate conversations so nothing gets lost amongst the clutter. We get the idea and what the company was trying to do, but they did end up overdoing things. The communication feels too isolated. Every tiny conversation takes place in some other corner of the app, and switching between individual conversations isn’t really as easy as Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc.
