Basecamp

Comments: Basecamp provides a platform for collaboration and project management that can be the backbone of digital marketing agencies, software development companies, or any other company which has a team of 5+ and at least 5+ projects (my estimates, not limitations of the product). It just helps the team to keep it all in one place and more importantly - it helps bring together remote teams, which is an ever-increasing scenario for many IT companies hiring VAs, content writers, PPC specialists, developers.

Pros: It gives you the opportunity to manage a complex business with multiple projects and team members, providing a platform for communication and collaboration. I've personally used Basecamp for two years and have liked it in general for organizing Digital Marketing projects within an agency. You also get the ability to add the client to the project and choose what to show or hide from them, making it just a bit easier to keep them in the loop and get required feedback from them.
The ability to export tasks to Google Calendar is a good touch, but it would really depend if workflow creates Google Calendar worthy items. If not, you have a calendar within Basecamp.

Cons: Like any software with vast functionality, you have to learn all of its features to use it as it is intended to be used. Collaboration with teammates adds one more layer of complexity and problems can arise if the team is not coached to use it in a common way.
The ability to assign tasks to others can get overwhelming for the assignee. I personally had two account managers above me, as well as content writers I worked with and they all kept assigning even the smallest of tasks, or even worse - largely undefined tasks, that eventually led to me accumulating a whole lot of tasks and not seeking to clear my list.

Comments: Basecamp is where we keep all of our assignments and initiatives, and we've become diligent about not letting any lists or to-dos creep outside the system. This relies heavily on managing the project list carefully and making sure everything has its place. There are not guide-rails to keep you from placing a task in the "wrong" place - fortunately you can move tasks all around if someone puts something in an incorrect place. It's important that you define what Projects exist and create a framework for where assignments should go. A frequent complaint we hear around the office is "I don't know where to put this" so it's important that you outline your project structure and communicate it clearly. If you can nominate a gate-keeper to watch over the system organization, Basecamp can be a very effective way to manage all assignments across an organization and allow people to simply see what's due, when, with ease.

Pros: Basecamp requires very little setup and there are very few barriers to overcome to get in and start making projects and tasks. It can very very scalable in terms of users and project count, and it's approach to To-do Lists and Tasks makes project organization fairly straight-forward. At it's core, making tasks is as easy as choosing a place to put them, naming them, and assigning them. With simple reports, users can view their tasks across all projects and start tackling them. If you want to take things a little bit deeper, you can assign mutiple people to tasks, set due dates, and loop other people into the tasks for conversations.

Cons: Basecamp still has some key missing features that create workflow issues every now and then. You can create recurring events, but not recurring to-dos. So, for example, if you want to create a "Close Accounting Books" to-do and assign it to a user to be finished each month by the 15th, there is not currently support for that. There's also no built-in gannt views, although they continue to innovate project management with new simpler ideas such as the "Hill Chart" which i'm a fan of. A lot of the lack of complex features comes from their desire to carefully curate features to keep the application from ballooning into a beast that's unwieldy and hard to learn.

Comments: Our team has always been collaborative but with Basecamp used as a tool, we have been able to increase our collaborative spirit. In addition, we have been able to accomplish projects and tasks faster because it gives us a way to share which piece we are working on and thus eliminating duplication.

Pros: I love Basecamp! I think it is a great software for keeping tabs on projects and people you work with. It is a collaborative space for users to update each other on what parts of the project they are working on or finishing up. It gives our team the balance needed to ensure no one is working on the same thing or on overlapping projects. It has been a huge asset and we have all loved watching the progression of projects and campaigns we are working on. It has many settings so you can really set it up based on how your team would best thrive.

Cons: One con is that this product could easily turn into a micromanaging tool for bad managers and leaders. When utilized properly it will do wonders for your team but if overused it could be a huge pain point and stressor for employees. They allow an option to have your team give a daily summary of their tasks and I could easily see that going wrong if used by the wrong manager.

Comments: We use Basecamp for every project that goes through our company, and we have some team members that use it constantly and some that barely want to touch it ... when you rely on Basecamp for your company to run smoothly, you need to make sure you have 100% buy in from the team and everybody is using the software with some form of ground rules in place to help keep everything organized. Once that is dialed in, basecamp really can cover every needs we run across and it has grown with us from a 3 person company up to a 28 person company and should be able to sustain for the foreseeable future.

Pros: The pros of basecamp are the company wide team access and usage, easy access to current project related data, storage for project photos and renders. We have an archive of our projects for the past 6 years as well, so we can always go back in and find any info we may have had in the past but are missing now.

Cons: Basecamp is just difficult enough that our team members who are a little less tech savvy can feel overwhelmed with navigating the software. We tend to have 150 -250 open, active projects at any given time, so they struggle to know which project relates to them and get discouraged by the navigation. Since there are so many ways to use the software, to-dos, conversations, calendars, file browsing, etc. it can become disjointed and unorganized quickly. You really need to stay on top of keeping everything in a manner that cuts down confusion.

Comments: We felt that the "all in one" nature of the software was great, but beyond our initial tests we found it lacking in adaptability to fitting into the way WE work, (it wants you to wholly adopt their approach and we felt that there was an internal resistance to that development style) - therefore we abandoned the platform and looked for alternatives.

Pros: For years we have been looking for an all in one project and task management system to use with our business. And BaseCamp is so nearly it, it has most of the features you'd expect but presents them in a different way to most other task tracking systems. On the positive side, it's easy to use, friendly to the eye and everything is where it should be. It has some nifty features that you can easily become over-reliant on that aren't present in other management software tools. One recent addition was the Hill Chart where you plot a task on an "planning hill" - in a really visual way. This is totally unique and works well, helping you quickly identify the progress of any given task. As a project manager, this is a very useful way of seeing where everything currently "is at"

Cons: Onto the Cons: For us, we found that the software was too verbose in its approach, it has a work log system where each user is expected to fill in a diary of what they have done today - sure, this can be switched off in the options, but the regularity of BaseCamp e-mailing you is far too high as a default. By default you're constantly managing e-mails from the system (which is precisely what is is meant to eliminate!) Once you disable these notifications, we felt that the software starts to lose its impact, our staff started to drift away from it over time and went back to other task tracking methods (such as trello) for different areas of the development. This caused us to reconsider the entire enterprise and look for alternatives, our team just couldn't seem to adopt the (very rigid) way that Basecamp wants you to work.