Accelo vs. Basecamp vs. Teamwork.com

Accelo is a system that can do it all. It's extremely sophisticated. Depending on the sophistication of your organization, or specifically the abilities of the people you put in charge of the implementation, it can almost be too sophisticated. It all just depends on your situation. The more you use it, the more data you give it, the more you'll be able to see and do. It's incredibly powerful. But it's definitely not a tool that would be appropriate for smaller boutique type organizations that have only basic needs.

Incentivized

Basecamp is a wonderful tool for teams of varying degrees of technical knowledge, teams managing lots of different types of "agifall" and waterfall projects, and teams that are remotely distributed. It's probably less useful for more strictly agile-focused development teams, compared to other more flexible software applications like Jira and Asana.

Incentivized

Teamwork is awesome for teams who need a flexible tool that supports all types of projects. Since it supports kanban it makes visualizing the work to be done and the work in progress very easy. The Gantt chart support is decent and helps to understand how a team is doing when it comes to getting work done in a given time frame. Teamwork isn't a great option for companies that have a bunch of projects going simultaneously due to the way Teamwork structures their billing based on a number of active projects.

Incentivized

• Timing Client Work: You are able to better manage your time on your clients.
• Housing Client Info in one Area: You can view all you need for any given client in one area.

Incentivized

• Task management - It is very easy to add, organize and discuss tasks within Basecamp's interface.
• The "Campfire" function is great for communicating when you just have a quick question for someone on the team.
• Notifications - Basecamp lets you decide how often and about what you'd like to be notified. The ability to respond to messages in Basecamp directly via email saves a lot of time.

Incentivized

• I am a believer that simple and easy should be the key to create great opportunities.
• Teamwork has helped me to turn simple task management into the execution of large, massive projects.
• It has certainly worked great in helping to maintain workflow in my department.

Incentivized

• Accelo is excellent on the adaptation to its deep functionalities.
• Managing multiple project is very challenging.
• Not easy to collect multiple reports across platforms.

Incentivized

• High Learning Curve. It's true that it can be easy to use, but to use well and effectively takes some time to learn. It's recommended to have an agreed-upon system in your team of what tools to use and when.
• Notification Overload. If people aren't careful they could send a notification to everyone when only a couple people were meant to be prompted. And since emails are sent by default, you could have your mailbox overloaded with unnecessary updates. This is where it takes a bit of training in your team to have an agreed-upon system.
• Lack of organization with Archived Projects. I will often need to reference an archived project to make a new one, but there is only a list of archived projects in alphabetical order, with no way to organize by archive date, or even search.

Incentivized

• Visualization needs to be improved, charts graphs are limited
• Value stream mapping should be available to determine and prioritize the work.
• Documentation should be available stepwise with export and printable facility.
• It should be configurable like ERP with cross functionalities of different users, where users login, assign and approve the work, job or project details, where it should be collectively effected on a project.
• Add many examples, little more AI, Machine learning required for suggestion and recommendation. It would be a plus point

Incentivized

Looking forward to seeing more refinement of features provided and upcoming features promised :)

When I bring new people onto a project, it's immediately obvious how to use Basecamp. I don't have to worry about teaching them the features or walking them through it, it's just incredibly user-friendly. For this reason, I'll continue to renew my subscription even as new people are brought onto production jobs or the client changes.

We are already at an annual contract, and have been for the past 5 years; so far the system has delivered, and our personal is already trained in it. A major overhaul of our entire infrastructure (as in moving everything to a single, unified platform) might change the current continuity of Teamwork Projects on our organization, but that's not feasible in the near future.

Incentivized

It is easy to use, even for clients who have no experience with the platform. It can only get a little cumbersome to ensure that a client can't see certain documents you might want to keep in the Docs & Files folders. And sometimes, getting a client to actually use an unfamiliar platform can be a challenge.

Incentivized

I give it a 9 out of 10, because there is a bit of a learning curve when you first start using Teamwork Projects because there is a lot to learn & recognize where to find it. They do offer a good range of tools that can be applied to every project - So say you're working on an internal project and don't need Milestones or Billing, you can shut those modules off. This can help simplify the interface for beginners. Once you've had a few days in Teamwork Projects, I think it's a 10/10 usability. It's very easy to accomplish your tasks and keep track of what you're managing.

Incentivized

I've never experienced downtime while using Basecamp, or been unable to access it when I needed it. That's not to say they've never had downtime, but I've been lucky enough not to encounter any, and I work odd hours, including late nights when maintenance is often undertaken.

Incentivized

From the beginning the Accelo team has been very invested in ensuring our success and overall happiness with the platform. The initial implementation specialists and trainers did a fairly good job of learning our company and needs, and tried to tailor the trainings accordingly. However, once we made the formal switch to the platform, meaning we no longer were using our legacy systems, we found that we had a lot of questions....and a lot of ideas and recommendations. The support team is extremely responsive and seemingly happy to receive our continual feedback. And if we encounter an issue that seems to be a system issue, they work diligently to fix it (we've actually had an engineer join a call with us to learn of the issue - and subsequently fix it)

Incentivized

For the many reasons I've given, Basecamp is a very strong program. There are a few features I can imagine that might make it even better, but I don't have a basis for comparison to be able to say that there is definitely a better one out there. I've noticed that Basecamp has evolved a bit from the time I started using it until now, so that makes me think that the producer of this program values it and believes in continuous improvement. If you could use the features offered by Basecamp, I would think you could use it with confidence.

Incentivized

We've been able to meet with the customer success team on multiple occasions to discuss the roadmap and learn about the company culture. Being based in Ireland, we occasionally have to wait until they wake up to get support requests handled in the states and larger conversations about big enhancement requests were politely collected but not followed up on

Incentivized

Decide the process before implementation - i.e. when it's due 8/9 does that mean 8am, noon, 5pm, 11:59pm? Check your to-do list frequently Set-up templates - just not with the dates (they can be funky)

Accelo doesn't really exceed any competitors in any one area of their product, but in 2015 when we made the move this was the best option that included all the tools we wanted. However, user adoption was low in some areas due to the UI, so we scaled back Accelo and added other tools.

Incentivized

Pretty good, but [Basecamp] has its drawbacks. Honestly I find the interface non-intuitive and sometimes have trouble figuring out how to change the status of a task. Perhaps it has something to do with the way it was originally set up by the admin, but I'm not sure. I liked Jira's drag and drop obvious functionality, but the project management side of the software was lacking. Smartsheet has excellent project management functionality, but the task management isn't as good.

Incentivized

I spoke about this quite a bit before, but as far as usability goes, Microsoft Projects is totally useless for me, so I avoid it at all costs. Basecamp was just a task management app and had very small feature set beyond that. We had to rig it to do other things for us, but it failed at that. Asana was a very nice app to trial, but it lacked many of the features that we were looking for.

Incentivized

• It substantially reduced the number of systems we use to run our business.
• It reduced the need to train our staff on a variety of platforms.
• It gave us the ability to have a client-facing portal that directly integrates with our backend systems.

Incentivized

• It has saved me time when having to get the same message out to multiple restaurants
• It has helped us make smarter operational decisions because we can all collaborate on an answer in a shorter amount of time (instead of calling a meeting!!!)
• The calendar function allows us to plot out our marketing agenda for the month and add/change it together as needed. The chef will post his recipe, the managers will cost it out, the social media manager will post pictures on it, and ultimately we will get that information out on an info sheet to the staff by printing the page.

Incentivized

• Teamwork was a great starter into project management software. We were WAY more organized and efficient than we ever were with Trello boards and the PM software included with our accounting system.
• Clients were mostly pleased with interacting with Teamwork, and appreciated the ability to track their comments and requests in one place.
• Ultimately, we stopped using Teamwork after about 6 months because we need something more focused on web development projects specifically

Incentivized