Basecamp vs. Brightpod vs. ONCE Campfire

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

I like Brightpod. We used their previous product, DeskAway, which we actually liked a bit more for our needs (cannot remember why now as we've found workarounds over the last three years!). It is good for us, and we need to organize multiple task lists for multiple clients. We need to be able to monitor task progression and completion, as well as to track time by resource. We need to prioritize and focus our resources, and we need to review time tracking/performance reports. All possible in Brightpod. We especially like the access we can give to clients, which is on a task list basis, so they can see some task lists in their pod but not others, which allows us to not overwhelm them with unnecessary info, but at the same time, accomplish the detailed tracking we need.

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

• A very visually pleasing layout of projects in a Kanban style view.
• Keeps all communication on a task or project in one place, so that everyone is on the same page.
• Great template system for recurring projects like onboarding or deploying a specific service that has a defined timeline.
• Flexile recurring tasks.

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

• Reports.
• Team Member workload.

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.

It's working very well for our organization.

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

Brightpod is easy to use. We have several levels of users, some are from outside the USA and some are here. We needed something that could be used by programmers, coders, technical project managers, marketing individuals, and administrators. We get a thumbs up from all these user types. The system is hardly ever down, so we are able to use 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

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

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

Customer Support was fast and helpful.

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)

SaaS is the way forward :)

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

Brightpod was definitely the most attractive and we felt like it had the least amount of clutter. We hated how Wrike handled recurring tasks. ActiveCollab just seemed to have some complexity that we didn't need. The Brightpod developers are very responsive and were able to fix bugs quickly.

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

• Increased employee efficiency
• Ability to have remote teams