Basecamp vs. HaloPSA

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

Having been in IT for 10+ years and used so many different PSA platforms, I must say working with HaloPSA has been simply amazing. Straight out of the box, it's fast. It's feature-rich. It's easy to set up the basics, and the onboarding team was amazing. The onboarding team actually spends time with you, human on human, walking you through the setup and getting it working how you want. No one else does that included. Yeah, sure, you can pay CW and the other huge amounts of money, and they sort of help you, but HaloPSA helps you from the start; it seems they realise if they help set it up correctly in the first place, it reduces support calls. We can run our business from day one - very customer-centric. We have been using HaloPSA for a year now, and there is still plenty to learn and develop on the platform, but every week we are learning new things that we can do. The support team is great; they are humans who understand the issues we face, so they get things working fast. We have suggested some missing features to the dev team, and so far, they have implemented all of them - WOW. Don't get me wrong, as with all platforms, HaloPSA is not perfect. It's young, but it's maturing fast, very fast, and they are getting integrations built with the major players in the IT industry, which is fantastic. Yes, a few times, the link to Xero broke, which was annoying, but unlike the platforms we used in the past, the support team spoke to us and told us what the problem was and got it fixed, so you can't ask for more than that. Their growth has been fantastic to see, but again this has meant a bit of change around with account managers, support personnel, etc., but everyone they bring on is just as good as the last. All in all, migrating to HaloPSA was the best software/platform decision I have made in our business since I began the business. I would recommend HaloPSA to any IT business. Well done, Team HALO. Keep up the awesome work.

• 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

• Workflows
• Stock Control
• Quoting

• 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

• Stock control
• There are 3-4 different ways to do that same thing
• Documentation

Incentivized

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 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'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

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)

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

We have used and tried several other PSA vendors and HaloPSA was our favorite by far. Many others were either much too overly complicated, clunky, slow to respond to issues, incomplete, or they simply failed to deliver on promises made, especially in terms of integrations.

• 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

• Improve our technicians efficiency
• Helped improve asset recording
• Knowledge base