Basecamp vs. Quip

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

Quip is an excellent program for pulling all writing together under one roof. Some may argue that you could just use the Google suite of products (which is technically true), however, I think Quip is easier to use and bring all document types together with better organization. The searchability is top-notch (I solely use ctrl+j and the search pane to move through Quip). For any company that does a lot of writing for multiple clients, or has a lot of projects going, it provides solid organization. It also is great for allowing visibility into project status without someone potentially causing a conflict (corrupting a document). If you are looking for a full-scale project management software - Quip could probably do it, but it would likely take a bit more internal work to get your system setup.

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

• Our experience with Quip has been nothing short of astounding; I love everything about this collaboration tool.
• I love that it is cross-platform and works so well on mobile devices; it makes it unhindered to make progress on to-dos, take notes, export spreadsheets and documents, and have all my information organized within one environment.
• I also love that it notifies me when someone has done something in shared documents and the incredible ease of linking documents in chats.
• Quip's user interface is friendly and comfortably navigable; it feels right.

• 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

• Update frequency - it feels like I need to update the application about twice a week. It's important to push new functionality and address bugs, but it often feels like the Quip team doesn't have their release schedule planned out very well. Constant updates are disruptive and counterproductive.
• Automatic date reminders - Quip will automatically set a date into a reminder as you type it, which could be a useful feature, but it just ends up being annoying. More often than not I'm just typing today's date in a document to track meeting minutes, or potentially adding in an expected delivery date, for which I really don't need a reminder.

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.

Basecamp is a little tricky to learn. I've used it for quite a while but I feel like there's still so much I don't know. It took me a while to learn but having used it in college definitely helped me integrate it into my work career.

Incentivized

It is the best collaboration tool in my company. Through it, the organization has achieved better connectivity and efficiency in its communication. Primarily, the docs feature of this software is the most utilized in the company. Slowly, dash-boarding and project management features have also been utilized. Generally, it is the best tool, very easy and fairly streamlined

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

I have never used Quip's support. To be fair, we hired someone who used to work for Quip before working at our company, and he implemented it and pushed it with the team. He was very biased toward the product, and yes it was better than Google Drive, but by how much?

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 no longer use Teamwork but when we did, we tried to house documents but we'd always forget where they were. They weren't easy to access. Dropbox we still use sometimes, but if all our clients used quip, we would no longer need to use Dropbox except for audio and video files so Quip could improve on importing audio and video files.

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

• Quip allowed collaboration and communication between Salesforce team and the rest of IT as well as business users.
• Quip allowed collaboration on documents that was very interactive and helpful to the creation process.
• Quip frustrated us because we had so many documents that we already had but they did not work well inside of Quip.

Incentivized