Basecamp vs. Sellsy

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

We like sellsy. Its not perfect and as other users have pointed out, there is and always will be, room for improvement.

If you require deep integration with Google apps and Microsoft Office 365, then Sellsy may not be for you. Sellsy just about manages to work with google in so far that it can sync contacts, calendar, sales docs and incoming email with google. There is currently no way to make sent email appear in the sent items section of sellsy unless you compose the email within the sellsy app. The O365 integration is not nearly as powerful as sellsy does not sync sellsy contacts or calendar with microsoft (in its current form).

I believe that one of the primary functions of any business management app should be the capability to centrally manage all of a company's business clients, contacts etc. and sync this data to all employee accounts with the 2 biggest players for business email (Microsoft and Google) as a minimum. This data should never be an island stored only on 1 application. The Discovery that sellsy does not currently sync contacts and calendars with O365 was a disappointment. If Sellsy started supporting exchange sync for Microsoft Office 365 we would immediately dump google and switch over. In fact Sellsy is the only reason we continue to use Gapps as we need our contacts and calendars synced to our mobile devices.

We have built up a list of small little things that do not work as expected since we started using sellsy and continually pass them on to the development team. Many are small trivial things from an engineering perspective but are still annoying nonetheless, especially to users who wish to get the job done. Employees are easily frustrated if they have to fight with software to do certain tasks. Annoyances in the user experience (no matter how small) can lead to lost productivity which in turn costs money in the business world. However based on our experience with Sellsy support we believe that they do listen carefully to their customers concerns and are on the path to deliver a quality experience to their customers through the process of frequent updates to the software. You can easily establish how good a SAAS provider is by measuring their ability to fix problems soon after they are initially reported.

In simple terms Sellsy is an incredibly feature rich application and is way ahead of the competition. It represents good value for money and is backed up by free support.

• 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

• Appealing Design
• Easy to prepare invoices and send them
• Good tracking system
• Friendly support staff

• 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

• Training. The only real issue I have with Sellsy is that its got so many features its hard to understand them all. I looked for training videos and they are all in French. Thats a big problem for a guy who grew up in NJ.
• I would embed training videos directly into the software. This way as you add services, you get a full tutorial immediately.

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.

Sellsy ticks the most boxes for us. While it could still do a lot of things better there is no other single app that offers the same spectrum of features at a comparable price for SMEs.

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

There is room for improvement.

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

We have not yet experienced any down time with sellsy.

Sellsy is slow to load pages for us. Sometimes waiting a few seconds. This could be due to our geographical location.

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

Based on our experience. We have submitted a large amount of tickets and they have proven the Sellsy development team have the ability to respond fast and implement changes reasonably quickly. (Updated July 2015)
It took sellsy a number of weeks to solve an issue with the billable hours section of their application. This delayed us from being able to invoice our client for completed works. Lots of small things like email tracking timestamps have never been fixed even though we highlighted this issue months ago. Though small it is growing more and more frustrating to be reminded every time we try to see what time a client read or opened an email from us.

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)

If you are importing data from a CSV, Sellsy recommends you use OpenOffice. OpenOffice is an absolute disaster on Windows 8 and crashes every few mins. While no fault of Sellsy they should not recommend software which makes an already challenging task even more difficult. A small gripe in hindsight but during the process was deeply frustrating. For any users looking to format your CSV Google, try importing CSV data into Excel and your life will be much more easy.

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

For me it is close to what Salesforce did. I do not use all the options they both offer so I mostly judge on the customer / contact tool.

The license model once you understand it is very flexible allowing you to select from the modules within sellsy. This gives small companies control of the cost facilitating them with the option to only pay for the features they use.

• 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

• It helped us look and operate professionally even though we had started out of our homes. That's huge.