Basecamp vs. Ziflow

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 work with a lot of cross functional teams, so it is nice to have them review things on their own and provide feedback all in the one place for our team to review. It helps cut back on meetings and emails full of feedback that gets lost. This is especially helpful when we are working on our catalogs. We do reviews on Ziflow all the way from rough layouts to proofreading.

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

• Simple and user friendly interface with little if no learning curve.
• Accurate and specific change requests are especially enhanced when using the markup tools.
• Nice to be able to assign who the decision maker is and also be able to change project participants easily, like when someone goes on holiday or sick leave.
• SOCD (sent, opened, comment, decision) progress indicators provide an awesome 'at a glance' view of project participants activity.
• Email notifications and integration with ASANA is brilliant.

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

• Comments with instances that span multiple pages force you to zoom out, which can be rough on multi-page proofs. We end up making a comment on each instance for ease of review.
• Maybe it is in there, but I would love to be able to upload a new version and review/make comments before any of the other reviewers can see it—to double-check for errors. Maybe there is a verification stage first before releasing it to the other reviewers.

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.

Ziflow is easy to use, efficient and now is also part of our daily lives. Hence, the teams are already adapted to the tool and willing to work with it. The features are according to all what was expected and we had a great experience until the moment with the tool

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

The tool is easy to use for digital oriented people. For the ones not used to this kind of environment, it could look a bit complicated at the beginning, but following the instructions and tutorials and performing it once makes you get a grip of it in just one use.

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

The ZIflow support team has always been very responsive to my questions, issues and other problems. The good thing is I have never had to use their support team all that much because Ziflow has been for the most part trouble free. If it had been error prone, we would have dropped it long ago.

Incentivized

They were friendly and took the time to go through everything, especially relating to how we would use the system.

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)

It was seemless! Things got instantly better when we started using Ziflow!

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 found Ziflow to be much better than PageProof in several ways. The tools available for making comments and edits are more intuitive and there is a greater variety of tools and the version control features worked much better as well. Also their customer service was far better when it was necessary to interact with the company

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

• Improved efficiency and time saved in making proofs and adding people to proofs with staging and template features.
• Robust proofreading features for reviewers like comparing previous versions.
• In my experience, customer service is quick to help with issues or outages (which aren't often).

Incentivized