Item: Zoho Projects
Rating: 3
Author: Tammy Roberts

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently decided to not use Zoho any longer. I have a small Accounting business, and myself and my partner tried to use Zoho for many months to organize our projects and keep up with projects that were in a pending status, completed as well as reoccurring. It was a struggle to use this software based on the lack of customization we wanted and needed. It worked well for client data storage and campaign process, but overall it did make the cut as being our project management solution long term.

Pros and Cons

It's easy to enter data.
Sends out daily reminders (to my inbox).
It had a nice calendar feature.

It needs to have more customization.
Features were too basic.
It's hard to reach support and training features.

Return on Investment

We needed a system to organize our growing business, so anything was better than what we had, which was nothing.
Recording time spend is a huge reason for using project software. It has made me aware of the tasks that are taking too long and where we are not being profitable as a company.
It has kept our team accountable for what needs to get completed and when projects are not in motion or completed timely. It's helpful to know in order to get billing out faster.

Usability

I think I started using this system in an early phase of development. They were constantly stating that "that feature will be coming soon." I felt that since I was already paying to use the software, I did not want to wait on their development team to get to my suggestions. Therefore we decided to move to another platform.

Support Rating

Support was not well trained. Most times being on the support calls were frustrating. It was mainly because the system could not handle our requests and therefore made the support staff feel inadequate.

Alternatives Considered

Asana

We were testing out Asana at the time we moved on to Zoho. Zoho seemed to have more features that met our needs. Asana was not quite developed to the point of our liking. Zoho has an awesome calendar function that I loved, which Asana did not.

Other Software Used

monday.com, RUN Powered by ADP, Quick Base

Likelihood to Recommend

It worked well for reoccurring projects when you have the same items as a template base, and it was easy to create new projects from templates. However, it was cumbersome to customize and lacked a good conversation history for storing information that a team could easily find and respond. I did like the integration features, especially the calendar functionality. It was also very difficult to get support. I found that there was overall a lack of good support when trying to learn the product. I prefer to learn on my time instead of having to schedule time with someone live. Our current software has training clips to help learn the features of the software fast, and it is very convenient when I needed it. I felt that this product could have used more time in the beta phase before being rolled out. There needed to be more upgrades for common features that just were just not there yet.

Zoho needs more time in development phase

Overall Satisfaction with Zoho Projects