I have been evaluating the range of Project Management and Collaboration software now for the last couple weeks, trying to find the right solution. One thing I have noticed is the lack of mid-range solutions.

For instance, at the very affordable end we have BaseCampHQ and Central Desktop. They cost about $100 a month, give or take, and can support many collaborative functions to mange about 25 project at any given time. If you need more than that, Central Dektop offers Enterprise or custom pricing.

In the midrange, there isn’t a ton of competition. You can check out Qtask, which is about $30 per user, and offers signficantly more storage and mostly the same funcitonality as the low-end, with a couple add-ons like task dependencies. Unfortunately,t he mid-range is a pretty slim category.

On the other hand, you can deploy a high-end system like Dpativ or @task. With all the features you could ever want in a system, these are not “light weight” solutions but really full-fledged enterprise systems. I haven’t explored these two systems in depth yet, I will be reviewing them after I finish the lightweight systems. What I can tell so far is that, these systems are very expensive (in the ten’s of thousands of dollars range). Will the high cost be justified? I’ll let you know in detail when those reviews are available.