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Software Comparison
product	task mngr	Time and Resource Mgr	Storage and Document Mgr	Client Interface	Program Mgmt	Custom izable?	total	price range
Get a Free 30-day Trial + 25% Every Month For The Life of Your Subscription	Rating: 4 / 5 Intuitive Task Management, easy cloning of task lists, only thing missing is dependencies	Rating: 5 / 5 Canned and Fully customizable Resource reporting	Rating: 4 / 5 Best in class document mgmt with check-in/out and great interface	Rating: 4 / 5 Yes, but limited to 10 users per project	Rating: 5 / 5 Yes, custom reporting interface for program mgmt capabilities	Rating: 5 / 5 Yes, fully customizable with your logo, domain name, and Style sheet	Total Points: 27 / 30 Top Pick! Best-In-Class Solution with many great features at very affordable price point. Highly Recommended for small to midsize teams on simple to medium-high complexity.	Free-$129 a month 25% Off and Free Trial (Free-$99 a month)! No Credit Card Required Free Trial
Get a Free 30-Day Trial of Basecamp Today	Rating: 3 / 5 Simple and friendly task management but no dependencies, due dates, or task priorities	Rating: 3 / 5 Canned Resource Reporting sufficient for many needs	Rating: 3 / 5 All accounts include plenty of storage. Document mgr stores revision history, but no check-in/out	Rating: 5 / 5 Yes, unlimited external and internal users	Rating: 2 / 5 Possible, but no easy interfaces	Rating: 3 / 5 Somewhat, change color scheme and logo, plus subdomain. No CSS modifications allowed.	Total Points: 21/30 Recommended Great solution, smaller feature set but easiest to use and recommended for small to lare teams on simple to medium complexity projects.	Free=$149 a month Free Trial
No Free Trial, but you can order your MS Project or Sharepoint here!	Rating: 4 / 5 The gold standard for managing tasks independently. Collaboratively its not great with out project Server, PM must do a lot of housekeeping.	Rating: 3 / 5 Without MS Project Server, the resource manager is only as good as the data that the PM enters to this project	Rating: 0 / 5 None	Rating: 0 / 5 None, unless you spend a ton of money on project server and the external interface upgrade ($37,000)	Rating: 0 / 5 none without Project Server (at least $8,000 for one license)	Rating: 0 / 5 its Microsoft, so, no, not so much	Total Points: 7 / 30 Its OK Best task and resource management for a single project, no doubt. But too expensive to upgrade to MS project server, which still only provides half the functionality that the SaaS service provide	About $200 for one MS project CAL, $8000 per Project server. $37,000 for one server web interface, $7000 for one SharePoint server. A lot of $$$$$
Get a Free Trial of @task	Rating: 5 / 5 @Task has by far the most sophisticated task scheduling interface around, combining the best features from MS Project with new innovations that are so obvious	Rating: 5 / 5 Better group resource planning than any other system, with ability to see all users free time and skill sets before assigning project tasks	Rating: 3/ 5 OK amount of storage, between 100-250 megs per user by default. This can be increased or negotiated with a sales rep if you need more.	Rating: 4 / 5 Yes, can setup unlimited number of "client" or external users (for a fee)	Rating: 5 / 5 Yes, top of the line Portfolio PPM Management available with Enterprise version. Some features available with normal version	Rating: 0 / 5 none, must use delivered functionality.	Total Points: 23/30 Highly Recommended More expensive than the other online solutions, but less expensive and with a lot more functionality than MS Project Server, this is the go-to software for large projects and corporations that require Gantt charts and top of the line project management. Highly Recommended for Large Projects, Teams.	$33-50 per month per user. Get a Free Trial of @task

 

In-Depth Reviews

Central Desktop Review
Central Desktop is my favorite collaboration and light weight project management solution for a reason: Tons of features! For the price, it is by far the most feature rich online system available, yet at the same time it is still intuitive to use and easy to understand. Its so easy you can sign up for an account and be creating your first project workspace in under 5 minutes. What I really like about Central Desktop is that it is not just for project management, but for project collaboration and management. You can create a variety of workspaces, each one with a slightly different feature set. These workspaces are all very useful, and include a wiki workspace, a project management workspace, a public workspace (no login required), a user forum workspace, a corporate blog workspace, and a database workspace which lets you capture data with a web-based front end if you wish (very useful for surveys, client questions, or just general data capture). I think the most powerful part of central desktop is the reporting module, which lets you create custom, ad-hoc reports on all your data in one or any workspace you manage in central desktop. This is amazingly useful for all kinds of tasks, from executive status reporting to day-to-day management of your project. Once you use these reports, all other online tools in this class just seem inadequate.

For project management in particular, I find Central Desktop is one of the best light weight solutions. You can create tasks, tasks lists, and assign each one to milestone. Unlike some other products, you can assign due dates AND priorities at a task level, which is incredibly important when managing anything but the simplest of milestones. The file management interface is amazing, and allows you to set it up in a familiar file folder hierarchy, which helps to manage lots of files. The ability to check-in and check-out files for version control, and capture all comments about the files as they are being discussed, is really helpful (and you no longer have to worry about losing comments in your inbox about that latest document). The project dashboard is easy to use and informative. Overall, I think the only thing that central desktop is missing are the more complex project management features such as task dependencies and resource leveling features the more expensive solutions include. But compared to spending $60,000 a year for some of the “enterprise” solutions, you can spend about $1200 a year instead and get most of the features. Sure, if you really need an intensive PM solution, Central Desktop may not work for you. But I suspect that there are many teams and projects out there that don’t need that level of software, and for many people that do have it, they don’t even fully utilize all the features. I am sure that Central Desktop can save your company time, money, and help it operate more effectively than it currently is now. Give it a shot with a 30 day free trial. Or, want more info, screen shots, and details about what Central desktop can really provide? Check out my detailed review here.

BaseCampHQ Review
There is no doubt that BaseCampHQ is a slick and easy to use application. It is so intuitive and simple, that the nifty help videos they offer when you first log in are not really required at all. Simple is often good. Their approach to project management is very collaborative, and flies in the face of some conventional logic. Things such as Gantt Charts or any type of task dependencies for tasks are not included, nor is any real type of reporting outside of the one canned and printable project status report. However, BaseCampHQ may be appropriate for all your collaborative and project management needs. Moving to an online project collaboration environment has been proven to reduce costs and increase project success rates.

BaseCampHQ lets you create tasks, assign them to milestones, and assign those to individuals with email reminders. You can upload and keep multiple versions of files, and you can store discussions and have “live” documents with their “writeboad” and “chat” functionalities. You can export your calendar to Microsoft Office 2007 or any other iCalendar application (such as google), and there are some nifty iphone applications and integrations available.

Even more interesting, because BaseCampHQ has opened its API to developers, many have created Free or reasonably priced application plug-ins for BaseCampHQ that include Gantt charts, milestones views, and Program Management features that are really nice to have (I especially like the Free ones from http://www.youcalc.com/apps/basecamp ). The core functionality of BaseCampHQ that really makes a difference are the collaborative elements, and those or easy to use and top notch. Taking file reviews and discussions out of email and archiving them in one place is a feature alone that will save companies a tremendous amount of time and money. The integrated messaging, milestones, task lists and resource reporting is, like everything BaseCamp, simple, easy to use, and it just plain works. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, and that is at once either its main selling point or its biggest draw-back. It really depends on your type of projects and management style. While it won’t work at all for some organizations, it will work amazingly well for many. Check it out here and start your Free 30-day trial to see if it will work for you.

MS Project 2007

Microsoft Project is certainly the gold standard in many instances. Used all over the world, it is an indispensible tool for many projects. However, there are many things left to be desired. While the task interface is in my opinion the best, and one of the easiest ways to build out your project timeline, it requires a ton of work to keep it up to date once you have built your project. Because the project file lives on the manager’s desktop, or laptop (or maybe a network drive), the PM must act as a secretary in many cases constantly polling the team leads or team members for status, and checking off tasks as complete or partially complete on a daily or weekly basis. It’s a ton of work, I have lived that dream before. With Microsoft, there really isn’t much other choice. Also, the PM has to spend a ton of time communicating that status to others, as for tasks that have dependencies, many other people in other departments may be waiting on that information. On big projects, I could spend 50% or more of my time babysitting the project plan by collecting and communicating various status to the team. With Central Desktop or Basecamp, those days are over.

What about Project Server you ask? Well., if you are in the market for MS Project Server, the good news is that you have money. Project Server and 5 access licenses for MS Project will cost you at about $9,000 for the software alone, plus a couple thousand for the hardware, plus the maintenance fees etc for an IT guy to run it all. All in all it is very expensive. For true enterprise deployments, the Microsoft solution set, including MS Sharepoint server, MS Project Server, and MS Project may very well make sense. But having used this solution set multiple times at multiple companies, the lack of true integration between Sharepoint and Project Server still makes this solution a bit clunky and certainly more expensive and less elegant than the fully integrated offerings of Central Desktop or BaseCamp.

Conclusion
There is little doubt that both Central Desktop and BaseCampeHQ will save your company money and increase your project success rate (if they are utilized and used correctly, of course); this has been proven by numerous case studies and by many happy customers. Which one do you choose? Central Desktop has the most rich feature set, with an amazing ad-hoc reporting system built right in, you can slice and dice the data any way you choose. This is much harder to do with BaseCampHQ, but they do have many of the reports built-in. On the other hand, if you want to manage fewer projects, and desire to have external client access, BaseCampHQ may work better for you, since only the $99 plan and above for Central Desktop allows external client access. But, with that $99 plan, Central Desktop allows you to fully customize the look and feel with CSS style sheets, and if you purchase 3 months in advance, will even design that CSS style sheet for you FREE of charge, so you get a seamless and professional look and feel for your website both internally and externally. BaseCampHQ lets you change the color scheme and the logo, which may or may not be enough for you. If you want the most customization, flexibility, and the most features, Central Desktop is for you. On the other hand, if you want something light weight and simple, there is nothing more elegant that BaseCampHQ. Either way, both offer free trials, so check them out and decide for yourself, the small monthly investment your company will make in this software will be paid back in spades.

Highest Rated Project Management Software
Based on my extensive reviews and in-depth product usage, I recommend Central Desktop as the top project management software currently available.

Based on my extensive reviews and in-depth product usage, I recommend Central Desktop as the top project management software currently available. If you want to learn more about Central Desktop, read my detailed review.

Get a Free 30 Day Trial plus 25% Off When You Signup through this link, and try it out yourself.

#1 Ranked Project Management Software | Get the Free Whitepaper: "10 Tips for Choosing the Right Project Management Software"