This is the first of a 10 part series where I will review the top 10 “online project management” systems available. In order to qualify the systems/applications must center around project management, and be completely web-based (online!). The online portion is particularly important as offline apps have been available for years, but exclusively-online systems are fairly new, but most importantly, incredibly useful, enabling users, clients, and project managers to access their data and manipulate and update projects anywhere. As you know we’re big fans of Basecamp, but I thought it would be appropriate to review Basecamp’s competitors. Basecamp will be used as the baseline against which all other project management applications will be judged.

GoPlan

According to GoPlan’s website:

Manage multiple projects with ease using Goplan’s intuitive user interface. No click-trickery to get to the information you need to work on – all your projects are immediately accessible from your account dashboard, next to your assigned tasks, issues and calendar events.

Features - GoPlan has some nice features – some that Basecamp has, but not as robust as GoPlan. The feature that caught my eye and truly seems to differentiate GoPlan from the rest is it’s complete and attractive calendar, which can be subscribed to using the iCalendar standard. Basecamp features “milestones” which is very similar, but much more task oriented. Another feature that appears to differentiate GoPlan is the “tickets.” Unfortunately, from our experience with users tickets may be redundant or unecessary as users will more likely submit a message in order to solve or make note of a problem (messages are called notes within GoPlan).

Pricing/Packages – GoPlan excels in some respects when it comes to the format of their pricing. Their most basic package, which is free, allows you to manage more than one project – which is important when testing the app for real future use. Across the board the pricing is less expensive then basecamp, but at the highend, even the ultimate package doesn’t provide as much disk space. If you are using your online project management system to store a number of files you may want to watch this number and GoPlan may not be the best option for you (particularly if you’re storing lots of high-res images or video).

Website - Although the website is nicely designed it neglects to offer compelling information for users to join. Although it clearly reveals the use of the application, it does a terrible job at selling the end customer or discussing the applications complete feature set. It is only by examining the screen shots that the tool can be further (albeit minimally) explored. Additionally, at the time of this writing some areas of the website (roadmap) are not even functional.