Tableau is a data visualization tool and one of the market leaders in data analysis and business intelligence. It offers numerous products, all of which do something slightly different but each of which still falls underneath the umbrella of data discovery, analysis, visualization, and business intelligence.

Best Alternatives to Tableau

GoodData: Best for security & compliance

GoodData offers two major products: an end-to-end data platform and embedded analytics. These two work on the GoodData security structure that runs the gamut from HIPAA to GDPR and financial data regulations. The platform gives companies a full data management and analysis system that runs on any data source. This software provides the architecture for data integration, cleansing, analysis, and publication to reporting tools and apps. The scalable enterprise platform lets companies use their data to grow in new, stable, and innovative ways that protect the company’s data but drive analytics toward insight.

Why we chose GoodData

GoodData’s embedded analytics are perfect for smaller corporations looking to improve data analysis and access but who can’t commit to a full end-to-end data management system. The analytics use the GoodData platform as a service model to get companies up and running quickly, sometimes within a matter of days, and without hiring data scientists. Because GoodData encourages quick setups with minimal additional staff, it makes for a great upgrade for businesses looking to expand regardless of limited access to resources.

InsightSquared: Best for clear visualization

InsightSquared is a sales-focused data visualization company that aggregates and provides a platform for business users to better understand their data. The software is split into two main products, Tiles and Slate, which are built to scale to a business’s needs.

Why we chose InsightSquared

InsightSquared, as a sales-focused data visualization tool gives teams incredibly detailed insights into their sales metrics. Small businesses and enterprises looking to make data-driven growth will find utility in the predictive analysis tools that InsightSquared provides. These insights use the rates at which team members close sales, the quality of leads that have been gathered, and historical data to project out the rate at which a business can expect its revenue to grow or contract. InsightSquared can very easily aid in building quarterly business plans and market redirections.

SAS: Best for enterprise

SAS Business Intelligence and Analytics (also called Visual Analytics) is just one of the many data processing and analytics tools available from SAS, which specializes in building enterprise-ready tools for users across industries. Choose the right tool, or set of tools, from SAS based on your business and technology needs and the maturity of your data program.

Why we chose SAS

Look to the Visual Analytics program to gain business analytics without tying up IT resources. The system is built for business leaders and technical data analysts to work in tandem, with IT controlling governance but business guiding the data visualization process. SAS also integrates with MS Office programs like Excel and Outlook to keep data in the hands of those who need it most.

The focus on AI-aided forecasting and data analysis will be the main draw over Tableau to users looking for something new. While Tableau is easy to use and generates perfectly serviceable data views, it cannot be understated how the additional processing power provided by the AI can help along the data analysis process. Staff members finding themselves bogged down in the volume of data they have to comb through for work may find that SAS and its AI-aided visual analytics program will ease the burden of work.

TIBCO Spotfire: Best for shared data

Spotfire aims to democratize data across an organization by giving access to all employees, rather than forcing you to make requests through your IT or data teams. They provide cloud, platform, enterprise, and AWS-focused systems for BI from lots of disparate data sources.

Why we chose TIBCO Spotfire

Spotfire’s extensive capabilities include both big data and what they call “big content.” With big content searching, analysts can easily view all user-generated text across multiple platforms, including email, chat, and search terms. Big content searches help identify customer pain points and possible solutions. To sweeten this deal even further, Spotfire provides predictive analysis from your data, so businesses can be proactive rather than reactive. 

Tableau users would generally be able to spot these same trends using its visualization tools, but Spotfire’s proactive predictive analytics make this process less time-consuming and labor-intensive. This gives analysts more time to work on their actual analysis rather than spending their work days on finding insights.

Viur: Best for dashboard-to-email automation

Viur’s major strength comes in the form of dashboard-to-email automation that gives users scheduling capabilities over your report data. With Viur, data runs and aggregates silently and publishes when needed based on preset rules, rather than forcing analysts to run a new report.

Why we chose Viur

Like other options in this category, Viur offers responsive reports that look good on every device, as well as a visual dashboard creator that offers a wide range of report types. This software requires some SQL expertise for greater customization than the out-of-the-box reporting options, but educational resources and contract analysts will help you learn and maximize use of the software. In the short run, this makes Viur a little less user-friendly than Tableau upon installation, but once the learning curve has been overcome, Viur offers a much more robust customization experience.

The Viur team understands security, so data is stored in a personalized secure location that suits the needs of each specific company. The software encrypts connections from those user-selected databases all the way through the reporting process to keep every client’s information safe.

Zebra BI: Best for Excel integration

Zebra BI’s interface resembles a plug-in more than a separate platform that connects to data sources. The entire system bolts onto Excel, so a spreadsheet-heavy workplace doesn’t have to learn new tools. On the downside, if data does not exist in an Excel format, analysts will need to go through the process of importing it.

Why we chose Zebra BI

Zebra provides new chart types that can’t be found in Excel, which means generating these views is as simple as selecting data and choosing the chart from the Tables option. Zebra also offers data scaling to ensure data isn’t skewed when generating these new views. The data skewing Zebra BI uses is a nice touch that works to avoid common chart distortions and detrimental chart misrepresentations. 

Presenters that need to update a chart shortly before a meeting will have no problem at all. Zebra automatically updates linked PowerPoint slides when changes have been made to a chart in Zebra BI. Zebra works for companies new to BI or those who do a majority of their work in Microsoft Office. 

Tableau may be more complex than a business needs for its data analytics, and companies that primarily use Microsoft Office will find a transition to Zebra BI fits right into their workflow.

Infor Birst: Best for multi-tenant cloud architecture

Birst’s multi-tenant cloud architecture aggregates data in the cloud, with AWS, or locally. Infor Birst also offers a desktop client. The company employs strict security standards throughout its  data centers and encryption in the cloud to keep client data safe.

Why we chose Infor Birst

Because data travels between the cloud and your local databases, analysts can access all of their data and visualizations from any device. Run your analyses with visual discovery dashboards that make data more accessible. This reduces the need for IT interventions or extensive training to use the product. Tableau offers similar mobile access, but Infor Birst’s increased focus on security and ease of use makes it a more attractive choice for security-minded organizations.

Microsoft Power BI: Best for data analysis and visualization

Part of the Microsoft suite of business tools, Power BI is built specifically for data analysis and visualization. While providing the usual dashboards and reporting features, Microsoft’s Power BI also gives analysts the ability to embed data within their apps—an integration that others on this list don’t offer.

Why we chose Microsoft Power BI

With 60 data sources, the native connectors aren’t overwhelming, but analysts can search and combine data with question-based analytics. Microsoft Power BI offers a free trial with an upgrade to the business version. This tool can be used in conjunction with other Microsoft Business Application systems including PowerApps. The integration with familiar Microsoft tools also makes it an easy fit in many offices that already use Microsoft tools in their daily operations. There is much that can be said about a gentle learning curve and familiar software design.

What Does Tableau Do?

Tableau is a data visualization tool and one of the market leaders in data analysis and business intelligence. It offers numerous products, all of which do slightly different things but still fall underneath the umbrella of data discovery, analysis, visualization, and business intelligence.

Most businesses opt for the Tableau Creator plan, which bundles together Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep Builder, and one one license for either Tableau Cloud or Tableau Server for a comprehensive solution.

Why Tableau May Not Work For Your Company

Tableau is a business intelligence industry leader for a reason, and it regularly receives high marks for its eye-catching data visualizations, powerful analytics, and relative ease of use. Given the platform’s popularity, you may be wondering why it’s even worth it to consider a Tableau competitor, but there are plenty of reasons to look at other BI software.

For starters, Tableau has a less steep learning curve than some other competitors in the BI space. However, it still requires a certain level of technological know-how to make the most of the product, most notably with an understanding of SQL queries. This is a big roadblock for small companies or teams which don’t have access to an in-house SQL expert.

In fact, Tableau’s offerings are often too robust for companies just starting to experiment with data analysis and visualization. Tableau competes with BI offerings from Microsoft, SAP Analytics Cloud, and other enterprise-level software designed for multi-national companies. If you’re working with huge datasets and need to run complicated analytics on them, Tableau is a great option. But if you just need to turn last quarter’s metrics into a simple chart, it will likely be overkill for your business’s needs.

This high level of functionality means that Tableau comes with a high price tag relative to some other options on the BI market. If your organization needs a lot of data analysis and visualization, then it might be worth the investment. But if your business intelligence needs are more occasional, the platform might not offer the return on investment you would like. On the other hand, a Tableau competitor such as Qlik Sense or Zoho Analytics could make a better option.

Also Read: Looker vs. Tableau: An In-Depth Data Analysis Showdown 2023

Methodology

At TechnologyAdvice, we assess a wide range of factors before selecting our top choices for a given category. To make our selections, we rely on our extensive research, product information, vendor websites, competitor research and first-hand experience. We then consider what makes a solution best for customer-specific needs.

For our Tableau Alternatives list, we looked at 17 options before whittling them down to the eight that cover most reasons a person might choose Tableau. Features evaluated include analytics, integrations, reporting abilities, pricing structure, overall functionality, and more.

Looking for a new BI software? We’re here to help

These products are by no means the only Tableau alternatives. There are plenty of viable solutions in the business intelligence software market, but a high learning curve keeps many buyers from doing enough research.

Looking for the latest in Data Visualization solutions? Check out our Data Visualization Software guide.

Featured Business Intelligence Software

If you need a way to jumpstart your research into business intelligence software, here’s a quick list of the top BI tools.

The post Top Tableau Alternatives For Visualizing & Analyzing Data appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

An effective project manager uses their experience and tools to implement innovative and effective strategies. Careful deployment of innovative project management (PM) strategies speeds up production times and leaves project teams feeling fresh and ready to tackle the next task on their plates.

The rigid nature of traditional PM, and the predictability it aims for, can be at odds with innovation. This, however, doesn’t mean project managers must always stick to the book—sometimes unique challenges are best overcome with agile thinking and flexibility.  

The challenge is finding a strategy that allows for oversight without stifling creativity. The following are a few innovative ways businesses are re-imagining project management while encouraging creativity and ideation.

Build in time and scope to experiment and fail

Experimentation doesn’t always have a neat home in modern project management methodologies. Project management tends to focus on assigning very specific tasks and initiatives to meet metrics and KPIs that produce easily identifiable progress. Often, this means that experimentation will fall by the wayside if time is not set aside for it.

Simplify the process with the right PM tools

Robust project management tools allow many different project team members to enter data, track progress, and report on results. 

Modern project management tools encourage smooth communication through clear processes, automations, and centralized updates. Project managers can have more control of task organization and process management than ever before, and team members can be empowered to take minute task management into their own hands. 

How can the right pm tool help ease bottlenecks?

Use tools to ease bottlenecks

Project management software can make it easy to spot where tasks are held up the most. With the right setup, you can see problems at a glance, and some software can track how long tasks sit in various statuses. By identifying where bottlenecks are, a project manager can make adjustments to eliminate roadblocks. 

how to identify the right pm tool for you?

Test different tools with free trials

Most project management software and tools offer free trials so you can get a feel for the setup and see if it works for your team. Don’t be afraid to test a few or several—you may find your team needs more than one tool to get the job done.

Identify where tools can save time

There is a tool for every team. Sometimes multiple tools can integrate with your current infrastructure. Automating time-consuming tasks like planning, scheduling, tracking, and resource allocation frees up time for more important work and for more innovation.

Moreover, complex projects require close planning, tracking, and collaboration to be successful. Project management tools can provide the necessary functions to simplify these steps for more success.

The post Top Innovative Project Management Strategies appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

The direct benefit of using these solutions may not be readily apparent, so let’s cover five clear and precise task management benefits. 

1. Visibility and trust

When teams track their tasks in task management software, they have easy visibility into their day-to-day work. You could even set up dashboards that track team members’ individual progress and participation toward goals.

Plenty of software also offers alerts and automations, so team members can be pinged with updates and for specific tasks—meaning managers can step back while their team works more autonomously. 

Workers value freedom and autonomy, so by having these systems in place, managers can still see how things are going while individual contributors work more independently without manually reporting their progress.

That helps minimize micromanagement and, as a result, build trust across the organization. Team members are free to produce work on their own schedule without checking in with their managers at every turn, but managers are also adequately informed to ensure everything is running smoothly.

Software example: Trello

Like most project management software, Trello allows managers to open a new project board and add necessary tasks. But from there, team members can simply claim cards and move them down a customized path without much supervision. 

With the right automations and alerts, managers can choose to be notified when a task has reached a specific stage. That way, employees feel trusted to run with their tasks and complete them, but the manager can easily take care of their part when the time comes. 

If a manager needs to check on things at any time, they can glance at the project board to get an idea of how things are progressing. Employees can also tag their manager in project cards if something specific needs their attention.

2. More mental bandwidth

It’s hard enough for a person to keep all of their own tasks in their brain without assistance from some kind of tool, be that pen and paper or a project management solution. Managers often have even more to juggle, between their team needs, their own projects, and expectations from above.

But task management systems can help you track all of that, freeing you up to focus on other things and relieving some of the pressure. And with helpful notifications and automations, you can put in more focus time while still communicating effectively with your team.

Software example: Basecamp

Basecamp has a calendar feature that clearly marks meetings, deadline projections, and to-do lists with a familiar visual format. By creating public lists of deadlines for deliverables and making a calendar that everyone in the workplace can access, managers can more easily communicate expectations without losing time.

3. Improved processes

Project management solutions are most often defined by their ability to manage tasks. But these task management features can also show managers where project processes can be improved. 

As things move through the process, teams can easily identify where bottlenecks and miscommunications are. Say tasks are piling up in a status owned by one person or tasks are incorrectly moved from a specific status. By visualizing the work process, you and your team can quickly identify problems and discuss solutions.

Software example: Asana

Many teams use Asana to create a visual view of projects with a set of sub-tasks. Having a detailed view of where a project is going can make each step easier to track. And because it’s so easy to see where the process is breaking down, teams can have productive conversations on how to continually improve that workflow as tasks, projects, and teams evolve.

4. Time savings

Little tasks and busy work can eat away at valuable work time, and so can miscommunication or scattered conversations. Missed deadlines, unclear expectations, and forgotten tasks can also complicate timelines and lead to accidental inefficiencies. 

Task management software fixes these shortcomings by centralizing team tasks. Having it all in one place with clear organization can simplify task prioritization and expectations. For example, if tasks are moved to a “Manager Review” status, managers immediately know they’re on deck and need to take action. 

You can also keep conversations within a specific task so anyone can look back on what was discussed before asking their own questions.

Software example: Jira

Jira is a favorite for developers, and it has a lot of features baked in with DevOps in mind, like bug tracking, data security, and agile project management. By taking advantage of these features, developers can trim tasks from their personal workflows and free up time for other business needs. 

And with the proper task fields and processes, team members can have what they need before it even gets to them. Say, for example, there are fields specifying who made the request and what exactly is being requested—developers can then peruse the inputted information and know exactly who to go to with follow-up questions for an efficient discussion.

5. Flexibility

While task management software can be as simple as a checklist, many tools also have built-in flexibility to scale with companies and visualize data in many different ways. 

For instance, you can create data dashboards, different visual views, filtered views, and calendars—and it all lives in one place. Team members can have personal views that work best for them, and managers can have various views for planning, reporting, and supervising. And many tools have ways for project boards to talk to each other for cross-team collaboration.

Robust task management solutions are meant to help you do your best work, and not all minds or industries process information the same. So having such flexibility allows you to tailor your task management to your team’s specific needs on both an individual and team level.

Software example: monday.com

monday.com has dozens of tools for editing a project board’s view—as well as several view types. Team members can create their own, customized views that pull information from the main board. For example, they can filter their view to show only tasks assigned to them, and they can hide fields that don’t apply to their role for even easier info navigation.

And if a regular list view isn’t working for a team member, they can try a kanban view. Or they can create their own board that connects to the team’s main board for even more customization.

Other task management tools

We’ve already named a few examples, but there are a lot of task management tools out there to choose from. And what works for one team may not work for another. Ultimately, the right solution is what meets your needs the best. So we recommend outlining your essentials before reviewing your options.

In addition to what we’ve already mentioned above, here are a few other task management favorites.

Wrike

If your team uses a lot of different software to complete tasks, you may need something with a lot of integration options to keep your workflow more manageable—Wrike has over 400 integrations to choose from. And if you have tasks that touch a lot of different projects, you can cross-tag tasks so they show up in multiple places for broader visibility.

ClickUp

For teams who lean into written communication, ClickUp offers a variety of collaboration features. It has stronger comment capabilities than many other tools, and you can even create a document for individual tasks that everyone can contribute to.

For brainstorms and planning sessions, you can create a whiteboard within ClickUp to jot down ideas either asynchronously or in a team meeting.

Smartsheet

There are a lot of spreadsheet-based task management tools, and Smartsheet is one of the favorites. If you’re most comfortable with traditional spreadsheets, Smartsheet may feel like home. It has custom formulas to better customize your fields and connect different boards for easier collaboration across teams and departments.

While you do have to work from the base spreadsheet view, you can still create varied views with different setups, such as kanban and Gantt charts.

Improve efficiency with task management systems

Relying on a tool for task management can truly ease processes and open up a lot of opportunities. And honestly, they can offer even more benefits than what we’ve named, depending on which software you choose. 

Different tools have different specialties—so if you didn’t find a fitting software here, take a look at our list of other top project management software for something more in line with your needs.

The post 5 Benefits of Using Task Management Software appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Its ease of access, price point, and intuitive design make it an easy pick for many overloaded workplaces. By using Asana to organize workflow, businesses are able to more accurately track, monitor, and adjust project plans. Asana may be a great solution in many cases, but that does not make it the perfect solution for every workplace.

Why Asana may not be right for your business

Asana is an incredibly versatile tool, but it does center its design around the familiar to-do list. Tasks are simple to create, and they can be nested underneath each other to create a tree of sub-tasks. This simple structure works well for straightforward projects and simple lists of intuitive tasks that simply need a home, but it falls short for organizations routinely dealing with a certain degree of complexity.

Asana can quickly become a tangled web of interwoven assignments if a project manager relies on it for complicated projects. And large teams that need individual boards for their own sub-projects will find themselves mired in checklist clutter that can cause confusion and frustration. Asana has a few additional views and plugins that may mitigate these issues, but in many cases, it’s simply more effective to seek out a separate solution.

If you’re at that point or just looking for comparative options, we’ve curated a list of alternatives for a place to start.

Top Asana alternatives

ClickUp: Best for team collaboration

ClickUp is a feature-rich project management tool designed to be flexible for any team across an organization, including managers, designers, and developers. Like Asana, ClickUp is organized around tasks and to-do lists that you can view in multiple ways without losing hierarchy or clarity.

Why choose ClickUp over Asana?

ClickUp provides a few unique customization features. The ClickUp Toolbar, for instance, allows for bulk changes on tasks to better accommodate rapidly shifting environments. Custom statuses and a strong tagging system that are also customizable give project managers the tools they need to communicate their exact needs on a wide scale with very few actions on their end.

Furthermore, ClickUp’s smart search and free data import feature make it easy to transition to this tool from others, and detail-oriented project managers can quickly double-check the import once it’s complete. 

monday.com: Best for cross-team functionality

monday.com is similar to Asana in structure and usability. The difference is in the details and the increased functionality. monday.com uses a bulletin board as its most basic unit of task assignment. 

These boards are highly customizable and display statuses, timelines, and assignments all in one area. monday.com also features a wide variety of views to cater to different needs.

Also Read: Asana vs. monday.com

Why choose monday.com over Asana?

Because monday.com and Asana share several design features and philosophies, it may initially seem difficult to choose between the two. But teams that feel themselves constantly pushing against the boundaries of Asana’s feature set will feel freer with the more robust monday.com. 

These overlaps between monday.com and Asana also make it easy to draw a sort of progression path between the two. If a mid-size project team has started with Asana and yearns for more, then monday.com is an easy choice.

Jira: Best for developers

If you have iterative projects or tasks, Jira provides a strong agile project management solution with Scrum and kanban views. 

While it can be used for teams from all types of industries, and for all kinds of tasks, it’s a favorite for developers specifically. It has security features for data protection, bug tracking, and useful reporting options to see where projects lie.

Why choose Jira over Asana?

Asana is built to work for a wide variety of teams, but Jira is most tailored to DevOps, streamlining the complex, iterative process. So if your company or team does quite a bit of development work, we recommend Jira as a more fitting option.

And because Jira offers some integrations across project management software, including Asana, you could use Jira for your dev teams while using another project management tool for other teams in a powerhouse combo.

Wrike: Best for digital marketing

Wrike uses a combination of task-based to-do lists within projects and interactive Gantt charts to help teams stay organized. The Gantt charts in particular give it the extra edge if you have a lot on your plate, since they show a clear project path from a bird’s eye view. Plus, the charts are simple to set up, so you can get right to your project without much fuss.

Also Read: Wrike vs. Asana

Why choose Wrike over Asana?

While the task tracking and Gantt chart creation is a massive draw to Wrike, it’s only a small slice of what Wrike offers. Wrike also has request forms and templates to drastically reduce labor on either end of the planning process. And it provides interactive features like a live activity stream for at-a-glance updates with click-and-slide task adjustments, so you can quickly make adjustments to plans mid-development.

Trello: Best for quick setups

Trello may not have a portfolio management system like Basecamp. But it does feature simple board creation, and its focus on kanban task management makes it simple to peek at the board and get rich information with a swift onceover.

Why choose Trello over Asana?

Trello makes project hierarchy a very clear and precise matter. Because everything is organized into boards, lists, and cards, splitting up projects is quick and easy, and expectations are more immediately clear. 

Trello cards also feature a comment system that confines conversation to the relevant task, minimizing the risk of miscommunication and reducing information overload.

ProofHub: Best for simplicity

ProofHub is a by-the-book project management tool. Traditional project managers who have been through the Project Management Institute’s certification process will find a toolset that matches their education. ProofHub also offers further functionalities, like time tracking and productivity analysis, for a well-rounded solution. 

Why choose ProofHub over Asana?

ProofHub is simply much more advanced than software solutions like Trello or Asana. Medium to large enterprises will find that ProofHub covers more of their needs than something as lightweight as Asana. By covering HR needs like billable hour tracking, ProofHub becomes a central place for multiple business needs.

ProofHub also handles more complex project structures, and it provides project templates that make planning and assigning project tasks easy for first time users and veterans alike. Plus, administration can use ProofHub’s custom roles and progress monitoring features, Gantt charts, and graphical reports for budgetary and timeline needs. 

Basecamp: Best for keeping everything in one place

Basecamp, like Asana, is a software solution that’s easy to slot into a workplace with relatively little up-front time investment. Many of Basecamp’s assignment tracking tools are visual in nature, and onboarding staff to Basecamp is relatively quick.

Why choose Basecamp over Asana?

Basecamp is much better suited to handling a project portfolio. Asana does technically handle project portfolio views, but those tools are not built into the basic Asana experience. 

Basecamp has a broader suite of features that are specifically tailored to the portfolio management experience, so managing several projects at a time is easier. 

It also has a unique “campfires” feature that creates group chats across the workplace, meaning team members across projects can share live updates in conversation form—rather than relying on notes left behind on tasks that have been checked off. 

Smartsheet: Best for tracking multiple projects

Smartsheet is a spreadsheet-focused project management solution that comes complete with automations, reporting, and activity logs. And like a spreadsheet, it has a robust list of custom formulas, conditional formatting, and other features—but it also has varying project views, forms, and templates.

Why choose Smartsheet over Asana?

Smartsheet and Asana may have quite a few shared capabilities, but if you’re juggling a lot of projects at once, we suggest trying Smartsheet instead. Its sheet formulas can be used across boards to simplify cross-project and cross-department collaboration, and the spreadsheet view fits plenty of information without much scrolling.

For complex projects, you can use layered sorting and filtering to better manage the mess of tasks, as well as create filtered views for different teams, team members, and purposes.

Airtable: Best for small teams or individuals

As a spreadsheet-formatted solution, Airtable can cram a lot of information into its default grid view. While it doesn’t do so well with adding subtasks, it can accommodate tons of information with a wide variety of field types. It’s also got an incredible filtering and grouping system so you can make sense of those many, many rows of tasks and details.

Why choose Airtable over Asana?

Airtable and Asana have somewhat similar grid setups, and they share quite a few field capabilities. But one thing Airtable holds over Asana is its robust free plan. Sure, you’re limited to just five board editors or creators, but you can have unlimited commenters if you need folks to weigh in occasionally.

And you can do a lot with Airtable’s free plan, such as creating columns upon columns of various fields with custom colors. You can group by any field and even create subgroups for better organization, and you can create several custom views that pull from the main board. There are some limitations, but compared to other free project management options, Airtable has a lot to offer.

So if you’re working with not a lot of budget for a smaller team, Airtable could be the answer you’re looking for.

Top-tier team tracking

Asana is a tough product to find an alternative for if it has already found its home in your business. It’s straightforward and works exactly the way it needs to for easy project tracking. Despite that, you can quickly outgrow its limitations with more complex projects, a wider project portfolio, or a rapidly growing team. 

Hopefully, you’ve found what you need in this list. But if not, hop over to our list of the Best Project Management Software for additional solutions. 

The post 9 Asana Alternatives for Project Management appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

People use Trello for everything from agile software development to managing content calendars to planning weddings. Trello is fantastic for straightforward, ongoing projects, but for larger, more complex projects, it can be difficult and frustrating to use.

Fortunately, the project management software market is bursting at the seams with great tools, so if your needs have evolved beyond what Trello can accommodate, you have options.

To give you a place to start, we’ve put together a list of six Trello alternatives. Without further ado, let’s get into it.

Why Trello may not be right for your business

Trello, in many cases, is an excellent tool for many project managers, but it may not be perfect for everyone. Trello is a lightweight solution for assigning and managing tasks across teams, and it works particularly well for remote offices by creating cards that have a sense of physicality to them.

However, Trello falls short for businesses and projects that run information-rich tasks because Trello’s kanban cards are not designed to hold a massive amount of information. You can expand the cards to look at additional details not on the card face, but if you’re doing that all the time, then it’s not the most efficient fit for your needs.

Read Also: Top 5 Project Management Software & Tools for 2023

Trello’s scheduling features are also suitable to lean operations, so once a team requires task dependencies or communication between multiple teams, Trello begins to strain. Trello has lots of add-ons, or “power-ups,” but if you find you’re relying quite a bit on power-ups, you probably need a stronger option with those features already built in.

While Trello may struggle under heavy burdens alone, it still acts as an excellent supplemental piece to a project management system. We’ve pulled together a list of some more robust project management solutions that will pick up the slack that Trello may leave behind.

Top Trello alternatives

monday.com: Best for cross-team collaboration

monday.com is a project management software solution that provides a higher degree of flexibility over Trello. While Trello’s board creation is straightforward and streamlined, monday.com offers a similarly low bar to entry. Project boards can be categorized however a project manager sees fit and further customized down to a personal level by team members.

Why choose monday.com over Trello

Trello and monday.com both offer a high-level overview of workloads for both internal and external stakeholders, though monday.com’s default is a list view where Trello’s is a kanban view. But monday.com offers more customization so your team can better tailor their workspace to fit their needs.

monday.com can filter and sort your tasks however you need—and you can save those filtered options in a personalized view that pulls from the team’s main board. So anyone can return to a view of their own tasks with a click of a button. You can also hide fields within those personalized views to keep things simpler as you move through tasks.

Asana: Best for simplifying complex projects

Asana is a software solution that is built on a solid foundation of project management principles. Its scheduling, communication, and task management is quite basic in the grand scheme of things, but Asana’s simplicity translates to a lower learning curve for team members so you can get right to it without much trouble.

Read Also: 8 Asana Alternatives for Project Management

Why choose Asana over Trello

Like many options on this list, Asana is simply more robust than Trello. Asana also offers kanban boards similar to Trello’s default boards, but even with the free plan, you also have list and calendar views at your disposal. It’s still a pretty simple project management solution, so it’s still pretty easy to hit the ground running after exploring the software a bit.

Additionally, with Asana, project progress is centralized in a single place, giving higher managers and project managers a view of multiple projects at once with the portfolios feature. Asana also lets you build in simple task dependencies without having to search a secondary market for plug-ins, and Asana has custom fields, among other things.

Basecamp: Best for centralizing project info

Basecamp can help manage your projects efficiently, and it’s excellent for keeping project conversations within a single space. It has nifty chat features within the software and opportunities to collaborate within tasks and files. So if your team prefers asynchronous chatter, Basecamp can help pull scattered conversations together for more efficient collaboration.

Why choose Basecamp over Trello

Trello approaches simplicity by maintaining a lean base experience for its software, and Basecamp expands on that experience by leaps and bounds. Basecamp also differs from Trello by providing access to expanded features in Slack, Google Drive, Dropbox, and many other apps.

And one of Basecamp’s more prominent features is the ability to organize projects, shared documents, and chat rooms into “camps.” This gives project managers a higher degree of control over their project portfolio.

Wrike: Best for digital marketing teams

Wrike is a project management tool that integrates machine learning into its infrastructure to give project managers insights into risk factors and allows users to automatically extract text from scanned documents (printed or handwritten). 

Wrike has quite a few features that are built with creative and marketing teams in mind, such as a proofing feature where team members can comment directly on images and compare file versions—and it offers integrations with popular creative apps, like Adobe Creative Cloud.

Why choose Wrike over Trello

Wrike’s machine-learning risk management gives it a great deal more utility over Trello. Trello’s functionality is primarily manual, which means that risk management, organization, and predictive estimations will be something you have to do yourself or leave to a third-party app or service.

Additionally, tasks in Wrike can span across multiple projects. So if, for example, your developers are creating a specialized tool that applies to several projects, you can link their tasks to whichever projects they apply to for maximum visibility across departments and teams.

Microsoft Planner: Best for simple visual task management

Microsoft Planner will feel familiar to teams used to Trello since its primary task management feature is also a kanban board. But Microsoft Planner also includes other views for easy chart reporting and task planning, and its inclusion with the Office 365 suite makes it an attractive option for frugal offices already outfitted with the software suite.

Why choose Microsoft Planner over Trello

Because Planner is built to mesh with Microsoft’s other office tools, it plays well with the rest of the suite right out of the box. Like Trello, users can create tasks that contain content-rich details, such as due dates, color-coded labels, and files. One place where Microsoft Planner differs is how it uses these tasks to create visual pie and bar charts without manual setup or much onboarding. 

Microsoft has many other PM tools that pair with Microsoft Planner, such as Microsoft Project and To Do, so you can create an ecosystem that is easy and more intuitive for teams to navigate.

Smartsheet: Best for multi-project tracking

Smartsheet is a spreadsheet-based project management tool full of alerts and automations. You can set reminders and notifications to simplify team communication, and customize your project boards with spreadsheet-like formulas and setups. There are even formulas to bridge various project boards so different teams and departments can manage requests and tasks more easily across the business.

Why choose Smartsheet over Trello

Having customization features like formulas can be a bit of up-front work, but it’ll also provide a lot more long-term rewards. You can take a lot of the manual bits out of team and cross-departmental processes, meaning you’ll have less to juggle and more mental bandwidth to focus on higher-value tasks.

Vendors and clients without sheet access can also review content proofs, keeping them in the loop without having to jump through any hoops. Plus, Smartsheet offers integrations with several apps to enable real-time synchronization and visibility, so teams and external stakeholders can view up-to-date information across all systems without having to switch apps.

Choose the right alternative to Trello

Trello is popular for a reason—but that doesn’t mean it’s the best fit for everyone. Hopefully you were able to find a fitting solution in our list of alternatives, but if not, hop over to our other project management favorites for a few other options.

The post The 6 Best Trello Alternatives & Competitors 2024 appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

However, each platform has distinct benefits that make them ideal for different use cases. Trello remains the lightweight, kanban-focused tool for a variety of project management needs, while Jira Service Management enables software development teams with fully-featured and powerful agile software. Jira Service Management and Trello are two of the most popular project management tools, but they may not be the best fit for everyone. Our Project Management Software Guide has more options to choose from, so you can find the right software for your project needs.

Trello vs. Jira Service Management: Task management

Task management is the heart and soul of every project. Break down the project into smaller pieces, then decide what needs to get done and who needs to do it. This is true whether working on a piece of software, planning a marketing event, or designing a new branding guide for your company.

Trello

Trello excels at task management; it’s also one of the easiest platforms on the market to learn. Tasks and project work are logged using a three-part hierarchy: Boards, Lists, and Cards. These elements can be organized in whatever way is appropriate.

A Trello board is a simple kanban board users can customize. These boards feature interactive cards that can be dragged into different categories. Each board is used by team members to manage any number of tasks, limited only by their imagination and personal organization skills.

The only potential downside here is a lack of prebuilt workflows. Existing boards will have to be copied, and customized processes will have to be built from scratch for any work managed in Trello. Adding new project tasks is simple but requires time and manual effort to manage.

Trello’s kanban board feature is a visual representation of task status and progress for an entire project. Source: Trello

Jira Service Management

Jira Service Management takes a different approach to task management, although with some of the same features.

Most out-of-the-box Jira Service Management workflows are designed to help teams build, test, and release software, but custom workflows for use in other product development and Agile scenarios can be tailored to the project’s specific needs. Then again, Jira Service Management’s task management features are baked directly into an Agile framework, so teams that aren’t developing software will likely have less flexibility than they would with Trello.

As with Trello, Jira Service Management allows teams to create task cards, assign them to team members, and move them between custom kanban swimlanes such as “To Do,” “In Progress,” and “Done.”

Jira Service Management’s approach to task management offers powerful customization options for software developers. Source: Jira Service Management

Which to choose for task management?

It’s a tie. Here’s why: When it comes to task management, it’s hard to beat the tactile satisfaction of moving Trello’s cards from column to column. The kanban-centric approach Trello takes to task management makes it a straightforward option for many teams.

However, Trello’s simplicity can be a trap of sorts. Complex projects will suffer from Trello’s lack of automation capabilities and organization on the scale of Jira Service Management’s. The complexity trade-off here is one to be carefully considered before picking one management tool over the other.

Trello vs. Jira Service Management: Team collaboration

While it is important to move tasks toward completion, it’s also important for team members to communicate about progress and requirements along the way. Both platforms offer a number of features to make this possible.

Trello

With Trello, a team can invite any number of people to share the same board, which means everyone will have the same visibility into project status and tasks. Users can comment directly on cards, share attachments, and mention other teammates to direct their attention to a particular card. All users assigned to a particular card, list, or board will receive notifications via email, SMS, or push based on their preferences.

Trello’s approach to collaboration makes it easy for large teams to stay on the same page about each project’s tasks. Source: Trello

Jira Service Management

Jira Service Management also offers the more traditional collaboration features when it comes to tagging issues and boards, such as team member task assignments, notifications, file sharing, and messaging. These tools, next to Trello’s reactive cards and friendly design approach, are comparatively spartan, but they are exactly as robust as they need to be for software development teams that are working on complex projects with dozens of moving parts.

Additionally, Jira Service Management’s project centralization and automation capabilities gives teams a clear view of the project process without the use of a cluttered spreadsheet, keeping progress communication clear and open.

Jira Service Management’s Dependency Map is a visual representation of task dependencies at a high level. Source: Jira Service Management

Which to choose for collaboration?

Jira Service Management. Here’s why: At the end of the day, Jira Service Management is a much more fully featured project management tool than Trello, especially in terms of collaborative functionality. Delivering products that require a lot of plate spinning with Jira is much more collaborative than Trello’s simplistic task pings.

With Jira Service Management, teams are able to centralize tasks, so teammates are able to view the same information simultaneously from all over the world. Files can be shared with a few clicks, removing massive barriers to collaborative work in remote or in-office workspaces alike.

Trello vs. Jira Service Management: Agile-based features

Trello

While Trello excels as a flexible, visual kanban task management platform, it doesn’t offer most of the Agile-based features a traditional software development team would need. These include scrum and sprint planning, a backlog of user stories, detailed project reporting, issue tracking, and code repositories.

Although these features aren’t native to Trello, they do have several Power-Ups and app integrations that could mimic what team members need. What Trello lacks in features, it makes up for in usability, flexibility, and integration with Jira Service Management.

Trello’s calendar view allows teams to handle sprint planning in a visual way. Projects with very few interdependent moving parts could be planned out on Trello’s calendar and broken down into individual task cards that are then distributed to teammates.

Trello’s calendar view helps teams conceptualize due dates with daily, weekly, and monthly views. Source: Trello

Jira Service Management

Jira Service Management was built specifically to serve Agile software development teams and offers a full suite of features to that end. Whether building code or tracking issues (available in Jira Service Management’s Service Desk edition), Jira Service Management can support scrum methodology, kanban, or a mix of the two.

Jira Service Management also includes the ability to draft and visualize new roadmaps. These roadmap views keep teams up to date no matter how many changes are made. Even in the face of creeping scope, developers will have a clear understanding of how much work lies ahead.

Jira Service Management’s Sprint View showcases an at-a-glance view of sprint progress, bottlenecks, and teamwide performance metrics. Source: JiraService Management

Which to choose for Agile-based features?

It’s a tie, depending on the team. Here’s why: Trello manages brief user stories, and issues marked in Jira Service Management can be turned into Trello cards, so project managers can quickly distribute tasks among teammates. These tasks can be tracked with Trello’s kanban board, which is a valuable feature for non-development teams that want to leverage the Agile methodology.

However, in the face of Jira Service Management’s Agile-based reporting features like burndown charts, sprint planning, and editable roadmaps, Trello lacks many of the capabilities software developers need. With the lack of powerful Agile tools, a software development team is more likely to use Trello as a supplement to Jira Service Management rather than as its primary Agile tool.

Trello vs. Jira Service Management: Pricing

The best project management software offers all of the right features without being cost-prohibitive. Since Trello and Jira Service Management are both owned by Atlassian, their approaches to pricing follow a similar structure.

Trello

For teams looking to spend as little as possible to get a basic Agile-based collaboration tool up and running, Trello’s free option may be enough. The free version of Trello gives users access to most project management features, supports up to 10 boards, and doesn’t impose any limits on the number of cards or users.

If all a team needs is an independent productivity tool to keep tasks organized and share work between team members, the free version will most likely suffice. If the team is working with code from a repository or data from another business system, they are going to need a paid edition of Trello.

Trello’s three paid versions — Standard, Premium, and Enterprise — give teams unlimited boards; the ability to sync data with other business systems like Slack, Github, and Salesforce; a board collections feature; and administrative tools. Trello Enterprise offers a tiered pricing system per number of users and supports two-factor authentication, single sign-on, premium customer support, and onboarding assistance in addition to all the Business Class features.

Jira Service Management

Jira Service Management also has a free option for up to 10 users, whereas Trello supports unlimited users for free and paid accounts alike. What Jira Service Management lacks in flexible pricing, it makes up for in flexible deployment options. In addition to cloud-based software, Jira Service Management also offers on-premises deployment for organizations that want to customize their installation on their own hardware; though, it comes at a higher cost.

Jira Service Management’s Agile software comes in three different versions: Standard, Premium, and Enterprise. Standard includes many of the features a team looking to use Agile methodologies for their work structure would need, including roadmap visualization, kanban boards, and dependency maps. Enterprise comes with ideation tools and strategy rooms for company-wide collaboration, and Premium aims to offer businesses a generous middle ground between the two extremes.

Jira Service Management’s Enterprise pricing is notably more complex than Trello. Whereas Trello’s Enterprise tier has a transparent price per month based on the number of users, Jira Service Management’s highest tier is only available for businesses with more than 800 users on an annual billing cycle.

It’s also worth pointing out that Jira Service Management’s pricing is based on the volume of users who need access to the software. After a company reaches a certain threshold of user seats, the annual cost per user increases. The lack of flexibility when it comes to pricing may be a disadvantage for smaller teams that have significant growth plans or want access to Enterprise-level features.

Which to choose for pricing?

Trello. Here’s why: Trello’s straightforward pricing is more affordable and flexible than Jira Service Management’s complex user tier-based approach. Though Jira Service Management’s higher price point is reflective of its advanced capabilities, growing project management teams that want to control costs as closely as possible will likely favor Trello’s simplicity.

Trello vs. Jira Service Management: Which is right for your business?

Trello is a simple, customizable kanban board for teams that want visual workflows. Trello supports a few different task management views, such as its handy calendar view, but this alone is not enough to support more complicated projects like software development.

Teams that are interested in Agile as a work structure but aren’t working on software-related projects will most likely find success with Trello. Conversely, large organizations with complicated webs of stakeholders may find Trello’s feature set limiting.

Jira Service Management, on the other hand, is a project management tool for by-the-book Agile teams that are building, fixing, and releasing software. Its customization and robust set of Agile-based features make it a strong solution for software development teams and other projects like product development that require an iterative approach.

The post Trello vs. Jira Service Management: Top Agile Project Management Tool (2024) appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

• When comparing Insightly vs. Zoho, the two prove to be evenly matched in sales automation and contact management. The two CRM software systems differ most in task management and reporting features.
• Insightly’s project management feature is a clear advantage for businesses of any size or level of experience. Zoho’s scalability with territory management and add-on modules quickly growing and projects a similar rate of expansion.

Insightly vs. Zoho CRM makes for an interesting matchup. Both sell their products in subscription tiers with affordable rates while offering an impressive amount of contact management, workflow automation, and reporting capabilities.

Also Read: Zoho vs. Salesforce

To help you make a more informed decision, this post will compare the two CRMs based on systems and pricing, features, mobile capabilities, and integrations.

What Zoho Offers

Zoho is an incredibly scalable CRM solution with broad territory management features and add-on modules. This gives Zoho the ability to quickly grow and change in response to rapidly expanding businesses.

If a project taken on by a small business requires new software or a reporting perspective that base Zoho does not include, the broad suite of modules grant small businesses the flexibility to try new things in the pursuit of growth.

What Insightly Offers

Insightly is a cloud-based CRM that gives small business teams the ability to collaborate on projects distantly and gives everyone the opportunity to work from anywhere. Insightly comes with a variety of robust automation features that streamline customer pipelines, daily tasks, and optimize workflows.

Insightly vs. Zoho: Systems and Pricing

Insightly and Zoho employ the standard software-as-a-service (SaaS) model and offer subscription tiers priced on a per-user, per-month basis.

Zoho’s tiers are divided into Standard, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate, with each tier corresponding to added features that allow Zoho to manage the needs of increasingly larger businesses.

• Standard includes access to reports and dashboards, a conversion workflow, email marketing insights, and a 100,000 records limit.
• Professional offers webhooks, inventory management, Google Ads integrations, and unlimited records.
• Enterprise adds a conversational AI tool, mobile SDK, custom module creation, workflow automation, and custom applications.
• Ultimate edition provides a dedicated database cluster, automation suggestions, email sentiment tools, and data enrichment.

Insightly offers three subscription types: Plus, Professional, and Enterprise. Each tier includes the CRM basics, such as project management tools that track progress on deliverables, calendar synchronization, and the ability to access Insightly from any device. The professional and enterprise tiers offer access to all of the automation tools.

Enterprise increases the number of templates and mass emails, adds custom fields, space for storing records and files, better business intelligence tools, and unlimited records. It should also be noted that Enterprise is the only tier that includes access to serverless lambda functions.

Both companies also offer free trials with limited functionality.

Insightly vs. Zoho: Contact Management

Zoho has a territory management feature that assigns leads and contacts to different sales teams based on geographical location, product line, and industry. To provide another level of organization, a territory manager can be assigned to act as an admin for the accounts under them.

Insightly, on the other hand, utilizes tags to offer a distinct method for directing contacts once they’re inside the system. Custom tags can be created to represent a geographical region, product line, and any other important information specific to a business’s needs, making it a much more flexible and simple system to organize.

Also read: 8 Zapier Alternatives for Seamless Data Connections

Both systems also include web-to-lead forms which can be embedded on a business’s website. When someone fills out a form, their information will automatically be added to the CRM.

Insightly vs. Zoho: Task Management

To help salespeople develop a better contact follow-up cadence, many CRMs now offer task management features. These tools use automatic reminders to streamline tasks that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle. Instead of guessing the best time to call a person, users can set a reminder to follow up after a period of time.

Zoho and Insightly each provide some form of task management, though this is one area where Insightly has a definite advantage.

Insightly uses a horizontal pipeline to visualize sales stages instead of the traditional vertical funnel. This is great for lead management, but the value of the pipeline feature extends beyond sales stages and into full-blown project management.

Pipeline stages can be customized to represent different project stages. Sales opportunities can be managed as projects from end to end. Projects can also be sorted by stage or assigned to a user.

Zoho, on the other hand, offers standard management features like a bulletin board-style view and color-coded bar charts that compare the reported progress of different projects in a clear, but simple manner.

Insightly vs. Zoho: Reporting

The reporting in Zoho vs. Insightly differs significantly, although both products have full capabilities for CRM data reporting, analytics, and dashboards.

Zoho classifies its available reports in sales, marketing, and activity reports. For each report generated, a spreadsheet can also be downloaded as a .csv or .xls. Once these reports run, the data can be visualized in charts or graphs.

Zoho comes with more than 40 pre-built reports, like pivot tables or summary views. The system also allows users to build custom versions if a hyperspecific view is required for a certain report. More data analytics capabilities can also be unlocked with a subscription to Zoho Analytics.

Insightly includes business intelligence reporting and dashboards within the product and — depending on the subscription plan — can build customized chart cards and share them with anyone. This software also offers 40 chart types, but lacks the same robust classification and granular tools as Zoho.

Insightly vs. Zoho: Sales and Workflow Automation

Getting salespeople to consistently use a CRM has long been a major roadblock to achieving ROI. That reticence stems from the amount of manual work that older-generation CRMs required. The software vendors that were smart enough to respond to this opportunity equipped their CRMs with automation features that reduce laborious data entry.

Zoho also has task management capabilities provided by workflow automation tools. Build custom process automations with the Blueprint tool or set custom approvals to quickly route tasks through team members and sales stages. Zoho also offers a more comprehensive task management system in Zoho Projects, which is available as an add-on.

Zoho also integrates a powerful suite of customer tracking tools that provide businesses with a wealth of information. This is a strong benefit that Zoho offers, but it can often be more data than a small business is prepared to work with.

Insightly automates the entire customer journey, making it an excellent fit for small teams that may find themselves pushing up against the limitations of their staff’s capacity. Insightly takes a simple, but effective flowchart approach to the customer journey, triggering customizable actions dependent on the behavior of new and potential customers. This offloads a great deal of work from the shoulders of the workforce, freeing them up to tackle new leads. 

Insightly vs. Zoho: Email Marketing

Zoho offers dynamic email campaigns with A/B testing and simple, clean templates. In addition, it features advanced email automation and tracking tools to make robust email marketing a simple task regardless of a small business’s level of experience.

Insightly makes this process less labor-intensive by integrating its email marketing features into its marketing automation suite. This integration makes it easy for an individual making dozens of sales to trigger a cascade of routine customer retention missives, ensuring nobody falls through the cracks in the fast-paced small business environment 

If a business is looking to connect its CRM to a third-party email marketing software, each system has a different solution. Insightly integrates with Mailchimp, and Zoho connects with Zoho Campaigns — the company’s own email marketing tool.

Insightly vs. Zoho: Extras and Integrations

Both vendors offer Android and iOS apps. Insightly’s app lets users view and convert records, create tasks, and call, email, or text any record in their database. There is also a map feature making it easy to get to that next in-person sales call.

Zoho’s mobile app offers a similar array of features, including the ability to call directly from the app and geolocation for finding a prospect’s office. Zoho’s app works offline, so even if mobile signal is lost, contact information can still be edited inside the CRM. The app will sync the changes once internet access is recovered.

In terms of integrations, both products offer a similar set of options. Insightly integrates with over 30 apps, including Dropbox, Outlook, and Google Apps (full list here). Zoho integrates with Mailchimp, Unbounce, Evernote, and others (full list here).

If an office wants to sync either of the two CRMs with an app not listed in their native integration list, Zapier can be used to build a trigger automation.

Zoho’s base CRM can be combined with any of the other apps in its “online office suite,” including Zoho Projects, Zoho Invoice, Zoho Support, Zoho Books, and others. That means it can be customized and expanded as a company’s needs change, which may make Zoho more appealing for a fast-growing or mid-sized company.

Which CRM is Right For Your Business?

Insightly vs. Zoho is a close contest. Both systems at a similar price point and get similar contact management and sales automation capabilities. Insightly’s project management feature, however, is a clear advantage for businesses of any size or level of experience. This means a small business can take advantage of Insightly and its suite of features without having to pay for tools it may not need. Zoho’s scalability with territory management and add-on modules quickly growing and projects a similar rate of expansion.

Trending CRM Software

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If you’re shopping for a new project management platform, how do you choose between Wrike and Basecamp? Start by answering one question: Is your organization best served by a system built for power and customization or a straightforward system that’s easy to learn?

Keep your business’s unique needs in mind while comparing Wrike and Basecamp on task management, scheduling, collaboration, and reporting capabilities. If neither option seems like the right fit, explore other solutions in our Project Management Software Guide.

Wrike vs. Basecamp: Task management

All project management begins with task management. The easier it is to assign and manage tasks, the simpler it is to complete projects.

Wrike

In Wrike, users organize tasks under “folders” which refer to different projects. You can nest subfolders under top-level folders to better organize related tasks. Clicking on a folder pulls up an adjacent panel with a list of all tasks in that folder. Clicking on each task summons yet another panel where users can do some detailed editing — assign due dates, attach files, leave comments, track time, and add dependencies.

If you need to make changes to an entire group of tasks, you can do so at the folder level. Wrike also has search functionality at the folder level to help locate specific tasks. Folders function as a kind of dashboard: the left navigation that displays them is ever-present and acts as a filter in other views.

Basecamp

Basecamp’s approach to task management is somewhat more basic than Wrike’s folders. The platform displays tasks in to-do lists organized under their respective projects. Next to each task is the assignee’s profile picture or initials and a checkbox signifying if it’s complete or not. The to-do lists don’t offer nuanced statuses like “On Hold” or “In Progress,” which means Basecamp might be better for very small teams that can get by with just a checkbox.

Clicking on an individual task takes you to a new window where you can comment on the task, upload a file, change the due date, and otherwise edit the task. Whereas Wrike’s interface makes it possible to view one task’s details in the context of all other tasks in the project, Basecamp focuses on only one to-do list or task at a time.

Which to choose for task management?

Wrike. Here’s why: Wrike’s folder approach creates a familiar nesting visualization that stacks related tasks. The ability to quickly edit a group of project tasks also grants a lot of flexibility to teams that find themselves needing to pivot quickly. Basecamp is similar to Wrike, generally providing the same suite of tools Wrike provides but with a few features missing when looked at more granularly.

Wrike vs. Basecamp: Scheduling

The approach that Wrike and Basecamp take to scheduling is similar, but the ability to automate task dependencies and the difference between project-wide schedule views will have a distinct impact on project teams with different needs.

Wrike

One of Wrike’s most unique features is the interactive Gantt chart available in the timeline view. Using folders as a filtering tool, users can visualize each task in the folder as a horizontal bar spanning days of the week, giving project managers the ability to survey a week of work at a glance.

Users can also create and adjust task dependencies by dragging one end of the task’s bar and connecting it to another. This view can also be used for creating milestones that indicate higher-level deadlines for a project. Wrike also allows users to connect tasks directly to their calendars, making it easy to integrate visual confirmation of timelines into a team’s workflow.

The timeline view is one of Wrike’s biggest differentiators. Gantt charts are a time-tested way to visualize the moving parts of a project, and Wrike’s version gives users a substantial amount of control over tasks.

Basecamp

Basecamp’s scheduling feature displays upcoming task deadlines like a simplified digital corkboard organized on a per-month basis, which can be a little more cluttered or confusing than Wrike’s task management.

Basecamp also includes a calendar that can show project deadlines or function as a stand-alone, personal calendar. The calendar can be used to create tasks, email stakeholders who need to know about tasks, and set deadlines. Though it’s not quite on the same level as Wrike’s Gantt chart, the Basecamp calendar is a handy tool for keeping track of deadlines.

Which to choose for scheduling?

It’s a tie. Here’s why: If a team simply needs a calendar of due dates and a way to quickly knock out time-dependent tasks, Basecamp provides a streamlined and intuitive solution. On the other hand, Wrike offers the ability to not only create a calendar of work but dependencies that automate the work accountability process, ensuring team members work their way down the task list in exactly the order required to minimize delays.

Wrike vs. Basecamp: Collaboration

Project collaboration features usually come in two broad forms: collaborative updates and file management. In terms of file collaboration, both systems have native text editors, which makes tracking changes to text documents relatively straightforward, but a few key differences set the two apart.

Wrike

Wrike has several functions for activity updates — the most prominent of which is its news feed that keeps a stream of updates on all project activity, treating workflow much like the easily parsable social media timelines that workers are accustomed to. Wrike also lets you call your colleague’s attention to a particular task via email update by tagging them on the task level. Wrike also allows users to live edit documents, streamlining the process of offering critique and collaborating on complex design documents.

Basecamp

Basecamp uses a message board as the center for all of its activity updates and a centralized messaging app called Campfire. This gives teams, no matter the size, a place to slot in concerns or work-related conversation starters without clogging up email inboxes or creating distracting conversations during the workday.

Basecamp also has a client view function that lets you invite clients to a project and send them notifications. Project managers can specify what clients can see and access, thereby maintaining a level of privacy between the internal team and the external customer. Field service management and design projects that require regular input from stakeholders will find this feature useful.

Which to choose for collaboration?

Basecamp. Here’s why: Basecamp’s friendly approach to collaboration gives teams the ability to communicate with stakeholders and clients without surfacing too much internal information. They are able to do so with very little additional training. Wrike, on the other hand, requires a bit of customization and onboarding before an external party would be ready to take a peek into the more insular workspaces. Basecamp is an easy option for operations that spend much of their project time face-to-face with clients and external stakeholders while Wrike is much more well-suited to internal collaboration.

Wrike vs. Basecamp: Reporting

After a project is in motion, stakeholders need to keep an eye on progress. Strong reporting features are critical to identifying bottlenecks in the project workflow and adjusting accordingly.

Wrike

Wrike’s reporting features come in a few varieties. Filters can be used to create reports on certain types of tasks, like overdue tasks within the quarterly email campaign folder, giving project managers the ability to quickly pop into Wrike and pull information relevant to any routine check-ins.

Additionally, every Wrike folder has a burndown chart on the far right side of the screen, so teams can see how many tasks have been completed relative to how many were assigned.

A task digest view below the burndown chart visualizes all of the different types of tasks within each folder: completed, overdue, and backlog. This effectively removes the need to seek out data for reporting, as it is constantly presented to project managers.

Basecamp

Basecamp’s reporting mostly takes place in the Progress view, which shows a list of all of the completed tasks for each project in chronological order, but this reporting lacks the degree of detail and automation Wrike provides at a glance.

What Basecamp lacks in reporting and customization can easily be supplemented with its integration with tools like Gantiffy and Easy Insight. Small businesses and businesses that don’t find themselves needing to produce detailed reports for stakeholders will find Basecamp’s reporting is robust enough on its own. Should this need change, the prevalence of supplements ensures there’s an option for everyone with a little extra work up front.

Which to choose for reporting?

Wrike. Here’s why: Wrike handles its reporting without the need for additional tools. It provides a breadth of clean, robust reports that are ready to present at the drop of a hat. Basecamp’s reporting is serviceable, but it will likely require the addition of a third-party integration and extra labor spent learning how to generate reports through another service.

Wrike vs. Basecamp: Which is right for your business?

Wrike and Basecamp are two of the most popular project management tools on the market. They both offer unique advantages, so it can be difficult to determine which one is the better option.

Basecamp advantages

Basecamp’s platform is divided into several tools every productive group needs: an organizational dashboard, messaging, to-do lists, file storage, and simple scheduling. The breadth of features that Basecamp covers makes this tool an excellent fit for most project management efforts. Basecamp’s simplicity also means that the learning barriers to entry are quite low, making onboarding easier than more complicated project management tools.

Basecamp’s design is beautifully straightforward, which makes it easy to learn, navigate, and use. Basecamp comes equipped with simple boards, clean design, and integrations to other services that allow users to simply integrate their preferred productivity services like Github, Zoom, and Slack.

Wrike advantages

Wrike’s platform focuses more on power than simplicity. Its design is slightly less streamlined but can accommodate a tremendous amount of customization. The ability to create workspaces dedicated to a project that can then be broken down from the broadest view to the smallest task is an excellent organizational tool to have access to.

Wrike’s workflows are customizable from team to team, and the platform offers built-in clean visual timelines. This combination gives project managers the ability to be as particular as they like in creating and adhering to workflow structures once a project is underway. Remote teams and projects with many dependencies will benefit from Wrike a great deal.

Basecamp disadvantages

Sometimes, simplicity is not enough to shoulder the burden of complicated task management. While Basecamp shines in its ability to get out of the way of project teams, it does so at the expense of handling complexity. Large software development teams, organizations that deal with iterative design, and enterprises with a large number of interconnected teams may find that the simplicity Basecamp offers becomes messy in the face of a winding project.

Wrike disadvantages

Customization is not always the solution to project management conundrums. The power and intricacy that Wrike offers may prove to be overwhelming if a team is looking for a simple answer to an organizational roadblock. It is possible to tweak Wrike into the perfect solution, but that time tinkering and onboarding could be better spent with a more simple solution like Basecamp.

How to choose the best project management solution

Wrike versus Basecamp is a classic example of simplicity versus customization. If your team needs bespoke solutions for workflow management, then Wrike will serve you well; however, Basecamp is better suited to a broader audience of project managers with more basic needs.

That said, Wrike and Basecamp aren’t the only two options worth considering. If neither of these vendors meets your needs, explore our Project Management Software Guide or browse trending solutions below.

The post Wrike vs. Basecamp: A Project Management Software Comparison appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

6 Essential Agile Project Management Software Features

1. Progress visualization

2. Issue tracking

3. Collaboration

4. Estimation

5. Customer portal

6. Project portfolio management

How to Choose the Right Agile Solution for the Features You Need

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Business intelligence (BI) software systems help businesses create meaning from their data by analyzing it in large batches and presenting it in bite-sized chunks. There are many BI vendors that can help make data usable in this way, but two of the most popular options are Qlik and Tableau.

Both solutions source data from multiple data connectors to provide businesses with meaningful and actionable insights. However, each system is best for different kinds of businesses.

Qlik is best for quickly growing large enterprises that handle a significant volume of data on a regular basis. Its AI-backed data presentation services and multiple node deployments make it an excellent fit for sprawling workplaces. Tableau, however, is better suited to smaller businesses with local operations and agile processing needs.

If neither of these BI solutions seems like the best fit for your organization, you can explore more solutions on our comprehensive list of BI software.

Qlik

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Pros

• Excellent data integration and transformation capabilities
• Associative data model makes connections across multiple data sources
• Data scripting

Cons

• Non-intuitive for novices
• Visualization not as robust as Tableau

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Qlik strives to make data literacy more accessible to everyone in an organization. The software does this by leveraging many different options for visualizing data, which users can build using drag-and-drop features.

These visualizations allow a surprising amount of granularity, considering how well they summarize large groups of data. Users are able to request data views as specific as “quarterly sales in a given region” in plain conversational, requests.

Qlik also uses an associative engine to help reveal insights that can be easily lost to human error. This focus on showing associative data tends to surface insights a human would not have on their own. While this is good for viewing the same data sources in different ways, some users might find the experience overwhelming.

Tableau

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Pros

• Top-notch data visualization
• User friendly
• Efficient handling of large datasets

Cons

• Limited data preparation and transformation tools
• Inferior associated data model compared to Tableau

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Tableau helps users tell stories with data by making it easier to find and share insights. Customizable, user-friendly dashboard tools let analysts generate graphs and reports for forecasting, spotting trends, and more.

Tableau’s query-based approach gives users a more hands-on experience and allows for exacting deployment of only the data points a user has personally sought out. Although this empowers individual users to find answers for themselves, it may do so at the cost of unexpected insights.

Tableau also lets users present data analysis as a story, using slideshow tools like Microsoft PowerPoint to help analysts create narratives. This simplifies the process of parsing data and translating it for broader business audiences.

Qlik vs. Tableau: Pricing

Qliksense

Business plan: Priced at $30 per user per month, it includes full access to Qlik’s Associative Big Data Index, augmented intelligence, and shared and managed spaces.

Enterprise plan: Pricing varies based on the organization’s size and specific needs. It offers additional capabilities like unlimited sharing, collaborative development spaces, and governed libraries.

QlikView

Personal edition: Free of cost, but limited to personal use without the ability to share documents.

Enterprise plan: Pricing is quote-based, with licenses typically sold as a package including a number of CALs (Client Access Licenses).

Tableau

Tableau Viewer: At $12 per user per month, this plan offers a way to share insights across the organization. It also requires at least one Tableau Creator subscription.

Tableau Explorer: Priced at $35 per user per month, it requires at least one Tableau Creator subscription. It provides self-service analytics on a governed data platform.

Tableau Creator: At $70 per user per month, it includes Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep Builder, and one Creator license of Tableau Server or Tableau Online.

Qlik vs. Tableau: A Detailed Comparison

Deployment

Depending on your organization’s needs, Qlik and Tableau offer different deployment options. For Qlik, businesses can choose from a selection of software as a service (SaaS), on-premises, or private cloud for deployment. Similarly, Tableau comes as an on-premises or cloud-based solution.

Qlik prioritizes scalability with its multi-node deployment options, allowing massive enterprises to locally house and access their own instance of Qlik. For smaller operations, though, this may be excessive.

Tableau deployment is usually faster and simpler compared to Qlik. However, large businesses may experience bottlenecks when bloated servers are forced to manage more requests than they are equipped to handle.

HR Analytics

Both Qlik and Tableau handle the less obvious number-crunching that human resource (HR) analytics requires.

Qlik aids talent acquisition initiatives by monitoring data at large businesses that would otherwise be a time-consuming process for an individual. The data Qlik provides can be anything from departmental headcounts to the precise spending areas for hiring budgets. By utilizing its AI to display data like employee development and training costs, Qlik becomes a useful and responsive HR companion.

Tableau carefully monitors turnover rates, retention headcounts, and intracompany movements. Crucial data points like slowly increasing turnover rates or steady intracompany movement are revealed with very little coaxing from Tableau’s HR tracking capabilities. This data is also easily collated by Tableau for stakeholder presentations, keeping everyone in the loop no matter their proximity to the hiring process or stake in HR budgets.

Security

Both Qlik and Tableau support multiple users with role-based permissions, so companies don’t have to worry about the wrong people viewing data they shouldn’t be able to access.

Additionally, system administrators can also enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) as an extra safeguard against weaker passwords. For Qlik, an enterprise can set up MFA using Okta, and Tableau users can use Duo.

For maximum security, both solutions offer single sign-on (SSO) capabilities. This is ideal for organizations looking to minimize the threat compromised user passwords pose for companies’ most valuable data.

Data modeling

Qlik

Qlik uses an associative data model, which means that all data loaded into Qlik is interconnected. This model allows users to make selections in one field and instantly see related data in other fields, even if they aren’t directly connected. Qlik’s in-memory technology ensures that data is available for immediate exploration without the need for pre-aggregated data or cubes. This results in faster response times and real-time data analysis. The platform also provides a scripting environment for data transformation and manipulation. While this offers flexibility, it does require developer skills.

Tableau

Tableau emphasizes a visual data modeling, making it user-friendly for those without a technical background. This visual approach to data modeling allows users to see the structure of their data as they work. Tableau offers data blending capabilities, which means it can pull data from various sources and blend it on a common dimension. This is useful when working with data that isn’t stored in a single repository.

Qlik vs. Tableau: How to Choose the Right BI Solution

Qlik and Tableau are powerful BI software solutions that offer numerous advantages, but one may meet your organization’s unique needs better than the other.

Qlik comes equipped with robust, AI-backed data parsing capabilities. The automatic report visualization and intelligent query features make it an invaluable tool for large enterprises working with large volumes of raw information.

Tableau, on the other hand, is an excellent fit for single-office enterprises and small businesses. From its deployment to its data management, Tableau is agile and powerful enough to handle complex workloads without being overwhelming for small teams.

Qlik and Tableau are some of the most popular business intelligence systems on the market, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your search should end here. If you want to save hours on the search for the right business intelligence solution, explore our complete list of business intelligence software. Our advisors can help you narrow down the top options for your business’s unique needs.

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