Project Management - Basecamp vs ProjectPier

While working with a recent client I thought I’d try out BaseCamp so I signed up for their 30 day free trial, after my trial expired I tested a free BaseCamp alternative, ProjectPier.

Basecamp is a project management system which allows you and your clients to keep track of your projects with messages, to-do lists, milestones, files and time management. When you setup a project on BaseCamp you can assign other users / clients who can track their projects through the web, RSS feeds or email updates.

At first I was very impressed with the BaseCamp features and ease of use, the interface was very good looking and intuitive. One of the main reasons I was keen to start using a project management was to allow my clients to track the progress of their projects and the amount of time I’ve been spending on work, BaseCamp did these very well.

The only problem with BaseCamp is the price, for the lowest package (there are several different packages) you pay $24 a month.

After I completed my clients project with the help of BaseCamp I decided to test out a free (host yourself) alternative, I went for the popular ProjectPier system, modified with a few style tweaks and a free time management plugin to bring the features up to par with BaseCamp.

While ProjectPier wasn’t as pretty and slightly less intuitive than BaseCamp all the features were available and did the job just as well as those in BaseCamp.

Overall Comparison:

BaseCamp was a pleasure to use because of it’s interface but I think I’ll still be sticking with ProjectPier for now, in this case my attitude is why pay $24 a month when you can have a system almost identical for free?