Podio

Podio is a free project management software with premium upgrade options as well. I am interested in discovering the best project management software for our start up moving forward and have recently had hands on experience with a couple of dozen. Suffice it to say I am always grateful for a free forever plan with decent functionality included which Podio does. And that pleasantly surprises me to have such quality free value available from Citrix somehow. Upon entering my account you find the user interface to be quite intuitive and relatively simple to use. You have the ability to take a tour to get to know your account features and functionality which I can appreciate. You can also create multiple workspaces for either additional projects or to breakdown a singular project into major entities within it so that's all good. And you do have a main activity stream which contains all of your communication across modules within each Workspace which is good too. You can invite others to collaborate very easily and this makes it a useful to for working as a team even in remote locations which is great. The task manager is pretty basic in the free account but keeping it simple is good. There is enough there to carry out relatively complex smaller projects with no issues. The advanced workflows or macros are available in each of the upgraded plans which start at $9 USD per user, per month. And they allow you to create macros which carry out multiple steps in a process for you saving time by doing several manual items for you in a few seconds. The calendar feature is very basic but you can export data to Google Calendar which is good. But the best part about this platform is your ability to integrate several third party apps seamlessly in a couple clicks including Google, Box, Evernote, GoToMeeting Free, Office 365, Dropbox, Facebook and a few more as well with various purposes. And I discovered that Plecto is a relatively inexpensive third party tool which syncs to Podio very well to make it much more of a sales tool which in my opinion is the key to enabling the most optimal communication and reason for using Podio in the first place. Even as a solo business you can use all of these integrations of which several are free combined with a one dollar per month Plecto integration to have yourself a really powerful customer relationship management platform which can also serve as a project manager along with many other uses which Podio offers when you set up your first workspace.

The basic functionality including the Tasks is limiting for anything but quite basic project in my opinion. But that's not a lot to complain about considering you can actually do a lot with the free account and you seem to be able to integrate third parties in your account.

When I was first interested in learning more about Podio I read a few reviews. The first one I read mentioned the robust features and price including a free version. And then it listed about four or five negative aspects and they all seemed to be from an experienced user with very good reasoning built into his argument for each point. So I signed up to Podio and somewhat expected a negative experience overall but can honestly say have been proven wrong regarding my assumptions. I disproved the negative points from this user perhaps they have made updates in the last year or so since it was written though otherwise once I spent good time with the tool it was easy to see this user had very particular needs and his negatives weren't necessarily extreme in any way. In fact, I can't believe how much free value you are getting here with the integrations and a one dollar per month Plecto account you have a really powerful sales customer relationship management tool which just may suit your business well. At the very least you have access to a solid project management tool which you can use GoToMeeting Free video conferencing in as well as Gmail, Box, Facebook and several others which make it incredible value.