Our team of specialists has reviewed Zoho Projects. We actually connected to a demo version of the product, test drove it and wrote down our comments. The review was written objectively and isn't advertising-driven.
Videos | Pricing
Zoho Corporation offers an impressive portfolio of web applications for businesses which all integrate with each other. Furthermore, several of their web applications integrate with Google Apps, including Zoho Projects. Basically, Zoho Projects is an online project management, collaboration and issue tracking software.
The first thing that caught our eye is Zoho Projects' dashboard. The page layout is a mix of Facebook and Twitter. Users can actually "tweet" what they are working on right now within the account, and these 140-character messages all show up on the dashboard, under "Latest Activities". The dashboard also shows up users' statuses (what they're doing) as well as announcements, milestones, overdue tasks and recently uploaded documents. Collaboration and communication wise, Zoho Projects is quite impressive and a charm to work with, thanks to the obvious influence social networks had on the product's direction.
Most key project management features are available in Zoho Projects. Whether you need to manage documents, timesheets, meetings, tasks, milestones and even bugs, Zoho has it all. Whenever a project is open, all tabs in the workspace refer to that project. It is also easy to track data across all projects, although there are not as much reports and features at this level. We especially liked the collaboration features like the wiki, the forums and the chat. The wiki enables you to create, for instance, a knowledgebase that can be updated over time. The forums enable users to create topics and discuss, share information and collaborate better. Finally, the chat room enables users to discuss topics with each other.
These 3 elements are essential in most projects but seldom are they available in a single product. Well, in Zoho Projects, they are! No need to use a third-party issue tracking system, a time tracker or an online storage service to get your projects delivered. Zoho Projects offers these features and they work very well, and may even surprise you, such as the document management feature. Not only is it possible to upload and share documents in a project, it is also possible to create spreadsheets, word processing and presentation documents within Zoho Projects, thanks to Zoho's corresponding built-in modules. If you like Google Documents, you'll like this feature, and perhaps even think about switching to Zoho for that matter.
Zoho Projects offers a free package and quite affordable paid ones. The free package lets you create 1 project and an unlimited number of users. As for the paid packages, they range from $12 to $80 per month, with discounts available for annual subscriptions. Some features are offered as add-ons at a reasonable extra cost (e.g. the wiki and the chat).
Zoho Projects is lots more than a project management software product. It is a feature-rich project collaboration system with many expansion abilities thanks to Zoho's modules. Furthermore, if you use Google Apps, Zoho Projects integrates with them. Whether you have basic or complex project management needs, Zoho Projects must be considered and given a try.