Planio

Full-featured project management, but low innovation because they are stuck on Redmine

Kommentare: Overall Planio was once my favorite project tool, and I still recommend it when people want something very simple and lightweight. But other competitors like Monday.com, Asana, Airtable and others have really overtaken Redmine based products in the project management arena, so given that Planio isn't really much cheaper than the lower tiers of these other tools, it's hard to know where Planio really come out on top any more.

Vorteile:

I love Planio's implementation of the popular open source project management tool called Redmine. Planio is basically hosted Redmine, but they add in a very nice looking theme/skin for the UI, and then they added a ton of very helpful plug-ins and make the system bulletproof by hosting it in their proprietary cloud set up. I really love the agile Kanban board functionality, the checklists, and all the other plug-ins that extend Redmine and make Planio a fully featured project management tool. You can also use it for a bug tracking, CRM, helpdesk, or a variety of other flexible things by creating your own issue customizations and workflow. Essentially you get the best parts of Redmine, its stability, speed, customizability, and low cost, but they really take away all the painful parts like hosting, configuration, and plug-in purchasing.

Nachteile:

The thing that makes Planio great Is that it is based on Redmine, but that's also a huge weakness because Redmine as a product has progressed very slowly over the past few years and compared to the other SaaS offerings that compete with Redmine, it looks like it's basically stuck in time. Also, anything outside of the core project management or issue tracking modes are very basic. Planio implements plugins to make things like the CRM or help desk, but they are super simple and realistically no one with more than 50 employees would try to use this as their only help desk or CRM tool. You would be much better off with something like Odoo or a full-featured open source CRM, or something like Jira service desk, which is surprisingly reasonable in cost. Even though I've been a customer for years, I've recently had to switch my main product management team over to Asana because Planio just wasn't going to have enough features for what we're doing in the future. We will still use it for some stuff when we want to really customize the workflow and do some of the deep issue tracking that Asana can't do, but Redmine is really showing its age now and the Planio pricing plan just isn’t as cheap as it once was.

Overall very positive.

Kommentare: The system is reasonably fast, and good at what it does. Problems are responded to promptly (very quickly in some cases!). Over a 6 month period we reported three relatively obscure bugs, and all three were fixed within 24 to 48 hours. The core functionality is strong and reliable. If there is a negative, it's that the company makes assumptions about its user base which in our case do not apply, especially in the area of external task status change notification. Specifically, the system allows plain text email notifications, but these contain all the task data, which represent a serious potential leak of private information. To avoid that, one can activate encrypted email notifications, but then every member of the system MUST have encrypted email setup in their email client. As anyone who has ever tried to configure that in Outlook or Thunderbird can tell you, the installation of a certificate and the configuration of the client to use it are fraught with difficulties. Many people just give up. An ideal solution would be for the system to support plain-text email notification of task status changes as it does now, but with the option to not include the details, just the task title and the statement "The status of this task has changed. It is now assigned to you with XXXX Priority. Please see the task for details [link]". However, this is a relatively minor problem that does not detract significantly from our overall positive experience using the system. It's a strong solution.

Could be worse

Kommentare: Generally ugly looking and can be very clunky and frustrating to use. Overcomplicated for what we need. But it does the job for simple things, and I had a really good experience with customer support quickly fixing a bug.

Vorteile:

Good customer support. Why does this field have a 40 character minimum?

Nachteile:

It's too complicated when you just want simple issue tracking. Hard to understand relationship between projects/trackers/statuses/categories etc without spending some time - not at all intuitive. Not a very nice looking UI. Wiki seems to be perpetually a mess and hard to navigate, but maybe that's just how we use it. Defaults for agile boards with *every* status across the top are impossible to use.

Useful tool for project management.

Kommentare: The obtaining of reports in relation to the hours worked, the assigned projects and the organizational structure is fantastic. We continue using Planio for all our projects. It allows us to optimize operations more and more.

Vorteile:

It is an innovative application that has an intrinsic project management under an agile methodology. This allows creating sections, timelines, letters, labels, time for each activity, incorporation of members to the work team, monitoring of activities, recording of hours worked. It is a tool that has helped us a lot in the company, I always highlight its potential for the most precise planning of each reality in the provision of technological services.

Nachteile:

Care must be taken when creating schedules, letters, tasks or tickets for any team member. It can cost very expensive. Well, this application can generate reports with multiple filters. In addition, it is tedious to eliminate tasks once completed and transferred to the production line. They have notifications by email, but they do it in excess.

Unnamed

Kommentare: Tracking projects, nothing weird

Vorteile:

issue tracking is pretty good, wiki support is decent, reliability is impressive

Nachteile:

Better integration with Smalltalk, specifically with the Squeak variant