Basecamp has a well-earned reputation as an industry-standard collaboration and project management tool, built for small businesses and freelancers working in offices together rather than the more dynamic remote-oriented team makeups seen in many modern business environments.
Although Basecamp is well suited to help teams collaborate and stay organized, it only offers a few options for project planning, task tracking, or team member management. Some of the missing essential features for managing remote teams include built-in time tracking and resource management tools.
A few key questions you should ask when evaluating a project management solution for your team are:
- Does this solution improve my project tracking and task management?
- Is this solution easy to use?
- Does this solution integrate well with other tools my team already uses?
- Is this solution customizable?
- Is this solution reasonably priced?
In this article, we’ll compare the top Basecamp alternatives with the most effective options for planning, tracking tasks, and remote or hybrid team resource management:
- Monday.com
- Asana
- ClickUp
- Trello
- Zoho Projects
Alternative #1 – Monday.com
Monday.com is a robust project management and collaboration tool that focuses on helping teams streamline work and collaborate more effectively across multiple projects. Monday.com is best known for its strong task management, project planning, and ease of use.
While Basecamp is ideal for small teams that prize simplicity in their collaboration tools, Monday offers advanced work management features and in-depth reporting to help your team track progress and performance for complex projects with multiple moving parts.
Here’s a detailed look at some of the features Monday users rely on most to deliver their projects.
Powerful Project Planning Tools
Monday’s dashboards help your team better outline project objectives, individual tasks, timelines, and deliverables. The dashboard is a flexible information hub that uses customizable widgets to centralize your data so you can stay up to date on multiple project elements in one place.
For example:
- Use the overview Widget to gather and summarize the progress from selected project elements into one place on your dashboard.
- Use the workload widget to see how your team’s work is divided and the upcoming timeline for dependencies and essential tasks.
- Use the Gantt Widget to generate a master Gantt Chart to combine all your projects’ pipelines in one compact view and view each of your items as an item bar with connecting lines for dependencies.
Dashboards present a practical toolkit to help teams stay focused and motivated on high-level goals without sacrificing productivity in the process.
Fine-tuned Task Management
Monday.com uses boards to display and manage all your essential project management-related details, from simple daily tasks to complex multi-step projects.
Boards are interactive and collaborative elements with four main parts so planners can control the flow of information with precision: Groups, Columns, Items, and Subitems.
- Groups help you organize and categorize the information on your boards in any way you want.
- Columns allow you to customize how your data is displayed.
- Items can be used to manage and track data of any kind—whether it’s tasks, teams, or timelines.
- Subitems add an additional level of detail to items.
Effective Resource Management and Time Tracking
Monday’s columns allow you to display and customize the data from your workflows in any way you want. The variety of available column types provides the necessary scheduling and resource management tools to support any workflow.
For example:
- If your team works in shifts and you need a weekly schedule, you can add the People Column to your board to assign each task your team needs to deliver!
- Once the tasks are allocated, you can include a Status Column to keep track of the progress.
- Using the Time Tracking Column, your team can start, pause, and stop recording the time they spend working on tasks.
Basecamp offers far fewer resource management options and no built-in time-tracking essential features for managing distributed teams or delivering projects with many moving parts.
More Ways to Streamline Your Workflow
Integrations let you connect the software with hundreds of third-party tools.
Available integrations range from project management to marketing, to software development to CRM—allowing your team to easily integrate any of the most useful tools into your workflow.
Monday also offers two-way sync between Monday.com and the selected third-party platform using predefined integration flows and just a few clicks.
This feature makes sure your data matches within both platforms and remains up-to-date.
Monday.com Pricing
Monday offers 5 plan tiers for you to choose from: Free, Basic, Standard, Pro, and Enterprise.
The free plan gives you access to all the basic features, while each paid plan offers even more advanced features, resources, and security.
Preview pricing for your plan—based on your plan tier and the number of seats/users—by visiting Monday’s pricing page.
Alternative #2 – Asana
Asana is a task-based collaboration tool offering project tracking and organization tools that help streamline communication. Best known for delivering strong project collaboration features, Asana is an excellent solution for teams focused on improving the scalability and reliability of their project delivery process.
Compared to Basecamp, Asana provides more task management tools and options to streamline your work. Designed to help your team spend less time writing emails or caught up in unnecessary meetings, Asana strives to be a customizable workplace that can help you organize, collaborate and execute tasks for projects more efficiently.
Other notable benefits include options to create custom workflows and automate processes.
Asana Pricing:
Asana offers 4 plan tiers: basic, premium, business, and enterprise.
Asana’s basic tier plan is free but limited to 15 users. Each paid plan tier supports unlimited users, more advanced features, and additional onboarding resources. Visit Asana’s pricing page to learn more about the available pricing plans and their details.
Alternative #3 – ClickUp
ClickUp is a highly customizable cloud-based collaboration and project management tool that is well-suited to businesses of varied sizes and industries. ClickUp’s approach to project organization uses a hierarchy of tier views. These tiers start very broadly and gradually become more and more specific, providing you with increasing degrees of control over your project details.
ClickUp aims to be an all-in-one project management and productivity tool that helps your team avoid wasting time moving between multiple tools to get the job done.
As an all-in-one tool, ClickUp includes many valuable features not available in Basecamp, such as built-in time tracking and creating task dependencies. Users of both platforms note that ClickUp offers more features but has a steeper learning curve.
ClickUp Pricing
ClickUp has 5 pricing plan tiers: Free, Unlimited, Business, and Business Plus.
You can learn more about ClickUp’s subscription plan details by visiting the ClickUp pricing page.
Alternative #4 – Trello
Trello is a well-established visual work management tool that allows your team to collaborate, ideate, plan, and deliver projects. Trello works to remove teamwork blockers–emails, spreadsheets, and daily to-do lists–that impact the productivity of your business teams.
Best known for its simple, intuitive approach to visual collaboration, one of Tello’s most popular features is its interactive project boards focusing on Kanban-style organization and visual planning.
While Basecamp focuses more on communication than tasks and dependencies, Trello provides a clear view of your entire process–from start to finish–keeping all your team members on task and on target.
Trello Pricing
Trello provides one of the most generous pricing offers on the market; much of the system is free to use. However, expanding functionality requires add-ons and upgrades, which make scaling production and customization more expensive.
Trello has 4 pricing tiers: Free, Standard, Premium, and Enterprise. You can learn more about Trello’s pricing plan details by visiting the Trello pricing page.
Alternative #5 – Zoho Projects
Zoho Projects is a cloud-based project management platform offering enterprise-quality planning and budgeting features well-suited for small to midsize organizations.
Zoho Projects provides tools for task management, time tracking, and cost projection—must-have options—to help you manage remote teams effectively. Zoho customers highlight ease of use and low cost as two of this platform’s most compelling benefits.
Zoho Projects Pricing
Zoho Projects offers 3 plan tiers: Free, Premium, and Enterprise. Visit the Zoho Projects pricing page for more details about Zoho’s available plan tiers.
Selecting a Basecamp Alternative
Choosing the best Basecamp alternative to manage your remote teams and provide better tools for task management and time-tracking is vital to your business because results matter—not just to your clients—to you, your team, and your stakeholders.
When deciding on the best Basecamp alternative, it’s essential to consider the value each option brings to the table and how well those values match the needs of your team and your delivery process. Managing a distributed team responsible for delivering complex projects with many moving parts presents a challenge that requires the right tools for the right job.
Our review of the top project management solutions highlights Monday as the best balance of features, functionality, and ease of use—to help your team collaborate, create, and get more things done.
Learn more about everything Monday has to offer and get started for free by signing up today at Monday.com
