Need an inexpensive project management tool that still has the power to improve collaboration, time management, and creativity for your team? Check out Zoho Projects. Part of a huge range of impressive tools offered by one of the world’s leading SaaS companies, Projects is a straightforward platform built for users with dynamic needs.
This convenient solution makes it easy to plan projects, track team progress, log minutes with time sheets, and even manage your budget. Plus, it can integrate with all the tools your team members already use, enable intelligent automation, and even offers access to an AI assistant.
I signed up for a free account with Zoho Projects, to find out whether it’s really the ideal project management tool for smaller teams.
Quick Verdict, Pros and Cons
Zoho Projects is an extremely flexible, and feature-rich project management solution, ideal for companies that want to keep costs low without compromising functionality. I’ve experimented with a lot of project management apps over the years, and I think Zoho’s system offers perhaps the best value for money out there – particularly for smaller businesses.
There are some downsides. For instance, you get fewer integration options than you would with some alternatives, and 24/7 support costs extra. However, overall, I think most companies would benefit from giving Zoho Projects a try.
Pros:
- Exceptional value for money, with a free plan for beginners
- Very easy to set up, navigate, and customize
- Wide range of task management options
- Time management and budgeting built-in
- Great collaboration and user administration tools
Cons:
- There’s room for more AI functionality
- Integrations are limited compared to some alternatives
- 24/7 support costs extra
Zoho Projects: Overview and Pricing
Zoho Projects is a comprehensive project management tool, designed for companies who want to be able to track and manage tasks more effectively, without spending a fortune on advanced software. It’s by far one of the best project management solutions I’ve tried, which is impressive considering how little you actually need to pay for a subscription.
Zoho even offers a free plan for beginners. Obviously, this plan is a little limited, supporting only two projects, with subtasks, and 5GB of storage space. You also can only collaborate with three people on this plan, which means it will probably only appeal to freelancers and very small teams.
Still, if you need to upgrade, the “Premium” plan only costs $5 per month per person, and you get a discount if you sign up for an annual plan. This option comes with unlimited projects, time tracking, Blueprints, Project Templates, and Zia (AI) insights. You even get 100GB of storage space, although you miss out on things like custom fields and roles.
Alternatively, you can choose the “Enterprise” plan for $10 per month, per person, to unlock all of the functionality Zoho Projects has to offer. Although this plan has increased in price over the years, it’s still remarkably affordable compared to some competing options.
Plus, the Enterprise plan can accommodate teams of any size, although you do need to contact support for a custom quote if you have more than 5,000 users.
Zoho Projects Review: The Core Features
Given its low price, I initially expected Zoho Projects to be a relatively basic platform. Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised by how much this solution can do. It even goes above and beyond options like Trello, with features for time tracking and budget management.
Let’s dive into some of the key capabilities of Zoho Projects.
Task Management
Let’s start this Zoho Projects review by looking at the capabilities of the most common feature you’ll find in any project management platform – task management. This cloud-based tool gives you endless ways to break down work cycles, with milestones, task lists, sub-tasks, and even integrated “issue management” options. For instance, you can list project bugs and assign them to team members straight from your central dashboard.
There are options for setting up dependencies between related tasks, which alternatives like Trello don’t offer. Plus, you can design recurring tasks, identify “critical” tasks with tags, and set custom reminder notifications for deadlines.
If you’re looking for flexibility in how you visualize projects, Zoho knocks it out of the park. You can access a Kanban view with filters and an integrated timer function, list views to help you sort through data and information quickly, and Gantt charts to map out your projects.
There’s also a fantastic “Portfolio dashboard” for getting a bird-eye view of all of your projects, tasks, and issues to be addressed within workflows. Plus, you can create baselines for projects at regular intervals, to help you monitor your progress.
I also love the fact that Projects integrates directly with Zoho Sprints, to help development teams handle hybrid projects.
Zoho Projects Automation Capabilities and Templates
In my opinion, automation should be a standard feature for all project management apps these days. While many platforms do offer automation options, they’re often limited in scope or complicated to enable. However, that’s not the case with Zoho Projects.
Zoho’s convenient “Blueprint” tool makes it simple to set up automated workflows. You can use this to quickly define broad processes and carry out actions automatically in certain circumstances. There are also options for creating individual workflow rules (or business rules) for more straightforward tasks, like assigning an issue to a user.
Beyond that, team members can customize task notifications, receiving alerts whenever a project moves to the next stage. They can create escalation procedures and SLAs to ensure that issues are promptly directly to the right people. There are even options for using webhooks to automate notifications to third-party platforms from Projects.
On top of that Zoho offers an extremely convenient template library, which can help you save time and boost efficiency in the workplace too. There are templates for software, website development, security testing projects, and countless others. I really loved how intuitive these templates are, and how excellent they are at streamlining workflows.
Collaboration and Team Management
If you need help keeping your teams synchronized at scale, Zoho Projects integrates with most of the tools companies use to share knowledge and communicate, like Microsoft Teams and Google Drive. However, there are plenty of brilliant collaboration tools built in, too.
Zoho Projects users can access collaborative documents and files, allowing them to work on tasks with staff in real time over the cloud. You can create forums where team members can discuss ideas and save information in a central space. There’s also a fantastic “Feed” tool, which gives you quick access to updates taking place across your projects, and allows you to comment on alerts.
If you just need to catch up with team members, Zoho has a handy “chat” function – although I’d imagine most people will still prefer to use integrations to tools like Slack instead.
To help with team management, Zoho gives administrators the freedom to assign tasks to individuals, and Enterprise users can assign projects to entire teams. Most of the advanced team management tools, such as the option to create custom roles and client users, are restricted to paid plans. Single-sign-on and two-factor authentication are also only available to Enterprise users.
Zoho Projects Time Tracking, Budgeting and Reporting
Although many features caught my attention when using Zoho Projects, the time tracking, budgeting, and reporting tools stood out most of all. Although you do need to use a paid plan to access these tools, they’re extremely robust.
You can log and track time spent on issues with automatic or manual timers on timesheets. There’s also the option to invoice time logs and record expenses within Zoho Projects by integrating them with Zoho Books or Invoice. Beyond that, the budgeting tools are phenomenal. They offer an easy way to plan and manage your project, keep track of potential budget overruns, and even compare planned costs to actual costs in real-time.
Zoho definitely shines in the wider “reporting” arena, too. You can create task reports (in basic or advanced mode) to track project status, completion rates, and more. Projects also include issue reports built-in for tracking potential bugs, timesheet reports for business leaders, and project dashboards.
I also really loved the “Earned Value Management” feature, which allows you to compare planned vs. actual schedule, cost, and time values to monitor your team’s overall performance. Plus, the “Roll-Up” feature allows you to instantly summarize data into a report, whether you’re tracking hours logged, planned work hours, or aggregate task completion.
AI Assistance (Zia)
Like many project management leaders, Zoho has begun implementing a range of artificial intelligence capabilities in most of its tools, including Projects. Notably, the features you can access with “Zia” – Zoho’s AI assistant – do vary depending on your chosen plan.
Premium plan users can access “Zia Insights”, which helps with rapidly analyzing project phases, milestones, and task lists. You can even use the tool to immediately generate reports for every chart – boosting your ability to make data-driven decisions.
In the Enterprise plan, users can experiment with a wider range of features, such as Zia search, for natural language searching, and Zia translate. The “Translate” feature can automatically detect input language and translate it into 70 languages, making it fantastic for global teams.
Zoho’s AI features also allow you to generate content, such as project descriptions or summaries and “paraphrase” long documents. However, some project management tools include additional features, like ClickUp’s AI, which can generate task details and suggest follow-up actions.
Zoho Projects Integrations
Project Management tools always deliver the best results when they can integrate seamlessly with the systems your staff already uses. As you might expect, Zoho projects can be connected to virtually any other app or platform in Zoho’s ecosystem, including tools like Zoho Desk, Cliq, Zoho Books, Zoho CRM, Sprints, Analytics, and Mail. When it comes to third-party tools, Zoho doesn’t integrate with quite as many options as some alternatives.
However, you do get all of the basic connectors for things like Google Drive and Calendar, Microsoft Office, OneDrive, Outlook and Teams, Dropbox, and Box. There are also various CRM integrations available for things like Zendesk, and ServiceNow. If you do need any extra connections, Zoho also supports Zapier, for custom webhooks and automations.
Zoho Projects Ease of Use and Customization
Zoho Projects is easily one of the most straightforward and intuitive tools for basic and hybrid project management I’ve ever used. Getting started with the platform is incredibly straightforward. It only takes a few seconds to sign up, and the clean interface makes it simple to access and create projects, track progress, and collaborate with team members.
You even get a fantastic, fully-featured mobile app for Zoho Projects, so you can continue to keep track of work and make progress on the move. There are also endless customization options for individual users and teams. You can design custom layouts and views for tasks, add custom fields into projects (on paid plans), add custom status tags to projects, and more.
One slight downside is that Zoho seems to use a lot of its own language throughout the platform, which can be a little confusing at times. Additionally, some features seem to have overlapping functionality (like Workflows and Blueprints), so it can be difficult to determine when to use each. Additionally, I think users will get more out of Zoho if they use it with other Zoho projects, like Zoho Books, Sprints, or Zoho CRM.
If you’re using many external tools and don’t work with Zoho much already, bridging the gaps between everything might be a little complicated.
Zoho Projects Customer Support
Finally, let’s take a quick look at the level of customer support you can get from Zoho Projects. This is an area where some SaaS providers ten to fall short, but Zoho has a great reputation for being responsive and helpful on various channels.
On any plan, you can access email, live chat, and phone support eight hours a day, from Monday to Friday. If you need faster response times, and out-of-hours assistance, on the other hand, you’ll need to pay a little extra. Zoho charges 20% on top of your current monthly subscription fee for access to onboarding assistance, 24-hour guidance, and remote troubleshooting.
Zoho Projects: The Verdict
Overall, Zoho Projects stands out as one of the most impressive, straightforward, and feature-rich project management apps I’ve used. Although it has some room for growth, particularly regarding things like advanced AI features, this tool is an incredible option for all kinds of small and growing businesses.
If you’re looking for a project management system that will boost efficiency, save you time, make your team more productive, and doesn’t cost a fortune, choose Zoho Projects. It offers exceptional value for money and couldn’t be easier to adapt to your needs.
