Project Management Tools for Start-Ups

By : anoop

An integral part in the success or failure, of any company is the management and communication between peers within the company as well as a well formed communication with the clients itself. 1990s was marked with the rise of tools like bugzilla, trac and a few other, which allowed developers to develop collaboratively, and more over, a bit more organized with the ticketing system. One thing to be noted is that, they did what they were supposed to do, and they still do.

As the time pass by, we got a huge number of code hosting, along with project management solutions sprout out, and old players let the ground.

A few of which stand out of the list, and relevant in present day scenarios  are discussed below.

Github

(www.github.com)

Features : git code hosting, ticketing system,, wiki, free for open source projects, code review, edit online

Pricing Plans :  from $7/month personal (5 private projects) to $200/month(125 private projects) and also enterprise solution starting at  $5000

Key selling point : one among the most popular opensource code hosting

Cons: NOT well known as a project management tool, more likely called as a source code management tool

Bitbucket

(www.bitbucket.org)

Features: supports git and hg code hosting, wiki, issue tracking, unlimited private repositories upto 5 users

Pricing Plans:  FREE till 5 users  to unlimited users at $80/month

Key selling point : Pricing, being in the sweet spot of unlimited private projects, it can be your personal code repo.

Cons:  NOT as many features to be a project management tool

Teambox

(www.teambox.com)

Features: Good Management tool, NO code hosting, ticketing system, can be used for task management, but very difficult to keep track of code and tickets, if you are a coder.

Pricing: Free till 5 projects or users, 5$/user/month

Key Selling point : Facebook alike share, discuss system, effective for communicating within the team.

Assembla

(www.assembla.com)

Features: Cardwall to show ticket statuses, Highly usable interface, good code review tools, code merge, milestones, messages, wiki, basic time tracking, burndown,  Team management, standup reporting, File upload

Pricing Plans :  Free for open source or for  one service(hosting/reporting) or

$9/month for 3 users, $19 for 20 and unlimited with custom branding at $100/month.

Key Selling Point : Usability,  Reasonable pricing,  Gives good perspective of project development

Fogbugz

(www.fogbugz.com)

Features: one of the most comprehensive solution, export database, extensive ticketing system, wiki, discussion, evidence based scheduling, email and customer management, code reviews, deployment services, code hosting, code search, side by side bugs and fixes.

Pricing:  $30/month/user [yeah, it’s a little costly.]

Cons: Costly, compared to other peers

Key Selling Point : Features that makes sense, Usability, one among the best ones reviewed.

Redmine

(www.redmine.org)

Features: self hosted, wildly customizable, themes, wiki, source code management,  diff tools, ticket management system, time keeping, open source, very much complete, written in Ruby, GANTT chart

Pricing: FREE

Key Selling Point :  A lot of installable modules, host on your own servers.

Cons: The server management overhead

Basecamp

(www.basecamphq.com)

Features: Complete project management solution,  todo, messages, whiteboards, files, calendar

Key Selling Point : Very famous, lot of users

Pricing: $49/month for 35 projects and $149 for unlimited usage.

Cons: No builtin source code management tools (Cannot be used in  a software development perspective)

Unfuddle

(www.unfuddle.com)

Features: Simple and easy to use, ticket management,repositories, projects, time tracking, people and permissions , messages, notebooks, milestones.

Pricing: free for single user, $9/month for 4 projects upto $99/month for 50 projects

Cons : Looks naive, little usable

Trello

(www.trello.com)

Features: Just a simple cardwall system , lets you keep track of things, as system grows, it becomes really difficult to do the same. Still, Its worth trying.

JIRA

(http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/overview)

Features : Bug and Issue Tracking, Project Tracking, Custom Work-flow, code integration, reporting and analysis, addons, available on demand and for download

Pricing : $10/month for 10 users till 2000 users for $1000/month

There are plenty of them out there. Its up to you to select what suits you and what not. Each among the discussed, have a very focused client base. The whole point of this post is to make you aware of the basic things you can expect and amount you need to pay for that, with some major players in the industry.