The world of Time Tracking and Project Management is a vast one. For small businesses like ours, there are seemingly endless time tracking solutions and a good number of project management answers. I spent nearly two weeks evaluating options in my spare time, so hopefully this data will help save you some time.
Here are the criteria I used to narrow down the possible project management and time tracking solutions:
- Web based application
Our devs use various platforms and it needs to run everywhere without install and upgrade headaches, I also considered Air and Flash apps - Support for 5 users
Because, yanno, we need five people to record time - Time tracking must include timer with start/stop capabilities
We are multi taskers and like accuracy; we considered products with timer widgets as well - Feature list and pricing prominent
Excluded all sites with vague details, no screenshots, or “contact us for details and pricing” models, due to sheer volume and time needed to research - Must have a free trial evaluation
Yanno, so I could evaluate them - Professional and sharp web site
Attention to detail is critical to good software design and project management, how they run their site should reflect this
After nearly ten hours of research, I narrowed the field to fifteen products. Then I evaluated each product by importing several of our current projects into it and using the time tracking tools for one day. After which I ran reports and recorded my findings in a spreadsheet. The final ratings were on a 1-5 scale, based on usability, project management capabilities, time tracking capabilities, invoicing features, reporting capabilities, and API and integration tools. Here’s what I came up with:
Once I had some numbers to work with, I weighted each product to meet our needs, based on the following criteria:
- Usability: Ease and speed of use is very important to us, as we have little time for project management (x2)
- Time tracking capabilities: highly critical (x5)
- Project management capabilities: highly critical (x5)
- Low price: we want to keep the price under $50 a month, so our value calculation was tweaked accordingly: rating *3 – (price per month/10)
- Invoicing, reports, and so on are nice, of course, but we can make due with our external, existing solutions
So, using this data, here were my findings:
It should be apparent that ProWorkflow is, hands down, the best overall product on the market. It’s quality, well thought out, bug free, fast, and powerful. Skylight was by far the best for our needs, according to price versus quality. The rest of the data is interesting, but several of the products listed had a time tracking or project management rating less than three, which is insufficient for our needs. So the final choices for us were as follows:
- Skylight – use this and put up with the slow, laborious interface; our preference for now
- Basecamp + MyHours/Harvest/Tick – together, these products are a complete package, but pricey
- ProWorkflow – very pricey, but we could bite the bullet on this and get the best quality product on the market.
If you’d like to view or download the complete data, including links to all of the product sites, you can find all the gory details in the Google spreadsheet. You can also view the same data sorted by total quality instead.
