5pm, a product of QG Software, is some pretty slick project management software, and it’s brought to you by two guys from Cincinatti, Ohio and two programmers in Eastern Europe–all with out any funding.
5pm offers the same project management tools as most others, including grouping, time reports, security levels, email notifications and attachment support. An interactive timeline gives you an alternate view of projects and tasks (one of its best features, soon to be editable–see screen shot below), but the reason it stands out is its easy-to-use interface and simple design.
5pm’s entering a field robust with competitors like 37signal’s Basecamp, MyQuire, Daptiv, Huddle, Zoho, Microsoft Project and a long list of others.
However, I found the software much simpler and easier to use than some of the others (including industry leader Basecamp, which I use). You don’t have to hunt for your projects and tasks; everything’s right there, pretty much one click away.
The company’s offering a 14-day free trial period, but it should consider making it free to single users to accelerate uptake and focus on drawing revenue from enterprise users instead.
Sergei Podbereschi, who co-founded the company with CEO Greg Roy, said the company is updating features “every two to four days” and plans on releasing a two-way email integration that will allow users to update tasks from email.
They may not take out the industry leaders any time soon, but this is definitely project management made easy.
7 Comments
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courtney benson said:
Thanks for the great find, I love Basecamp but you have a point. I’m in agreement that that they should give it away free to build a strong following, sell to the enterprise, and or upsell to individuals with version “3.0″ or “7.0″ - whatever -as long as it’s the one with all the bells, and gotta haves.
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courtney benson said:
P.S. Love the company name!
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Arthur said:
Have you seen Wrike http://www.wrike.com? It’s a much more functional application with drag-n-drop option in Gantt charts, customizable reports and with a very flexible structure. The best thing I like about it is email integration though. It lets you create and update projects via email. It helped me to complete 7 projects successfully and saved me days on project work.
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Joe said:
5pm does have email integration as well… Plus RSS, iCal and other things. The Timeline (Gantt) is made in Flash… so it has more potential, if they chose to improve it.
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Derek said:
I use Wrike and I’ve checked out 5pm. They do look similar, as they both are integrated with email and they have timelines. But 5pm’s timeline does not allow drag and drop items. This is inconvenient. Then 5pm doesn’t allow including one task into several projects. This is what I love in Wrike. It allows building various work breakdown structures. Our projects often overlap and this feature is very useful. In 5pm I also have to manually edit task to move it from one project to another. In Wrike this is done by dragging and dropping tasks. So my conclusion is: thanks, but no thanks! I’m with Wrike.
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Erica said:
Derek, this article is about 5pm, not Wrike :-). No need to get all fired up.
I personally found the 5pm interface much nicer and easier to navigate. Good found, VentureBeat!
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Ana Salve said:
I tried Wrike for some time, but like Erica said, the interface of 5pm is much nicer. Sadly there is no dutch translation so now i am using “planhetbeter” and that works fine to. But 5pm is defintly a great tool!
Kindest regards,
Ana Salve
Vitaaldier (http://www.vitaaldier.nl)
3 Trackbacks
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