David Emery Online

Online Project Management

26 January 2007

One of 37signals’ – one of the darlings of the modern web world, and rightly so – main products is a piece of software called Basecamp. Basecamp is an online, web-based project management tool which, like most of 37signals’ output, strips the concept back down to the bare essentials to provide a simple, easy to use experience.

It’s a great bit of software, and if you’re involved with working on a project with multiple other people it comes highly recommended. It does, however, come with a couple of drawbacks: firstly, other than the basic plan which only allows you one project it requires a monthly subscription fee. Secondly, Basecamp is a hosted application meaning it runs on 37signals’ servers. If you don’t want to administer your own server (and I imagine most don’t) this is great, but means there are very little possibilities for custom development – what you get is what 37signals give you, and you have no way to add to it.

At work we were looking for a solution to multi-people project management, and Basecamp certainly looked like a very attractive proposition. The monthly fee wasn’t a huge concern, although with our useage we’d probably need the $99/month plan. More of a concern was the lack of development possibilities; we have an ever-growing company intranet (which is based on Textpattern) and interacting with that, both from an aesthetic perspective and sharing data, is vital.

Luckily, there is a very viable competitor to Backpack which you can install on your own server, and comes with the low, low price of absolutely nothing: ActiveCollab.

ActiveCollab is essentially an open source clone of Basecamp, written in PHP. It offers most of the features of Basecamp, like tasks, milestones, user management, messages, files upload and more. It does miss off a few of Basecamp’s more sophisticated features like chat and time tracking, and overall the UI isn’t nearly as polished but it covers the basics very well.

Of course, the UI not being as good is both unsurprising – 37signals are very good at what they do – but also irrelevant; if you don’t like the UI, you can change it (which is exactly what we’ve done). We’ve added all sorts of integration with our existing business systems, which have proved invaluable, and skinned it using CSS to match the rest of our intranet.

ActiveCollab is being developed all the time, with lots of new features on the horizon, and if you’re looking for a customisable online project management application it’s a very viable solution.