Deskaway + Freshbooks rocks!

Dec 24, 2011 by Dan    4 Comments  

I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the last six months researching and trying out project management solutions, and my conclusion is that Deskaway is the best choice today, especially if you’re a Freshbooks user. And if you’re not, you should be. Although Basecamp is the original and classic project management platform, I can’t stand it. It has an ugly interface, lots of useless features (like a Wiki), no visual overview or dashboard area (Basecamp’s infamously ideological and stubborn founder banned Gantt charts), and it’s overpriced to boot.

Basecamp does their best to hide their lowest price package ($24/month) so you’ll pay twice as much for a plan that limits you to 35 projects. Deskaway’s lowest priced plan ($25/month) gives you that much, so in terms of cost, Deskaway brings great savings but also greater value, especially for Freshbooks users.

We use Freshbooks extensively and have loved it for years. It’s how we price projects, track time, and handle billing. I consider it the gold standard of SaaS business applications for its simplicity, quality, continuous improvement, and super fast, super thoughtful customer support.

The Basecamp integration Freshbooks provides is enough in itself to make us reject Basecamp. It requires that you either use Basecamp to track time and tasks, which can then be carried over and invoiced in Freshbooks — or else you can import your projects from Basecamp to Freshbooks to track time there. In the first case, Freshbooks never knows anything about your projects, as they’re only in Basecamp. Since the natural process for starting a project is to add it to a client in Freshbooks, possibly from an approved estimate you generated there, the first option for Basecamp integration makes this impossible. In the second option, your team is going to need to track time in Freshbooks for tasks they’re completing in Basecamp, so this segregation (rather than integration) confuses matters and wastes time. If you use the Basecamp time tracker, you’ll need to re-enter all that data manually in Freshbooks. It’s a choice between which application you cripple.

By contrast, with Deskaway integration our natural workflow starts with an approved estimate being turned into a project in Freshbooks, which we then map to a project we create in Deskaway. Then tasks and time we track in Deskaway (there’s a popup time logging clock for your desktop) will show up for the same project and tasks in Freshbooks. When we send out an invoice for that time we have a full record of it in both Freshbooks and Deskaway under the same project. Clients and team members can go into either application and understand fully what’s going on.

In terms of its interface and functionality, Deskaway is not quite as good as Freshbooks, but it’s still very good and a pleasure to use. There are really good charts and visualizations, including Gantt charts. GoogleApps integration is also well supported. I highly recommend it.

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