Zoho Projects is an online project management tool to collaborate and execute projects easily. It provides a great deal of features for a collaboration and project management: creating tasks, assigning ownership, setting deadlines and tracking milestones, a clear view of projects’ status, a time sheet for calculating the exact number of hours put in by each of your project members, a central forum for your team to discuss and upload project related files, Gantt charts and etc.

A nice thing about ZOHO Project is that there is a way to create a FREE account. Of course, there are some limitations but as it’s mentioned on the official web site it should be considered as a “starting point for Online Project Collaboration that is ideal for schools, freelancers, consultants and individuals”. So if you would like to check it right away, here is the page you should visit. But before you go ahead with that make sure you watch demo videos in order to understand the way it works.

In addition, it has pretty simple, but still attractive, interface. Let’s check some screenshots made from ZOHO Projects User account.

The Dashboard:

Tasks and Milestones Section:

Timesheet Calendar Section:

As it was mentioned before it’s a complete multifunctional tool with a lot of features; as regards the main characteristic ones the following should be considered:

• It’s a part of ZOHO Services (ZOHO Sheet, Writer, CRM, Show, Planner, Share, Chat, Invoice, Reports, Docs, Meetings and etc.)
• Multilingual: supports 15 different languages like Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English(US), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese(Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish.
• Gantt Charts support
• The opportunity to create invoices for clients
• Zoho Projects is 100% free for open-source projects
• and many others

To learn about the ZOHO Projects features, please visit features page.

ActiveCollab

ActiveCollab is a very functional next generation project management and collaboration tool. There is one important point about this solution that has to be mentioned from the very beginning – it’s not a SaaS solution, i.e. when you are buying it you don’t pay for the service (each and every month), but purchase the license. Of course in this case you pay more, but you need to take into consideration the fact that you buy license one and use the tool forever.

There are two version of ActiveCollab available – Small Biz and Corporate (this version has much more features included). Here you can learn more about the difference between two versions and the features they have.

To my mind given tool has one of the best user interfaces among the applications we discussed. Please check the following screenshots in order to estimate it.

The Project Overview Page:

The Discussions Page:

The Calendar Page:

Most likely it will be much better for you to try it yourself, so you will be able to make your final decision much easier. Moreover you need to pay attention to the speed of this solution, it’s really fast.

Finally let’s see what the main distinctive features of this application are:

• Ticket system feature
• One year of free support and upgrades is included for both Small Biz and Corporate license
• Full source code is provided in both licenses, which means that you can tailor ActiveCollab to fit your business needs perfectly
• Touch ActivCollab: ActiveCollab mobile interface will detect if you are using iPhone or iPod Touch and will make proper adjustments to be more usable with Touch interfaces
• Perfect for integration: API lets you easily integrate activeCollab with other applications. Use it not just to give access to your data to other application, but also to let them work with it, create new records and more
• Write, Share or Sell Module: you are free to create modules and sell them or offer them for free to the rest of activeCollab community
• Per User Language Settings: every user can select preferred language from their Profile page and etc.

Please visit the features page to check all the features.

5pm Web

5pm™ represents an online project management and collaboration application that has been evolving for the past five years. One of the greatest features of this solution is its simplicity. It’s considered to be much simpler and easier than well-known Basecamp. Thus there is no way you can encounter any problems with using it. It really takes just some minutes to get used to it. Moreover despite its simplicity it packs many powerful highly organized features.

The original customizable interface is another nice feature to be mentioned. Moreover to my mind it was a nice idea to use side-by-side window action. There is one more striking feature that you will notice at one – speed. It’s really fast and responsive for a web-based application. Of course, there are not the only characteristic features of the given tool.

Before we go ahead with the rest of the features I would like you to look at some screenshot of the user account in order to be aware of the interface 5pm has. Let’s start with Projects Section that has the abovementioned side-by-side look:

The second one is the Timeline Section (it has 4 Gantt-style chart views):

And the last one is Reports Section (that is customizable as well):

In case you are really interested in this product, you can check all the screenshots here.

Now let’s mention the other features you may find to be useful:

• The opportunity to import contacts from Gmail
• You can drag around and resize the projects and tasks directly in the Timeline
• It behaves more like a desktop app than a web-app, i.e. right click menus, quick response time
• iCalendar integration
• The opportunity to import Google Docs™ links and etc.

You can try it for FREE (14-days) and check the list of all the features on the overview page.

Related posts:

1. Online Project Management Tools Part 1
2. Online Project Management Tools Part 4
3. Online Project Management Tools Part 5