Review: Goplan (vs Basecamp)

I took a quick look at Goplan the other day to see how it worked. I’m a medium time, off and on Basecamp user and haven’t been fully satisfied with it so was looking to see if Goplan remedied some problems. The executive summary is that I think that Goplan doesn’t feel like a released, subscription based product, there’s a bunch of annoying, if minor issues, that don’t give me that warm fuzzy feeling I want to get when I’m paying for an app like this. I also think it is targetted at more public facing projects as opposed to Basecamp who targets more of an inhouse/contractor audience. Goplan seems to straddle the spectrum somewhere between a Basecamp and a Sourceforge.

Let me start out with some really minor issues that add up to a bad first impression. The signup process and adding a new user process to a project is tedious. On the various forms used to register yourself, if you make a mistake it brings you back to the same form with the error message, but all your fields are cleared, so you have to reenter everything again.

Then once I signed up, got an account and tried adding a user, there were a couple issues. First, it accepted an email address of this form “felix+test@example.com”, where I often use that + sign because sendmail understands that it should ignore everything including and after the +, so that email would be identical to “felix@example.com”. It’s convenient. Goplan accepted it and sent me the login information for my new user. Unfortunately, the user registration form does not accept the + as a valid email address, so even though my email was in the system, I couldn’t sign up. This coupled with the forms not pre-populating themselves with my information was incredibly annoying. I filled it all out 3 or 4 times before I realized that I wasn’t just making typo’s, it was just refusing my email. Finally, back in the admin form, I couldn’t remove the user from my system because the + seemed to be breaking the user lookup.

Ok, that’s definitely an edge case. So I used a different address and signed me up another user. The sign in/registration process is three consecutive pages. First register an account (you get this by clicking off a link in the email) - you have to enter your email address and some name/password info. You submit, then you come to a confirmation form - here you wait to get an email generated by the last page with a confirmation number in it. There’s no link in that email, you have to go to this page, retype in your email address, paste the confirmation number in and submit. Then, you have to actually login, again, retype email address, password and submit.

This process is so lengthy and filled without any sort of convenience that it really left a sour first impression in my mouth. Nevertheless I pressed on. Another annoyance is that in the notes section, it gives you a list of all your notes, but it shows you the full text of every note. There was no obvious way to get a full listing of just titles. If you have a bunch of notes of any length, I can see this being sub-optimal.

Another real annoyance for me was that the basic organizational element, the project, had a global namespace. That is, just like creating user names on other sites, I was competing with all other members of goplan to get useful project names. This is a genuinely not good feature, in my book, not just a niggle or inconvenience. I want to name my projects whatever, not Website_Creation_Project_1234 and send that to my clients. This is where Basecamp’s organization makes so much more sense, everything is contained in the deasil company namespace - so I can name my projects whatever I like in there.

This is one of the reasons I assume that Goplan is looking for more public facing projects. Their organization is primarily around the project (vs Basecamp’s client) and it deals with individual users (where Basecamp groups users into companies and associates companies with projects). For my purposes Goplan’s much lighter organizational structure just doesn’t fit the bill, I work with clients and other groups of people and like dealing with them as an entity, associating them at a stroke with various projects that come up. Also, it’s a nice touch that Basecamp gives me a third level domain (my company name) and a choice of a few non-basecamp second level domains, as well as letting you upload a corporate logo into the template. These are small details that give Basecamp a real feeling of professionality that seems lacking in Goplan.

Also the use of a public facing blog per project. I couldn’t imagine a need for that in how I use Basecamp. If I wanted a corporate blog I wouldn’t use Goplan’s. And a project based one for an internal project just doesn’t make sense. This makes sense only in the context of a public facing project, the likes of which might be housed on Sourceforge. That’s why I sort of put it somewhere between a sourceforge and Basecamp in terms of who might find this useful.

Having said that, one of the big reason my eye strays from Basecamp is that their user privilege system is annoying. There are certain privileges that simply can not be assigned to anyone who isn’t apart of the client company (that is the company who purchased the service from Basecamp). As a primary example, no one who isn’t of the client company can assign todo tasks to someone from the client company. This is really, genuinely annoying as well as a baffling feature miss. While the privilege system in Goplan wasn’t available in the free trial, I assume that it is pretty fine grained and full featured because users in the free version can do everything that the admin user can do. That’s a great plus.

Goplan also has the customization that lets you choose what features are to be used within each project, which is also really great. I think Goplan also shines by having a ticketing system to track bugs and other issues from opening to closure. Basecamp could definitely use this. Goplan has file upload capacity all over the place, allowing you to add files to almost anything in the system, yet another area where Basecamp lags.

For my purposes as a small company that deals with several client companies and several projects concurrently, Basecamp fits the bill much more than Goplan does. There’s a lot of polishing that I believe Goplan can use to give it more of a finished feel. But besides that there’s just several areas where it’s made architectural decisions that put it at odds with what I’m looking for, the global project namespace and lack of user organization. I think it’s on the right track and could definitely add features that I’d like to see, but I wonder if their focus is on a different group than me and it will evolve away from my needs.

Mar 21st, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: review · web2.0