ProofHub Review | PCMag

Like all project management software, ProofHub helps teams organize and track the status of projects, collaborating while they're at it. What makes ProofHub one of the best project management apps, however, is that it has tools that help your team discuss visual materials. If the kind of projects you team manage include design work, advertisements, or other visuals, ProofHub should top your list of options. It's also surprisingly easy to use.

ProofHub doesn't have every feature under the sun, however. It doesn't have budgeting, invoicing, or resources management tools (although you can integrate with accounting software if needed). On the flip side, you can learn how to use all the tools it does provide within a few hours of getting started. At times, the interface could be a touch more intuitive, and pages occasionally load slowly. Overall, ProofHub is an excellent project management app for teams that need to usher along projects that contain visual materials. The price is right for a small and growing team, as ProofHub charges a flat monthly rate, regardless of how many people use it.

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What's New in ProofHub?

In 2021, ProofHub added a few new features and capabilities. Notable among them are sticky notes, or Stickies. They're off to the right side of your project management workspace, and you can use them to quickly jot down thoughts or other information you need on hand while you're working. Another feature that helps you keep track of important information is Bookmarks. Bookmarking lets you save elements in ProofHub—tasks, task lists, topics, notebooks, notes, folders, and timesheets—to a shortlist that's easily accessible from the same place you keep your Stickies.

Another new feature is the ability to create custom fields in tasks. Custom fields let your team capture information that's important and unique to the work you do. Two administrative-level features are the ability to set password requirements and customizing working days for your account.

ProofHub also added support for a few more languages, making it a more accessible app across linguistic borders. You can now set your language preference to Dutch, English, French, German, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Taiwanese Mandarin, or Turkish.

A ProofHub representative also told me that a dark theme and enhanced project reports are in the works.

How Much Does ProofHub Cost?

ProofHub offers three plans: Free, Essential, and Ultimate Control. You won't find the free plan advertised on ProofHub's website, but you can get it by requesting an account by email to [email protected]

For the paid plans, the company charges a flat monthly or annual fee for an unlimited number of account members. Many other project management apps charge you per person per month. You can get a 14-day free trial of the paid plans.

ProofHub Essential costs $50 per month or $540 per year. Again, you can have as many people as you want on the account. You can manage up to 40 projects and you get 15GB of storage space. This includes all the service's core features: tasks, project templates, time tracking, group chat, Gantt charts, and more. It doesn't come with project and resource reports or a project manager role. The Essential account also misses out on a few key admin features, such as the ability to manage permissions through roles, as well as view advanced activity logs.

ProofHub Ultimate Control costs $150 per month or $1,620 per year. You get 100GB storage and there's no limit on the number of projects you can manage. The Ultimate Control plan includes everything in Essential, plus project and resource reports, a project manager role, administrative controls, API access, advanced activity logs, a customized sign-in page, priority support, and more.

How Do ProofHub's Prices Compare?

Because ProofHub charges a flat monthly or yearly rate rather than a per-person rate, it's tough to compare its pricing to other project management apps'.

Among project management apps, you'll find a vast range of pricing. The more simplified tools for small businesses cost much less than high end tools for very large organizations managing hundreds of projects and people. There are also plenty of mid-range project management apps. ProofHub probably compares most closely with other project management apps for small businesses.

In that subcategory, we have Editors' Choice winners Zoho Projects and Teamwork. They both cost around $4–$9 per person per month, depending on the number of people on the team. GanttPro, which I would put in the same category, costs around $8–$9 per person per month for a team of 10–20 people. For the same size team, TeamGantt runs approximately $8–$9 per person per month as well.

Based on these reasonably comparable products, you'd need only 11 people on your team for a ProofHub Ultimate Control account to be competitively priced.

In some ways, ProofHub shares similarities with Basecamp, which costs $99 per month for an unlimited number of team members, the same as ProofHub. The difference is Basecamp doesn't have a few key project management features, including Gantt charts and task dependencies (unless you add them via a third-party plug-in); that's why we categorize Basecamp under collaboration apps instead of project management apps. There's a huge overlap between those two categories, project management and collaboration apps, but to help consumers make purchasing decisions, we keep them separate. It's also worth noting that if you're considering switching from Basecamp to ProofHub, you can now import your projects from one app to the other.

Getting Oriented With ProofHub

When you first create a ProofHub account, you get a thorough walk-through in the form of informational popups that appear on each new page you land on. Beyond that, navigating the app at the highest level is simple and straightforward.

A helpful “Me” homepage gives an overview of what's happening in your ProofHub account. You get a summary of tasks and events assigned to you, a list of all active projects you've joined, and any announcements people on the team have made.

The announcements can be customized to appear only to certain team members or to everyone. You can set how long an announcement should stay on everyone's Me page. It's a nice way to use ProofHub for more general communication, even if it doesn't apply to any specific project. 

Navigating the app is simple. A column of buttons on the left side and tabs at the top help you move quickly from page to page. When you click to open an active project, a menu appears to help you dive directly into the section of the project you want to see, whether it's the Gantt chart view, Reports, or Discussions page.

Setting Up Projects and Your Team

When you create a project, ProofHub asks if you want to create a project or make a template. Either way, a page opens with fields to fill out. 

You give the project a name, description, start date, and end date. There's also a field called Category, which can be useful for managing projects by type, client, or the team working on them. You can also assign team members to the project and choose someone to be the project manager.

In setting up and customizing your project, you can choose which tabs you want to be in the app for the project. The options are: Discussions, Tasks, Gantt, Calendar, Notes, Files, and Time. If you have a project that doesn't require time tracking, you might omit the Time tab. If you want to streamline where your team discusses the project, you might omit Notes and Files but keep Discussions. Another customization option is the ability to assign a color to each project.

When you add team members to a project, by default you can make that person an owner, admin, or normal user. Owners and admins have access to all the projects added in the account, whereas normal users can only see projects to which they have been added. You can create custom roles, too, and define their access and permissions. ProofHub also comes with some team management features, which it refers to as groups. 

Usability

ProofHub looks good but could use some fine tuning to make it easier to navigate. You often have to open new windows to get to the details of an item. Some of the functions weren't intuitive and took a little time to figure out. For example, when it came to adding new team members to an existing project, I got stumped a few times before figuring it out. As another example, simply editing the name of the project takes multiple clicks. It looks like you might be able to simply click the text in front of you to change it when in fact you have to first press a separate Edit button first hidden behind an icon way over on the right. Those are somewhat minor usability issues, but fixing them would go a long way to making ProofHub more pleasing to use.

That said, many conveniences are built in, such as the ability to reorder tasks by dragging and dropping them and creating dependencies between tasks in a Gantt chart by dragging a little circle that appears from one task to another. 

Another area for improvement is how you move between projects. If you want to switch projects (something project managers and team leads do all day long), there are two ways to do it. First, you can navigate out to the Projects page, choose the project you want, and select which tab within the project you want to open. The other way is to use the Jump To button or keyboard command. The button is at the top left corner or you can press Command+J. The current page darkens and an overlaid window appears where you can select a project, and once again you have to choose a tab within it. No matter which method you use, it still takes three steps when it could be one. It would be better if there were a list of projects in that left column and when you chose one, it would automatically open to either a default tab or the most recent one you were viewing.

Additional Features

ProofHub offers a great range of features, enough for any small to midsize team to manage a project, but not so many you'll get lost in them. It offers task management tools, milestones, Gantt charts, time tracking, reports, notifications, a calendar, in-app chat, and others.

One is a table view of tasks. You choose which task fields to see, sort by different fields, rearrange the columns, and export the data to a CSV file if you like.

The task management tools are strong. You can add a lot of detail to any task, including estimated time to complete the task, labels (similar to tags), and documents you upload to the task. ProofHub gives you a range of options when you want to check off a task as well. You can mark it In Progress, In Approval, or Done.

ProofHub handles uploaded files better than many other project management apps. Others make you download a file before you can open it and see it. In ProofHub, you can open the file right in the browser, add arrows, write your comments to the side, and even approve the file by clicking an Approval button at the top. ProofHub could use a few more markup tools here, but the ones it includes are sufficient.

ProofHub has tools for tracking time and managing timesheets, but it doesn't include budgeting, invoicing, or billing. You can get those tools by integrating your ProofHub account to FreshBooks, however. In ProofHub, you and your teammates can enter time on task manually or run a timer while working. Time tracked on tasks can automatically feed into timesheets for each project or client you need to bill. 

Task View and Board View

A Tasks view puts tasks in a list, where you can quickly scroll through them and select any one to see more details, such as the start date, due date, assignee, and any comments or files attached to it. I wish, however, that when looking at the Task view I could change the width of the different sections of the page. Unfortunately, they're all locked in place.

If your team uses a kanban method for organizing and tracking work, you can view tasks in a Board View. The Board View is a nice addition, but if your team relies heavily on kanban boards, you might instead pick up a specialized kanban app instead, such as Trello.

A section of the app called Discussions lets you and your colleagues maintain ongoing conversations about each project. Because you might have several different discussions, you can organize them by giving each one a title. Discussions are associated with the whole project, rather than being at the level of a task or task list. This setup is ideal for having top-level discussions about the overall state of the project. It's a simple and clear way to communicate messages everyone on the team should read. The Discussions are in addition to any comments you add at the task level to have more specific conversations with only the people who need to be a part of them.

ProofHub gives you a few additional ways to communicate. An in-app chat box lets you message another team member any time without leaving the project management space. The chat box, confusingly, is found in the same chat bubble where you can message ProofHub support. It's not the most intuitive place for it. While I like having a chat app right in the interface, it's clear that team messaging apps, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, may make it irrelevant.

Integrations and Reports

FreshBooks isn't the only integration offered. You can also connect your ProofHub account to Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Outlook. That's not an especially long list, however, and we'd like to see it grow in the future.

Reports in ProofHub are heavy on graphics, which I liked. Admins can see an overview of all projects and the status of each one, how many projects are overdue, how many are archived, and so forth. You also see a progress bar for each project indicating what percent of all tasks associated with that project have been marked done.

A lightweight resource report gives you some insight into how your people are doing and whether they're overtasked, but it's not particularly rich with detail. You can't, for example, see when someone will be out of office or easily reassign work from one person to another. Those types of functions are often necessary for large teams that work on dozens or hundreds of projects at once—and it's the kind of thing that sets LiquidPlanner and other high-end project management apps apart from those more suitable for small businesses and small teams.

Simple and Straightforward

ProofHub is a simple, straightforward, and reliable project management service that charges a fixed and fair monthly price, regardless of how many users you have. It's especially compelling for small businesses. It could use minor improvements in its interface and loading speeds, but, overall it's very easy to use. Its strength is that it provides adequate tools for managing projects, especially those with visuals, without overwhelming you with features you may not need.

Having tested more than two dozen apps for managing projects, our top picks and Editors' Choice winners are Zoho Projects for small teams on a budget and Teamwork for small to mid-sized businesses. They have a lot in common with ProofHub, but they edge it out slightly in terms of features and quality. For larger organizations that manage many complex projects at once, we recommend LiquidPlanner.