Zoho Projects Review | PCMag

Teams can spend tens of thousands of dollars per year on project management software. If you're looking to get the best project management app on a budget, however, you don't have to spend that much. Zoho Projects is an excellent app that's affordable for even the most cash-strapped teams. It has a wide array of features, even if it doesn't include everything under the sun. At the highest tier of service, you get time tracking, resource management reports, and the ability to track project budgets for $10 per person per month. You don't get invoicing and billing tools, although you can connect with other apps that provide those capabilities. Overall, Zoho Projects provides a lot of value for a low price, making it an Editors' Choice winner for project management for small and growing businesses.

We have given two other Editors' Choice awards for project management software. One is to Teamwork, which costs more but comes with extra features that mid-sized businesses might want, such as invoicing. For large organizations managing hundreds or thousands of employees and projects, LiquidPlanner is our top pick. It's more adept at handling multiple projects and shared resources, and it has impressive tools for automatic scheduling and resolving conflicts.

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What's New in Zoho Projects?

In 2021, Zoho Projects released a new version of its software alongside updated plans and pricing. Here are some of the most significant changes for paid account holders from the past year.

Workflow Rules (Enterprise accounts only). Workflow rules let you effectively manage workflows with automated steps. For example, “When X happens, automatically do Y.” Here's a concrete example: “When a team member checks off a task to indicate they shipped a project, automatically update the Ship Status field to Shipped.” Workflow Rules support webhooks, meaning you can create actions that use tools beyond Zoho Projects, such as alerting someone of an action in another app.

Task Flexible Hours. This feature lets you dynamically set the number of work hours for a task every day, rather than set the same amount for every day of the week.

Earned Value Management. Earned Value Management effectively helps you track and predict budgets, though it provides other insight, too. It lets you compare planned versus actual values of projects by looking at three factors at once: schedule, cost, and time.

Assigning Teams (Enterprise accounts only). This new team management tool gives you a field where you can assign a team to a task.

Bulk Shifting Dates. This feature gives you more flexibility in changing a project schedule because you can alter the start and end dates for all tasks en masse, whether you need every task in a project to start earlier or later.

How Much Does Zoho Projects Cost?

Zoho Projects offers three plans: Free, Premium, and Enterprise. You can get a 10-day trial of the Premium plan. The two paid plans have among the lowest rates you'll find for a project management app. Previously, Zoho Projects offered five different plans. The new simplified offering makes it easier to decide which tier of service is right.

The biggest limitation of the Free plan is you can only have three people total on a team, and you can only manage two projects at a time. You get 10MB of storage space, which is a very small amount. Few features are included in this account type, as you can see on Zoho Projects' comparison page.

The Premium plan costs $5 per person per month with a discount if you pay for a year up front. This tier of service allows for up to 50 people on your account. With this plan, you can add client users at a rate of $3 per person per month. A client user is someone with read-only access to only the information that you give them permission to see. A Premium plan also gives your team 100GB of storage space, and you can manage as many projects as you need. The only features you miss out on at this tier of service are some custom fields, critical paths, project baselines, custom profiles and roles, and a few other features that are restricted to Enterprise accounts.

The cost of the Enterprise plan has nearly doubled in recent years, although it's still remarkably low compared to other services. It's now $10 per person per month or $90 per person per year. Enterprise accounts can handle teams of any size, although if you have more than 5,000 people, you can contact the company for a custom pricing quote. Additional client users cost $3 per person per month. You get all the features Zoho Projects offers, including the ability to create task dependencies among tasks that are in different projects, a cross-project resource utilization chart, and more.

How Do Zoho Project's Prices Compare?

Zoho, the company, specializes in providing low-cost, cloud-based, business software. It has an entire suite of business apps that are competitively priced. So it makes sense that Zoho Projects has such a low price, even though the rates have gone up since 2020. Still, it has consistently been the lowest-priced professional project management tool.

As a point of comparison, GanttPRO costs $8.90 per person per month—but only if you pay annually. That's one of the lowest prices on the market and it's still more than double what you'd pay for Zoho Projects Premium if you went with the annual rate.

Other low-cost project management apps make it hard to figure out their pricing. TeamGantt, for example, starts at $24.95 per month for the first person and then costs about $9 per month more for each additional person. ProofHub is another low-cost option at $50 per month for unlimited team members. The hitch is that your per-person rate varies dramatically based on how many people are on your team. 

Top-end project management apps cost the most because they're built to handle hundreds of projects and thousands of team members, and they run upwards of $40 per person per month. Examples include LiquidPlanner, Mavenlink, and Clarizen. These high-end tools often come with advanced features, such as automatically rescheduling work when a deadline slips or when a team member is unexpectedly unavailable. Zoho Projects' new Bulk Shifting Dates feature comes close to doing the same thing. Or, when the due date of a predecessor task is pushed off or rolled back, you can have the system automatically shift all affected tasks by the same amount of time.

Getting Started

To get going with Zoho Projects, you go to the website and sign up for a plan. As mentioned, every new account gets a free trial first. Zoho Projects works best as a web app, and there are apps for Android and iOS mobile devices for keeping up with work when you can't be at your computer. There are no local desktop apps, however.

The site looks friendly and contemporary. It's intuitive enough that if you can use most basic online apps, such as webmail, you'll be able to get around Zoho Projects in a few minutes. It may take longer to learn all of its rich features, but simply navigating the site takes no time. This ease of use and simplicity is necessary for small businesses that don't have a dedicated project manager on staff. 

Setting up an account, creating your first project, adding milestones and tasks, and inviting more people to join you takes minutes. When new people join, the site gives them hints about how to get started and what to do next.

Business owners and team leads will appreciate that Zoho Projects prompts people to enable two-factor authentication to help keep accounts safer and more secure. Two-factor authentication helps to keep all the company information you put into your Zoho account more secure.

Core Features

Some of the basic features and views of your data that Zoho Projects offers are dashboards, tasks, Gantt charts, reports, documents, milestones, timesheets, forums, and pages. I cover several of these features in a little more detail further on.

A customizable dashboard lets you see whatever is most relevant to you so that when you log in, you get a snapshot of the projects, statuses, or budgets that matter to you. For example, you can add a Task Status widget that shows both a pie chart and a raw number count of how many tasks are open versus closed. Whether you're concerned with time sheets or individual workloads, you can modify your dashboard accordingly.

Working With Tasks and Milestones

To start managing projects in Zoho Projects, you have to create a new project, give it a name and description, and add some tasks and milestones. While some project management apps, such as Smartsheet, come packed with templates, there are none in Zoho Projects. With this software, you can build your own templates or start from scratch.

Tasks can have a lot of detail. Every task can have a start and end date, rather than just a deadline, though you can't assign a task to be completed by a specific time of day, only the date. You can assign how many hours per day someone should dedicate to the task. You can assign multiple people to be responsible for a task, and more.

In paid accounts, every task has a built-in timer for tracking time spent doing the task. You also have the option to allocate that time as either billable or non-billable. As assignees work on tasks, they can enter a percent completion to show their progress. Another option lets you set a project as being on a strict timeline, meaning you cannot assign due dates for milestones that are outside the time scope of the project.

Zoho Projects lets you set up task dependencies, which are easiest to create from the Gantt chart view. Gantt charts are interactive, meaning you can drag and drop elements on the timeline to change when they're due or how long they should take. If you drag a task and its dependents too far so that the project won't get done on time or you create some other conflict, the affected tasks turn red. To create a dependency among tasks, you click and drag to draw a line from one to another and let go when you see a line appear indicating the two are now connected. One newer change to Gantt charts is the addition of an undo button, which anyone can appreciate.

Project Views and Resource Management

In addition to Gantt charts, Zoho Projects also has a task list view and a kanban board view. The kanban view lets you see tasks as cards in columns. The column headers in the kanban view match up to the statuses available to tasks. By default, they are Open, In Progress, In Review, To Be Tested, On Hold, Delayed, Closed, Canceled. You can change them to be whatever you like, although whatever labels you put on these columns will appear anywhere that you can see the task status. It's not limited to the board view.

Another key project management feature in Zoho Projects is a resource management report called Resource Utilization (for Premium and Enterprise only). It helps you see which team members are tasked with too much work, not enough work, or just the right amount during different time periods. Most project management apps show resource reports as a table. Zoho Projects shows it as a timeline, with spanner bars appearing in different colors to show when someone is unassigned to work, has adequate assignments, is nearly over-assigned, or is over-assigned work. Hovering over the spanner shows more detail. It's a little unusual compared with the table that other project management apps create, but it works. Large teams in need of solid resource management tools should take a look at LiquidPlanner, as resource management is one of the app's strengths.

There are some tools for limiting the number of hours employees can report working, explained in the Time Tracking section below. Administrators can set the working hours and days of the week and enter which days team members have off for holidays. You have to enter holidays manually, however, which is laborious considering you can usually just select or import a list of holidays for a specified country in other work management apps. So while we like the ability to enter custom holidays and days off, it could be easier.

Communication and Collaboration

Some of my favorite Zoho Projects features relate to communication and collaboration. The app gives you ample tools, some of which you can opt to include or exclude during the initial setup. One reason you might exclude some of these tools is if your team uses some other apps for team messaging, such as Slack, and you don't want to confuse people as to where conversations should take place.

For one, Zoho Projects offers you a chat box that's built right into the workspace. That way, you can ask colleagues questions about the projects or tasks you're working on without having to flip to another app. Forums are another option, which are better than chat when it comes to asynchronous communication. There are also status updates to tell your colleagues what you're working on and an activity feed where you can see all activity across a project in reverse chronological order.

Another communication tool I like is near-seamless integration with Zoho Meeting. On certain pages, you see a button that says Meet Now at the top. One click and it creates an online video or audio meeting in a new tab. Before the meeting starts, an invite prompt appears so that you can add people to the meeting. Your colleagues receive a notification containing the invitation and link to the meeting in real time. They can join without having to open any other extra apps or type in a meeting ID.

I also like that some notifications are interactive. For example, you can reply to or comment on important matters from the notification box, rather than needing to follow a link to the page where the original information appears.

Time Tracking

Some project management apps, including Zoho Projects, come with time tracking. It's quite different from what you get out of a dedicated employee time tracking app, though. By comparing Zoho Projects' time tracking with features found in dedicated apps, you may be able to tell which one will serve your purposes better.

In Zoho Projects, a built-in timer appears inside every task that you can start and stop to track how much time you spend doing the task. If you accidentally leave a timer running, it alerts you the next time you see it and caps the number of hours you can log for the day if you've exceeded an amount set by the account administrator. You can also log time manually. Time can be classified as billable or non-billable.

A Weekly Log Time in the Timesheet area makes for an easy way to track time as well. Just type in the number of hours spent on each project. 

One unique feature in Zoho Projects is the ability to clock in on multiple tasks at once. You can't do that in most time-tracking apps, including Hubstaff, VeriClock, and TSheets. Keep in mind that these other apps are specialized time tracking services, whereas time tracking in Zoho Projects is designed to fit into the context of project management.

Zoho Projects has strong time-tracking features for admins, including the ability to track approvals. Admins can also adjust the rules for timesheets, such as the maximum number of hours someone can log having worked in any given day or week. Admins can give team members permission to log past time and future time, or to prevent them from doing so.

Unlike TSheets, Zoho Projects doesn't let you separate accounts to track time for an admin or an employee. The only permissions you set are for who can view what. Zoho Projects does provide impressive configuration options like VeriClock does. You can block employees from adding a timesheet or you can set permissions, so they only have view access to their own.

You can manage employee time logs from Zoho Projects' mobile apps, too. There isn't a stopwatch timer in the mobile app, although employees can always log their time afterward.

Overall, time tracking in Zoho Projects is slightly more difficult to navigate than in Hubstaff and TSheets. That's why Zoho Projects is an Editors' Choice winner for project management, but not for time-tracking, where TSheets is the Editors' Choice winner.

Bug and Issue Tracking

If you're a software development team in need of rigorous bug tracking as part of your project management app, Zoho Projects gives you a few options. For one, you can import bugs into Zoho Projects from CSV, XLS, and XLSX files, as well as from JIRA. A second option is to use the included IssueTracker that comes with Zoho Projects. This tool helps you submit, track, organize, and fix whatever problems crop up in a software development project. Not everyone in your account may access the details kept in the IssueTracker. Only admins and managers are allowed to configure the status and workflow of issues.

Zoho also sells IssueTracker as a standalone app called Zoho BugTracker. There's a free version for very small teams, but otherwise, you can expect to pay $480 per year for up to 15 people, plus an additional $36 per year for each extra person.

Integrations and Apps

As mentioned, Zoho makes a whole suite of business apps. As a result, many of its own programs are tightly integrated with Zoho Projects, or at least they can be. For example, you can use the video conferencing tool Zoho Meeting easily from the project management app. You can also integrate Zoho Projects with Zoho Books and Zoho Invoice to manage your accounting.

Zoho Projects works with Google Apps, too. When they're connected, you can upload files directly from Google Drive and export calendar events from one to the other. You can even use Gmail to create tasks and log hours worked.

Other supported integrations include Bitbucket, Box, Dropbox, GitHub, GoToMeeting, Harvest, Insightly CRM, Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, Slack, SugarCRM, Toggl Track, Zendesk, Zapier, and others. Zoho Projects has shown significant growth in the number of apps it supports for integration. It makes a difference for growing teams who are thinking about using Zoho Projects.

A Well-Balanced Project Management App

Zoho Projects is a well-balanced project management app that's especially appealing to small and growing businesses. It offers all the core tools needed for managing projects, such as Gantt charts, basic resource management tools, and timesheets, for a price that's more than fair. Getting started with the app is fairly easy, although it takes a little time to learn its finer points. Overall, Zoho Projects is an excellent project management tool and continues to be an Editors' Choice winner. We recommend it for small teams on a budget, in particular.