Outplanr

What do you like best?

Outplanr is an app for teams that need to collaborate on tasks and projects, but don't need full-scale project management software. Outplanr shares many similarities with Asana, the darling app among collaboration services for its ability to manage not just work but also workflows. Outplanr does much of the same. It gives teams a shared place to track tasks in detail, monitor progress, and even tally up time spent on tasks. Outplanr costs about half as much as Asana's business subscription, and it includes a few features not found in Asana, although Asana also does a few things that Outplanr does not. Overall, Asana remains the Editors' Choice for workflow management, but Outplanr is poised to become an attractive alternative, as soon as it adds a few more crucial features.Unlike many other to-do apps and collaboration apps, Outplanr does not offer a free version. You can get a 30-day free trial, however, and no credit card is required. To use the app beyond 30 days, you need a subscription.

Outplanr costs $5 per person per month, with a minimum of three people and a maximum of 50. The plan includes 1GB of storage per person. If you pay for a year's worth of service upfront, you get two months free. In other words, if you pay monthly, it costs $60 per person per year, but only $50 per person per year if you pay annually. Again, those figures are based on having a minimum of three and a maximum of 50 people. For groups larger than 50, contact the company for a custom price quote.

What do you dislike?

While you can create subtasks in Outplanr, you can't create dependencies, such that Task A must be done before Task B. You also can't assign individuals to each subtask, which is a serious limitation. Only the parent task can have an assignee. Task dependencies are more commonly seen in full-featured project management software, although from time to time they crop up in other types of collaboration apps. In Asana ($0.00 at Asana) , for example, subtasks can be assigned to different people.

Some of Outplanr's other big limitations have to do with keeping everyone on the team up to date on what's happening at the task level. For starters, only one person can be assigned to any given task. That makes it impossible to assign two people to jointly complete a task. Moreover, there's no way to add followers to a task so that they can be alerted to changes, and @ mentions (when you use an @ symbol before someone's name so that they'll be alerted to the conversation) aren't supported either.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

To really get rolling with Outplanr, you have to create some projects, groups, and tasks. As mentioned, tasks can be assigned to projects, and they can have subtasks, deadlines, start times, comments, priority ratings, file attachments, and more. Tasks can only be assigned to one project at a time, however. That's not the case in Asana or Sendtask, where tasks can have more than one project. Outplanr does not let you add tags to tasks, making it difficult to filter across all tasks to find those that have something in common other than their project or assignee.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The Work button shows a list of tasks assigned to you. The Plan button brings you to a calendar view, with a summary at the top of what's happening in the selected week, plus summaries below for each person on the team with color-coded bar graphs indicating which days people are going to be busiest. I love this view because it gives managers, in particular, an easy way to glimpse at staff availability. The Plan view also lets you add events to the calendar, which is handy. In the Track section of the app, you see an activity feed across all members. You can filter the activity feed to show the activities of one individual as well.