Project management software smackdown

22.06.2012

From the very first screen, I was impressed, especially with the dashboard that contained pretty much everything I needed to see about my own work. This system enables an unlimited number of users to track tasks, projects, time, and expenses in a cloud-based interface that was fast and efficient to navigate.

The AceProject sidebar enables easy access to all of these categories, so you and your fellow users can find what they need fast. You can either view tasks or projects that are only assigned to you, so there's not a lot of clutter with other projects' information getting in your way.

I was really intrigued by the time and expenses features, which let you track time spent on projects and tasks, and any additional expenses a project might have. Managers can approve time and expenses as needed. You can even generate nicely formatted time or expense reports to turn into managers.

I also liked the Portfolio feature, that gathered all the projects assigned to me in one place. It was here that I found the stand-alone Documents library, as well as access to Gantt Charts that showed task and project progress. Whole workflows could not be created , but it was a simple matter to assign dependencies to any task, which did pretty much the same thing, just more ad hoc.

Document management in general was relatively clear and easy to work with; the Document library was good, but it was a little hard to tell which tasks had documents assigned to them without cracking open the task itself.