Zoho Projects vs Strategic Roadmaps: Which is a better fit?

Prathamesh M: Hi, my name is Prathamesh. I work as a tech lead in an online retail company and I give Zoho Projects five out of five. Before using Zoho Projects, we used to use JIRA in our company. We had many issues with JIRA in our company. And one of the thing was customization of the desktops and the customization of the projects, especially the time trackers and the features, which are responsible for customizing the dashboards. After understanding the issues with JIRA Projects, we realized that we're required to find a substitute for JIRA. And we had three options. One was the Zoho projects, second was Trello and third was Asana. And out of these three, we chose the Zoho projects so what, Asana and Trello is because Asana is more for [inaudible 00:00:44] large scale projects, which require high level of customization, but also come at a high price. Whereas Trello, is for small scale projects, which don't give you much customization, but which comes at a low price. Zoho Projects, actually fits very well between these two products. It came at the right price. It gave us the right customization for a medium sized project, what we do at our company, and it was the best option that we had out of these three. So we went with Zoho projects compared to the Asana and Trello. Zoho Projects, we selected this one with this product because of three reasons, one is scalability, second is feasibility and third is the price. When we talk about scalability, Zoho Projects has very good customizable desktops, has very good at customizing dashboards where you can customize your dashboard as per your project. So if a project is running in Agile, you can actually customize the dashboard to suit your Agile needs. If the project is running in Waterfall, in Zoho projects, you can customize your dashboard to suit Waterfall needs. So this is one of the main reason, and that's why the scalability was taken into consideration when we considered Zoho Projects. Second was feasibility, how reliable it is. Zoho Projects is highly reliable. When you consider projects, which are medium size and little bit larger size. Especially project which has multiple deliverables. Project which has multiple milestones and project which has high amount of sources allocated to it. Especially if you have a 100 member team, which is allocated to a project. Then the feasibility part of Zoho Projects [inaudible 00:02:10] is very highly reliable when it comes to providing the features like online communication using chats, online time trackers, online dashboards looking at particular resources and tracking their times and taking their deliverables and tasks on time. So these were some of the reasons which we're considered on the feasibility part. When it comes to pricing, Zoho Projects is very budget-based and it comes exactly the price point that we wanted it to be, especially for our medium-sized projects that would... So these were the three reasons why we prefer Zoho Projects. Scalability, feasibility and price, or other competencies. So when we considered Zoho Projects, we actually initially worked with the IT team and the sales team of Zoho. So initially, we did work with the sales team of Zoho, then we worked with the IT team. We also hired a third party vendor. So the way it happened was [inaudible 00:02:59] like step one was. Our solutions team, the in-house solutions team now, worked with the IT team of Zoho, and we outsource the implementation work, the production work, customization and implementation work to a third party or vendor. The third party vendor was responsible for developing this whole project for us. It was quality checked by the Zoho IT team. And once that was done, the integration was done by third-party vendors, as well as our in-house IT team in-house ERP system. So integration went very smooth, there were no issues. Quality assurance and quality control was done by the Zoho IT people, as well as by our own in-house people. And third party vendors were only responsible for developing and integration. When it came to onboarding, there was a paramount of support provided by the Zoho IT team to us. Once the initial software was integrated and was, went live with us, for the production by the third party vendor. So good when it comes to integration, as well as onboarding. Zoho IT team did a great job. It was very well supported by our internal IT team, as well as the third party vendor who was responsible for the production of the software. I highly recommend to all other prospect buyers. And the reason is, as I said, it fits very well. If you are a company who is looking for medium-sized projects and project management for those medium-sized projects, especially you are very considerable towards time-tracking because Zoho Projects provided fantastic time-tracking. As well as Zoho Projects tracks deliverables very well. With respect to particular resources allocated to Zoho Projects. So on a scale of 10, I would say, I will use the whole nine out of 10 as a recommender. And I will tell all prospect buyers to look into this part, the part of scalability feasibility and price. Zoho Projects is highly customizable. It fits very well with medium-sized projects, as well as it's the best thing that you can buy or time-tracking and deliverable time.

Brent J.: Hey, I'm Brent, Director of Product, and I give Roadmunk a five out of five. For more reviews, click here. For roadmapping and product management, it goes hand in hand. And we tried a tool called Aha!, and we also tried a simple tool called Trello. And both of the tools didn't work out for us. Trello was a little bit too simple. We needed something a little bit more powerful to connect to our Jira system, so that we could track projects a bit better. And Aha! was just way too complex. You needed to set up tons and tons of stuff. So on the implementation and on the tracking, and moving roadmap items around was just way too complex for us. Yeah. So we ended up picking Roadmunk, and I've actually used this tool at several different companies now. And, we all love it. It's extremely easy to set up. Any team member from your product group can jump in there, and it's super flexible, drag and drop interface. It's easy to move items around. And what probably was the main reason that I like it in a director role was that you can customize the view of your roadmap for any audience. So, if you're talking to your CEO or C-suite or VPs, you can give a specific view for them. And then you can tweak that view and change it for your development team, or maybe one of your development squads, same thing for your UX group. And so, it's super powerful to kind of slice and dice the different view that you want to give all your different stakeholders. Getting started with Roadmunk was really simple. We just signed up online. We got it in our account. Yeah, essentially, no training was needed. I mean, we followed a couple of their little tutorials to get set up, but essentially, the user interface is so simple that pretty much anyone working in software or development will be able to pick it up really easy. You can also import your items. So if you have a spreadsheet or some other tool that you're tracking already, you can quickly import it. But yeah, extremely easy to set up and get going. So anyone that's looking for a really simple, easy, flexible roadmapping tool, Roadmunk would be my first recommendation. The only thing that I'd caution you on, when thinking about Roadmunk, would be, it's not the best tool for prioritization techniques. So if you want a tool to do both, you could look at something else. But if you're good with your prioritization techniques using a whiteboarding tool or Excel or some other tool, Roadmunk is the perfect thing to fit in, in your product organization.