OpenProject vs Qatalog: Which is a better fit?

Jacob: Hi, my name is Jacob, and I am the chapter administrator for LANFest Colorado. We are a roughly 500 person strong company and we use OpenProject a lot, so I'm going to give it a five. So, before OpenProject, we were actually utilizing a variety of things, the most mundane of which was email, sending emails back and forth, trying to collaborate on projects. We then switched to Google Drive, but that just didn't quite do what we needed to. Myself as the chapter administrator, I needed to see the overall view of the entire project and what was going on, and Google Drive just did not allow me to do that. Some of the reasons that we chose OpenProject were fairly simple. One, because of the fact that it's open-source and can be deployed on your own host, it's free if you have the infrastructure. So we were able to deploy it that way, compared to other services which charge a significant amount. Us being a 501(c)(3) charity, we try to cut costs wherever we can. So it certainly was a easy decision. Additionally, it had features that we did not have using Google Drive. Again, that overarching view of the entire project, the ability for me to assign tasks to people rather than it just being on a spreadsheet. Getting started with OpenProject wasn't, admittedly, the easiest at first. I am not a Linux person. I am a Windows Systems Administrator in my normal life. So getting some of the HTTPS set up, and things like that, did take a little bit of technical knowhow. However, because of the nature of my team and what it is that we do, I have people that can do that. So I did outsource it to other employees and we managed to get it up and running very quickly. If you're considering getting OpenProject, there's a few things I would recommend you do first. First and foremost, do you need it? And I'm not saying that OpenProject is not necessary, but it is definitely a learning curve. It is definitely a very large time investment to learn how to use the software. If you only have a small team, five people, maybe this isn't the software for you. But as you start to scale, as you start to get bigger and bigger with your projects, this is definitely something you need. And of course, if it's cost related, if you're worried about costs or anything like that, if you can self-deploy this, it is relatively easy and, of course, free.