Highrise CRM (discontinued) vs. Zoho Projects

I am not familiar with other contact management systems; before Highrise, we used a paper rolodex. But for our purposes, which have certainly changed over the last several years, we've been able to adapt Highrise to our needs. We've changed our tagging protocol - now, for example, we have social media tags, so I can narrow a contacts search down by contacts who have Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. And we've added fields in the Contact Info so that we can include links to those pages when they exist, and you can click on it to go directly to those pages. It definitely meets our needs, though we are a fairly small marketing department, under 50 employees who utilize Highrise, and probably far fewer who use it frequently. Particularly with the tagging system, I could see a large number of users creating useless and overwhelming numbers of tags

Incentivized

My work involves projects of 5-15 people with numerous projects running simultaneously. Prior to Zoho, I did not have a central location from which to view all project statuses at once. Zoho looks to provide this and also looks like it will deliver. I am anxious to see how our organization's use of it develops. At this time, I feel I am likely to recommend Zoho Projects because my organization has made great software decisions in the past so I have a level of trust already that the research has been done that Zoho is the best solution for our line of work.

Incentivized

• Able to see all activity, this helps if you need to find out who made updates last.
• You can create different tags for clients. We have tags labels for each product the client has with our company, so when we need to pull reports it saves a lot of time.
• If a client has multiple people in the office you can add all their informaiton.

Incentivized

• Swiss Army Knife: The suite of Zoho projects can be tailored to fit the needs of any business. It's great to have a bunch of different software offerings that will work together seamlessly.
• Task Customization: Zoho allows you to customize your tasks more than other platforms (add start dates, due dates, dependencies, subtasks...)

Incentivized

• Would like to be able to copy information from the right sidebar more easily without having to open up & edit the contact (like Skype or email info)
• When I start a search by tags and pull out information, I have to re-do the tagged search to pull it up again
• Takes a while to export a custom list

Incentivized

• More flexibility on making the user interface more compact (like Excel or MSP). Current interface is well spaced, but some users may like a more compact view.
• More simplified Gantt Charts that help us understand progress and dependencies.
• Ability to export projects to Excel for sharing with others we can't/don't want to bring on to Zoho projects

Incentivized

It's become the heart of our contact management system - it's low cost, simple to use and high impact for us. We are using a version that allows for unlimited employees, 50,000 Highrise contacts and 100 Gb or file storage. This means to us that this is scalable and sufficient for the foreseeable future. By using some other apps we can add some things that we need that aren't built into the product. We use infusionsoft but not as a contact manager for clients. When a contact in infusionsoft reaches a certain stage and we get more "hands on", we use Zapier to setup the contact in Highrise and create an embryonic deal. We like Mailchimp for email newsletters and Mailchimp syncs nicely with Highrise. Finally we use SalesClic to give us a more refined sales pipeline.

Zoho has been able to fit the needs of our Engineering organization. The employees and management that are using it have not found a 'catastrophic' reason to discontinue use. Although certain features and better support mechanisms would be much better, it has been able to keep with both basic needs and more advanced ones. A majority of the company has enjoyed the basic interface it offers, the apps it has for iPhone and Blackberry, the mobility of updating a project without needing to be connected to any type of server. There are still improvements that can be made in future releases but as the person who originally purchased the solution for our company, I have found it to be an excellently priced solution in the functionality it offers.

It's quick and easy to setup and use. There isn't any feature "bloat". Nothing to struggle with

Zoho Projects is an easy project management tool to use. It provides all the functionality that we required for handling projects. We can easily create personal forms for projects and tasks, allowing us to add and report on our own desire. Apart from this we can create and edit documents in real time which saves our time. This allows us to share text docs, presentations, tables with the whole team and we can work on them together

Incentivized

Has not been down to my knowledge.

Speed meets my expectations.

They are quick and SO nice. They are very friendly and are eager to help.

Incentivized

Although it might lack intuitiveness, once you get a hang of how Zoho Projects works, you can do a LOT. The impact good project management has on profitability is huge, and it has helped not only improve communication and coordination when working on a project, but more importantly have adequate tracking of time, due dates and potential bottle necks

Incentivized

We use to use Connectwise and Highrise is a breath of fresh air compared to Connectwise. We love that the 37 signal services are all web based. We can connect anywhere making working on the go much easier for everyone. Our challenge with Basecamp was that it was a computer program based product which made it very slow and inefficient. It also conflicted with our Mac computers because it only worked on a Windows platform. None of this is the case for Highrise. I've never had a load issue nor has it ever run slow. It's up to the minute with any updates and entries. The categories it offers is wonderful and very appreciated. Organization is key, and it's the best way to keep everyone on task. Overall, we are very happy with the product

Incentivized

Zoho Projects provides a more limited set of functionality and customization options than other task/bug trackers on the market, but what it lacks in functionality it makes up for in ease of use. It probably has 80-90% of the features of its competitors but takes about a third of the time to get up and running and realizing value.

Incentivized

• We use it to streamline and assign inbound sales calls.
• Sales reps use it to automatically store correspondence , schedule follow ups, and note requirements.
• We download the text data and apply big data techniques to learn about customer needs and product requirements in the aggregate.

Incentivized

• Unfortunately, prior to creating Project Task Templates we'd occasionally miss a step and something that was necessary would be overlooked.
• The creation of the Project Templates was a team collaborative effort to make sure that everyone had some input as different people was integral to specific projects.
• It took a little while to learn some of the more tricked out features like task dependency but even starting out with the most basic of features was very significant.

Incentivized