A few years back, when I was working for an IT analyst firm, I headed a project to find us new task/project management software. (Our existing application for this was old and homegrown and pretty bad.)
The issue is that the significant majority of our tasks/projects were very small: Take a briefing with a client, write up notes, attach presentation, possibly include a followup note for sales, done. So project management software that was organized around the principle of a modest number of projects with milestones, actions, sub-tasks, etc. didn't really work for us. (Including the 37signals options.)
We eventually settled on trac which worked pretty well for the purpose. And we'd probably have supplemented that with something more like Basecamp if we got into some more complex projects and simply handled them as a separate case.
My broader point though is that I found that the "best" project management software depended on what you were trying to track.
A few years back, when I was working for an IT analyst firm, I headed a project to find us new task/project management software. (Our existing application for this was old and homegrown and pretty bad.)
The issue is that the significant majority of our tasks/projects were very small: Take a briefing with a client, write up notes, attach presentation, possibly include a followup note for sales, done. So project management software that was organized around the principle of a modest number of projects with milestones, actions, sub-tasks, etc. didn't really work for us. (Including the 37signals options.)
We eventually settled on trac which worked pretty well for the purpose. And we'd probably have supplemented that with something more like Basecamp if we got into some more complex projects and simply handled them as a separate case.
My broader point though is that I found that the "best" project management software depended on what you were trying to track.