Zoho Projects Reviews

One of the first things you’ll notice about Zoho Projects is its well thought out and attractive interface, which facilitates its smooth user experience. There’s a customizable dashboard with switchable widgets for My Tasks, My Overdue Work Items, My Events, and others.

The collapsable sidebar has shortcuts for the homepage, reports, projects, collaboration, tasks, phases, timesheets, and recent projects. You can also add your own shortcuts by using internal web URLs.

Regarding work management, Zoho Projects offers project templates for various purposes, including construction, IT, marketing, vehicle inspection, and even wedding planning. These templates are warmly welcomed as they’re a big help for starting the project management journey, especially if you’re new to this type of software.

Additionally, the blueprints feature enables users to create custom workflows using an intuitive drag-and-drop editor. It’s easy to add automation to workflows across projects, reducing tedious manual tasks. For instance, it lets you automate notifications, email alerts, task transitions, and authorizations.

The combination of pre-made project templates and building your own workflows makes Zoho Projects stand out for its user-friendliness. However, it should be mentioned that both features are exclusive to paid subscriptions.

Task management also includes excellent features. The platform lets users break down projects into manageable project phases, task lists, and subtasks, which allows teams to create a clear roadmap. In addition, Zoho Projects has gantt charts and kanban boards, which offer good alternatives for visualizing project plans and tracking progress. To coordinate projects even more, you can create dependencies by setting up relationships between tasks.

Another highlight of Zoho Projects is its powerful customization options, which allow teams to work more effectively. You can add custom fields to tasks, build custom views to filter out specific data, use unique domains, and tailor layouts to your preference.

Since Zoho Projects offers in-depth project management features, it would only make sense to provide time tracking – which it does. This solution includes timesheets and timers to track the time spent on each task efficiently.

This further enhances the whole package’s functionality as time tracking is fundamental for increased transparency, efficient expense tracking and client billing, and detailed insights.

Regarding insights, Zoho Projects offers impressive reporting capabilities. Multiple types of charts make data visualization easy, and you can generate basic and custom reports, as well as productivity and workload assessments. Additionally, it’s easy to integrate Zoho Analytics to enhance your reporting capabilities.

Zoho Projects includes additional features such as issue tracking, which allows you to submit, track, and prioritize issues. SLA management is also offered, which is pivotal to ensuring client satisfaction by defining service level agreements and escalations.

For team collaboration, Zoho Projects has chat rooms, interactive feeds for updates, and document and sharing tools. All these features are complemented by user administration that includes user profile management and customization, role permissions, read-only users, and resource management.

For businesses already using third-party software for recruiting, mailing, analytics, and other operational needs, Zoho Projects offers a marketplace for integrating these tools. It’s compatible with services like Google Calendar, MC Excel, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, JIRA, Dropbox, Slack, and Zapier.

Alternatively, you can just integrate with Zoho’s ecosystem and enhance your project management system from within. The apps include Zoho Books, Zoho Invoice, Zoho Analytics, Zoho CRM, and Zoho People. Although Zoho offers numerous integrations, it still lags behind some competitors.

Due to the sheer number of features available in Zoho Projects, we found that getting started wasn’t the easiest task. For first-timers, it involves creating a new project or selecting one of its templates, followed by inviting team members to join it and assign specific roles and permissions.

For the next step, we recommend breaking down the project into tasks, subtasks, and project phases, and then implementing timesheets to log billable and non-billable hours. While the interface is easy to navigate, the setup process may take a while.

However, it’s worth the effort because in the end you get a comprehensive view of your project’s progress and the ability to track team performance effectively.

Alternatively, those looking to switch from another online project management tool can easily migrate data from various other solutions like JIRA, HubSpot, Monday.com, Salesforce, and Basecamp.

Zoho Projects is available as a web and mobile app for iOS, Android, and iPadOS. It supports both portrait and landscape view modes and offers an interface as intuitive as its web version, with the option to customize colors and themes.

However, the mobile app doesn’t include all of Zoho Projects' features. It’s limited to essential task management, time tracking, and a feed for staying updated on projects, tasks, and related discussions. That said, the mobile app is still excellent for on-the-go teams, allowing them to manage their work efficiently while away from their desk or office.

Online project management solutions don’t always come cheap, but this isn’t exactly the case with Zoho Projects. The cheapest paid subscription is Premium, which costs $4 per user per month and includes unlimited projects, 100GB of storage, time tracking, and reports.

For more in-depth features, there’s the Enterprise plan, which costs $9 per user per month, and adds custom profiles and roles, SLA. Plus, subscribing on an annual billing cycle lets you save up to $12 per user per year.

That said, you don’t actually have to pay to use Zoho Projects, as there’s a completely free and credit card-less version that includes the basics to start managing your projects.

Either way, we recommend first trying Zoho Projects' Premium and Enterprise plans by using the 10-day free trial combined with its 30 or 45-day money-back guarantee (depending on the subscription). For payments, the company accepts MasterCard, American Express, PayPal, and Wire Transfer for yearly subscriptions.

Even though we were told the average response time for ticket submissions is around 6 to 8 hours, we got a reply after 2 hours, which is remarkable considering the app also features a built-in live chat. In fact, we recommend using this online chat system for reaching customer support, as it’ll deliver the fastest response – most of the time instantly.

In general, Zoho’s customers have positive experiences with customer support. Although some find it inconsistent, most praise it for its responsiveness and professionalism.

In addition, it provides reliable task management, built-in time tracking, and detailed reports. Unfortunately, the abundance of features means there’s a steep learning curve getting used to the platform.

Zoho Projects doesn’t offer as many integrations as its competitors. Still, its app ecosystem allows businesses to integrate other Zoho products and build a cohesive project management system without requiring external subscriptions. For companies seeking on-the-go support, Zoho has a mobile app, although it’s limited in features.

With a credit card-less 10-day free trial, a free plan for up to 5 users, and paid tiers starting at just $4 per user per month, Zoho Projects is an excellent choice for anyone looking for a cost-effective yet feature-rich project management solution.