Product Review: Zoho Projects

I’m continually curious to learn more about the enterprise project management software market 🤓 What products exist? How could they potentially revolutionize the way that teams do business without breaking the bank?

This time, I’m taking a look at Zoho Projects, the project management software solution associated with a much larger Chennai-based B2B software company called Zoho.

Product Philosophy

The idea behind Zoho’s business software suite is to build a solution for any business problem that an organization might encounter. Zoho offers 50+ software applications ranging from customer support to finance to sales to HR, with the goal for a business to run itself entirely using Zoho.

Zoho’s project management solution, Zoho Projects, is a workhorse, offering a broad array of functionality to meet the needs of the company’s primarily mid-size and enterprise customers.

Even if you’re a smaller organization that is looking to get started with project management software, Zoho Projects could be a good fit if you either: 1) want to run other parts of your business on Zoho or 2) hope to scale your project management practices over time.

Let’s dive in to explore Zoho Projects’ features!

Features

Portfolio Dashboard. When you log into Zoho Projects, you’ll see a home page that includes a personalized dashboard summarizing the status of your portfolio. You’ll see which projects are active, including upcoming deadlines, ownership information, and cost and schedule performance.

Most importantly, you can customize the dashboard based on the information you would like to see. Clutch for controlling project managers who can’t stand clutter.

Home page with portfolio dashboard

Task Management. In addition to a higher-level project view, Zoho Projects lets you drill down into the detailed tasks that comprise each of your projects. Task view options include:

• A Gantt chart view that you can custom color code. While I’m not typically a Gantt chart fan, I like that this view lets you create and edit dependencies AND adjust the dependency type (although I’m still waiting to encounter a start-to-finish dependency IRL…)

  You can also toggle the view to show the critical path only. And, even better—Zoho Projects gives you the option to set a baseline for your project timeline 🥰 Sounds simple, but it’s amazing how hard this is to find.

• A Kanban view to visualize ongoing tasks.

• A calendar view that helps you schedule tasks, events, and meetings.

Within the task management portion of the tool, you can also enter project milestones along with their supporting tasks and sub-tasks. You can filter within the tasks view to zero in on items that meet criteria you specify (e.g., task status.)

Finally, Zoho Projects includes built-in project templates and task lists so you don’t have to create these elements from scratch. If your clients insist that your project is special and your suggested template won’t cut the mustard, you can add custom fields.

Charts and Reports. Zoho Projects prides itself on being a report-heavy tool. The product includes multiple built-in reports that you can access via the portfolio dashboard or the left navigation panel.

Example of a custom task report

Some reports of interest include a timesheet report, a project status report, and an ability to view project tasks by assignee. You can also create custom reports (e.g., you can choose to see a report of outstanding bugs organized by severity.)

I am particularly pumped to see their version of a resource utilization chart, which visualizes how work is distributed across the team. I like that you can drag and drop from the chart view to redistribute work on the fly. Essential for scenario planning.

Resource utilization chart

You know your girl asked about accessibility as soon as I saw those reds and greens. Surprisingly, Zoho Projects hasn’t gotten many customer requests for this feature (yet), so accessibility enhancements remain in the discovery stage rather than on the immediate roadmap.

While Zoho Projects does offer integrations with most of your standard Google and Microsoft products, I wish there were more options for integration with advanced analytics tools to augment the product’s existing reporting capabilities.

If you’re operating within the Zoho ecosystem, however, you do have a bit more flexibility here (definitely a consideration if you’re in the early stages of shopping around for enterprise business software.)

Time Management. Zoho Projects offers a built-in time tracking feature. Users can add their time manually via timesheet entries. Another option is to use an automatic timer.

Using this feature is as simple as starting the timer once you start working on a task and then stopping it when you take a pause. The information flows directly into your timesheet. You can even set up an approval process to review time logs for your people. YES PLEASE.

Time tracking doesn’t do too much good if it doesn’t link to your budget. I was glad to see that Zoho Projects also offers budget tracking capabilities (again, sounds basic but is not universally available in other applications I’ve used.)

Within each project, the project manager can input the project budget based on estimated staff or project hours. You can integrate with Zoho Books and Zoho Invoice accounting software to pay your bills based on project-level data.

Team Collaboration. Zoho Projects offers a lot of team collaboration capabilities, with a stated goal of both reducing context switching and the need to invest in additional applications.

TBH, the amount of team collaboration capabilities felt a little haphazard, likely reflecting the early adoption of these features relative to Zoho Projects’ competitors.

The good news is that you’re hooked up with everything you could possibly want in terms of collaboration. The downside is it would be a cleaner user experience if these features integrated more tightly.

Team collaboration capabilities include:

• Built-in social feed so you can see updates on what’s going on with the projects you’re involved with

• The ability to add comments or file attachments to existing projects, tasks, or issues (i.e., bugs)

• A “discuss” tab that lets you send async messages regarding a specific project (both DMs and group chats.) You can also initiate video calls via Zoho Meeting (their version of video conferencing software) directly from the tab.

• A forum module to facilitate detailed discussions

• Pages, a wiki and document management repository. Pages integrates with Dropbox, Google Docs, and Zoho's version of document management software, Zoho Work Drive.

Automation. I’m a sucker for a good workflow builder that automates routine project management tasks. Zoho Projects’ blueprint feature lets you create custom flowcharts to build out the well-orchestrated process of your dreams.

Sample workflow builder

You can trigger custom actions based on updates to custom fields. For example, you can configure a workflow so that a certain team receives incoming high-priority tasks, followed by daily reminders until they complete the work.

Suddenly, you have more time to work on that strategy presentation instead of reminding your team to complete routine tasks.

User Administration. Although you can’t share links externally, you can export most of the views in Zoho Projects, including projects, milestones, tasks, issues, and timesheet logs, as either PDF, XLSX, or CSV files.

Additionally, you can export Gantt charts, calendars, project dashboards, and reports as PDFs—perfect for that executive presentation.

You can adjudicate user permissions in Zoho Projects for both internal and external users based on user profiles that you define. It’s a nice touch that even external users can receive custom permissions.

Product Pricing

Zoho Projects offers three plan tiers, including a basic free plan for up to 3 users. They have a 10-day free trial for their premium and enterprise plans, which are $5 and $10 per user per month, respectively.

Zoho Projects pricing comparison

The enterprise plan offers additional project templates, external access permissions, and storage space relative to the premium plan. If you’re not sure which plan might be right for you, check out their detailed feature comparison for more information.

Even better is the cost comparison calculator that lets you see where Zoho Projects stacks up against competitors like Jira, Monday.com, and Asana.

I am pleased with what this product can do for you for the price point. Plus, their trial options give you some latitude to get started and test things out with minimal risk involved.