Online Project Management Software

Every project requires some form of tracking, whether it is a simple to-do list or a highly detailed gantt chart. At some stage a some formal planning must take place, and if you are collaborating across different physical locations an online tool can really help.

I had a few requirements:

• Ability to track milestones & tasks
  
• Sepecifiy interdependencies between tasks
  
• Track issues/bugs (Ticketing)
  
• A visual display of the schedule (eg: Gantt, Time/Time, or Burndown chart)
  

I also wanted the tool to allow different management approaches (ie: not a purely scrum-based tool), and the usual niceties such as email notifications and a blog/wiki/forum/etc. Finally I wanted all this for free (ofcourse!). The usual suggestions are Bugzilla, Trac and MediaWiki, however none of these provide all the features we needed. Some of the better products I found included:

• Redmine - A free (open source) web application with issue tracking, gantt charts, email notifications, wiki, forums, time tracking, etc. Unfortunately it is still quite 'beta' but definately one to watch for the future.
  
• Assembla - A paid web service with task management, issue tracking, some scrum support, wikis, forums, but no visual way of representing a schedule as far as I could tell.
  
• Clocking IT - A free (closed) web service that provides project tracking, it looks great but seemed a bit too simplistic for my needs.
  
• CodeSpaces - A paid service, but offers free accounts. Easy to use, supports visual scheduling, forums, but is tightly SVN and scrum based (card walls, stories, etc.) and the help was a bit poor. I seriously investigated this option but decided against it in the end, however I can recommend this option.
  
• CoMindWork - A paid service, but offers a limited free version. Can be both online and installed, provides a decent visual gantt chart with task and time tracking, issue tracking, email notifications, wiki, blog, and good help videos and instructions all through making it easy to learn. A big bonus is that it directly imports and exports between Microsoft Project, integrates with BaseCamp and provides an API for import/export. It also has a bit of a plone-like feel, which I was comfortable with having used it before.
  

So CoMindWork was the winner for me. Some of the other promising ones I was looking at included:

• Zoho projects
  
• Unfuddle
  
• Agile42
  

but since I'd found CoMindWork by then I didn't look into them into too much depth.