Easy Projects Review

Easy Projects is a sophisticated-looking tool that focuses on getting things done and saving teams money. Built by Toronto-based developer Logic Software, it has been around since 2004. In this Easy Projects review, we’ll compare it to the competition.

Its clients include HP, Goodyear and Reuters, so it is an established player trusted by several big companies.

We were impressed by its features, as well as its general quality. Everything works well and it is full of useful ways to keep tabs on your project. Task management goes hand in hand with time tracking and billing, and Easy Projects could save you a lot of paperwork.

We were less impressed with its support, which didn’t respond to our questions, despite its sales team finding the time to contact us on multiple occasions.

Aside from its slow support and cost, though, we didn’t find much wrong with it. We would recommend it to anyone looking for a quality, easy-to-use program. It isn’t the most visually appealing software around, but its interface is readable and it gets the job done without being flashy.

Alternatives for Easy Projects

Strengths & Weaknesses

Features

Easy Projects has a strong feature set, and its tools and interface work well. We didn’t have technical problems or issues while using it.

It’s activity center has a list of tasks on the left and a Gantt chart on the right that shows how the tasks fit together. You can change it to a multi-column kanban view if you prefer. If the kanban view meets your needs, it might be worth looking at our Trello beginner’s guide to learn about a simpler alternative.

Easy Projects’s report generator allows you to create tables, pie charts and bar charts using all kinds of metrics. It has many options and filters and it is dynamic, so it is an excellent tool for converting your data into information.

If you need to generate reports regularly, check out our Smartsheet review for another platform that does it well.

You can view time logs that show what team members have been doing, or at least what they’ve logged. If you want to get a breakdown of how your team members are working, you have no shortage of options.

Billing reports for customers are included and you can generate printer-friendly, detailed Gantt charts that will highlight scheduling issues for you.

There are custom forms, which you can use to tally different types of information. You can create them or use one of the ready-made options, which include forms to track leads, job candidates, sprints and more.

You can convert form items into various types of project data, so these are a good method to let people enter information in a reliable way.

Easy Projects User Roles

Easy Projects gives you enormous scope to define roles. Five types are available by default and you can add more. There are more than 15 settings to define what different types of users can do in your account as a whole, as well as options to specify what they can do in particular projects.

You can set the hours per day, manage vacations and choose the start of the work year. If you’re a real monster, you can opt to treat weekends as workdays, too. That said, you can also specify public holidays or even create your own.

You can upload your team logo, as well, so your workspace feels more like home. There are few other visual customization options, though.

It has an easily fine-tuned notification system that lets you choose how often people get notifications. That’s useful if you want to choose whether to nag people about everything or leave them alone to focus.

In addition to giving you more notification options than most tools, Easy Projects allows you to modify the templates used for over 20 kinds of them. Editing them is technical, but it is a powerful way to customize the way your team interacts with the platform.

Storage space depends on your tier, with 50GB available on the Team plan and 500GB for Enterprise users. If you need more than that, take a look at our best online storage for teams article or consider a service with unlimited storage. You can read about one of those in our monday.com review.

If you want to use data from other platforms, you can do so via Easy Projects’s integrations. In addition to working directly with Gmail, Evernote and a handful of other programs, including a few Microsoft tools, you can use Zapier to connect with over 1,000 apps.

Easy Projects has apps for iOS and Android, so you can use it on the go as well as in the browser.

Overall, it is full of high-quality features that work well. It does what you need and does it well, so it gets high marks here.

Easy Projects Features Overview

User-Friendliness

Easy Projects is not a simple tool, but it is designed well enough to make its strong feature set usable. It is not visually attractive, but it consistently gets things right from a usability perspective.

Signing up is simple, though its form sneaks in a few extra fields after you give it your first few pieces of information. It asks for a phone number, but doesn’t force you to provide one. Its terms and conditions look almost readable to humans, too.

There is a 10-minute introductory video which shows you the basics, but it has a PowerPoint feel to it. Once you get into the app after getting your confirmation email, you are offered a selection of categorized tutorials.

There are loads of them, and though the pop-ups for them are small and fiddly, they are accurate and to the point. You can access them as needed by clicking a button at the top right of the screen.

Its sample project includes tasks that help you learn how to use it. We’ve seen the method in a few tools and it remains our favorite for learning to use new platforms.

Its default view is the activity center, which, depending on how you set it up, can include a task list, Gantt chart or kanban view.

Click one of its tasks and you can see the options you have. Tasks can be assigned to team members, categorized and prioritized. It is easy to add dependencies. It involves clicking a plus button, picking from a list of your tasks and selecting one of several dependency types.

It has a hierarchical structure, with subtasks being easy to add and view in an expandable list. You’ll likely use subtasks a lot. You can also comment on and attach files to each task.

You can set tasks to repeat, which is useful if you have regular jobs that need to be assigned because it saves you from having to create multiple identical items.

If you don’t need the complexity of subtasks or dependencies, take a look at our Podio review. It is a powerful tool despite its simple structure.

Easy Projects Gantt View

Like the task views, the Gantt view allows you to create dependencies easily by dragging lines from the tools at the end of each task. That will sometimes result in them being moved automatically to make sure the schedule is workable.

If you like working with the Gantt view, another tool worth a look is TeamGantt. Read our TeamGantt review for more on it.

Easy Projects also has an excellent “audit trail” feature that shows the changes everyone has made. It is a great way to track who has been doing what and hold people to account. If anything, it is a little too detailed. We would be worried about discouraging people from making changes, since the boss can see their every action. Still, it is there if you want to use it.

If you have concerns about who is keeping tabs on your online activity, take a look at our PRISM, Edward Snowden and government surveillance article for interesting information.

Projects include time tracking and cost-related information from the start. Many tools allow you to set those features up, but if you want them out of the box, Easy Projects is a good choice.

For another tool that gets the business side of things right, take a look at our Mavenlink review.

Easy Projects does what it promises, being easy to use, mostly bug-free and enabling useful, business-related information to be entered and tracked. There are simpler platforms around, but Easy Projects does a good job of making complexity manageable and scores well here.

Cost

Easy Projects claims to pay for itself in three months. To allow you to test its claim, it provides a return on investment calculator on its pricing page, which translates the estimated time you’ll save into a cash figure.

For a team of 11, including one manager, that comes to nearly $7,000 using Easy Projects’s default figures. That is a good illustration of how cloud-based tools can save you money. It is worth pointing out, though, that its figures don’t appear to include its compulsory training program.

Price 1 User	$ 24.00/ month
Enterprise Call for details	FREE

Its pricing plan is simple, with just two tiers. The Team plan costs $24 per user per month and the Enterprise price is negotiable. It isn’t the cheapest tool, but there is a free trial, as well as a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Unusually, its “Path to Success” training program is compulsory if you have more than 10 users on the Team plan. You’ll need to get a quote from its sales team for the price.

You are likely to get contacted by salespeople during your trial and, because you can’t see what its training costs on its pricing page, you’ll need to talk to them if you want to use it. From our investigation, it is probably a one-time payment of around $1,000 for 10 users.

Easy Projects also offers big discounts if you sign up for more than one year, so it makes sense to commit to a longer term if that’s what you want. Educators and nonprofits can also get discounts if they contact the sales team.

If you want to see what things will cost upfront, there are platforms with clearer pricing. You can read about a business-focused alternative in our LeanKit review.

To be fair, though, we found Easy Projects’s salespeople helpful. They answered the queries its support team didn’t. Payment is via credit card only, as far as we were able to tell.

Easy Projects gets a decent score on price. It isn’t cheap, but it offers a lot. Be sure to factor in the cost of its training program when sizing it up, though.

Security & Privacy

Business-focused tools need to ensure their clients’ data is safe, and Easy Projects does plenty to reassure you.

It uses Microsoft Azure for its infrastructure and that gives it many features, such as network load balancing and built-in software patching. Easy Projects has several certifications, too, including SOC 1, SOC 2 and HIPAA.

It uses continuous backups, which are geo-redundant, and promises to restore your data from any point in the last 30 days, down to the exact second. That’s an impressive level of accuracy and means you don’t have to worry about data loss.

You can choose whether your data is hosted in the U.S., Canada or Europe, which could be useful if you prefer the privacy laws of a specific jurisdiction. Its FAQ only mentions secure data centers in the U.S. and Canada, though, so its documents are outdated or its European data centers aren’t secure.

Easy Projects Privacy Policy

It has a long but human-readable privacy policy and a separate page detailing its efforts to be compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation by May 2018. It looks like that page is overdue for an update, too. We didn’t find mention of the EU-U.S. or Swiss-U.S. privacy shield frameworks, but the U.S. government doesn’t seem to be keeping up to date on those, either.

Easy Projects’s website doesn’t look up to date, but it covers most bases with respect to privacy and security. Our article on how to protect your privacy also offers tips.

Within the app, its security settings give you plenty of control. You get a fantastic selection of options and can change your users’ password requirements, set up a banned password list and manage password expiration.

You can lock users out after any number of failed login attempts and choose whether to unlock them automatically after a set time or make the user go through password recovery. Users can also be shut out after a period of inactivity.

Login via SAML single sign-on is also available for those who choose the enterprise plan. There’s no two-factor authentication, though.

We were happy with our options here. Two-factor authentication would be a plus, but you get many settings to customize how your team interacts with the platform. In addition to having multiple certifications, Easy Projects gives security and privacy the attention they deserve.

Service & Support

Easy Projects offer support through a variety of methods. You can contact it via phone, email or instant messaging, as well as give it remote access to your projects, so those who prefer the human touch have plenty of options.

A weekly onboarding session is available, though it always starts at the same time, so your location and business hours may make it difficult to attend.

There is also a community forum, but not many questions get responses, so it does not look like something you can rely on.

In the bottom right of the screen, a pop-up offers tips and videos when you enter areas of the platform for the first time. Many screens also have a detailed pop-up that shows an example of what the screen can do with tips on how to do it.

We asked a question about payment methods using the in-app messaging system, but didn’t get a response, despite the person we asked continuing to send us, apparently automated, help suggestions.

There’s also a contact form you can use. We tried using it to ask about the cost of its “Path to Success” program and clarify a few other things we weren’t sure about. We did not get a response there, either, so after patiently waiting a couple of days, we tried asking our questions again, but this time it was in response to a sales email we had received from its product advisor.

That person got back to us with answers to most of our questions, but it was disappointing not to get a response via the two support channels we tried, especially because the forum is lacking. We also got several sales messages via email and the in-app messenger, which was extra annoying after getting the silent treatment from support.

If you want to see a service that responds quickly, read our Basecamp review. It responded to our query in only three minutes, which is the fastest response we’ve seen from a project management support team.

We were disappointed with Easy Projects in this area. We did not get a response when contacting its support team in either method we tried. Its community isn’t that strong, either. There is onboarding but it is compulsory and expensive. Its in-app pop-ups and videos aren’t bad, but we generally felt shortchanged in this area and our score reflects that.

Final Thoughts

Easy Projects surprised us with its impressive features set and an interface that works well, and it gives you a lot of ways to manage your projects. Despite not looking the best, it is a usable and effective tool.

Its support response times were disappointing, so if you value a service that gets back to you quickly and reliably, we suggest looking elsewhere.

That’s a shame because aside from that, Easy Projects gets most things right and has great features. The core platform is strong and effective, with excellent time tracking and auditing. Its report generation is good, complex relationships between tasks are easy to set up and you get plenty of control over notifications and security.

If a platform is good but has weak support, we can usually recommend it to those who prefer figuring things out themselves. That said, we can’t see that kind of person welcoming the repeated sales contacts and compulsory training. Though we didn’t dislike Easy Projects, we feel many people will find a better fit in our roundup of the best project management software.

If you’ve tried Easy Projects and have anything to share with us, please do so in the comments. Thanks for reading.