ProofHub Review

Most projects fail because of the lack of a proper system, ProofHub tells us in its intro video. Project management tools provide that, adding structure and accountability to your plans. In this ProofHub review, we’ll see how it compares to the best project management software.

ProofHub’s testimonial page is packed full of reports from happy customers from an impressive selection of companies. It has over 85,000 clients, and they include the likes of NASA, Disney and Nike.

ProofHub’s website also has direct comparisons with several other tools, including Wrike, Trello and Asana. ProofHub hasn’t been featured in our comparisons yet, but if you want to see how those tools shape up against one another, take a look at our, hopefully more objective, Wrike vs. Trello and Trello vs. Asana articles.

Our opinion on ProofHub is that is shapes up well, with a strong selection of features and a good interface. We experienced occasional slowdowns, but in general, it was sound. It’s a solid, balanced option that’s good at most things but has a few flaws.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Alternatives for ProofHub

Features

ProofHub’s tasks view lets you create multiple task lists, fill them with tasks and further divide them with checklists of subtasks. That lets you define the structure of your projects. You might want to give each team member their own list or have lists for different goals or time periods.

You can change the status of tasks by clicking a circle on each one. They start with “null” status, which doesn’t immediately convey what the status button does.

The circles switch to “to-do” and “done” as you click the button, which makes more sense, but it isn’t the best approach to ticking tasks off we’ve seen. Check out our Asana review for that. Asana gives you flying narwhals and unicorns when you get things done.

The calendar view allows you to plan your time, showing you the tasks, events and milestones coming in the next month. You can view everything or see just what’s assigned to you or another team member.

ProofHub User Permissions

There’s a dedicated people page where you can keep track of your team members and assign them to groups. You can see who has been invited and not logged in, as well as revoke memberships. You can also set user passwords directly, which is an unusual feature. Read our how to set up a strong password article to make sure you choose them wisely.

That means users’ accounts are closely coupled to your team, in contrast to Trello, which makes users create their own accounts and then join teams that invite them. Read our Trello review to learn more about it.

The timeline is a pop-up window on the right of the screen that logs changes made by team members. It’s fantastic for seeing what everyone has been up to and is a good way to keep people accountable. If you need to track when changes are logged, it makes ProofHub a great choice.

ProofHub’s Gantt view lets you see how tasks fit together and spot potential roadblocks in your schedule, as well as assess the impact of delays. It allows you to create dependencies. You can do so by dragging between dots at the end of tasks. You can also drag tasks around to reschedule them and organize things visually. It can be awkward, but in general, it works well.

If you expect to use the Gantt view a lot, read our TeamGantt review for a tool focused on it.

The different views allow you to show tasks from multiple projects together, so if you have lots of things going on, you can see how everything fits together and spot when people are more or less busy.

Each user gets their own page showing tasks assigned to them, potentially across multiple projects. Everyone also gets their own private task list, the amusingly titled “quickies.”

ProofHub Notes

ProofHub has a notebook system that allows you to make text notes and share them with your team. You can color code them, too, so you can use some for critical information and some for client details or whatever else you need. Note-taking apps are a great way to document your project as you work.

ProofHub does a good job of communication, allowing you to start group chats, as well as private chats with team members. There’s a messaging app in the bottom right of the screen for live chats, and there are discussions, which enable you to have ongoing conversations. You can attach files to those.

ProofHub does a good job handling files. It enables you to upload and share them, and its built-in file viewer lets you view images and .pdf files. You can also leave comments on them. It didn’t play the video or audio files we uploaded, though, and marked our video file with a musical note, so it isn’t perfect. If you’re storing media files, our best cloud storage for video article will help you out.

In addition to uploading from your computer, you can use Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive and Box without needing to do any setup.

ProofHub Integrations

Those are integrations, but most of what’s available was installed by default in our trial and there weren’t many extras. There was no Zapier integration, for example. Though ProofHub supports a good selection of file sharing services, there isn’t much scope to extend it beyond what it does by default.

Fortunately, that’s plenty. It has many views and communication options and it’s a good choice if you want to keep your work in one place.

You get 15GB or 100GB of storage depending on your plan. That’ll be fine for most people, but if you’re working with video, you’ll want more. Check out our best cloud storage for large files article for options.

ProofHub’s time tracking features let you estimate how long things will take and log the actual hours spent on them. That tells you how accurate you were and can help you see where the extra hours went and improve your productivity over several projects.

It includes a timer that makes tracking simple and is easy to use. You just click it, and it appears in the bottom left of the screen. Click “save,” and you can assign the tracked time to a project and add necessary details.

It has options to import and export data, but they’re limited. You can only import from Basecamp and export to a .html file. There’s no option to export a .csv or to any particular tool. Read our Basecamp review if you’re thinking of using it.

Even ProofHub can’t import the .html file it exports, though coders will be able to extract something from it. Plus, you can only export once per day, so if you delete it accidentally you’ll have to wait to try again. Exporting takes a while, too, but that’s not unusual.

The exported .html file contains a complete mini-website version of your project, though, and is useful to look around, if not to import to another service.

ProofHub lets you control whether or how often you get notified about messages. You might also want to uncheck the junk mail box, called “product related updates,” on the options page.

ProofHub Reports

ProofHub’s report page gives you an overview of problems, showing you whether tasks and milestones are overdue, as well as letting you see what individual team members have on their plates. That’s useful if you want to know whether to ease off or ramp things up.

If you want to make your team feel more at home, you can use your own logo and pick a background color. You can also pick a theme for your login page. There’s quite a selection, such as the rainbow theme, which has clouds floating by and an animated rainbow.

You can pick a custom domain name, too, which is a nice touch.

If you just can’t wait until you get to the office, ProofHub has you covered with Android and iOS apps.

ProofHub has a wide selection of views, offers dependency management and works with several storage platforms. It could do with more integrations, but it offers plenty without them.

ProofHub Features Overview

User Friendliness

It doesn’t take long to get started with ProofHub. It’s quick and painless to sign up for a free trial, with no need to enter credit card details. It requests a phone number, but doesn’t prevent you from making one up. You are asked a few questions and given the option to request a demo.

Logging in is annoying because you have to enter your custom URL before your email and password combination, and we can see people forgetting it or not writing it down.

Once logged in, you get to pick your color scheme, so if you aren’t fond of the one in the screenshots, that’s our fault.

There’s a screen to invite coworkers, after which you’re presented with a four-minute introductory video.

Once into the tool proper, a sample project is provided to show you ProofHub’s basic structure. It includes task lists, many of which match the software’s controls and features. If you work through all of them, you’ll have a good idea of how things work by the end of it. Learning by doing is the best way.

The sample project included comments and notes posted in our name, which we found cheeky. There was one saying that we recommended ProofHub, for example. You’ll have to finish the review to find out if that’s actually the case.

The sample project stopped working the second time we logged in. We tried logging out and back in but couldn’t, and we had to wait for a while before it worked. We checked its system status page and it seemed the whole website was having connectivity issues. That only happened to us once while testing it, though.

Creating Projects in ProofHub

Creating projects is easy. If you have multiple similar ones, you can create a template or copy an existing project when you need to duplicate your setup. No templates are included to help you get started, unfortunately. Take a look at our Airtable review to learn about a platform that has them.

Tasks are easy to create and sort into lists. Each contains a lot of information. Besides the basic description, they can be given labels, which show their priority as well as whether they’re in progress. You can assign them to people, give them due dates, make comments and attach files to them.

The interface is clear and the controls invite you to play with them to see what they do. It is generally easy to figure out but not quite as simple as Trello or as beautifully designed as monday.com. Read about our favorite project management tool in our monday.com review.

Sometimes things didn’t work as expected, but we always figured them out with a bit of playing around. ProofHub is at the easier end of the spectrum when it comes to getting things done.

Using ProofHub

Navigation is fast and controls respond quickly, which isn’t always the case with browser-based tools and makes a big difference to the moment-to-moment experience of using them.

We’ve seen complaints on the web about general slowness, but we didn’t find that. There was the occasional delay. Ticking tasks off took a second at one point and adding task dependencies was clunky.

The layout went awry when resizing and restoring the window. There are other missteps, too. Having two “manage” menus with the same icon seems needlessly confusing.

The attractive login themes are easy to miss on the “manage account” page. Opening that page auto-selects the restricted IP address access checkbox, which stops you from closing it if you make other changes without unchecking it. That’s clumsy and makes two strong features awkward to work with.

On one occasion, ProofHub’s timer window went missing while apparently still running and the program’s menus stopped opening correctly at one point, too.

Overall, though, ProofHub scores well here. Its occasional problems are outweighed by its generally high quality and readable user interface.

Cost

Most project management services charge by user, but ProofHub takes a different approach. You pay a flat fee and can add as many users as you like to your projects.

It comes in two versions. The Essential plan is $45 per month and gives you the core features for your team. The Ultimate Control plan has many extra features, such as network control, role customization and data export. You also get priority support.

The Ultimate Control plan costs $89 per month at the time of writing, which is a discount over the usual $150 per month price. That’s among the cheapest offers around and is especially good value if you have a moderate to large-sized team.

Nonprofits can save even more with a 20 percent discount, so contact ProofHub to find out if you qualify. You might also want to look at our FunctionFox review because that service has discounts for educators and nonprofits.

If you want to test it, there’s a generous 30-day trial that lets you do so. If you sign up after that, you can pay by credit card or PayPal, as well as by bank transfer with annual billing.

Essential	1-year plan $ 3.75/ month $45.00 billed every year
Ultimate Control	1-year plan $ 7.42/ month $89.00 billed every year

ProofHub is cheap, has a long free trial and plenty of discounts and ways to pay. It scores well here as a result and is a great choice if you’re looking for an inexpensive tool for a mid to large-sized team.

If you’re not so fussed about watching the purse strings, read our Aha review for a high-quality but expensive alternative.

Security & Privacy

The security page on ProofHub’s website offers information on what it does to protect you from cybercrime, but it doesn’t tell us everything we’d like to know.

Its privacy policy goes into more detail, and it can be read and understood without a law degree. ProofHub says all the right things, promising not to hand your data to anyone without a warrant and to inform you about data requests if legally able to do so. It basically says it doesn’t do anything beyond what you’d expect with your information.

It complies with both the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. privacy shield frameworks and has a dedicated  email contact if you need to get in touch regarding how your data is used. Data is removed from its servers within 15 days of you closing your account. Our how to protect your privacy guide talks more about keeping your data safe.

ProofHub uses SSL to protect data in transit, but we don’t know what TLS version it has. It doesn’t encrypt data at rest. Our description of encryption article goes into more detail on the subject than ProofHub does.

We noticed that its .html export function produced a file that let us download files from its server without re-entering a password. That seemed generous to us, but there’s a balance between security and convenience. We could also close our browser session and get back into it without logging in again.

It doesn’t have two-factor authentication, which is unfortunate. Take a look at our what is two-factor authentication article to learn why we value the feature.

In the app, you can customize user roles. You can set a wide range of permissions and create roles as you see fit. Confusingly, you can’t change the settings in the default roles, but it’s easy to create and assign new ones. That’s a powerful feature for controlling how your team interacts with the platform.

ProofHub does the basics right, but doesn’t go the extra mile like some platforms. If this is an area of particular concern for you, read our Wrike review to learn about a top-quality platform that nails online security.

Service & Support

A question mark icon at the top right of ProofHub’s interface takes you to its dedicated help and support page. It has over 100 articles explaining the tool’s various features and functions. There are also several videos if you prefer to learn that way.

The support page includes a contact form, email address and Twitter handle, giving you several methods to get in touch.

ProofHub’s support is listed as a contact by default in the live chat window you use to talk with teammates. We got a surprise when trying to ask a question there, though, because it turns out that clicking the support contact in the IM system just redirects you to its regular support page, which doesn’t have a live chat option.

A button on the support page asks which channel you prefer to use to start a conversation in but only gives you one choice: email. We made our inquiry via its contact form instead, asking if two factor authentication was available. It replied around six hours later, which was impressive because we asked late on Sunday in U.S. time.

We were happy with ProofHub’s quick response to our inquiry and its knowledgebase was good, but we didn’t like its non-existent live chat option.

Final Thoughts

ProofHub has a lot to offer. It’s easy to create tasks and lists, and it has plenty of views and features. Its communication tools are good, and its file sharing isn’t bad, either. It isn’t the hottest on security, but it’s convenient to use. If not for a few usability issues it’d be one of the better tools out there. As it is, it’s a decent choice but not one that stands out from the competition.

It’s worth keeping an eye on, though. A few nips and tucks to the interface and better response times in places and it’d be one of the strongest tools out there.

For now, though, it’s worth checking out, but you may want to see what other options there are, for example monday.com. 

If you’ve taken ProofHub for a spin, please share your thoughts on it in the comments. Thanks for reading.