Basecamp aims to streamline the project management experience and largely succeeds. Its accessible interface, flat pricing model, and variety of effective collaboration options make it a compelling package for new and growing teams. However, that simplicity comes at the expense of many features, from automations to different project views and more. Basecamp’s impressive array of integrations helps bridge the gap in some cases, but it’s not as capable as our Editors’ Choice winners, including Teamwork for client work and Zoho Projects for teams on a budget.

Pricing: The Flat-Fee Plan Makes Sense for Large Teams

Basecamp has three core plans: Free, Pro, and Pro Unlimited. You can trial the Pro and Pro Unlimited tiers for 30 and 60 days, respectively. None of Basecamp’s trials require a credit card number. Instead, Basecamp simply prompts you to sign up after your trial expires.

The biggest limitation of Basecamp’s free plan is that you can maintain only a single project with up to 20 users and 1GB of storage. Otherwise, you get what Basecamp calls its “essential fundamentals”: direct messaging, group chats, Kanban boards, message boards, reports, scheduling, and to-dos.

The Pro plan ($15 per user per month) supports as many users as you want to pay for, unlimited projects, and 500GB of storage space. Outside of the ability to purchase the Admin Pro Pack and Timesheet add-ons, the core functionality of the Pro plan is largely the same as the free plan. That said, Basecamp promises 24/7/365 customer support for Pro subscribers.

Basecamp’s top-end Pro Unlimited plan costs a flat monthly fee ($299) and accommodates an unlimited number of people. It includes everything in the Pro plan, plus more payment options, personal onboarding with the Basecamp team, the aforementioned Admin Pro Pack and Timesheet add-ons, priority support, and a massive 5TB of storage. 

Both of the add-ons available for purchase on the Pro plan cost $50 per month, regardless of how many users are on your account. The Admin Pro Pack add-on gives you administrative tools, including the ability to change who can edit people on a project, project details, send pings, and turn on public links, among other things. The Timesheet add-on lets you track time spent on work within a Basecamp project. Separately, you can purchase an additional 1TB of storage for a flat $50 per month.

Basecamp is somewhat difficult to compare with other project management apps on value due to its unique pricing structure. Its introductory paid plan costs more than Teamwork (starting at $10.99 per user per month, billed annually) and Zoho Projects (starting at $4 per user per month, billed annually), and its free plan doesn’t have as many features, either. GanttPro takes a similar approach to project management, and its introductory premium plan is more affordable at $7 per month, billed annually. However, it doesn’t have a free plan. Add-ons also significantly increase the price of Basecamp’s introductory paid plan. The Pro Unlimited plan could save you significant amounts of money over the top plans of competitors, but that depends entirely on how many people on your team need access. As such, you can get the most value out of Basecamp if you stick with its free tier or adopt it for an especially large team. 

Interface and Ease of Use: Big Tiles, Little Complexity

To get started with Basecamp, all you need to do is make a free account. Basecamp offers dedicated desktop (macOS and Windows) and mobile (Android, iOS, and iPadOS) apps, as well as a web interface. 

The service's onboarding process is effective. Simple video tutorials walk you through the basics you need to get going, but even without them, the interface is incredibly straightforward. It never overwhelms you with too many elements on one screen, and what’s there either has a description or is self-explanatory. 

(Credit: Basecamp/PCMag)

Using Basecamp is closer to using Hulu than Zoho Projects, thanks to its tile-based design. On the one hand, I really appreciate how approachable this makes Basecamp compared with the busy look of many other project management apps. But on the other hand, the interface has so much negative space that it sometimes feels clunky and inefficient. This is the case even with Basecamp’s website, so it’s more a design philosophy than an oversight. Whether you will appreciate the design direction is a matter of preference.

Support: Help Is Always Just a Click Away

If you get stuck, you can send questions directly to the Basecamp team or peruse the knowledge base to find answers yourself. Basecamp even offers live classes and office hours to help new users get up and running. Considering Basecamp’s limited complexity for a project management app and the many support resources available, you really don’t need project management experience or even significant technical ability to use Basecamp.

Managing Projects: Simple, Intuitive Functionality

Once you sign in to Basecamp, you can create a project. You can do so using templates, but you have to create them yourself. Still, setting up a project on Basecamp is easier than it is in most competing apps because you have to make fewer decisions at the start.

Basecamp advertises itself as a project management app, but according to Basecamp’s CEO, Jason Fried, “most project management systems are bloated, complicated, and confusing.” As such, Basecamp gives up some features common to other project management apps to maintain simplicity. For example, the app doesn’t support Gantt or table views; it only supports Kanban boards. 

I created a project to manage an editorial team in testing and populated my Kanban board with tasks across columns for each stage of the process, including editing, planning, publishing, and writing. Clicking on a task opens it up in a dedicated page, which is a remarkably inefficient use of space. Tasks have details you might expect, such as assignee, assigner, column, comments, due date, notes, and subtasks, but they lack dependencies and priorities, among other things. Subtasks exist as bullet points you can check off within tasks, not their own discrete items, and you can’t add information to them beyond an assignee, description, and due date.

If you spring for the $50-per-month Timesheet add-on, you can track time in Basecamp. But if your team consists of just a few people, it’s quite expensive for what is relatively basic functionality. Within projects or tasks, you can click the timer button that appears at the top of the screen to log how many hours you work, and that’s about it. You can access Timesheets as reports in Basecamp and export them as CSV files, too.

Missing Features: AI, Automations, Billing, Proofing, and More

Unfortunately, Basecamp’s list of missing features is almost as long as what it includes. AI is a big omission. Whether you love it or hate it, almost all modern project management apps provide a bevy of AI features, from AI assistants to AI-assisted task creation. These features can be hit or miss, but some of them are useful, such as AI-assisted project creation that helps you spend less time setting up every part of a project yourself. Basecamp’s only offering in this area is support for third-party AI agents via the command line. Whether it’s Teamwork’s TeamworkAI or Zoho Projects’ Zia, among others, Basecamp just can't compete.

Automations are arguably the most significant missing piece of the Basecamp puzzle. Certain third-party integrations help bridge the gap, but the lack of a core system for automating actions with if-this-then-that statements (as is customary in project and work management software) means you waste time doing things that could be automated. Meanwhile, other project management apps, such as Smartsheet or Wrike, support automations. For example, on Smartsheet, it takes only a few clicks to set up an automation that notifies me whenever a team member comments on a task.

Basecamp is missing quality-of-life features, too. Don’t expect billing and invoicing support, form creation, proofing, or workload management. Not every project management app supports all of these capabilities, but most have some of them. For example, Wrike provides form-building and proofing tools, but it lacks robust billing and invoicing functionality. Even GanttPro, which aims to streamline the project management experience like Basecamp, supports workload management. It also offers features Basecamp lacks, such as a variety of views (including Gantt charts) and a broader range of premium plans.

Reports: Multiple Options, But None Are Perfect

After setting up a project in Basecamp, tracking its progress is easy thanks to Basecamp’s 10 report types. These run the gamut, from plotting out your projects on a timeline to checking on a particular team member’s activity or assignments. Setting up reports can be slightly awkward, but they generally work as described. For example, to access the Mission Control report, you need to enable progress indication, which you do back in your project’s main interface by clicking on the name as if you wanted to edit it.

(Credit: Basecamp/PCMag)

Other project management apps do better here. For example, Teamwork not only provides 13 premade report options but also allows custom reports, so you can easily extract exactly the information you want to see. Basecamp’s reports are also often quite simple. For example, the “Someone’s activity” report lets you see a team member’s activity log, while the “Unassigned work” report lists unassigned tasks and to-dos. You also don’t get meaningful ways to customize reports, whereas with Teamwork, for example, you can add various widgets to reports or filter them in more ways.

Basecamp’s reports also lack a common feature of project management apps: dashboards. GanttPro’s dashboards, for instance, though limited, feature a collection of widgets that track task competition, time spent on tasks, scheduling, and more in one place. Basecamp doesn’t have a dashboard that lets you view all this information in one place. Instead, each report gets an independent page.

Communication and Collaboration: Stay Connected Easily

Basecamp’s suite of collaboration features is robust. First and foremost, Basecamp has direct messaging, something not every project management app offers. If you don’t want to chat directly, you can still comment on tasks. Basecamp doesn’t just facilitate communication between individuals but also across the larger team, courtesy of its message board. The message board is like a mini forum where people can create threads and comment on them.

(Credit: Basecamp/PCMag)

Beyond all that, Basecamp has a shared calendar that helps to keep every team member in the loop about what’s happening and when. For emails relevant to your entire team, Basecamp provides an email forwarding feature. You get a personalized email address tied to your project, and if you forward an email to that address, it shows up directly in your project. This email forwarding system even preserves attachments. Basecamp also has a unique feature for automatic check-ins. For example, you can set up a weekly check-in that asks team members what they worked on during the past week.

Although Basecamp might not have every possible collaboration tool, such as whiteboards, it has almost all of them, which makes collaborating and communicating with team members a total breeze. Inevitably, your team won’t exclusively use Basecamp to keep in touch, but if you integrate Basecamp into your workflow, you can offload a lot of communication to it.

Integrations: Fill In Basecamp’s Feature Gaps With Other Apps

Although Basecamp lacks many features, you can claw some of that functionality back through integrations across many different categories. For example, Basecamp's Zapier integration lets you create automations using "if this, then that" statements. I tried this out by setting up a Zapier integration to send me an email whenever someone adds a new item to my project’s to-do list. However, it can do a lot more than just send an email.

(Credit: Basecamp/PCMag)

Still, Basecamp’s integrations aren’t necessarily a perfect replacement for the real thing. With the Zapier integration, for example, setting up an automation requires creating a Zapier account, connecting it to my Basecamp and Gmail accounts, and learning how to navigate Zapier to set everything up correctly. Given Basecamp's focus on ease of use, this isn't ideal.

Nonetheless, Basecamp’s integrations are a significant boon. Whereas an app like GanttPro also focuses on the user experience and omits features, it doesn’t support a wide variety of integrations. I appreciate an app with Basecamp's design philosophy, at least allowing you to build back some missing functionality. Of course, you still need to check whether the integrations you need are available.

Security: Is Your Data Safe With Basecamp?

Reading through Basecamp’s privacy policy, nothing stands out as especially egregious. Basecamp collects a variety of information related to billing, geolocation, product interaction, website interaction, and more. The privacy policy outlines each type of data it collects, along with the reasons, which is a level of transparency I appreciate. For example, Basecamp collects geolocation data for fraud prevention and security, storing it as long as the associated account remains active.

Product interaction data refers to the information you upload to Basecamp, such as your messages, tasks, and time sheets. Basecamp keeps this information for as long as your account is active, and it deletes it 60 days after you close your account. I couldn’t find any significant evidence of serious hacks or leaks of Basecamp servers in recent history. Basecamp also supports multi-factor authentication on all of its plans, which I like to see.

Jill Duffy and Khamosh Pathak contributed to this review.