Discover how Basecamp offers you a one-stop portal for all your business needs, while Pneumatic enhances operations with workflow management. Dive in to choose your ideal business tool!
Basecamp bills itself as the ultimate remote working portal, claiming to offer an all-in-one alternative to a slew of SaaS solutions: DropBox for online file storage, GoogleSuite for online productivity and document processing, Slack for corporate messaging and communication, the likes of Trello and Asana for project management, the list goes on.
It’s a bold claim and by most accounts Basecamp executes on it with sufficient success. But then again, as the old saying goes, our greatest weaknesses are extensions of our greatest strengths: adopting Basecamp means that if you want to get the most bang for your buck out of it, you need to migrate everything into Basecamp. It won’t be a big deal if you’re just starting out and have little or nothing to migrate, but things can get ugly real fast if you’re an established business with heaps of stuff spread out across a bunch of online apps that you’ve come to love and depend on.
Pneumatic positions itself as a workflow management system. Online file storage, messaging etc are offered as extra features available to every subscriber at no cost but they’re never emphasized in the messaging. It’s all workflows all the time.
Pneumatic’s whole raison d’etre is to help you organize your work around sequential workflows so that task-assignment and job tracking can then be done automatically by the system.
As for other functionality, instead of reinventing the wheel, Pneumatic emphasizes integrations through third-party platforms like Zapier and through its own powerful API. The pitch here is that you get to continue to use all your existing apps, with Pneumatic simply adding automated workflow management to your software toolbox, rather than trying to completely replace it.
The killer feature in Basecamp’s project management is to-do lists, which allow users to more easily track progress on specific tasks at a greater level of detail.
Pneumatic also offers to-do-lists in tasks, however, in addition, in Pneumatic tasks are organized into sequential workflows so that when a task is completed, the workflow moves on to the next step automatically, and all the tasks contained in that step get assigned to relevant performers as per the configuration of the underlying workflow template.
Basecamp doesn’t have a comparable feature as apart from to-do lists in tasks, the rest of Basecamp’s project management is based on the standard run-of-the mill paradigm of tasks being manually moved between lists. No sequential assignment and execution is enforced and there is no automatic handover of workflows between teams.
The two systems go about boosting the efficiency of your business in two very different ways:
Both systems offer flat-rate plans for growing businesses.
Our verdict is that Basecamp would be a better match for companies that are just starting out and who have a predominantly remote workforce: these types of businesses can save money by not having to buy subscriptions for a bunch of online apps like Slack or Dropbox and just using Basecamp for all their needs.
Pneumatic is mainly for companies that want to take their operations management to the next level and organize their business around repeatable sequential business processes that reliably deliver predictable results.
Basecamp can help your business get off the ground fast, but Pneumatic will help you keep it in the air.
