I wonder if there's a compare/contrast between the features/capabilities of LiquidPlanner, Acunote, and others.
EDIT after downvotes:
I was being diplomatic, out of respect for anybody who ships in general, and any YC company in particular. However, since I'm now feeling less charitable, let me be less diplomatic. The features of this app are a subset of LiquidPlanner. I see no features that it does not have, and considerably less polish. I would say this is a good start, but they have a long way to go.
I haven't done a serious competitive evaluation of Liquid Planner so I would hesitate to offer an opinion about them. Much like with a new source control system it take 1-2 solid day to get a feel for a system like this, and your understanding stays primitive until you talk to real customers.
I can tell you that talking to our customers, some of whom evaluated 50 alternatives (no joke) at the end it all comes to:
* being fast
* easy to use
* scalable
I know it sound undifferentiated, but the reality is that while everybody claims all of these, few products do any of this well.
I'll give you one example. We have keyboard shortcuts for just about every operation in Acunote. For many power users this is really important, as lets them do a lot of stuff rapidly. It's a qualitative difference when you can work at the speed of though.
From the engineering and feature point of view that's like 5% of the product, but that's what matters to customers, so that's what makes sense to talk about. Having said that, Acunote does offer a ton more, but we do it based on a few powerful orthogonal primitives, so we don't have to come up with a new button for every kind of need as it leads to unusable interfaces. This lets us serve large customers with complex needs while remaining highly usable and approachable for smaller groups.
One thing we should offer is better training, screencasts, tutorial on getting started. That's definitely something we are working on.
Please shoot an email to our support. We'd love to discuss this further with you.
I've been a big big Acunote enthusiast for a long time. I recommend it to everyone -- they're an incredibly sharp and responsive team.
It's essentially a hacker-friendly task management system. I have trained all my engineers to use it pretty efficiently -- if people are interested in seeing how I use it, I will think about putting up some videos of how efficiently I use it.
I came here to comment about the how the proj. mgmt. problem has been solved in numerous ways by several companies. How could there by anything left to do?! And yet there are raving fans of this product right here. I guess there's a hundred different niches within the project management domain.
Right, project management software has a ton of niches, and it is also much harder than it seems. It hasn't happened yet, but much expectation is that somebody will be able to consolidate a big chunk of this space. We count on that being us :-)
Just signed up, since I was looking around for a Basecamp alternative. First impression is that Acunote is more user friendly and faster. Also, thank you for creating a plan for Indie developers. Are you going to keep it free or will you start charging in the future? If you do, will you accept Paypal?
If anybody says they can predict the future, they are lying. So I can only that we've never charged small teams and right now we have no plans to start. We accept VISA/MC/AMEX (and standard enterprise billing terms for large customers).
I think Asana is a solid product. Their long-term vision seems similar to ours - new category of business software covering all employees who do project/task-oriented work (developers, operations, marketing, product management, legal, etc..), that individual contributors actually enjoy using.
Our strategy on how to get there is completely different. Unlike them we provide the vertical functionality individual groups (like software developers, product managers, IT, etc.) need in addition to common horizontal task management. And we expect to be best-of-breed in the verticals we cover.
One vertical they do cover much better than Acunote is personal productivity using GTD. We focus on groups.
For larger companies we also have a really strong focus on data-driven management - letting you manage the whole company using data not politics. I haven't seen Asana offer analytics, but that's probably just a question of time. It's a smart play to focus on getting basics just right first.
Redmine is pretty nice and for small projects you can host it for free on an AWS micro instance (pretty easy to setup with something like bitnami). For open source projects JIRA is also free.
[+] [-] pdx|13 years ago|reply
I wonder if there's a compare/contrast between the features/capabilities of LiquidPlanner, Acunote, and others.
EDIT after downvotes: I was being diplomatic, out of respect for anybody who ships in general, and any YC company in particular. However, since I'm now feeling less charitable, let me be less diplomatic. The features of this app are a subset of LiquidPlanner. I see no features that it does not have, and considerably less polish. I would say this is a good start, but they have a long way to go.
[+] [-] gleb|13 years ago|reply
I can tell you that talking to our customers, some of whom evaluated 50 alternatives (no joke) at the end it all comes to:
I know it sound undifferentiated, but the reality is that while everybody claims all of these, few products do any of this well.I'll give you one example. We have keyboard shortcuts for just about every operation in Acunote. For many power users this is really important, as lets them do a lot of stuff rapidly. It's a qualitative difference when you can work at the speed of though.
From the engineering and feature point of view that's like 5% of the product, but that's what matters to customers, so that's what makes sense to talk about. Having said that, Acunote does offer a ton more, but we do it based on a few powerful orthogonal primitives, so we don't have to come up with a new button for every kind of need as it leads to unusable interfaces. This lets us serve large customers with complex needs while remaining highly usable and approachable for smaller groups.
One thing we should offer is better training, screencasts, tutorial on getting started. That's definitely something we are working on.
Please shoot an email to our support. We'd love to discuss this further with you.
[+] [-] rmorrison|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gleb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mahmoudimus|13 years ago|reply
It's essentially a hacker-friendly task management system. I have trained all my engineers to use it pretty efficiently -- if people are interested in seeing how I use it, I will think about putting up some videos of how efficiently I use it.
[+] [-] gleb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fg|13 years ago|reply
http://www.acunote.com/plans-and-prices
http://highrisehq.com/signup
[+] [-] dsawler|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdl|13 years ago|reply
Would be interesting to learn about your security.
[+] [-] gleb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mvkel|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raheemm|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gleb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hubrix|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexg0|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gleb|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mmackh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gleb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] misiti3780|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gleb|13 years ago|reply
Our strategy on how to get there is completely different. Unlike them we provide the vertical functionality individual groups (like software developers, product managers, IT, etc.) need in addition to common horizontal task management. And we expect to be best-of-breed in the verticals we cover.
One vertical they do cover much better than Acunote is personal productivity using GTD. We focus on groups.
For larger companies we also have a really strong focus on data-driven management - letting you manage the whole company using data not politics. I haven't seen Asana offer analytics, but that's probably just a question of time. It's a smart play to focus on getting basics just right first.
[+] [-] jotux|13 years ago|reply
>Acunote integrates with your source control. We support Subversion, Perforce and GitHub.
That wording is rather poor as it makes it sound like github is a source control system rather than a hosting service.
"and git (via GitHub)" would be better.
[+] [-] saym|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adharmad|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gleb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edwinnathaniel|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Legend|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jotux|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steelaz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gleb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ams6110|13 years ago|reply
Be ready for a flurry of patent lawsuits from google.