Clarizen – A great Project Management tool via SaaS

I had the pleasure of watching a demo of Clarizen today.  Well…watching isn’t right…I was watching as Gil Heiman, Director of Community at Clarizen, walked me through the tool.

I really liked what I saw. Clarizen’s strength comes with the collaboration tools it provides to make it easy for project team members to work together, update their progress and share information.

I’m not going to go into detail about features and functionality…you can find that at Clarizen’s website as well as on their Community. The thing that Clarizen does best is break away from the MS Project mentality that makes people think that Gantt charts “is” project management.  Clarizen gets project managers back to the basics of tasks, people and getting things done.

The recent 2.6 release (released in December) has some new resource management capabilities that I believe makes the tool an ideal choice for many projects.  Future releases look to have some very interesting functionality (multi-currency for example) and based on their history of releases, the company will continue to add more functionality quickly.

Clarizen isn’t going to dethrone entrenched enterprise project management (EPM) tools but it is definitely a contender for organizations that don’t have an EPM system (and don’t really need one) but want a tool that allows for a more collaborative project management experience.

The pricing model and SaaS platform makes this system ideal for small and medium sized businesses and/or those groups that need a project management tool but don’t want to sell their souls to MS Project.

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16 responses to “Clarizen – A great Project Management tool via SaaS”

  1. Arturas Avatar

    There is a lot competition these days on SaaS project management area, and it is hard to stay competitive. What we found at http://www.comindwork.comis that often users are looking for a very custom solutions, and for them the best way to get them is by ordering custom installations.

    Arturas's Recent post…COMINDWORK/BLOG: Продвинутое форматирование Wiki

  2. […] Go to the author’s original blog: Clarizen – A great Project Management tool via SaaS | Eric D. Brown […]

  3. New blog post: Clarizen – A great Project Management tool via SaaS http://tinyurl.com/9o6vdt

  4. Bud Leffler Avatar
    Bud Leffler

    Clarizen provides a great tool to get all of the information organized for a project before kick off. Everyone can have access to all of the necessary information and a kick off meeting can be conducted using Clarizen as a communication tool. This allows you to easily walk new resources into their role in the total project. Everyone can not only catch up but they can see the project goals and resources. They will feel as part of the team as soon as they begin to contribute and complete a task. This is how collaboration is supposed to work where in a successful project everyone feels part of the winning team. If only the Cardinals would have listened.

  5. Eric D. Brown Avatar

    Hi Bud – Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts on Clarizen. They've got a great tool…I've been using it for the last month and really like it. Simple and effective.

  6. Alexander Will Avatar

    Very interesting article on Clarizen – currently I use a combination of Huddle and Basecamp and Highrise for online collaboration, project and contact management. Might have to think about moving to Clarizen.

    Alexander Will’s last blog post..Spoonfed in the Financial Times

  7. Eric D. Brown Avatar

    Thanks Alexander. I found Clarizen to be a great little tool….worth looking into. Basecamp and HighRise are great products too but I like Clarizen better for PM work.

  8. finance review Avatar

    SaaS has certainly been a really awesome tool. I've been using it for all my small projects for a very long time and keeps getting better. appreciate all the information. cheers

  9. Detroit SEO Services Avatar

    I've been looking for an easy to use project management tool.I tested out several and started to use zoho’s pm tool but find it very limited.I'm now working for an IT Consulting Company as PM and all we do is implement projects for our customers. Having a proper PM tool would work wonders for us!I believe that Clarizen is the tool we have been looking for. Hopefully It'll make life a lot easier for me 🙂

  10. Web Design Indiana Avatar

    Thanks for the article on Clarizen. To be honest, I had never heard of Clarizen until this article. My firm is looking for a collaborative project management tool that is easy to use, works well, and not too expensive, and I think you might have given us the perfect tool. It seems there are so many today out there on the market and we have tested several, but there is always something missing, but this one looks like a winner. Thanks so much!

  11. Project Management Templates Avatar

    Thanks for this post Eric. I’ve got a overview coming up from Clarizen and am starting to get excited about this product.

  12. RT @ericdbrown Clarizen – A great Project Management tool via SaaS | Eric D. Brown http://bit.ly/sm7Qd

  13. Céline Arave Avatar
    Céline Arave

    Awesome artice Eric! These days I use combination of asana and proofhub. Clarizen seems to be a nice tool and I will surely give a look to this.

  14. Steve Avatar
    Steve

    Great write up…. One vote up for clarizen