Planio

The obtaining of reports in relation to the hours worked, the assigned projects and the organizational structure is fantastic. We continue using Planio for all our projects. It allows us to optimize operations more and more.

The system is reasonably fast, and good at what it does. Problems are responded to promptly (very quickly in some cases!). Over a 6 month period we reported three relatively obscure bugs, and all three were fixed within 24 to 48 hours. The core functionality is strong and reliable.

If there is a negative, it's that the company makes assumptions about its user base which in our case do not apply, especially in the area of external task status change notification. Specifically, the system allows plain text email notifications, but these contain all the task data, which represent a serious potential leak of private information. To avoid that, one can activate encrypted email notifications, but then every member of the system MUST have encrypted email setup in their email client.

As anyone who has ever tried to configure that in Outlook or Thunderbird can tell you, the installation of a certificate and the configuration of the client to use it are fraught with difficulties. Many people just give up. An ideal solution would be for the system to support plain-text email notification of task status changes as it does now, but with the option to not include the details, just the task title and the statement "The status of this task has changed. It is now assigned to you with XXXX Priority. Please see the task for details [link]".

However, this is a relatively minor problem that does not detract significantly from our overall positive experience using the system. It's a strong solution.

Was using my own redmine cloud server instance but wanted something more stable and easy to manage for a corporate envioronment. Looked at Planio and another company. Both good, but the Planio UI is a more familiar redmine look and feel. The price plans are good, they actually have a free bronze plan which they don't advertise - good for 1 person operations. The customer service was very good. They were able to pull in my tasks from my old instance into the new instance, overnight. Then I had a couple of questions, and they always answered within a few hours. Note that they are in Germany so a question in the morning (US) might be answered same day, but one in the afternoon not until the next day. Response times seem good, so far anyway. I really like that they give you the repository for free - install tortoise on your clients and you have a managed, versioned, cloud repository in no time. Awesome. Oh, and the agile boards are included as part of their standard plans, which are very useful.

All in all, extremely happy. Always liked redmine, but using planio to manage/host that is a no brainer. Have used redmine before in projects large and small, and once people understand what it is, productivity goes through the roof. I would say it doubles effective output. Many people don't understand what it is - they think that servicenow or MSProject or Sharepoint can do the same - and to some degree that's true. But redmine/planio takes all of that to the next level, makes it super easy and configurable, and provides an end to end solution all the way from Senior management right down to day to day team members.