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Ask HN: Project management app for a digital agency?

8 points by kull ↗ HN
We are a small web design company with remote team of 5 in few time zones. Currently our project management is based on emails and Google Docs. It is slowly turning into nightmare. Keeping track what is going on, time tracking and billing etc. is getting very difficult.

We are looking for a simple software, which will easily let us organize our work - many small projects and few bigger ones per month, including ongoing clients. I also need to be able to extract information such as “how many issues completed and time spent on each for a given project in a given month.”

Suggestions?

Thank you!

9 comments

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iamben
Harvest works very well for me as far as time tracking and billing goes (and seeing time spent on what and where). You can connect it to a bunch of other stuff as well (trello for instance). https://www.getharvest.com
kull
I am just testing it and it seem to be not so intuitive, I cannot just go and create an issue to assign it to a team member? I create some event and it starts counting time... strange.
kull
what about teamwork.com ?
dtawfik1
Gizmo App works really well as a project management solution for digital agencies: https://www.gizmo.cool/

It has invoicing and billing built in, which really solves a major pain point for most agencies.

mhoad
I have a remote team of 3 currently and am using a combination of Basecamp and Todoist. Find it works really well so far.
atmosx
I ended up at tectonic's website[1] this morning. We spoke once at #ruby@Freenode. He is a really nice guy. He works at Mavelink[1] which from what I've seen is EXACTLY what you're looking for.

On a side-note, huge upgrade from Google docs could be tiddlywiki[3]. This little gem can me moulded into nearly everything. I wouldn't use it for billing and time-tracking of course. But as todo, wiki, docs, notebook, etc. is excellent. If you go with tiddlywiki server-side, make sure you backup and auto-save the data!

[1] http://andrewcantino.com/

[2] https://www.mavenlink.com/

[3] http://tiddlywiki.com/

j2bax
Our company which sounds similar to the makeup of you company has been using Teamwork.com for project management along with getharvest.com for time tracking and invoicing for a few years now. Both of the tools are great at what they do. We also use Hipchat for instant communication, project specific group chats etc. although lately the service hasn't been stellar. I think we are going to give Slack a shot instead.
thecodemonkey
I can highly recommend https://basecamp.com - it just works and you can even invite clients to the projects so you can show transparency.

Worked with this in multiple agency settings in the past.