Yalla gave us what Basecamp lacked

Are you curious about the difference between Basecamp and Yalla? To be honest, Basecamp is a great application. But it’s also one of the reasons we created Yalla. We’re going to jot down some of the reasons why we left Basecamp to build and use Yalla for our own company.

Basecamp is not conducive to client management

Basecamp is set up as a basic project management system. It’s a way to bring different people together to collaborate in a single centralized area. The whole application revolves around projects. But our whole business revolves around our clients. So we jury-rigged Basecamp to act sort of like a client management system by creating one never-ending project named after the client. Then we would dump everything that had to do with that client into that “project.” Needless to say, over time, that “project” got messy.

We also needed to be able to keep and track time, and we also wanted the ability to allocate that time toward a client so that we could bill that time at a later date.

We wanted Yalla to revolve around our team and our clients. So that’s what we did. In Yalla, you work on projects and tasks cohesively with your team and your client. But those items are associated with your clients for easy future access. In Basecamp, when we surpassed 50 clients, our “projects” started to get unmanageable. In Yalla, you can have hundreds and thousands of clients with their associated work history as part of their account. When your clients log in to Yalla as your guest, they get to see their own dashboard with all of their open projects, past and current discussions, uploaded files, chats and many other items.

Keeping time is non-existent in Basecamp – but built into Yalla

When we used Basecamp, we were in it all of the time. It was where all of the work took place so we couldn’t really understand why there was no way to track our time. Our team needed to keep track of their hours for payroll, and we had to bill our clients based on those hours. Not all of the work we did was on retainer so time keeping was important to us and we really didn’t feel like signing up for another app just for that piece of our workflow.

So we built time keeping into every aspect of Yalla. You can enter and track time from almost any screen in Yalla. We also have a built-in timer so that you don’t have to keep track.

Basecamp lacks true “project management”

We like to visualize projects as they move across different stages in their process. We call it process management. In Basecamp, it’s just a check of the box that shows that an item was completed. In Yalla, you can set up funnels to represent how many projects are in a specific stage of your process. Then you can visualize your projects moving across a funnel toward the finish line. We also use this part of Yalla as a great place to manage sales and deals for our company.

Yalla makes communication fun

Yalla has a full-blown chat feature built into it where team members and clients can chat and collaborate with each other. You can bring in notifications from almost any other cloud application, and chat using sounds and GIFs. Yalla chat puts everything in one central location.

Yalla lets you organize your company into teams

It’s really helpful to be able to structure your company into functional teams. In Basecamp you just have a bunch of users. In Yalla, you have teams. You might make the Executive team, the Finance team, the Development team…and so on.

Then you can drag and drop projects and tasks on to the various members of your team for quick assignments of work. Yalla is a true team management platform that still gives you the project management and collaboration features of a platform such as Basecamp.

As we mentioned earlier, Basecamp is a great application. We just couldn’t get what we needed out of it to move our business forward.