Pros & Cons
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- Excellent value
- Easy to set up and navigate
- Supports multiple communication methods
- Deep configuration options
- Capable time-tracking tools
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- Slightly unusual resource management view
- AI features won’t be relevant to everyone
Zoho Projects Specs
| Android App | |
| API Available for Customers | |
| Budgeting | |
| Customizable Roles/Permissions | |
| Dependencies | |
| Free Account Offered | |
| Free Version Available | |
| Gantt Charts | |
| Guest Accounts | |
| Guest/Client Access | |
| In-App Task Timer | |
| iOS App | |
| Number of Projects in Free Account | 3 |
| Pre-Built Templates | |
| Price Per Month | From $3 per person |
| Price Per Person Per Month | $5 (Premium) |
| Resource Management | |
| Storage Included at Price Listed | 100GB |
| Storage Space for Free Accounts | 5GB |
| Time Estimates | |
| Time Tracking |
You don't need to spend thousands of dollars trying to find a project management app that works for your team: The highly capable Zoho Projects is accessible even for the most cash-strapped organizations. It offers a wide array of features, including an AI assistant, bug and issue tracking, lots of communication tools, smart automations, and tons of ways to customize and view projects and tasks. Premium tiers of service even unlock budgeting, critical path, time tracking, and reporting capabilities. The app doesn't have billing or invoicing tools, but you can connect with third-party services that support those functions. Zoho Projects is a clear Editors' Choice winner, thanks to its superb flexibility and value for small and growing businesses.
Pricing: Highly Affordable
Zoho Projects offers three main plans: Free, Premium, and Enterprise. Anyone can sign up for a 10-day trial of the Enterprise plan without providing a payment method. You can also contact Zoho's sales team directly for a custom plan that bundles Projects with other Zoho apps.
The biggest limitation of the Free plan is that you can have only five total people on a team and manage just three projects at a time. Still, this might work fine for smaller teams. You get 5GB of cloud storage, but features are limited compared with premium plans. For instance, you get just basic issue tracking and reporting features. No AI features are available at this tier, either. Here's the full breakdown of the plans.
The Premium plan ($4 per person per month, billed annually) unlocks 100GB of cloud storage and supports an unlimited number of projects. You can create up to 20 project templates at this level, which seems sufficient. However, you still miss out on critical paths, custom fields, custom profiles, custom roles, project baselines, and a few other features. As for Zoho’s Zia AI tech, the Premium plan gets you access to Zia Insights, which can provide commentary on your tasks and projects.
The cost of the Enterprise plan has nearly doubled in recent years, although it's still remarkably low compared with other project management apps. It now goes for $9 per person per month (billed annually). Enterprise accounts can handle teams of any size, but you should contact the company for a custom quote for groups of more than 5,000 people. This tier also includes access for 10 read-only users, too. You get all the features Zoho Projects offers, including the ability to create task dependencies among tasks that are in different projects, a cross-project resource utilization chart, and more. The Enterprise level also includes the full suite of Zia AI tech, including generative features, Zia Insights, Zia Search (which lets you search for things with natural language), and Zia Translate (which can translate text across Zoho Projects).
Zoho has long had a reputation for offering affordable products, and Projects fits that image. For comparison, both GanttPro (starting at $7 per month, billed annually) and Teamwork (starting at $10.99 per month, billed annually) cost more. More expensive options often offer more capabilities, of course, but Zoho’s balance of price and features is tough to beat.
Interface and Ease of Use: Dense, Yet Approachable
To get started with Zoho Projects, head to its website and sign up for a plan. As mentioned, every new account gets a free trial first. Zoho Projects works best as a web app, but mobile apps (Android and iOS) are available for keeping up with work when you can't be at your computer. Zoho doesn't maintain local desktop apps.
Setting up an account, creating your first project, adding phases (formerly milestones) and tasks, and inviting people to join you takes just minutes. When new people join, the site gives them hints about how to get started and what to do next.
(Credit: Zoho/PCMag)The site looks friendly and contemporary. The sheer number of features in Zoho Projects can be overwhelming at first, but we didn’t have trouble navigating individual pages or learning how things work. This simplicity is necessary for small businesses that don't have a dedicated project manager.
A customizable dashboard gives you a snapshot of the projects, statuses, or budgets that you care about most. Here, you can add a Task Status widget that shows both a pie chart and a raw count of how many tasks are open versus closed. Whether you care most about individual workloads or time sheets, you can set up your dashboard how you like.
Managing Projects: Tons of Features
To start managing projects in Zoho Projects, you have to create a new project, give it a name and description, and add some tasks and phases (stages of a project). Tasks support a lot of detail, including a start and end date, rather than just a deadline. You can't specify a specific time of day for a task's completion, but you can set up task reminders for specific times. You can also assign how many hours per day someone should dedicate to the task (as well as allocate that time as billable or non-billable), assign multiple people to a task, and more.
The app gives you multiple ways to track progress. As assignees work on tasks, they can enter a percent completion to show their progress. Within a task, you can view its attached Activity Stream, which shows all updates (with timestamps), including when assignees add work hours. You can also turn your projects into strict projects, which means issues (which can be bugs or general problems for a project), phases, tasks, and more, can't start or end outside the project’s original schedule.
Zoho Projects lets you set up task dependencies, too. Sometimes, assignees need to do tasks in a certain order, and the completion of some tasks might change what future tasks entail. The app makes it easy to outline how long dependent tasks will cause your project to lag, what kind of dependency a task has, and which tasks depend on others. You can set these up from within tasks themselves or in the Gantt chart view. The latter makes setting up and understanding dependencies easy; you simply draw connections between dependent tasks. Zoho's critical path feature helps you identify "the longest path in a chain of interdependent activities from start to finish in a project."
Further controls allow administrators to set the working hours and days of the week, as well as which days team members have off for holidays. You have to enter holidays manually, however, which is laborious, considering you can usually just select or import a list of holidays for a specified country in other work management apps.
Templates and Blueprints: Getting Started Is Easy
Although Zoho Projects lets you set up projects manually, it also provides premade templates to help ease the process. These cover a variety of disciplines, such as construction, HR, manufacturing, marketing and sales, pharma, software and IT, and more. Selecting a template takes only a few clicks, and once you do, your dashboard populates with a ton of customizable tasks.
(Credit: Zoho/PCMag)Blueprints are Zoho Projects’ take on automations. Within a task, you can set up dependencies and subtasks, but doing that for each task takes time. What if you have a process for completing a certain type of task, such as putting up a blog post related to each one? Blueprints can help with that; they automate processes in response to a certain action.
You might create a Blueprint for the above blog post example that starts once you create a task with a certain name, such as Blog Post Approved. Then, you can set up a chain of events through statuses and transitions. Statuses are the different stages of an in-progress task, such as In Progress or Published, while transitions move said tasks between their stages. Once you have an active Blueprint, you can simply advance a task to its next stage via a button.
Blueprints are powerful and useful tools, and we recommend diving into Zoho’s Blueprints tutorial so you can fully take advantage of them.
Viewing Options: Kanban Boards, Task View, and Reports
Gantt charts are the cornerstone of project management apps, but that’s not your only option with Zoho Projects: Kanban board and task list views are also available. The former lets you see tasks as cards in columns, while the latter turns your project into a spreadsheet with editable cells. The column headers in the Kanban view match up to the statuses available to tasks. By default, they are Open, In Progress, In Review, To Be Tested, On Hold, Delayed, Closed, and Cancelled. You can change them to whatever you like. Just keep in mind that whatever labels you put on these columns will appear anywhere that you can see the task status. It's not limited to the board view.
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Workload Reports are another key way to visualize a project. These break down the workload of each team member to help you better distribute tasks. You can view reports as bar graphs, heatmaps, and timelines. Many project management apps offer reports in the form of tables, but Zoho’s approach works just fine. Reports are also available on issues, tasks, and your time log, which Zoho presents as charts. The format is up to you, though, with options for (in menu order) bar graphs, vertical bar graphs, pie charts, doughnut charts, line graphs, and area graphs. Large teams might need more robust resource tracking that takes equipment into consideration, for example, but smaller teams should find everything they need here.
Time Tracking: Capable, If Not as Robust as Dedicated Apps
Some project management apps, including Zoho Projects, include a time tracking component. It's quite different from what you get from a dedicated employee time tracking app, and one approach might suit your team better.
In Zoho Projects, a built-in timer appears inside every task that you can start and stop to track how much time you spend on it. An account administrator can cap the maximum number of hours for a day. You can also log time manually, as well as classify time as billable or non-billable. The Timesheet tab makes it easy to track time as well: Just click New Time Log and type in the number of hours you spent on a project.
(Credit: Zoho/PCMag)One unique feature in Zoho Projects is the ability to clock in on multiple tasks at once, which you can't do in most time-tracking apps. Keep in mind that these apps are specialized time-tracking services, whereas time tracking in Zoho Projects fits into the context of project management.
Bug and Issue Reporting: Eliminate Problems With Ease
If you're part of a software development team that needs rigorous bug tracking as part of your project management app, Zoho Projects gives you a few options. For one, you can import bugs into Zoho Projects from CSV, XLS, and XLSX files. Alternatively, you can manually create an entry for a new bug. Once you log a bug, it appears in your Issues tab, where you can organize and track all your current problems. You can tie issues to specific teams or team members, and you can add a variety of details to them, including affected phase, severity, whether it’s reproducible, and more.
If you’re looking for a more robust bug tracking solution, Zoho has a dedicated BugTracker app. You can use BugTracker on up to two projects for free, as well as add issues via email and attach files of up to 5GB. Starting at $3 per user per month (billed annually), premium tiers of BugTracker increase usage limits and introduce features, such as automations, bug reports, time tracking, and more.
Communication and Collaboration: A Variety of Options
Zoho Projects has an impressive number of useful communication and collaboration features, though these might not be relevant to you if your team already uses another dedicated team messaging app, such as Microsoft Teams or Slack (both integrate with Zoho Projects).
As an example, Zoho Projects offers a chat box in its interface for asking colleagues questions about the projects or tasks you're working on. It’s also easy to start new conversations that include multiple team members. You can set a status to tell your colleagues what you're working on or when you aren’t available, too.
(Credit: Zoho/PCMag)Another useful communication tool is a near-seamless integration with Zoho Meeting, a video conferencing app. No matter where you are within Zoho Projects, you’re never more than a click or two away from opening Zoho Meeting.
Beyond all the above, an activity feed lets you stay up-to-date with what’s happening on your larger team. Similarly, there’s a calendar view, so you can get a bird’s eye view of what your colleagues are working on and what’s coming up in the next month.
Apps and Integrations: Impressive Support
As mentioned, Zoho makes a whole suite of business apps. Many of these programs are easy to use alongside Zoho Projects. In addition to Zoho Meet, for example, it's simple to connect Zoho Books and Zoho Invoice.
Zoho Projects works with Google apps, too. For instance, you can upload files directly from Google Drive and export calendar events from one to the other. You can even use Gmail to create tasks and log the hours you work. But integrations don’t stop at Google products. Here's the complete (long) list of compatible third-party apps.
Zia AI Assistant: Capable, But Will You Use It?
Like pretty much all other software, Zoho Projects has AI functionality, too. Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant, has four main components: a generative content ability, Zia Insight, Zia Search, and Zia Translate.
To get started with Zia, you need to head to the app's settings and enable each feature individually. If you want to generate content with Zia, you also need to provide a ChatGPT API key from a paid ChatGPT account (starting at $20 per month).
After those setup steps, using Zia is easy. If you want to generate content, simply open an editable text field, click the Zia button, and it prompts you to describe what you want, such as action items, an action plan, an event plan, a description, or a summary. Zia Search kicks in when you use the search bar at the top of the Zoho Projects interface; it allows you to search for items using natural language. You can open Zia Insights from the phase or task list detail pages, where it gives you various insights into what you’re working on. For example, Zia Insights might break down tasks by priority into a pie chart, among other things. Lastly, if you come across text in a language you don’t understand, you can get Zia to translate it just by clicking a button.
These features largely work as advertised, even if Zia Search can be a bit finicky with what natural language it accepts. However, these tools might not be relevant to everyone. Yes, it's easy to generate a description, but we couldn’t help but wonder how often we’d want to rely on AI for this. These tools are still at least worth trying for yourself, though.
Is Zoho Projects Safe to Use?
I didn't notice any major causes for concern in Zoho’s privacy policy. Zoho promises to collect only the data it actually needs, which includes account data, customer support inquiries, event registration data, or payment data when you buy something. Additionally, Zoho automatically logs some information when you use its software, such as how you got to its site and what features you access.
Zoho firmly commits to not selling your data for advertising purposes and never making money by showing you advertisements for other companies’ products. The information you input into Zoho Projects is service data, which Zoho makes clear that you own and it processes. It stores this data for as long as your account is active, and deletes it entirely within nine months at most if you terminate your account.
Naturally, a company’s internal projects and tasks are, by definition, sensitive, so if you’re particularly security conscious, you can enable multi-factor authentication or have your IT department set up single sign-on for Zoho Projects.