There are many task and project managers for collaborating with others, like Asana, Trello, Wrike, monday.com and others. Zenkit is an interesting alternative that is worth considering.
Organize your time and tasks more efficiently and you will get more done each day and week. Whether it is a personal project or work, on your own or in a team, Zenkit Base aims to organize everything and make it easier. It is an online time, task and team manager.
Zenkit Base enables you to break down a project or your weekly work routine into smaller tasks that you can see at a glance and schedule when they need to be started and completed. It enables you to create lists of the items that are needed for a project, like documents, images, and other files. It even enables you to connect to other sources of data and files.
Asana, Trello, Wrike, MeisterTask, ClickUp and others are all variations of the same concept and Zenkit fits right in with them. It enables you to create projects and tasks and view and organize them in many different ways, switching between views with a couple of mouse clicks.
A free account is available at the Zenkit website and that is what I am using here. It has some limitations, but it is fine for personal use or for you and a couple of co-workers or friends. Subscriptions are available from $8 a month, which provides more features, unlimited teams people, large projects, and useful collaboration features.
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Organize your projects and tasks
One of the best features of Zenkit is that it is straightforward and easy to use. Everything is fairly obvious when you see it and use it, and getting started is a breeze. Although there is documentation, you probably won’t need to read it, it is that easy.
You work with Zenkit using collections, which are basically collections of tasks. They are organized into folders called workspaces and a Workspace can contain many collections, which contains tasks for a project or simply your weekly or monthly work duties.
Although you can start from nothing and build your own collections, there are many ready-made templates that are either just right for your needs or close enough that you can easily customize them to do what you want.
Here are just a few examples of templates selected at random: Personal calendar, CRM for sales, File archive, Job applications, Blog planner, Guide for new employees, Dinner party, Support helpdesk, Study planner, Project planner.
There is a good mix of personal and business templates and all are customizable and can be modified to suit other uses. They give you an idea of what is possible with Zenkit and there is also a tutorial template and a sample template of a Mars mission project with Tasks, Inventory and Documents collections.
View tasks in different ways
Fundamentally, Zenkit is a database and there are many ways to view the data. It reminds me of Airtable a little. Table view is the most database-like with records in rows and fields in columns. List view is a simplified version of this. Both are useful in some circumstances, but Kanban view is much more fun.
You create lists that contain tasks and the simplest is To-do, In Progress and Done (like Trello). Tasks are added to To-do as little cards and they can contain text, links, images and files. When a task is started, drag it from the To-do list to the In Progress list, and when it is done, drag it to the Done list. You can see at-a-glance what tasks need to be started, which are underway and those that are completed.
These lists can be any set of processes, such as writing documentation, editing it, getting approval, publishing and so on. Each item added to a list has a title, description, due date, files, the person it is assigned to, comments from people, and more. Only the title is necessary and the others are optional.
Organize tasks on a calendar
The calendar is another great way to view a collection and all the tasks with due dates appear on it. It gives you a useful overview of the month. I like the way you can list unscheduled tasks and then drag them to the calendar to set due dates.
It is easy to see when tasks are due and how much time you have to complete them. If you find tasks as bunched up or you need to reschedule them, they can be dragged around the calendar to change the due dates and it is a great way to organize your work week or month.
Mind maps and more
There are several other views, including hierarchy, mind map and wiki views. Wiki shows a navigation or contents panel on the left and a large document window on the right that can contain text, images and links.
The view you use depends on the project and the tasks you add to your collections. A default can be set, so you can get straight to what you need, but switching views is easy and I switch mostly between Kanban and calendar views.
There are even more views and tasks can be grouped, such as by stage, writer, category, editor or whatever you want. You just add a new field and set the type, such as Label.
More features
File storage comes with Zenkit and 1 GB is provided with free accounts. This is fair enough for personal use and is enough for me, but subscribe to a business plan and you get 50 GB.
The free plan allows up to three users, but paid plans are per user and there is no limit. Permissions can be assigned to users, like owner, member, editor, commenter and guest, so if you have a team or contributors, you can invite them and set what they are allowed to do. 2FA security can be applied to protect your account.
Zenkit can connect to other online services and it can import Trello, Asana and others. You can link it to Google Drive, Dropbox, or Box, connect to Microsoft Teams, use Zapier automation, and more. For example, a Zapier zap can add new Zenkit items to a row in Google Sheets. There are many more business features like these and I have barely scratched the surface here.
Zenkit Base conclusion
Zenkit can be accessed online in a web browser at the Zenkit website, but there are also desktop apps for Windows PC, Apple Mac and Linux, and phone apps for iOS and Android. I like Zenkit Base because it looks great, is easy to use and has the features I need, but it costs more than some rivals.
If the subscription cost for Zenkit Base does not worry you, it is worth considering.
Alternatives to Zenkit Base
There are many alternatives to Zenkit Base and they are all variations of the collaborative online task and project manager idea. Here are a couple that are cheaper than Zenkit Base.
ProofHub
ProofHub stands out because of its flat-fee pricing with unlimited users. You can sign up for as little as $45 annually and invite everyone in your team or company. There are some limitations with an Essential account, but the Ultimate Control account with all features was only $89 paid annually when I visited. If you plan to have multiple users, ProofHub is cheaper than most rivals.
The pricing means ProofHub is a bargain for teams and you can invite users and assign roles, which limit what they can do and see. You begin by creating one or more projects and you select the attributes to be associated with it, like discussions, tasks, Gantt, calendar, notes, files and time.
Task lists are added to the project and they can be private to you or public for team members. Tasks can have subtasks, start and due dates, stage, assignees, progress, labels and user-definable fields you can create yourself. There are table and board (Kanban style) views, Gantt, calendar and other views.
The project reports are interesting and you can see charts with milestones, a tasks burn-up chart, tasks by resource, labels and workflow, time logged and time spent be each user. There is a lot of useful information on the report screens and they enable you to keep on top of tasks and projects.
The more people you have on your team, the cheaper ProofHub becomes and it has a lot of great features for tracking projects, organizing people and monitoring the progress of tasks assigned to them. I recommend you at least try the free trial.
Freedcamp
Freedcamp offers four accounts, Free, Pro, Business and Enterprise. A Business account is $7.49 a month per user and has all the features you would expect of a collaborative project and task organizer too.
A free account has all the core features for project and task management and allows you to add unlimited collaborators. A pro account adds Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox integration for $1.49 a month.
Many features are common to all services of this type. For example, open the Projects page and you can create projects and global teams. A few templates are available to get you started, but creating your own projects is easy enough.
Open a project and you can add tasks to it. Tasks can be assigned to people, have start and due dates, status, followers, subtasks, attachments and so on. A private task list is also available.
Tasks can be displayed as lists, Kanban boards, table or Gantt. Task lists can also be grouped and filtered, and you can view them on a calendar in day, week, month and agenda views. The Freedcamp home view shows a Work list of tasks due and an agenda, so you can immediately see what needs to be done next.
There is something for everyone here, from a solo free user to small teams to large businesses with large teams of users. I have had a free account for a long time and have used it from time to time for projects and tasks.
