5pm Review

Detailed Reviews

Founded in 2003, 5PM is a Wake Forest, NC based company. This is an online project management software designed to help managers stay updated as well as organized. It acts as the central location for various activities such as project management, task management, collaboration, tracking, and reporting. Without any kind of training, you can put your team on it for accessing files, notes, task details; sending alerts; and tracking progress.

Different Packages

5pm is known for its affordable plans, which you can select as per your firm’s limited budget. What is even more commendable is that you can customize the plan of payment. Currently, there are five different packages or plans that differ in terms of supported users, active projects, storage, and number of clients.

Of all, the priciest one offers unlimited projects, 30GB storage, and unlimited user and client support. You can start with a 14-day free trial with 1000 users or 1000 projects and 10MB file storage capacity. Irrespective of the plan you choose, the app features nightly backup service and secure data centers that are SSAE-16 compliant.

Features

The clean design with friendly layout allows you to act quickly. Adding tasks, navigating projects, customizing layout, and experiencing real-time collaboration happen within a few clicks. In short, all that you need to access is available at a distance of just one or two clicks away.

Progress Tracking with Views

The standard view with its two-column layout shows tasks and projects in a well-organized manner. The left side lists all your tasks and projects, while the details appear on the right side. One more standout feature due to its superb experience is the timeline view, similar to a Gantt chart, for facilitating task management.

Task Management

5pm is the right choice for all those who consider task management as their top priority. You can create, edit, delete, and assign tasks at any time. Further, the tool allows importing CSV files full of tasks, which means smoother working with big volume of tasks. Believe it or not; even today, Excel is popular for its ability to create tasks and projects quickly.

Email Integration

Like a few other project management tools, 5pm ships with this innovative feature that enables sending and receiving mail notifications to the team. You can create and edit tasks, messages, and projects via email. They call this two way email integration.

Time Tracking

You can log hours through the interface as well - adding Progress Notes to tasks. With time tracking feature you can also define estimated time required for each task. There is also a Time Report that integrates the time spent on various tasks and projects.

The time tracking desktop widget is if you need extra features, like the stopwatch. It is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. There are two more widgets available from other companies (free) with even more features.

Import, Export & Backup

There are plenty of ways to import projects to the platform. There is a standard CSV/Excel and MS Project project import option for users to import projects, tasks or user’s list straight to the platform. Users can also import project from Basecamp using their XML project data file. The data also can be exported in CSV format.

5pm offers automated as well as on demand backup option. There are option to integrate the platform with online backup services like Dropbox, onedrive and google drive.

Conclusion

Get the 5pm Software if you wish to manage your projects and big teams in an organized manner. It is also great for strict task management but not for financial or file management.