Hey friends. Welcome to the small tech podcast from Éphémère Creative. I'm your host Raph. And today we will be talking about project management tools. So the first episode, the intro episode was kinda I could say stiff, but it was a bit more structured than what we want to bring to you in the future. I think it was just first episode one to write a draft and have it properly like organized. But it is supposed to feel a bit more. Loose.
A bit more explorative and more like a discussion that you can potentially join in on. It would be great to hear people ask questions or contribute if you want to, if you want us to talk about. Something then definitely let us know. We would love to do that. But yeah, this this time. We are going to talk about project management tools, because if you're going to build a digital product, if you're going to build technology, you need to do that.
And. There's so many tools out there to help you manage your work and organize things and keep your people talking to each other and coordinated and understanding who's doing what and what was done when and why. Even if you're working alone, it's really useful and important to be able to keep track of your own tasks, but also your information and why you're doing the things that you're doing. So. Let's talk about project management tools. We have tried a few over the years.
And I have tried some myself , in different contexts. Yeah, so I kind of broke them down into four different categories. Thinking of a digital product development, technology development. We have used Asana and ClickUp at Éphémère Creative. I have used JIRA in the past. I've also explored two others called Linear and Height. That I guess I say two others, because I kind of think of them as similar. Uh, And two more.
Uh, Notion and Coda. The big project management tool is a JIRA and very software focused. But you can certainly use it for other things the way I think about JIRA. Is that if you're going to use JIRA, you need a person whose job it is to manage JIRA, not to do project management, but just to make sure JIRA is properly configured for what you want it to do. I remember the first time I I jumped into a JIRA project or into a JIRA install. Which was... a while ago. And it was just so overwhelming.
There's so many ways to organize things and do things and they have their own query language. So you can query your tasks if they even call them tasks. And. It's it was it's wildly powerful software. It is mind blowing to me. It feels like its own sort of machine that you can program against and configure infinitely to do essentially whatever you want. But that is very overwhelming when you're a tiny team who does not have someone with the experience to do that, or the bandwidth to do that.
Yeah, that was my impression of JIRA. We used it for this project many years ago. But I never really fell in love with it. We were using other Atlassian tools at the time. But. Even though that integration was really nice. So you can integrate a JIRA with a BitBucket and a Confluence and presumably anything else that Atlassian has put out. But it was just, it was a lot, it was just a lot to deal with.
So yeah, I personally wouldn't recommend it for small teams, unless you have someone who's very experienced with setting it up and and you know how you want to use it. Two next ones are Asana and ClickUp. Which in many ways are actually quite different. But they feel like they're targeting the same... kinds of people in terms of the functionality... and the price range... and I guess even just the messaging around these products. Though. Maybe not completely.
So Asana is very focused on it's very much task management. And you group things by teams. And by projects within teams. And you can create templates for projects and it's yeah it's pretty, it comes out of the box with a lot of the things that you would expect. There are some reporting tools. Though, I think the reporting tools, if I remember correctly on a higher priced tier. So you might not have that on the lower costs. Not even just the free, like they have a few different tiers.
If I remember correctly. And I think it was free. And I'm like pro and then business, something like that. We dropped Asana last year. And basically our reason for dropping them was that. They aren't very friendly to tiny teams from a pricing perspective. Essentially. We found the other tools would price per user. But Asana prices per like bucket of user. So it's 5 users at a time or 10 users at a time or 20 users or 30 users.
And so if you're in between 10 and 15, Or whatever the tiers are, you're paying for the higher chunk. So if you've just got two people you're paying for five people. But that actually adds up. It becomes fairly expensive and there's ways to get around it, but they're awkward. They're not ideal. Where it's you can invite someone as a guest, so they're not really on the team, but then.
It becomes weird to handle situations where someone needs access, but it, yeah, it's not great from a pricing perspective, I didn't love it. Though the tool itself is very nice. It's very smooth. But, like I said, it's very focused on just like tasks and reporting. You don't. Put anything else really in ClickUp. Sorry. Asana it's just tasks and the information around the tasks. That brings us to ClickUp, which kind of aims to be an everything tool.
It's all of the project management information you might need. ClickUp has its own documents system, and it has its own white boarding system and you can do tasks and you can do reports and you can do all kinds of different things in they're all framed around project management.
So you're probably not going to do like... their white boarding tool probably isn't something that a designer is going to use where they might want some additional design tools, like stuff that you might find in Canva's white boarding tool or. Even Miro I think has more sort of design options. But if it's just about organizing a project and brainstorming some ideas around how you're going to perform tasks, X, Y, and Zed, Then it's great for that.
And having that whiteboard in your project management context is great. You also get access to Gantt charts and other sort of ways of displaying your information. Which Assana limited per tier. I'm sure there are some limitations in ClickUp as well, but I felt like you got a lot more out of the box and most importantly, for us you paid per user, you didn't pay per block of users or bucket of users.
So that's why we switched to a, to ClickUp and it feels like they're constantly adding more features. That seems to be their philosophy where it's just like more features. But perhaps not as beautifully delivered as Asana or as fast as Asana. Asana is real time stuff is wild. Everything you see someone dragging. If someone's dragging a task around in a list. Like you see them dragging the task in real time. It's very fast and very smooth. Whereas ClickUp.
There's more lag it's real time, but it's things... take a little, take a few seconds to update. Maybe not when you're typing, but if you're moving things around and in a task list, then it does. All right. The other two that I find really interesting and I explored a little bit. But I didn't. Actually try in much depth are Linear and Height. These are two very beautiful very focused tools. These seem to me... they're very focused on software development.
And so if the context of what you're doing is software development, then they're probably great choices. In our case, there were a couple of limitations that meant that they didn't make sense. Mainly I think both of them at the time we were trying to use both GitHub and GitLab. And I think it was that we were using multiple GitHub organizations or multiple GitLab organizations or something like that. And it was that wasn't supported. I think it was, you had to connect to a single organization.
Which just didn't work for what we needed at the time. So that's why I I went with a ClickUp side note on that ClickUp does integrate with both GitHub and GitLab. So if you need to tie your stuff into your code, your project management, into your code. You can create merge requests and see commits tied to a given task and that sort of thing. So that's neat. Linear and height both seem to do that quite well. Integrate with with the git repos.
So you can make sure that your code is nicely tied to your tasks. But they had that limitation. They both seem to have additional tooling, so you can tie into visual studio code. So if you're a developer, that's probably quite nice where you can see the things that you're working on directly in your editor. They both seem to have very simple clean user interfaces that I quite liked. And I heard very good things from a friend of mine about Height's support team.
Apparently they're very responsive, very friendly. So yeah, that's another nice thing. Sorry, just to say one thing about Linear, it seems to be the most developer focused tool out there. So if you're technical and you want your stuff to work well with a development workflow specifically, that's probably the one year one you're going to want to consider. Finally, there's these two other tools that I used to not think of as project management tools, but really they are.
I used to think of them as more like knowledge management. But there's this like weird gray area between project management and knowledge management. That is I feel like ClickUp goes into that as well, where, they have their documents. And. Documents are the core of everything these two tools do. So it's Notion and Coda, and both of them basically structured the entire workflow around. Documents. If you want to build, for example a backlog of tasks to work on for a project.
You would put that in a document called backlog, but then in that document you would create a table of some sort. I forget exactly how Notion and Coda make this work, but you can create like a system of rows of things to do with statuses that you can assign to people like those are things you can inject into documents and you can reference them from other places. And that's a thing that is really neat. Coda, I think does this especially well, from my brief test. About six months ago.
Yeah, it was very cool. What you could do with that. All kinds of like automations. It's kinda neat because you can write around these things or you can have multiple tables and one in one document and build workflows that, that feel more visual somehow. So yeah, very cool. For me. I like thinking of project management as sort of there are atomic units of work that needed to be done and need to be composed and organized. And I might want to reference them in a document.
But starting with a document as the sort of top level thing that I interact with. Just feels off for my brain. But I know a lot of people who absolutely love it. So yeah, those are some some of the tools that we have come across that we have tried. ClickUp is currently what we are using and we're really happy with it. It's a very flexible tool with a lot of features that are not quite as polished and clean as some of the other tools out there.
But they're adding a lot and they are polishing them as they come along. Yeah, that's that was our choice. If we were doing a more focused, like a single product. With a single. Yeah, single git repo or organization on GitHub or GitLab or something like that. I really wanted to try Linear. It seemed really lovely. Very felt like a very smooth way of working. Yeah, I would give that a shot. They're all interesting. And they're all worth trying out. Yeah. Give em a shot.
Let us know what you liked. We'd love to hear from you. And yeah, we'll see you in the next episode. Don't forget to subscribe. If you want to keep up with this stuff, I've been your host Raph. And remember, we all want to do some good in the world. So go build something good out there, friends