Podio - Flexible collaboration tool for teams

It's difficult to describe Podio in a few sentences as it's flexibility and extensibility through the addition of apps from the library or creating your own means that it can be used for many different things. We've used it for project management and as a simple space to hold and share information when several external parties are involved. It means everyone can see what needs to be shared and current status with compromising internal systems and worrying about correct security settings for various parties. Podio isn't always first choice for team collaboration as there may already be solutions in place that clients prefer (for example, Microsoft Teams), but it is a quick way to pull disparate people and data together and get working quickly. As with all collaboration tools, it needs a bit of planning to configure it best for the type of project you want to use it for, but once you have used it a couple of times setup should be quick. For 'standard' users who have a degree of competence with collaboration software, the interface is intuitive and they should get up to speed pretty quickly. If you work in an Agile environment, all the tools are there to configure an Agile project and get started quickly. Some people love Podio immediately, others don't get it. Try out with a couple of small projects to get familiar with it; keep it as simple as possible - Podio's greatest strength is that you don't need to add more features/apps than are suited to the job.

Pros

Fast to configure for team collaboration on a variety of tasks - from the simple to fully featured Agile project management.

Adding only the apps you need means you can have a flexible and bespoke approach to each project depending on the requirements.

Easy to share with external users.

Cons

The flexibility that can be a strength can also be a weakness. There needs to be strong leadership over configuration and apps included.

The number of apps that can be added and the configurable options can lead to unnecessary complexity in the hands of inexperienced users.

If you have complex security requirements, configuration can be a pain.

High Customization Project Management

Pros

The level of customization is amazing, and really makes Podio an incredibly versatile tool. Even with the mid-level plus pricing plan, we've utilized custom workspaces for a large variety of use cases throughout our company. The team at Podio also releases updates fairly often, which is great to see. Almost every update has added value to how we use the application.

It's obvious that the Podio team has put a lot of work into what they have released thus far. The quality is great, and I can't think of anything that doesn't work properly or that feels messy. I'm confident that new features they release in the future will be just as well polished.

Cons

The number one limitation to Podio is the lackluster permission structure. On one hand, it has really forced us to create truly collaborative and transparent workspaces. However, it has also made it /impossible/ to use Podio for certain more sensitive applications. It is also incredibly annoying that there isn't an overall admin group for the total organization. We have multiple admins for our Podio organization (who help create and maintain workspaces), and each of us have to be added to every workspace as an admin in order to maintain the system. This means that our feeds get spammed with activity from every workspace, making it pretty useless for our own needs. It also bloats some of our workspaces, and makes it tricky to maintain stuff.

In the plus price level, reports are kind of a joke. I believe they get a lot better in the higher plans, but plus level reports are almost useless.

Project management with all the bells and whistles.

Podio is powerful, indeed. I ranked it a bit lower than most as my focus has always been around small businesses. And Podio might simply be too much for that sector. But it does offer an impressive array of features that perhaps small businesses with lots of development background need. It seems to wrap too many features into one product and many organizations simply do not work this way. But the concept of keeping all this functionality in one single place does make it appealing. Yet, there is much to be desired for regarding features in each category. Project Management, for example. It has features that are very common among competitors, but lacks features like milestones, issue tracking, defects, testing, epic and story hierarchies, etc. It simply does not provide the power one would expect from a solid project management functionality. Instead of ramping up these features, others are added, such as a CRM and financial features, etc. I would not entirely dismiss Podio, as it might be exactly what your organization's structure needs. Perhaps a quick test drive would do. I found it cumbersome for my small business, especially since I was already managing my clients using another CRM and my financials were being managed by another online application... keeping them all isolated and visible only to the required personnel.

Pros

Podio is feature rich and more aligned with larger companies with design and development teams. It offers a wide range of views to fit any and all your needs. Create and manage workspaces with ease. Podio is much more than just a project management tool. It offers the ability to track leads and clients with default or customizeable templates to display their details. Manage projects, portfolios and much more. With a focus on the creative (design) and development, Podio offers much more than one can ask for. It even offers an impressive library of APIs for customization and integrations. Track tasks with incredible details including time. Podio even gives you a place to track expenses. If your organization is looking for a product that keeps everything in one place, Podio might provide this for you.

Cons

Despite the rave reviews on the Pros, I believe that Podio is just too much for the average project management role. It feels as though it is trying to combine the features of a CRM, Financial System and Project Management product all in one place. Most organizations are simply not structured in a way that all these features should reside in one system. Perhaps it will work for some, which is why Podio does have a strong hold in the industry.

Double-edged tool. Lots of flexibility and features, but easy to lose your direction and focus.

Reliable communication with the team through the chat function. Good personal tas management and also knowledge management. Even though we stored or files in a cloud service, we 'indexed' and sorted our knowledge through Podio.

Pros

This app felt like a blank canvas. You can create a lot of workspaces, each with differentes apps that have different functionality, such as "Expenses" and "People". For each app, you can create items, that you can call whatever you like, e.g. "Payment" and "Person", respectively. Within them, you have many field options and you can customize quite a bit, even automatically creating tasks. I also appreciated that the calendar, your tasks and your contacts have their separated site. Each works automatically, adding events that you interacted with automatically to your calendar, the same with tasks that were delegated to you. In summary of the good stuff, lots of possibilites. Also, formulars where quite helpful.

Cons

As much as it has pros, there is for me and the organization where we used it, one big Con, that goes throughout the whole app: too much flexibility and little restraint/focus. The tool is a blank canvas, and I am sure you can create a good workflow for different needs. The problem is, that you (at least we did) need a single person that first, understands how it all works second, takes the time to create each app and the item-configurations (altough there is a marketplace where you can use other people's templates) and third, explain it to everybody else. The problem comes, when you realize there was an unknown feature or a simpler way of doing things. There is so much that is possible that you might end up complicating your workflow to much.

Love this tool, fully customizable!

I'm using the free version, so for me it's a free project management tool that can be customized to track any type of project or process. I can assign and schedule tasks for any user in the workspace.

Pros

It can do anything! There are pre-developed apps and packages of apps that you can add to your workspace to get started quickly. Those modules can be modified to meet your needs. OR, you can create your own apps to serve your own purposes. I've created my own apps for a variety of workspaces and have found it can do almost anything! So far we've used it for lead development, website development/QA, order tracking, and customer feedback handling. Love that we can assigne and schedule tasks for any user in the workspace. We're a small team, so the free version has been able to meet our needs as well.

Cons

It can be time consuming to figure out how build your own applications. The pre-built apps are great to start with, but then you have to visualize how to modify them to meet you unique needs. Not bad, just a learning curve. Also, the per user per month expenses can add up quickly if you need the more advanced features.

Good process flow tool

We are getting deals and making money, and we are relying on Podio as our current database. I do believe there is a better system developed for real estate investors that would work better for us and support our follow up process more efficiently and effectively, but for a generic database or project management sytem, Podio is very functional.

Pros

I like the customizability and usefulness of this platform. The app-based system allows anyone to use in different ways depending on the different process flows. I like the task functionality and integration with other apps. We use another party to add backend automation which has been helpful for tagging and tracking leads.

Cons

The system goes down fairly often and prevents leads from flowing successfully into our database. I'm not sure if this is due to glitches in our automations or a site-wide problem. The apps may pull data from other apps, but the information is separate. As a real estate investor, I see this as a con because if a lead information is transferred from one status to another (into another app), the information is created again rather than updated in a separate location. If a change is made in one app, it isn't reflected in the other. There may be workflows that could help with this for the field data, but not for notes left of the activity.

This software has helped our teams to easily interact and work together.

Pros

The cloud-based application lets the organizations to communicate within the company or with another company for their requirements. It has helped us to collaboratively work using a single platform by sharing data such as business processes and project management reports, and through real time communication. Delegating and tracking the tasks has never been so easy! Using this software has improved our productivity and time management. We could build and maintain good relationships with the customer. The best thing about this software is that, it had given us the ability to control who can access the workspace environment, thus adding to the security feature. Since the files can be shared in one common place, multiple email threads and redundancy could be avoided.

Cons

This utility does not provide phone support, which is a huge drawback. The users are expected to always work from their desktop computer environment. The developers of this application are not always ready to change the application features of the tool. The option of printing out the shared pdf, directly, is not present in the current version of the application. The user interface of this application also needs to be updated, as some find it cumbersome to use. If you are checking out for some automation in workflows, you would be disappointed as there are none!

Great Resource for Businesses

Podio is our main project management source and we love it! It allows us to assign project managers to projects, tag team members that need the information, others to add information they have gathered, copy emails directly to Podio, assign tasks, and so much more. I would highly recommend Podio for any type of business and think it is a great tool that is easy to use.

Pros

What I like most about Podio is the organization of project management. It helps to keep track of current information, copying emails directly to Podio, tagging team members, and organizing the project with information that is useful in my business. It has been such a great management tool for our small business and relaying information that is easily searchable when the project information is needed quickly!

Cons

What I like least about this software is that is can get confusing in the beginning and overwhelming of features. It does take some time to understand the functions of Podio and all that it can do. Once learned it is user friendly, but it is hard to get started!

Amazing Customizable CRM with lots of hidden power using add ons.

Pros

I really like the fact that Podio offers a customizable CRM solution that can be configured for almost any kind of business. The free product tier is critical to test feasibility of concepts and to help determine if the software will support your needs. The GlobiFlow additional service is incredibly powerful to automate particular process flow within Podio and externally. Using GlobiFlow, you can link to outside services and trigger actions based on events in the system. Also critical to my business is the developer API, which allows me to connect my own value added software to orchestrate other business related tasks not supported by GlobiFlow.

Cons

The user interface is in need of updating. Some widgets like scroll bars are cumbersome to use with tables due to a scroll bar within scroll bar effect that makes the page and table scroll in a strange way. Also, some basic capabilities of certain form widgets are missing like default values setting.

Podio. Great Tool That Not Enough People Know About

At our local Red Cross we needed a simple way to keep track of volunteer info and first aid training participants. It used to be a very manual process and being a small branch I couldn't convince admin to spring for an expensive CRM. My search landed me on the Podio website and I gave it a try. What an amazing tool it proved to be. It took a few weeks to get the hang of it (mainly because I had no previous experience with CRMs) but it has now become a central part of operations. We now can't imagine life without it. Now that we have it set up just the way we want it we can now easily figure out how many volunteers have been trained in not just First Aid but all of the other courses we offer. We have an easy way to check the number of events each volunteer has attended over any given period. Using webforms we have a really simple way for clients to requests First Aid volunteers at their events which automatically notifies the people we've specified so following up is now much easier. It has an iPhone app so even on the go staff always have access to data as long as there is an internet connection. I could go on and on but I think I would say my favourite feature is the customizability. It doesn't do everything (nothing does) but even with a free account you can get so much done it's simply mind blowing. Looking forward to the improvements (which have been never ending since we signed up). I now use it at my job to keep track of staff info and again it has become an invaluable tool significantly speeding up my workflow.

Pros

Ease of use
Price (free option is great)
Very customisable

Cons

Would love the ability to print pdf reports instead of just exporting Excel files