Zoho Projects Review 2023: Are Features Worth the Pricing?

If you’ve spent some time in the world of business SaaS, you likely know the name Zoho. The vendor is famous for a variety of business tools including its CRM, customer service, and accounting platforms.

In this Zoho Projects review, we’ll look at the brand’s offering in the domain of project management software. You’ll get a breakdown of pricing plans and the most important project management tools and features included. 

At the end we’ll give our thoughts on whether it’s worth the cost, and our rating of this PM solution.

Zoho Projects review 2023: Is Zoho Projects any good?

Zoho Projects is among the most popular project management software used today, especially by startups and small businesses. 

When comparing project management software, users focus on things like price, ease of use, and variety of tools and features. This article will show that Zoho Projects goes head to head with any of those other project management tools.

A typical Zoho Projects review ranks it in the top 5 project management tools competing for market share, and its place there is quite deserved thanks to its fair price. 

On that note, do consider checking out a Zoho review to get a broader view of the vendor’s app ecosystem at large, as you may want to think about how Projects connects to other Zoho products.

Zoho Projects pricing plans 

First of all, how much does Zoho Projects cost? Let’s first review Zoho Projects prices:

How much does Zoho Projects cost for nonprofits?

Zoho is known for providing flexible pay-as-you-go contracts for nonprofits. For example, Zoho CRM, Zoho Social, and Zoho Creator all have customized pricing and features tailored to the needs of nonprofits. If you’re seeking discounted pricing for Zoho Projects, we recommend contacting the vendor directly via support@zohoprojects.com.

Are there any Zoho Projects coupon codes or promo discount vouchers?

Well, we went ahead and did the research, and it seems there are no Zoho Projects coupon codes or discount vouchers at this time. Keep on checking as these things pop up periodically.

Zoho Projects free vs paid: what’s the difference?

The free plan is only good for up to 3 users, and lets you run just 2 projects, and it only provides you with 10 MBs of storage space. 

Both paid plans are good for unlimited projects but only the enterprise plan is good for unlimited users. You get at least 100 GBs of storage in both paid plans.

The free version offers many core tools for task management, but not really any of the advanced tools like automations and workflows or more customizable features. In fact, for the best in workflows, one must actually get the enterprise plan.

You can always check with Zoho about their 10-day free trial or about requesting a Zoho Projects demo, though the website does not have any information about demos.

Zoho Projects overview: What is Zoho Projects & What is Zoho Projects used for?

Zoho Projects is used as a premiere project management solution. It helps you manage your work schedule, your tasks and your involvement in larger projects. 

Zoho Projects is used by teams for collaborating and communicating on shared work and goals. 

With Zoho Projects, you and your team can track and manage the time and costs of all your work activities, and use that data for future project planning.

Zoho Projects is also a PM platform that lets you set up automated workflows to help streamline the day-to-day activities of your whole team. It automates away time-consuming tasks which results in a productivity boost for the staff.

Zoho Projects features list 

The main features of Zoho Projects are:

• Task management

• Task dependencies

• Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and views

• Issue tracking and bug tracking

• Time management

• Collaboration tools

• Automations and workflows

• Human resource management

• Roles and permissions

• Analytics and reporting

• Integrations and add-ons

• Mobile apps

Task management

Like many great project management software, Zoho Projects is a very comprehensive set of task management features. You get functionalities to break down tasks into subtasks and create to-do task lists. Creating new tasks or subtasks can be done nearly instantly. Task management tools also include due dates for short term planning and milestones for more big picture project planning. You can set up automatically recurring tasks, and get automated reminders and notifications related to ongoing tasks.

Task dependencies

One of the main features of project management tools that should be spelled out specifically are task dependencies. You can set dependencies onto tasks which will automatically tie tasks together in a sequential order. What this means is that if task B is dependent on task A, then task B cannot be initiated before task A has been completed.

Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and views

With Zoho Projects you get a solid Gantt chart that is great for visualizing timeframes and dependencies. With these Gantt charts and other project templates, you can create custom fields. There are also Kanban boards for easy agile project management. There are both classic list views and a simpler ‘Plain’ list view, and you get calendar views and milestone views as well. You even get a featured view to help do service level agreements or SLAs. 

Issue tracker and bug tracking

One of the areas that project management solutions are very useful for is for IT departments in customer support. With Zoho Projects, it’s easy to log issues and do bug tracking reports and assign them to specific support reps who might have experience with the bug or customer. You can use any of the views to manage issues and add custom fields to them too.

Time management

Project management software needs good time tracking, and Zoho Projects excels at tracking and analyzing your tasks and work hours in real time. This is decent functionality for updating billable hours. You can set up task timers which automatically track hours. Another tool you get is timesheets that allow for manual time logging that can be submitted to managers for approvals. Budgeting and invoicing feed on data from the timesheets and tracked hours to streamline creating those documents.  

Collaboration tools

To help team members, Zoho Projects delivers some great chat functionality like personal messaging and group chat rooms with nice user interface aesthetics, and there is a ‘Discuss’ mode that invites everyone in for things like brainstorming. For more broad team knowledge base sharing, there is a forum tool. Users can also @-style mention each other in notes and chats, and team members can use a shared document management tool. What’s more, you can perform many of these features from your email inbox.

Automations and workflows

With Zoho Projects as your PM software, you can use drag and drop functionality to create workflows. These can automatically send notifications and updates to team members and collaborators, update invoicing with new billable hours, and more. There is also a business rule builder for higher level trigger-based actions. You can send third party notifications through a webhooks tool as well. 

Human resource management

Streamline your labor resource utilization with Zoho Projects tools that recognize when one team member is free or overloaded with tasks and let the system redistribute the work more equitably. Heatmaps give visualizations of work intensity areas for people or during timeframes. View schedules for specific periods or employees, automate assignee rules, and even create new projects and tasks directly from these dashboards. 

Roles and permissions

Setting up user profiles for all collaborators on projects and tasks is smart. With Zoho you can set user profiles and client profiles with different access for each. You can also create custom profiles. Profile permission roles include admin, manager, employee, contractor, moderator and client.

Analytics and reporting

You got all your standard reporting that you’d expect with any great project management system, like task reports, issue reports and timesheet reports. A project dashboard shows you real time updates on all aspects of a project or endeavor. You also get tools for budget forecasting, planned versus actual cost analysis, and an earned value management tool for schedules, costs and time comparisons. 

Integrations and add-ons

First thing’s first, there are of course great Zoho integrations with other Zoho apps like Zoho CRM, Zoho Invoice and Zoho Books. There are native integrations with Google apps like Gmail, Microsoft apps like their spreadsheets Excel, as well as Dropbox, Github, and Slack. There are also imports like the Jira import and the Basecamp import. Through connector apps like Zapier, you can integrate Zoho Projects with other project management apps like Trello or Asana.  

Mobile apps

Zoho Projects has dedicated tablet and mobile apps for both Android and iOS. It’s nice as a day-planner and to-do list manager, a team communication tool, and you can log ours with it as well. More advanced features can include a document scanner. 

Zoho Projects pros and cons

Here are the advantages and disadvantages of Zoho Projects:

Zoho Projects advantages

Firstly, the price. The free plan is a great plan for any person new to PM. The premium plan is very affordable compared to competitors, as is the enterprise plan’s cost.

Next, ease of use is another benefit to Zoho Projects. It’s a clean and intuitive interface and nothing is over complicated.

Finally, the integration with other Zoho tools makes this another great PM solution, but that’s only if you are really into the Zoho ecosystem.

Overall, it’s a great tool for individuals and startups.

Zoho Projects disadvantages

You do not get unlimited projects with the free plan, so you cannot use that to really scale up anything.

While the template and workflow customization is not bad at all, it can feel simplistic to users who get ambitious for these tools.

Finally, the best workflow automation features are reserved for the enterprise plan, but as mentioned, it’s not a huge drain on the expenses compared to other vendors.

Zoho Projects complaints & praise (from real Zoho Projects customer reviews)

Online positive reviews of Zoho Projects mostly come from users at small businesses, startups, or are independent, and they are quite positive in their reviews. 

There is a lot of good praise for the task management and to-do functionality as well as an overall work planner. Features like time tracking, billable hour logging, and invoicing also get good comments.

Negative Zoho Projects reviews from users and online review sites are more sparse and varied and seem to deal with more personal problems like bugs, though no single issue stands out as widespread. 

Some reviewers lament the lack of an on-premise option for enterprise, as there is only the cloud-based solution.

Review of Zoho Projects customer support

Zoho offers a user guide, a knowledge base and a Projects Community where users can help themselves with support issues. There are also tutorials, webinars, help videos, and a “productivity compass” that helps with overall workplace culture stuff.

For more customer support, you can get in touch with someone by email, call, or chat, or you can make a request for a remote assistance session. 

There are also premium support packages from Zoho with things like 24/7 multi-channel support with fast response times. You can also get product training and onboarding services as extras.

Is Zoho Projects worth it? Our key takeaways

So, in the end, is Zoho Projects worth it? 

Yes, enthusiastically, emphatically and ecstatically yes. This is true even if in the end you feel compelled to get the most expensive enterprise plan to take advantage of the most advanced Zoho Projects tools like the customization, recurring tasks and workflow rules builder. 

So, we hope that’s given you a bit of encouragement to at least give the free version a spin. 

And there are Zoho Projects alternatives to check out as well, of course, if you feel like you should survey your options more.

But don’t waste too much time deliberating, when you could be out there managing the heck out of some projects.