Clarizen Review

Clarizen is truly one of the best project management software you can find in the market. It includes many features that really matter in managing your team, and you can rely pretty much only on Clarizen to get your job done, without the need to integrate it with external modules.

Clarizen sports a very clear and simple interface.

Usability

Even if Clarizen is aimed to enterprise-level users, its developers worked hard to ease the use for everyone, even the most inapt of your team member. Clarizen cornerstone is the “roadmap” for your project, a place where everything the team’s doing is showed in a chart, seen by all your coworkers. We found this a neat piece of design, capturing with clarity your progress (or lack thereof). There’s a left panel from which you can access any feature you need (and they’re a lot).
Those of you accustomed to downloadable software to use on your machine won’t appreciate Clarizen focus on cloud computing and syncing: the app is a full-fledged SaaS, although not the swiftest webapp you can find. (Basecamp is still one of the quickest project management app around, and one of the best also.)

Features

Clarizen has a wide variety of features: task management, time and expense tracking, reports, and many more. It allows you even to manage tickets, which is an amazing feature for every business with a lot of requests from users. With Clarizen you can also track issues and bugs, which makes it the perfect tool for developers.
Time tracking stands out as a well-though feature: Clarizen stores your time informations and share them between its applications and you can enter your time sheets using its mobile apps.
Teamwork collaboration is a solid selling point for Clarizen, which allows you to edit and comment documents together; it even lets you markup or comment PDF or CAD files (yes, architects & engineers out there, CAD files).
You can set different level of access to your projects, letting clients or contractors to participate or see progressions without granting them complete control on the project. For example, you can keep your clients or your contractors posted sending them updates email updates. You can use pre-made templates or create one from your projects, and of course there are different integrations for more specific needs.

Support

If we consider Clarizen support, meaning phone or mail support, is top-notch, and its online counterpart is really good. You’ll find the customary best practices, webinar, and “victory kit”, brief course to learn something specific (i.e., the “Project Manager Victory Kit” focuses on remote collaboration, transparency, deadlines and more). We found this a cool way to train its customers.

Pricing

It’s not that Clarizen is too expensive (well, it is): it’s the intricacy of its plans that gets us confused. First of all, you have to pay in full in advance 36 months of usage for every user in your team or company: there’s three tiers, and the most expensive one will cost you over 2,000$. (Yes, you can pay month by month, but it’s too much expensive.) Then you can cherry-pick other solution for your colleagues: email updates only, project only but not the expenses module, etc. Maybe include every option in each tier, which are already expensive (more so if you pay in advance) could improve user selection.