Podio’s project management software has been built for a wide range of companies – small businesses to large enterprises. While it provides building blocks to create custom apps for various business processes,  critical factors like usability, learning curve and significant setup time make it “not a good fit” for small businesses. TeamWave comes with out-of-the-box solution to manage & streamline everything in your company: Project Management, CRM & HR.

Why TeamWave is the leading Podio Alternative.

1. Ease of Use

Small businesses need simple software that can provide most of the functionality out-of-the-box. Essentially the software should have a minimal learning curve, setup time and save resources (time and money).

With Podio you can add various apps and customize them according your business. But, for a small business this can be very complex. TeamWave comes pre-loaded with various features required for important business functions and helps you get started right away. Here are couple of examples:

Client Collaboration in Projects

There is no dedicated workflow to share your projects with clients to gather feedback and collaborate while delivering the project. There is a generic share project option with which you can provide access to projects. This also means you’ll have to manage all the team members of your clients.

TeamWave has a specialised workflow to collaborate with clients or vendors. Just  invite just one person from your client’s team and they will be able to independently add/manage their entire team.

Task Management

With Podio, all the tasks (deliverables) from are shown in one place.

• There is no way for you to group related tasks in a task group. This is useful when you’d like to break a large task into smaller tasks.

• You’ll have to create filters to segregate tasks as per projects and save different types of views everytime a new project is created.

TeamWave has a section to view all the tasks from all the projects. You can view the tasks for certain project by opening up the project and applying various filters. Easily breakdown large tasks into smaller tasks by grouping them in a task list.

Sales Pipeline

Although Podio offers different types of views for deals, it doesn’t offer sales pipeline view. It lacks the user-interface to provide compelete visibility of the deals across all the sales stages.

TeamWave’s CRM is built around a proven sales pipeline management methodology.

Just some of the sales-related things you can do easily from a single page:

• Check progress of each deal/opportunity
• Add and move deals from one stage to another
• Mark them as won/lost
• Schedule deal activities
• Select different sales pipelines
• Figure out cumulative deal worth in each stage of the pipeline
• Find out the rotten deals (no activity for specific number of days)
• Filter deals via tags, deal ownership and deal state (open, won, lost, rotten)
• Quickly connect with support via in-app messenger

Note: TeamWave also lets you toggle between list view and time line view of deals.

CRM Customisation

As Podio’s sales management workspace doesn’t work on sales pipeline management methodology, it doesn’t let you create multiple pipelines inside “Deals” app. In case you’re selling different types of products/services, you’ll have to create multiple “deal apps” along with relevant sales stages.

TeamWave offers you a pre-built sales pipeline with five sales stages that help you get started right away. Add additional pipelines from the same page and manage the sales stages as well. In the pipeline view you can simply select the pipeline you’d like to view.

Smart Email

Podio requires you to add new app and map the email fields to Podio fields in case you’d like to keep a log of the email conversation you’re having with a client or prospect. But, there is no way to link the email with deals and contact persons.

TeamWave offers you a dedicated CRM inbox along with a “smart emal address”. It’ll help you get a complete visibility of all the communication around your deals and contacts. You can also automate the process of creating deals and contacts by creating rules & workflow for your email address. Simply BCC or FORWARD emails to the “smart address” and all  the emails will be automatically linked to relevant deals and contacts in CRM.

2. Pricing

Podio has tiered pricing structure that starts from $7.20/user/month and goes up to $19.20/user/month with annual billing. These pricing plans restrict you from using certain features and integrations.

TeamWave has a straightforward pricing – $3/user per month. For annual subscription, the pricing is $2/user per month. All the plans get all the features and apps – absolutely no restriction.

Here is the cost comparison for a company with 10 employees:

3. Application Suite

TeamWave is a unified platform for collaboration, sales and HR management. This means you’d get an application suite that integrates three apps. Some of the benefits:

Sales and Projects: Important files can be copied from deals to projects (example: requirement document) with a few clicks. Comes in handy when you commence project delivery after winning a deal.

Projects and HR: Project admin can keep track of the performance of the employees along with appreciation received from clients and log them as private notes in the HR app. During appraisal these notes can be reviewed for better decision making.

Sales and HR: In the HR app, if you add someone as the reporting manager of a sales rep, then the reporting manager will be automatically added as a deal follower whenever the sales rep adds a new deal. This fosters collaboration and helps in progress tracking.

Here is a sneak peek of our upcoming features:

We’ll be providing tighter integration of CRM and project management app to help you directly convert deals into project and smoothly transfer all the required files.

Bottom Line

Podio offers a lot of components (like lego bricks) to buld various custom applications. It is left to the customers to make the best out of them! While it might be suitable for large enterprises with complex workflows, it definitely falls short in case of small businesses who need simple apps that require minimal setup time and at the same time, provide powerful features.

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