Like all project management software, ProofHub helps teams organize and track the status of projects collaboratively. What makes ProofHub one of the best project management apps, however, are the tools that help your team discuss visual materials. If the kind of project your team manages includes design work, advertisements, or other visuals, ProofHub should top your list of options for improved productivity. If proofing is not your primary concern, we have three Editors' Choice winners to recommend for project management: GanttPro for beginners, Zoho Projects for growing teams on a budget, and Teamwork for client work.
What Is Project Management Software?What's New in ProofHub?
Since we last reviewed ProofHub, the app has gotten a Dark mode you can access from the Profile icon. ProofHub has also leveled up its reporting quite a bit. In addition to generating basic project reports, you can also see time spent by a user on a particular project, or even just tasks completed by a particular user on a given day, week, or month across a project or multiple projects. You can also generate reports based on any custom fields you've enabled.
ProofHub has added support for a few more languages, making it more accessible. You can now set your language preference to Dutch, English, French, German, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Taiwanese Mandarin, or Turkish.
How Much Does ProofHub Cost?
ProofHub offers three plans: Free, Essential, and Ultimate Control. You won't find the free plan advertised on ProofHub's website, but you can get it by requesting an account by email from support@proofhub.com.
For the paid plans, the company charges a flat monthly or annual fee for an unlimited number of account members. Many other project management apps charge you per person per month. You can get a 14-day free trial of the paid plans.
ProofHub Essential costs $50 per month or $540 per year. Again, you can have as many people as you want on the account. You can manage up to 40 projects, and you get 15GB of storage space. This includes all the service's core features, such as tasks, project templates, time tracking, group chat, Gantt charts, and more. It doesn't come with project and resource reports or a project manager role. The Essential account also misses out on a few key admin features, such as the ability to manage permissions through roles, as well as viewing advanced activity logs.
ProofHub Ultimate Control costs $150 per month or $1,620 per year. Ongoing deals for this tier of service are confusing, so we asked a ProofHub representative for clarification. As of this writing, the deal for the Ultimate Control annual commitment is that you pay $89 every month for the first three months and then the rate goes up to $135 per month; so you pay monthly even though you have an annual agreement. If you purchase the monthly subscription, you pay $99 for the first three months and $150 per month after that. With Ultimate Control, you get 100GB storage and there's no limit on the number of projects you can manage. This plan includes everything in Essential, plus project and resource reports, a project manager role, administrative controls, API access, advanced activity logs, a customized sign-in page, priority support, and more. You need this plan level if you work with external clients and want to give them limited access to ProofHub.
How Do ProofHub's Prices Compare?
Because ProofHub charges a flat monthly or yearly rate rather than a per-person rate, it's tough to compare its pricing to other project management apps.
Among project management apps, you'll find a vast range of pricing. The more simplified tools for small businesses cost much less than high-end tools for very large organizations managing hundreds of projects and people. There are also plenty of mid-range project management apps. ProofHub probably compares most closely with other project management apps for small businesses.
In that subcategory, we have Editors' Choice winners Zoho Projects and Teamwork. They both cost around $4–$9 per person per month, depending on the number of people on the team. GanttPro, which we would put in the same category, costs around $8–$9 per person per month for a team of 10–20 people, for the Basic plan.
Based on these reasonably comparable products, you'd need only 11 people on your team for a ProofHub Ultimate Control account to be competitively priced.
In some ways, ProofHub shares similarities with Basecamp, which costs $349 per month for an unlimited number of team members, a big jump from the flat $99 per month that Basecamp had cost for years. The difference is Basecamp doesn't have a few key project management features, including Gantt charts and task dependencies (unless you add them via a third-party plug-in); that's why we categorize Basecamp under collaboration apps instead of project management apps. There's a huge overlap between the categories of project management and collaboration apps, but to help consumers make purchasing decisions, we keep them separate. It's also worth noting that if you're considering switching from Basecamp to ProofHub, you can import your projects from one app to the other.
Getting Oriented With ProofHub
When you first create a ProofHub account, you get a thorough walk-through in the form of informational pop-ups that appear on each new page you land on. Beyond that, navigating the app at the highest level is simple and straightforward.
A helpful "Me" homepage gives an overview of what's happening in your ProofHub account. You get a summary of tasks and events assigned to you, a list of all active projects you've joined, and any announcements people on the team have made.
The announcements can be customized to appear only to certain team members or to everyone. You can set how long an announcement should stay on everyone's Me page. It's a good way to use ProofHub for more general communication, even if it doesn't apply to any specific project.
Navigating the app is simple. A column of buttons on the left side and tabs at the top help you move quickly from page to page. When you click to open an active project, a menu appears to help you dive directly into the section of the project you want to see, whether it's the Gantt chart view, Reports, or Discussions page.
Proofing Tools in ProofHub
ProofHub's name comes from the fact that it includes proofing tools, which few other project management apps have, Smartsheet being an exception. Proofing tools help everyone on a team discuss visual materials, such as design mockups and advertisements, as they go through iterations and approval.
As a result, ProofHub handles uploaded files better than many other project management apps. Other apps make you download a file before you can open it and see it. In ProofHub, you open files right in the browser. Let's say you're giving feedback on a design. You open the file in the app and can add arrows and write your comments about the design to the side, and even approve the file by clicking an Approval button at the top. ProofHub could use a few more markup tools here, but the ones it includes are sufficient and similar to those included with Smartsheet.
ProofHub's tools are not overly complex. They won't help you give feedback on, say, video projects. But if your team needs to discuss and approve JPGs, PDFs, and other visual files as part of your project management work, having proofing these tools can make a big difference. We wouldn't say they are the main selling point of ProofHub, however. Its simplicity and ease of use are much more significant.
Setting Up Projects and Your Team in ProofHub
When you create a project, ProofHub asks if you want to create a project or make a template. Either way, a page opens with fields to fill out.
You give the project a name, description, start date, and end date. There's also a field called Category, which can be useful for managing projects by type, client, or the team working on them. You can also assign team members to the project and choose someone to be the project manager.
In setting up and customizing your project, you can choose which tabs you want to be in the app for the project. The options are Discussions, Tasks, Gantt, Calendar, Notes, Files, and Time. If you have a project that doesn't require time tracking, you might omit the Time tab. If you want to streamline where your team discusses the project, you might omit Notes and Files but keep Discussions. Another customization option is the ability to assign a color to each project.
When you add team members to a project, by default you can make that person an owner, admin, or normal user. Owners and admins have access to all the projects added in the account, whereas normal users can only see projects to which they have been added. You can create custom roles, too, and define their access and permissions. ProofHub also comes with some team management features, which it refers to as groups.
How Easy Is ProofHub to Use?
ProofHub looks good but could use some fine-tuning to make it easier to navigate. You often have to open new windows to get to the details of an item. Some of the functions aren't intuitive and take a little time to figure out. For example, when it comes to adding new team members to an existing project, we got stumped a few times before figuring it out.
That said, many conveniences are built in, such as the ability to reorder tasks by dragging and dropping them and creating dependencies between tasks in a Gantt chart by dragging a little circle that appears from one task to another.
The day-to-day project management workflow is as you'd expect. You click the Projects button in the sidebar, choose the project from the panel, and you're instantly taken to the Tasks view for the selected project. Then, you're free to move between any of the assigned tabs like discussion, notes or calendar.
What Additional Features Does ProofHub Offer?
ProofHub has an impressive range of features, enough for any small to midsize team to manage a project, but not so many you'll get lost in them. It offers task management tools, milestones, Gantt charts, time tracking, reports, notifications, a calendar, in-app chat, and others.
One feature in particular that is worth pointing out is a table view of tasks. You choose which task fields to see, sort by different fields, rearrange the columns, and export the data to a CSV file if you like.
The task management tools are strong. You can add a lot of detail to any task, including estimated time to complete the task, labels (which are similar to tags), and documents you upload to the task. ProofHub gives you a range of options when you want to check off a task as well. You can mark it In Progress, In Approval, or Done.
ProofHub has tools for tracking time and managing timesheets, but it doesn't include budgeting, invoicing, or billing. You can get those tools by integrating your ProofHub account to FreshBooks, however. In ProofHub, you and your teammates can enter time on task manually or run a timer while working. Time tracked on tasks can automatically feed into timesheets for each project or client you need to bill.
ProofHub's Task View and Board View
A Tasks view puts tasks in a list, where you can quickly scroll through them and select any one to see more details, such as the start date, due date, assignee, and any comments or files attached to it.
If your team uses a kanban method for organizing and tracking work, you can view tasks in a Board View. The Board View is a nice addition, but if your team relies heavily on kanban boards, you might instead pick up a specialized kanban app instead, such as Trello.
ProofHub Communication Tools
A section of the app called Discussions lets you and your colleagues maintain ongoing conversations about each project. Because you might have several different discussions, you can organize them by giving each one a title. Discussions are associated with the whole project, rather than being at the level of a task or task list. This setup is ideal for top-level discussions about the overall state of the project. It's a simple and clear way to communicate messages everyone on the team should read. The Discussions are in addition to any comments you add at the task level to have more specific conversations with only the people who need to be a part of them.
ProofHub gives you a few additional ways to communicate. An in-app chat box lets you message another team member any time without leaving the project management space. The chat box, confusingly, is found in the same chat bubble where you can message ProofHub support. It's not the most intuitive place for it. If your group already uses a team messaging app, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, the chat feature may be irrelevant anyway.
Integrations and Reports in ProofHub
FreshBooks isn't the only integration offered. You can also connect your ProofHub account to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Outlook. That's not an especially long list, but upcoming Slack and Zapier integrations should help, though we'd still like to see it grow in the future.
Reports in ProofHub are heavy on graphics, which we like. Admins can see an overview of all projects and the status of each one, how many projects are overdue, how many are archived, and so forth. You also see a progress bar for each project indicating what percent of all tasks associated with that project have been marked done.
A lightweight resource report gives you some insight into how your people are doing and whether they're overtasked, but it's not particularly rich with detail. You can't, for example, see when someone will be out of office, or easily reassign work from one person to another. Those types of functions are often necessary for large teams that work on dozens or hundreds of projects at once—and it's the kind of thing that sets LiquidPlanner and other high-end project management apps apart from those more suitable for small businesses and small teams.
Simple and Straightforward Project Management
ProofHub is a simple, straightforward, and reliable project management service that charges a fixed and fair monthly price, regardless of how many users you have. It's especially compelling for small businesses. It could use minor improvements in its interface and loading speeds, but, overall it's very easy to use. Its strength is that it provides adequate tools for managing projects, especially those with visuals, without overwhelming you with features you may not need.
Having tested more than two dozen apps for managing projects, we have three top picks and Editors' Choice winners. They are GanttPro for anyone new to project management, Zoho Projects for growing teams on a budget, and Teamwork for small to midsize businesses that primarily manage outside client work. For larger organizations that manage many complex projects at once, we recommend Celoxis or LiquidPlanner.
