However, there are areas of project management where Basecamp is lacking. Instead of trying to be everything to everybody, the Basecamp guys chose to stay focused on what their product is best at – collaboration. The logic behind this reasoning can be found in their excellent book, available here, also for free online reading.

The story didn’t end there, lucky for us – end users. A Basecamp API was created, which opened opportunity for enterpreneurs to create tools that add onto Basecamp’s functionality. There is vast array of these available for areas like billing, time tracking, planning, etc. Complete list can be found here.

One of those tools is PlannerX which appears to cater to project managers that are looking for a good and easy way to make project plans.

Strengths

• Nice interface for quick entry of milestones, todo lists and individual todo’s
• Bulk-assign of todo’s
• Sleek shiny UI

Weaknesses

• There is no way to see a master Gantt chart of all your projects. You can only work with/see one project at a time
• You can’t tell if a todo or milestone is completed or not
• You can’t tell if a milestone is late or not (other than by date), unlike on Basecamp’s side where a milestone turns distinctly red when late
• Once you sort your project items by Name or Assignee, you can’t return to the default sort order – by date
• Obscure shortcuts: Ctrl-~ and Ctrl-.
• Submitting support request feels very Facebook-y. Questions like “how does this make you feel.” I’m not even sure my support request (Gantt chart button not functional) even got submitted. I saw the Gantt chart once, then the button stopped working and I never saw it again.
• There is always a pesky “undefined milestone” as the last item on your list that you can’t get rid of. It even shows up on your Gantt chart (when you can get to that). At least it doesn’t get pushed to Basecamp.

Summary

PlannerX might help you to set up your project plan up front. It might save you considerable amount of time, especially for bigger projects. Not bad for $9/month or $90/year. 

After you are done with your project plan and the project kicks off, you should probably log out of PlannerX and not use it for the same project again. 

My overall feel of this tool is that it is in early beta and has a good amount of user feedback to go through before becoming a mature application.