GoPlan Offers Ruby-based Collaboration For Less

We don’t know if ‘WeBreakStuff’ is a good label for a web design and programming house. What we can tell you is that at least one of the items to emerge from the company’s workshop is some quality work, inside and out.

It’s called GoPlan, and it is an application that helps teams collaborate on projects, period. It lets users take notes, maintain a calendar, manage tasks and files, track stuff (things that require debugging, etc.), and even publish a project blog to let others know what the team behind the screen are up to.

GoPlan has its equivalents in the Web 2.0 application world. One is 37signals’ Basecamp, a product that’s been spoken about more than once here on Profy. Basecamp and GoPlan even share a fundamental trait: they both have Ruby under the hood. Also, there’s ActiveCollab. Its architecture is different from GoPlan’s - in that it relies on open source PHP to strut its stuff - but the actions and purposes for each are almost synonymous, regardless of their contrasts in code.

GoPlan will appeal to most people for its price plans. The software is pretty, sure, but most people look to online applications because 1) they need to be a little thrifty when it comes to the operations budget, and 2) you’d need to try pretty hard to get lost and throw your hands up in frustration over a simple, straightforward Ruby app. Let’s look at the pricing plans available for GoPlan and stack ‘em up against the standard of the day, Basecamp.

Both with GoPlan and Basecamp, pricing ranges from free to $99-plus, but tack on another dollar to that number and that’s where GoPlan tops out. At $100 per month, WeBreakStuff offers GoPlan with few limits. Unlimited simultaneous projects. Unlimited users. Chat. Complete SSL and ACL security. The works.

The only area GoPlan fails to trump Basecamp is storage, and even in that particular battle between the two there are exceptions. For instance, with GoPlan’s ‘Free’ option, users are given 5MB of storage. As a freebie, Basecamp offers naught in the way of remote space. Also, at GoPlan’s ‘Startup’ level (general equivalent of Basecamp’s ‘Basic’ plan), WeBreakStuff provides collaborators with 500MB versus 37signals’ 400. Similar discrepancies can be in the number of users allowed by the competing services.

And the details can be scrutinized for quite some time, and we’re sure that some won’t know which to pick. Nonetheless, GoPlan will likely rely on its lower cost to win itself some “shelf space” in the market. By offering its plans at lower prices than those advertised for Basecamp, groups in need of collaboration software may simply overlook the things like storage allotments (Basecamp’s $149 option offers 20GB, as opposed to GoPlan’s 8GB at $100) and focus on more important things like security and the amount of options available to collaborators. Since both are Ruby babies, they’ll both have similarly short learning curves.

GoPlan is sure to see a sharper growth spurt than Basecamp in the coming months and years, but then again, Basecamp already experienced its own. Also, GoPlan’s rise will likely be a result of its adoption of novice customers rather than Basecamp expatriates.

WeBreakStuff should maintain a level of cautious optimism back at home base about the future. It has a way to go before it encroaches on Basecamp’s territory, and if 37signals smells a foreigner nearing, we’re bound to see some cost cutting on the Basecamp pricing page. It’ll be interesting to see how things shake out for these applications in the ensuing months. GoPlan is clearly a serious contender in the area, and if it’s as much a winner as WeBreakStuff hopes (we’re sure it feels so), this race between the two Ruby-happy firms will turn out to be only the first leg of several.

GoPlan Pricing

Basecamp Pricing