In today’s era of flexible work, teams need a reliable communication tool.
Among other tools on the market, Slack, Trello, InVision and Dropbox are the most popular teamwork solutions. However, even though some of them promote themselves as a full-blown comms headquarters, their features don’t cover all the needs a modern team has.
Teams have to opt for multiple solutions which automatically raises costs and increases the number of headaches.
In this post, we’re going to compare a new hub for work – Heycollab – with its (partial) competitors to see what teams can get while saving up to 80% on their communication tools.
Let’s dive in!
Heycollab: The Best of Slack, Trello, InVision and Dropbox
When we consider the general teamwork needs, we typically think of:
- Constant contact
- Task and project management
- Collaboration and feedback
- File storage
Rarely any business nowadays stores their files on premises, and having in mind that flexible work is cost-effective, more and more teams are working from home.
This means everything has to be hosted in the cloud if we want to fight data silos and make sure that relevant parties can get the information they need to do excellent work.
Every one of these tools is a partial solution.
Slack offers constant contact, Trello offers visual task (and project) management, InVision has all the features you need to collaborate on projects, and Dropbox takes care of archiving everything so nothing gets lost.
However, all of them come with their own price tag if you want the full functionality and integrations.
More Tools, More (Budget) Problems
Slack starts at $6.67 per user per month. InVision starts at $99 if you want to have unlimited prototypes and up to (only) 5 members. Trello will cost you $9.99/user/month if you want to step above the 10MB attachment limit (and other teamwork setbacks). Finally, Dropbox offers cloud file hosting for €10/month/user for 3TB.
When you add that all up, it can make a dent in the budget. And even if it doesn’t, using these tools simultaneous requires either a high level of integrations or team members who have to keep writing down what’s stored where.
To put it simply: it’s a mess.
How Heycollab Helps with Teamwork
At Heycollab, we’ve been through the whole nine yards of app sprawl. It cost us our budget and our nerves.
When we can’t access all the information we need within one central hub for work, it causes problems and delays. Mary can’t remember where that one project file is stored, and Gavin can’t leave his feedback so the client gets a shoddy version of what was supposed to be an excellent, revenue-boosting project.
When Heycollab is added into the equation, you get four central work hub functionalities for the price of (less than) one:
- Team messaging
- Task management
- Collaboration
- File storage
The only Heycollab plan is $9 per month and it includes all the functionalities and an unlimited number of users.
Let’s see how it works and what kind of teams Heycollab is best suited for!
How to Use Heycollab
The first thing any team needs is a central workspace. When we’re replacing physical offices with virtual ones, we need a virtual workspace, as well.
The Team Workspace is the cornerstone of Heycollab’s platform.
It’s a group chat where members of your team can chat about everything; from projects to memes.
Due to its intuitive setup, all the three main functionalities are available within the workspace:
messaging, task boards and the media hub tab.
It’s like an office, minus the chairs and plus every file and person available at the click of a button.
Similarly to products we already know, teams can talk to other teams (cross-departmental collaboration), individual team members, and within their own teams.
When a team member references a project prototype within the conversation, they can pull it up from the media hub and integrate it into the conversation.
In addition to files, each workspace also contains a Tasks tab.
When team members log into their workspace every morning, they can see everything they need and focus on what matters. Right away.
The next important feature of Heycollab are task boards.
Building onto the principles of Kanban visual task management which improves retention and focus, task boards allow complete transparency into a project – from its status to each individual task.
Each board has multiple columns and cards.
Tasks can be separated into sub-tasks, assigned to specific team members, collaborated on and monitored by the managers and other team members alike.
Collaboration happens at this stage, as well. The task boards are highly interactive, stimulating engagement from the team and allowing for a higher degree of cooperation. Team members can leave comments, mention each other with @ signs, and communicate where they see fit.
Tasks can also be moved through stages. The interface is very simple; it’s on a drag & drop basis.
Other Heycollab features that simplify monitoring the status of projects and tasks are:
- Due dates by which tasks have to be actioned
- Labels to simplify the categories of tasks
- Notes and images
Heycollab also stores all of your files in the central Media Hub.
Every teammate who needs to access files relevant to the project can. Design feedback is simplified and integrated with other Heycollab features.
Finally, Heycollab’s main priority is collaboration made easy.
That is why every feature was specially created to facilitate communication.
When people can get in touch, knowledge sharing is much easier, and so is getting projects and tasks done in time.
Heycollab workspaces are like virtual offices (including the water-cooler chitchat), the media hub is the archive, task boards are like a super-efficient manager and the best part is:
Everything is available all the time.
No need to juggle multiple software and teamwork solutions. You and your people can get excellent work done with one tool.
Heycollab Use Cases
Due to the nature of the tool, Heycollab is perfect for real-time task, project and general team management.
You can track all the tasks, see who they’ve been assigned to, and instantly see what’s happening and whether you’re making the deadline. And when everything is so transparent, it’s much easier to optimize.
Since this same transparency allows for a better insight into what’s happening at which stage, it supports the agile development principles.
There’s no need to invest into something that’s not working just because you can’t see it. This usually happens when tools are too complex or if there are too many. Teams can’t see the forest for the trees, and you can’t see the client’s needs from the complexity of the project.
With Heycollab, everything you need is easily available and you can check the details, as well as see the general scope of the project.
Even though Heycollab is great for any kind of business that relies on cloud-hosted tools, it’s great for creative agencies and companies that juggle multiple tasks and projects at once.
As a perfect mix of collaboration and communication, Heycollab covers all the fronts so you and your team get a central hub for work. And excellent work at that.
How Heycollab Compares to Competitors
Even though Slack, Trello, Invision and Dropbox all enable teams to reduce paperwork and improve communication, they’re just puzzle pieces.
You still need a lot of integrations to get by.
And of course, there’s still the manual work of switching browser tabs because the team is talking in Slack, leaving comments on InVision, pulling up files from Dropbox, and checking tasks in Trello.
What Heycollab Does for Your Business
In addition to replacing the multiple tools (with multiple costs) and giving you more room in the budget for things that are worth your team’s time, Heycollab makes everyone happier.
Since the projects are easy to manage, clients get better results.
And when your team can do their work without fighting the app fatigue, you can bet they’ll give their 110%.
The only thing you need to do to make your team more efficient is get started.