It’s safe to say that project management has gotten trickier over the years, thanks to hybrid and remote work and evolving workplace processes. Fortunately, tools like the Nifty project management platform can help companies discover new ways to align and empower their teams.
I’ve reviewed several project management solutions over the years, from Trello and Asana to Monday.com and Airtable. I believe Nifty is a solid competitor, even in an environment packed with better-known brands. The platform is user-friendly, competitively priced, and has a huge feature set to explore. There are even some great AI tools.
The question is, should you be using Nifty for your project management needs? This review will give you all the insights you need to make the right decision.
Quick Verdict, Pros and Cons
Overall, Nifty project management is a convenient, user-friendly platform that makes it easy to keep track of tasks, projects, and teams. The AI features are excellent for boosting productivity, and the reporting tools are brilliant for gaining in-depth insights into your employees’ workflows.
However, getting everything set up initially takes a little time and effort, and there aren’t as many native integrations available as you’d get with other apps.
Pros:
- Fantastic range of road mapping and task tools
- Excellent built-in collaboration features
- Powerful reporting and analytical tools
- Easy to use interface
- Intuitive AI capabilities
- Affordable pricing
Cons:
- Limited integrations
- Lacking customer support
- Frustrating initial setup
Nifty Project Management Review: The Key Features
Like most of the top project management tools, Nifty’s platform comes packed with valuable features for tracking tasks, projects, employee schedules, and more. You can collaborate directly in the app with file sharing and chat capabilities, and even set goals for your teams. Plus, Nifty even offers a generous free plan for beginners.
Based on my experience, here’s a quick rundown of this platform’s key features and what you might like and dislike about them.
Project Management (the Home Hub)
Nifty is excellent at giving businesses and team members a comprehensive view of all their projects, tasks, and discussions in one unified place. The Project “Home” on the app is highly customizable, making it easy for team members to adjust what information they want to see when they log in. You can create specific dashboards and even design custom workflows within your home hub.
Plus, Nifty also makes it easy to unify information from a range of different apps in one environment. Although there aren’t as many native integrations available as you’d get from some alternatives, you can still import data from Asana, GitHub, Webex apps, Zoom, and more.
Another thing I really like about Nifty is the ability to create “project portfolios”. This basically means you can create folders for projects dedicated to different teams, like sales and marketing. The dashboard will even give you a quick high-level insight of the progress happening in each folder.
Business leaders can control who has access to each project hub, with public and private settings. You can also assign projects to different groups and owners throughout their lifecycle.
Tasks and Roadmaps
From a task management perspective, Nifty supports all of core “views” for tasks that teams love, such as tables, lists, Kanban boards, and Gantt charts. Users can assign specific users and deadlines to tasks, and add automations for things like reminders, notifications and approvals.
There’s even the option to create “recurring” tasks and immediately convert your task lists into milestones. Plus, you can create sub-tasks with unique fields and data and make every task trackable with built-in time monitoring functionality.
If you want to go really in-depth with your task management strategy, you can also create “roadmaps” with calendars so you can view deadlines and milestones at a glance. Users can automate aspects of this experience, too, such as setting up notifications for a team member to start working on a new stage of a project when a previous “sub-task” is complete.
Nifty Project Management Collaboration Tools
As I mentioned above, Nifty does integrate with most existing collaboration tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. However, there are various ways to collaborate within the platform too. The “Discussions” feature gives you a social-media-style experience where you can send direct messages to any member of your team, with attached files and images.
Users can create threads for longer conversations and instantly turn discussions into action items and tasks with a single button. Nifty project management also gives you a centralized place to store your files and documents (though storage levels depend on your plan).
You can upload files to the cloud from your Computer, Google Drive, and Dropbox. Plus, you can organize them by type, and use the built-in search function to track down specific assets. Users can also launch documents from Project Discussions to work on new pages in real-time, and you can invite anyone to view, comment or edit on a Doc.
The experience is very similar to using Google Docs (which also integrates directly with Nifty), but you get a more robust “chat” feature built into your workflow.
Goals, Analytics and Reporting
Nifty “Goals”, similar to the “Goals” capabilities offered by platforms like Asana, help to keep distributed teams on the same page about project milestones. You can create Goals that automatically add and remove tasks from your workflow when they’re completed. Plus, users can access custom tags to create goals that automatically update to measure KPI performance.
Teams and individuals can create custom goals in Nifty, and share them with team members with various levels of access. I think the Goals feature adds a lot to the reporting and data tracking capabilities you can already access on this platform.
Another handy feature for collecting more “in-depth” data on your projects and teams is the integrated “Forms” function. Any user can create a custom form with unique questions and track responses in real time. With a couple of clicks, you can also transform forms into documents, messages, and tasks for your to-do lists.
Nifty’s more advanced reporting and analytical features include its time tracking functionality, which offers detailed breakdowns into how each team member is using their time across different projects and tasks. Users can also export time sheets for HR purposes.
Plus, you can create a range of custom reports for overviews of overall project performance and productivity.
Nifty Project Management AI
Since AI project management tools are becoming increasingly popular among teams today, I was pleased to see that Nifty has its own range of intelligent tools. Nifty Orbit is baked into the project management app, giving users a range of generative AI capabilities.
You can use the Orbit app to tell the chatbot what you want to do in your projects, and it can generate milestones, roadmaps, and plans on your behalf. The AI tool can also create bespoke documents, agreements, and product descriptions in seconds. Plus, it can create tasks for team members, assign due dates based on your goals, and even suggest assignees.
The downside is that there no dedicated “Copilot” style assistant that can search through your documents and surface information for you while you’re working on projects. Other companies like Microsoft excel in this area with their Copilot app for tools like Planner.
Nifty Project Management Review: Pricing
One thing that definitely makes Nifty Project Management more appealing to smaller teams is its pricing. There’s a generous free app, that comes with support for two active projects and 100MB of storage space. You also get all of the “core features” like discussions, docs, file sharing, team chat, workflows, and so on.
If you need a solution for more than two projects (which is likely), then there are four different premium plans available, all of which include a 14-day free trial.
- Personal: $12 per month, per member: All the features of Free, for up to 40 active projects, plus budget tracking, custom fields, and time tracking and reporting.
- Pro: $16 per month, per member: All the features of Personal, plus 250GB of storage and up to 100 active projects, up to 5 guests, and file proofing, cross-project overviews, and goal tracking features. You also get Google SSO.
- Business: $25 per month, per member: All the features of Pro, plus unlimited storage space, projects, clients, and guests. You also get goal tracking, team workloads, custom roles and permissions, Microsoft SSO, and priority support.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing: All the features of Business, plus native forms, dedicated success managers, open API access, custom SAML, and IP restriction.
Quick note: Non-profits and educational institutions can receive up to 50% discounts on some eligible plans. You can also upgrade and downgrade your plan anytime without losing project data.
Ease of Use and Customer Support
As I mentioned above, Nifty project management is relatively easy to use. The platform is very intuitive, and the interface is easy to navigate. You can even customize your homepage dashboard based on your specific needs. The biggest problem is that setting everything up initially can be very time-consuming and complex, particularly if you have a large team.
Additionally, since there are only a handful of “native integration” options available, you might be reliant on API connections or Zapier to bridge the gaps between some of your apps. Nifty doesn’t automatically integrate with CRM platforms like Salesforce, for instance.
When it comes to customer support, Nifty does give you plenty of guides and training articles via its help center and blog, but they’re not particularly in-depth. Some do include videos that are hosted on Nifty’s YouTube channel, however, which offer slightly more advanced insights.
If you need to reach out to a team member, Nifty offers email and live-chat-based support, much like its competitors. However, if you’re on a Business plan, you’ll get faster responses, and Enterprise customers also get a customer success manager assigned to them.
If you’re on a lower-tier plan, relying on chat support, you might need to wait a little while before a tech support agent gets back to you.
Nifty Project Management Review: The Verdict
Overall, Nifty Project Management is an intuitive platform that makes it relatively simple to monitor tasks, projects, and team performance in real time. There are a lot of things to like about this platform, from its built-in AI capabilities to its generous free plan and robust time-tracking tools.
However, many more advanced features are relegated to more expensive plans, and you may find it takes quite a long time to get your ecosystem set up and working the way you like it.
I’d probably recommend Nifty to slightly smaller companies searching for a simple project management solution, for a relatively compact team.
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