Easynote is a more or less new contender in the project management space. Though it’s been around for a while, the software was still relatively rudimentary until recently. However, with version 3.0 out, Easynote is hungry to storm the throne and has positioned itself opposite the reigning champion, monday.com. In this Easynote review, our project management experts will see how it fares.

Key Takeaways:

• Easynote is powerful task management software that could, in the right circumstances, be used to handle larger projects.
• Easynote is extremely easy to use and very beginner-friendly, though there are some small issues that need to be worked on.
• Unlike most of its rivals, Easynote charges a flat fee of $99 per month regardless of the number of staff members you add. We’re not sure if it’s worth the money, though.

The short answer is that Easynote is a little hard to place. Though its feature set is limited — you won’t find the same array of doodads on offer as with Asana or monday.com, for example — everything works well and the interface is decent. However, Easynote is held back a little by a lack of polish, as well as some more serious pricing issues, including the lack of a free plan.

Overall, Easynote is an above-average piece of task management software that can handle some larger projects too. However, it’s hard to truly recommend it as there are plenty of free project management tools out there that do a similar or even better job (find some in our best project management software roundup). That said, there’s enough there to keep an eye on Easynote as it develops, as you’ll see in this review.

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Features

When it comes to features, Easynote has clearly decided to do more with less. Where some project managers will try to overwhelm you with a plethora of functions that don’t work too well — hey, what’s this ClickUp review doing here? — Easynote offers a small list of functions, but implements them really well.

Essentially, Easynote is a list — it calls this feature Easyview — plus an attached kanban board as well as a timeline. These last two are really just supporting cast, though; the list is clearly the star of the show. It has a lot more functionality than the other two, and in fact neither will work without first filling in the list.

A Look at Easyview

When it comes to Easyview, Easynote is taking its cues from monday.com. The two lists have the same idea behind them and even look similar. You enter tasks in a list that can be easily subdivided, and you can add widgets — Easynote’s word for modules — to the right of the rows.

As you can read in our monday.com review, the idea is to let users fill in the list as they please and use widgets to add details to each task. As with monday.com, you can adapt Easynote to whatever purpose suits you: There are more types of widget than you can shake a stick at.

You can find all kinds of interesting widgets, from ones that help you track the progress of tasks or set deadlines to ones that even let you make calls right from the browser. The end result is a list that’s highly customizable and perfect for at-a-glance task management. 

Kanban and Timeline

As great as the list is, the other two views disappoint a little. The kanban board is one of the most bare-bones of its type: It’s just blank cards moved around some simple columns. There’s no real information on the front of the cards or anything. Easynote should definitely take a leaf out of Trello’s book here and add some more information to cards (read our Trello review). 

The timeline is a little better. It doubles as Easynote’s calendar and it gives you a pretty good idea of what’s happening when. We’re not crazy about the color scheme, but that’s about the worst we can say about it. We don’t like it as much as Asana’s timeline — read our Asana review to find out why — but it gets the job done.

One thing we really don’t like about the timeline though is that Easynote more or less advertises it as a Gantt chart — which it is, but only kind of. While you can set task dependencies, they don’t show up in the timeline, which in our opinion is what makes a Gantt chart a Gantt chart. It’s a minor niggle, but one that leaves a bad taste.

Easynote Integrations

One important aspect of project management software is integration with other software. Currently, Easynote only has one built-in integration, with Slack, though its roadmap promises more in the future. If you need a specific integration, for now you’ll probably need to rely on tools like Zapier or IFTTT to make them.

That’s pretty much it for Easynote’s features, though the company has a lot more in the pipeline at time of writing. There are some other small doodads that can be found in the widgets menu, but all in all Easynote is all about the list. While we like what’s on offer here, we’re not sure if it justifies the price tag, which we’ll discuss next.

Easynote Features Overview

	Visit Easynote
Management Views
Kanban board
List
Calendar
Timeline
Spreadsheet view
Gantt charts
Workload planning
Long-term planning
Management Features
Multiple project management
Dependency management
Native scrum management
Set user permissions
File storage
Time-tracking
Built-in integrations
Reporting features
General Features
Free plan
Free Trial	7 days
Web app
Windows
MacOS
Android
iOS
Support
Ticket-based support
Tutorials
Knowledgebase
Forum
Live chat
Phone support

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, Easynote is of a new breed that charges a flat fee per month for your entire team, rather than charging per user. However, its price tag — $99 per month — is so high, we’re not sure if it’s worth it. 

In what we can only assume is a way to excuse this high price tag, the company also makes some bold claims to its cost-effectiveness, which we’ll discuss a little further down.

Easynote Cost

Prime

• Flat fee regardless of team size, All features, 500GB of storage space

1-month plan

$99/month

Enterprise

• 10TB of storage space, Dedicated manager & training program

Contact support for pricing

The Prime plan comes with a seven-day free trial, which you can sign up to with just an email address — no credit card required. The free demo present in older versions of Easynote is no more in version 3.0.

Easynote Pricing Breakdown

Let’s get the elephant out of the room first: $99 per month is a lot of money to ask for a program as limited as Easynote, even if it does let you add an unlimited number of team members. Proofhub charges roughly the same and can do a lot more, for example (though, as you can read in our Proofhub review, it doesn’t do it as well as Easynote).

To illustrate this, let’s use Easynote’s own bugbear, monday.com’s pricing. The Standard plan, which is the first one worth mentioning, $9 per month per user and can do a lot more than Easynote can. If you have fewer than 10 people in your team, it’s a lot more cost-effective. Even if your team is bigger than that, we doubt Easynote could handle such a large project size.

Odd Equations 

Though we have trouble justifying the cost, Easynote itself has very few issues with that. On its pricing page it explains how it will help you “save tons of money,” thanks to its low price. The weird thing here is that its small sum seems to have been — ahem — “inspired” by the pricing page of Basecamp, a rival task manager.

Much like in our Basecamp review, this little bit of arithmetic can be quickly debunked. Monday.com does not cost $16 per month, at least not for equivalent features. As we said above, the Standard plan has all that Easynote offers and then some, including a Gantt chart. 

As much as we love TeamGantt, adding it to this particular equation isn’t necessary, and even if it was, it doesn’t cost $20.

It doesn’t stop there, either: As you can read in our Dropbox review, if you’re spending $15 per user, you get a whole lot more than the 500GB that Easynote offers. We also have a sneaking suspicion you can get meeting software for less than $9 per month, and that it’ll be better than Easynote’s social features.

We really don’t like being forced to jump to the defense of products and it’s something we rarely do, but it’s simply not okay for a company — any company — to falsely represent its competitors’ pricing to persuade you to buy whatever it’s selling. Like Basecamp, Easynote loses marks for these shenanigans.

User-Friendliness

Overall, Easynote is easy to use. The interface is intuitive, and Easynote’s relative simplicity means that there aren’t too many functions to keep track of. Even if you’re not a veteran user, you’ll probably be able to understand what’s going on in a few minutes. However, there’s a lack of polish here and there that keeps the score in this section lower than it needs to be.

We’ll start from the beginning: Easynote’s website is an easy-to-navigate affair, though it feels a little crowded and chaotic here and there — there’s a lot going on. For example, the site has animations that jump out at you and there’s a bit of an information overload. We prefer a calmer style.

The signup button is easy to find, though, and the process is smooth. All you need for the free trial is your email address and some other details. Within a few seconds you’ll be ready to go. 

Templates and Tutorials

Your first step is to pick one of Easynote’s many templates — check out our Airtable review for another provider with many of these. We weren’t able to check them all out, but overall we really like them. Nice thing is, even if a template doesn’t suit you perfectly, Easynote’s adaptability means you can just swap things around.

To get you started, Easynote offers a video and some nice on-screen tips. Because it’s a straightforward piece of software, there’s not all that much to these. However, we appreciate the effort put in, and project management newbies especially will really appreciate them.

All this is fine so far, but once you finish the tutorial you’re met with a message that strikes an odd tone, congratulating you on making it through the steps. The wording in it is a bit off and the result reminds us a bit of the way a slightly condescending person would talk to a slightly stupid child. 

Though this is the worst example by far, it does highlight an issue with Easynote: the language. The program was put together by non-native speakers, and it shows. There’s a lot of awkward English everywhere, as well as some outright mistakes. It’s nothing that keeps you from using it, but it does make you wish the team behind it would hire a proofreader.

Task Management

The actual navigation is a doddle, though. Easynote was clearly designed by people who know more than a little about interface design and who watched what the competition did, to boot. Adding new tasks, moving them around — it’s all done with a single click. It offers a lot better control than Freedcamp, for example (read our Freedcamp review).

Overall, Easynote is a pleasure to use, but you do need to look past its issues. That said, most of these exist purely on the surface, once past them you’ll realize Easynote’s structure has been put together very well.

Security & Privacy

If you’re worried about the security of your data, then Easynote may be a great choice. According to its security and privacy page, it’s one of the very few project managers that does not use AWS. This means that you won’t be exposed to the (admittedly minimal) security risks posed by Amazon’s server hosting, which is a nice touch.

Other than that, it seems Easynote follows standard security protocols. SSL is used for transporting data and for storing it. On top of that, it has, according to its site, restricted access to its servers to just two computers, which can only be used by its technicians.

Easynote Privacy

When it comes to privacy, Easynote seems to also have its affairs in order. As it’s headquartered in Sweden and its servers are in Germany, it falls under GDPR rules, meaning you have the law on your side when it comes to the protection of your data. 

On top of that, the company pledges not to share data under any circumstance, as well as promising to completely delete your account should you discontinue the service. In the end you always need to take such promises at face value, but without evidence to the contrary, we’re going to say Easynote is a safe provider.

Service & Support

Easynote is quite impressive in what it offers in terms of support. It is one of the extremely few project management tools that has phone support round the clock (read our Taskworld review for another), as well as more conventional routes via email, chat and, of course, a knowledgebase.

Overall, we really like Easynote’s support system, answers come quickly, and they’re pretty thorough. However, its language skills leave something to be desired. As with our above examples, you get used to it quickly and you can read over it, but language purists might find themselves getting annoyed.

The Verdict

Overall, it’s hard to judge Easynote in a single sentence, let alone a single word. While it doesn’t have the most expansive feature set, what it does, it does pretty well — the list is especially good. Good enough, even, that you’d overlook the bland kanban board. It’s also extremely easy to use and has great security and privacy policies.

However, the good is balanced by some issues, some of which are small and some of which are a lot bigger. It’s pretty easy to overlook the lack of polish like with the language, but the pricing is, quite simply, a problem. 

Though it’s hard to break down the exact numbers as it depends heavily on the size of your team and your business requirements, for most businesses, most of the time you should be able to get something a lot more cost-effective than Easynote. Paying $99 per month for a list is just too much, period.

Have you used Easynote? What did you think of it? Do you agree with our assessment, or do you feel we were too harsh — or too lenient? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and, as always, thank you for reading.