Freedcamp Review
Freedcamp is project management software that offers an almost full suite of functions for the grand price of free. That’s just one part of the story, though; for the full picture, check out our detailed Freedcamp review.
— Last Updated: 2023-01-20T11:24:21+00:00 Facts checked by Elisabeth Ivey
Freedcamp is a cool piece of project management software: it offers a huge number of features for free and is very easy to use. There’s a lot to like, but there are also some issues that keep it from the upper echelons of our best project management software roundup. We go into the details on that and more in this Freedcamp review.
Key Takeaways:
- Freedcamp has a solid free plan with no user cap, meaning it’s great for large teams that don’t want to spend on project management software.
- While Freedcamp offers a solid and fairly complete package, many of its features fall a little short compared to the competition.
- Its paid plans are a great alternative to those of many competitors, thanks to its bargain-bin prices, especially on the higher end.
Freedcamp bills itself as the “first truly intelligent” tool of its type, but we’re not exactly sure what the company bases this claim on. While it does automate some basic functions, we wouldn’t herald any of it as a new wave in artificial intelligence. In our opinion, Freedcamp would be a lot better off advertising its free offering and cheap paid plans.
Digital smarts aside, Freedplan is a pretty solid tool. While it doesn’t offer the same breadth of features that our favorite project manager monday.com does (read our monday.com review), it’s an excellent budget option that could be a solid alternative to low-cost options like nTask (read our nTask review for more on its bargain-bin plans).
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09/21/2021 Facts checked
Rewrote the Freedcamp review with all new criteria.
Freedcamp Project Management Comparison
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- 4$9.80 / month(All Plans)
- 5$15 / month(All Plans)
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Freedcamp is a project management tool with a really good free plan and some very cheap paid plans. While it’s not perfect for everybody, large teams that want to keep overhead low will like it a lot.
Freedcamp does pretty well. While we feel that several of its competitors are better in many ways, Freedcamp has some specific advantages that could make it a great fit for certain businesses.
Yes. Like most of the competition, Freedcamp uses AWS to host its data, and it comes with a solid privacy policy. As such, your personal and professional data should be safe from threats both within and without.
Freedcamp’s free version is just that: free. You don’t need to spend a penny to use Freedcamp — just sign up with your email address and you’re good to go.
Strengths & Weaknesses
Pros:
- Decent feature set
- Good free plan
- Economical paid plans
Cons:
- Features are a little weak
- App is slow to respond
Features
Freedcamp has a decent array of project management features spread out over several plans, starting with the free version. What sets it apart from many of its competitors, though, is that it aims to do more than just manage tasks and projects. It also offers a password manager, an invoicing module and even a wiki editor. We’ll go through the highlights plan by plan.
Freedcamp Free Version Features
Though Freedcamp boasts that it offers a full suite of functionality for free, this isn’t entirely correct. Like most of the services we feature in our best free project management software roundup, it keeps some goodies behind a paywall to entice you to buy. One good example is its Gantt chart, which isn’t available until the Business plan.
Still, though, the free plan is pretty good, even if we disagree with Freedcamp about which functions can be described as “essential.” For example, it has a nice list function much like monday.com and Asana do, and also a solid kanban board, which should give you plenty of overview of what needs to be done.
Though Freedcamp won’t find a spot on our best kanban apps ranking any time soon, the board works well enough and syncs with the list associated with it.
Freedcamp Calendar
The calendar is a lot better, and we like how Freedcamp combines the regular calendar offered by almost all project management tools — except for weird exceptions like Todoist — with a timeline function as seen in apps like Asana (read our Asana review). It’s a pretty nifty tool, and gives you a great overview of how your week or month is looking.
Besides these integrated features, Freedcamp also offers several free add-ons and integrations that you can install if you want some added functionality. These include project management tools like time tracking, the ability to set milestones, integrated communications and a simple password manager. Though it won’t beat any of our best password managers, it’s a nice addition.
Pro Plan Features: Storage Integration
The few tools above form the basis of Freedcamp’s free offering, and in many ways that of the first paid tier, the Pro plan. The biggest thing that Freedcamp adds to its paid plans is some extra add-ons, but pretty important ones, like integration with cloud storage services like OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox.
Though some of the best cloud storage services are missing from that list — you’ll have to turn to DIY automation programs like Make and Zapier for that — it may be worth paying for, especially since Freedcamp’s Pro plan is so cheap. More on that later, though, in our pricing section.
There’s also a table view, which we weren’t as impressed with. We recommend reading our Smartsheet review or Airtable review if spreadsheet-based project management is your thing.
Features in the Freedcamp Business and Enterprise Plans
The last two tiers of Freedcamp are a little more interesting. The Business plan has several useful features — like the aforementioned Gantt charts — while the Enterprise plan is focused at larger businesses with advanced security and publicity needs. As most of our readers don’t fall into that category, we’ll focus on the Business plan here.
The major project management tool the Business plan offers is the Gantt chart, which is a lot like the kanban board in that it does a decent job, but others do it better. While you can adequately plan advanced projects using Freedcamps’ chart, if it’s a mainstay of your strategy, you’re much better off checking out our TeamGantt review, for example.
Other important features are project templates, which could save you a lot of time if you’re new to project management, as well as an add-on called “email-in,” which allows you to create items in Freedcamp from emails.
There’s also a reporting function, but a quick glance shows that, like many other of Freecamp’s functions, it does OK, but others do it better. Wrike in particular is a lot better at generating and populating reports than Freedcamp is; read our full Wrike review for more on this.
Overall, we like Freedcamps’ feature package, but feel that at an individual level there are project management tools that do it better. On top of that, there is also project management software that handles all the above and then some, like monday.com, which makes it a better pick than Freedcamp.
Freedcamp Features Overview
 | |
|---|---|
| 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 | 14 days |
| Web app | |
| Windows | |
| MacOS | |
| Android | |
| iOS | |
| Support | |
| Ticket-based support | |
| Tutorials | |
| Knowledgebase | |
| Forum | |
| Live chat | |
| Phone support |
Pricing
When it comes to dollars and cents, Freedcamp blows the competition out of the water. It’s even cheaper than nTask, which is an achievement; Monday.com’s pricing and Asana’s pricing seem insanely high in comparison. Look closer, however, and some issues appear. To fully understand them, let’s look at Freedcamp’s pricing table.
Freedcamp Plans
- Unlimited users, Unlimited projects, Basic functions
- Price per user, Storage integration, Table view
- Price per user, Templates, Gantt charts, Custom fields
- Price per user, Security options, 14-day trial
Freedcamp Pricing Breakdown
Freedcamp’s free version is solid, especially if you want to do some basic task management with a very large team. Freedcamp has all the tools you need to run even a large business, as long as you keep the planning basic and simple. It’s a lot like Trello in that way, though Freedcamp’s feature set is more diverse; read our Trello review to compare.
The paid plans are extremely competitive, but — and we can’t believe we’re about to say this — the choice of which project management tool is best for you is about more than just the bottom line. While paying $1.49 per user per month for the Pro plan is very cheap, nTask offers better functionality and usability at just $4 per user per month.
A better option would be to work within the confines of the free plan and avoid the upgrade to Pro entirely. The Pro plan really doesn’t offer anything that you can’t put together yourself using Zapier or IFTTT, and the table view is meh, at best.
Pricing for the Freedcamp Advanced Plans
The advanced plans are a little better: at $7.49 per user per month, you get pretty good bang for your buck with the Business plan, thanks to the many add-ons that it offers. Still, though, shelling out a little extra gets you a service with comparable — or even better — features, but without the usability issues, which we’ll talk about next.
User-Friendliness
When it comes to the basics of using Freedcamp, it does well enough. Menus are usually where they should be, and navigation is intuitive, though with some glaring exceptions that we’ll get to in a bit. The biggest issue with Freedcamp, though, is that it is slow, and by that we mean slow.
Some screens — the calendar is the worst offender, but not the only one — can take forever to load. By “forever” we mean that your reviewer could go into the kitchen and make some tea while waiting. We didn’t compare it to watching paint dry, but we’re pretty sure Freedcamp could give any coat of primer a run for its money.
Even with all other tabs closed and nothing else on the computer running — a computer rocking an 8th generation i7 processor with 16GB of RAM on a decent internet connection, mind you — some screens took minutes to load. This is simply not acceptable, especially when so many other web-based services run perfectly smoothly, including startups like Bloo.
This is a major strike against Freedcamp, especially considering that you may find yourself flitting a lot between screens, as you do when organizing a large team with a large project. Hopefully Freedcamp can fix this issue soon.
Freedcamp Signup
That aside, using Freedcamp is pretty smooth overall. Signup is simple: you go to the website, click the big “start now” button, fill in some details about yourself and what you want from the program, and you’re off to the races.
From there, you’re brought to the central dashboard (called “home”) where you can get information about everything you and your team are doing at a glance. The dashboard is pretty good; we really like it and there’s more than a few other project management solutions that could take a leaf out of Freedcamp’s book (read our Podio review for one).
Task Management
Navigation is pretty user friendly, or at least getting around the main screens is. At the top of your screen is a set of icons that get you from screen to screen: the division is between project management, task management, calendar, add-ons and the widgets screen. This last one seems to serve as a second dashboard for add-ons, but we didn’t quite get the hang of it.
Task management is simple: you click on the right icon and are brought to the list, which seems to be the default. You enter tasks with a single click, add details, all that. It’s standard fare, and Freedcamp does a solid job here.
What’s less well thought out is the different views. To access these, you need to click a tiny little gear icon at the right of the table or list and select from a massive number of options. Different views display this list differently, which only adds to the confusion.
Other than minor gripes, though, Freedcamp handles task management well. We just wish it was a little faster.
Project Management
Aside from managing tasks, Freedcamp also does a solid job of managing multiple projects. It does so through the “projects” tab, which is just an overview of the different projects, teams or what have you going on at any one time.
If you want different projects to share information, you can create custom fields for that purpose exactly (well, you can on the Enterprise plan), which is pretty cool and something we wish more project managers could do.
The nice thing is, with the right color-coding and tagging, all your different projects can share the same calendar, making Freedcamp surprisingly good for large-scale overview. As such, large teams may want to take a hard look at Freedcamp as it’s both easy to use and gives you a good bird’s-eye view of what your organization is up to.
Freedcamp Mobile Apps
Lastly, let’s take a quick look at what Freedcamp looks like on mobile. In all honesty, it’s not great. The program was clearly not developed for the small screen and much of its usefulness — like the overview — is lost on a smartphone.
If you need to jot down a note or add a quick task while on the go, Freedcamp’s mobile app will do, but don’t expect to be managing tasks and projects on a large scale while commuting.
Security & Privacy
When it comes to security and privacy, Freedcamp is quite different from most other services we’ve gone over. While it comes with standard documents like a privacy policy and an outline of security practices, they don’t follow the same format that most of its competitors do. Instead, it focuses on the practical, relatable concepts that most users need most.
As such, it reassures users that all staff are subject to background checks, for example, and that it is regularly audited by a third-party firm. The downside is that it’s a little light on details here and there. For instance, we’re not told which firm conducts audits in the main security document, and had to find a blog post that said it was one called Cyberoo.
Another example is that Freedcamp only mentions in passing that it uses Amazon Web Services for hosting its servers, an important detail for anybody worried about the service’s notorious leaky buckets. It also doesn’t go into detail on encryption protocols in transit or at rest, though if Freedcamp is using AWS we can assume everything is up to snuff in this regard.
Freedcamp Privacy
The privacy policy is thankfully a bit more explicit, though the number of typos is a little worrisome for a legal document. That said, as these policies go, Freedcamp’s looks solid enough. The company claims to stay away from data sales, and to only collect data it needs to make sure you have a good experience on the site and to offer you new products.
We like how the company pledges to delete user data 90 days after the account has been terminated, but at the same time wonder why it waits this long. It’s not a major red flag, but it is something to keep in mind before signing up with Freedcamp.
Customer Support
Freedcamp’s customer service is slanted heavily toward self help. There’s very little in the way of direct help from the company, save for a ticket-based support system. The more you pay for your subscription, the faster you’ll be served, with free users placed in the slow lane. That’s not too bad, though, as Freedcamp is very easy to use and the knowledgebase is exhaustive.
Every concept in Freedcamp has an entry in the knowledgebase, and people getting started have the video tutorials to get acquainted with the program and how it gets things done. We found the pace of the videos a little slow, though, and preferred to muddle through and use the articles in the help section whenever we felt we weren’t grasping something.
If you need support, though, response speeds are pretty fast even on the free plan, and the answers are detailed and clear. Overall, we expect you’ll meet little trouble when using Freedcamp or when dealing with issues.
Final Thoughts
Freedcamp has a lot to like. Though it feels a little rough around the edges here and there, the overall package is a pretty solid offering. Larger teams may like it more than smaller ones, though, especially if they’re planning to remain on the free plan. For example, if your team is smaller than 15 people, Asana’s free version would be a better pick than Freedcamp’s.
The advanced plans are a good value, though, and we were surprised at how well Freedcamp implements overview, especially for larger teams. However, its slow loading speeds are a major strike against it, and we can’t imagine working with a program that takes this long to load without having conniptions.
Still, though, we recommend that you give Freedcamp a spin yourself and see how you like it. It comes with a free 14-day trial of the Enterprise plan, which has all the options and add-ons available.
Have you tried Freedcamp? How did you like it? Let us know in the comments below and, as always, thank you for reading.
