Onstage have today released a free version of their Online Project Management tool todayy. Without a doubt this free package beats Basecamp hands down! Lets do a little comparison of Basecamp vs Onstage.

As you can see Onstage really does beat Basecamp hands down! Onstage pretty much beats Basecamp with their free version, up until Bascamp’s Plus version, in which case you would be paying €49/per month. Its actually better than their Basic and Personal version, the layout is amazing also! Onstage have certainly taken an amazing step forward for free software here!

Talking with John from Chmura [The Company behind Onstage] he agreed to an interview;

Sean: Hi John, thanks for your time. I suppose I will ask you first when did you create Onstage?
John: We created OnStage in 2005.

Sean: What made you decide to create Onstage?
John: For this answer to make sense, let me give you a little background on our company. We started in 1999 as an economic consulting and research firm. Since that time, we’ve built up an IT staff to develop and support our economics-related software (http://www.chmuraecon.com/software_jobseq.aspx). Now jump forward to 2005. Up until this time, we had been using a web-based project portal system similar to OnStage, but found that it did not exactly fit our needs. Specifically, there were quirks that we felt we could improve upon, and we did. Also, we felt that we could offer a higher level of customer service than our competition and I really feel this is a huge plus for OnStage.

Sean: Who else other than you is behind Onstage?
John: We have three software developers on staff (including myself). Staff from the consulting side of our company assist with testing, write the user manuals, and provide customer service.

Sean: What are your future plans for Onstage? Any new features?
John: Future plans will be driven by our customers. However, there are a few that are already planned:

• API – We are almost finished developing an API so that our users can integrate OnStage with their own systems and build additional tools.

• Integration – In conjunction with the API we are currently working to facilitate integration with the components used in day-to-day business. For example, an iCal feed that can be subscribed to in MS Outlook, Google Calendar, or Apple iCal. Another good example is blackberries – we’ve optimized OnStage content display when accessed from a blackberry or other handheld so that users can access their content on the road.

• Project Management – The plan is to offer more robust project management features (such as task dependencies and key performance indicators) but this has to be done with care because these can quickly become too complicated. We are taking the time to design these features so that they are easy to use and don’t add the complexity of a huge project management system.

Sean: Last question, You know, there is only one thing Basecamp has that you don’t, realtime chat that stores transcripts, any plans for an integrated chat into the system?
John: Oh, I should have mentioned that. Integrated chat is absolutely a useful feature and something that we are working on. However, I haven’t decided yet if we should build our own chat system or build on top of an existing platform like Jabber. I really like the way Gmail has a small Google Talk client built into their interface. The ultimate goal of any solution though is knowledge management: capturing the transcripts and making them searchable for future reference.
Another feature that I am not planning to implement at this time is real-time document collaboration (i.e. more than one person working on the same document at the same time). Google Apps already does a great job of this. Microsoft has a solution for it too. Why reinvent the wheel?

Sean: Sounds amazing! Thanks again for your time John! If anyone wants to leave any comments for John you can leave them here, or he will post contact details in a comment, whichever is handier for him!