We stumbled upon awesome the other day and its name is FreedCamp.

Currently we use Basecamp to manage all of our internet marketing and web design projects. Life is seriously rough without a project management system, this we know. I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought to myself “thank goodness for Basecamp” when looking at a project’s history to track who’s done what. It’s very nice to be able to easily mange projects without over complicating things. Also, our client’s very much enjoy that we give them access to their projects in Bascamp and they can see at any time, all of the good stuff we’ve got on the schedule for their project. In fact, some of our clients have liked using Basecamp with us so much that they went and signed up for their own account to manage various projects they have.

Then, about a month ago, we were introduced to Freedcamp – A free, hosted project management system…

We signed up and played around with it for a while and couldn’t help but notice the similarities to Basecamp – with the exception that Freedcamp is, well, Free. We had also mentioned Freedcamp to a client and they signed up for an account – appreciating the fact that it was money saved for their non-profit organization. In their case, instead of our role being that of the project manager, we had a role in their new project management system as part of their marketing tour-de-force. We have been quite surprised at how well Freedcamp is working for them to pull all the pieces together in their marketing projects. In fact, we have setup a few personal projects on our own account just to test it out — so far, we have been very impressed!

It’s a little bit shocking, to say the least, that something so robust is free – in fact, others have been wondering the same, to which the folks at Freedcamp have responded:

As far as paid plans go, Freedcamp will never introduce a pricing plan. Our core application is strictly free, and will remain this way forever.

Which says to me that the functionality we see now, at a minimum will always be free – and that’s nothing to scoff at, considering that the functionality is that or more than Basecamp which charges a decent amount monthly for their service.

Basecamp really paved the way with regard to simplicity in project management, however for some people it may be too simple (especially if you’ve ever looked through their feature request forum). Freedcamp seems to be looking towards evolving the platform, picking up where Basecamp may have dropped the ball for some. Since the tools are quite similar in functionality to that of Basecamp’s, there really isn’t much of a learning curve involved, which makes Freedcamp easy to consider if you’re in the market for a project management system. At a minimum, I would certainly recommend checking into it – it is free afterall

Full disclosure: This is not a paid review, nor were we asked to review Freedcamp. When we find something worth telling others about – we do!