Go for a Test Drive: The Free Trial

Compared to the burden of acquiring and installing a desktop or self-hosted application for demo purposes, online project management tools can be quickly and (relatively) painlessly evaluated via the nearly ubiquitous “free trial” on offer from most vendors.

The free trial comes in two basic flavors:

• Fully functional yet time-bound (e.g. 30 days), so you can put the application through all its paces. Just be careful of loading up any production data, given it will become inaccessible after the trial expires.
• Project- or user-limited, meaning while you may get access to the bulk of the feature set, and the “trial” is in effect a no-cost production application for your indefinite use, you are limited by either the number of active projects, the number of users, or both. Often this isn’t labeled a “trial” at all, but is just rightly considered the entry-level price point. One variation on this is where features may also be locked out unless you upgrade top higher, paid, packages – such as encryption, custom branding, charting, and so on.

A simple strategy to quickly test several online tools in short order is to select a real but small and non-critical project – one with some milestones, files, tasks, and so on – pick a few staff or trusted partners who you’ll invite to set up user accounts (unless the trial is severely user-limited), and set it up concurrently with several online project management tool trials. Encourage your team to update their to-do’s, add notations, track time, share files, and so on with each tool. It may mean a bit of extra, repetitive work, but the practical feedback you’ll get from staff using the applications for real work, and bouncing between several tools to do it, will be invaluable.

Especially in the evaluation stage, be sure to take full advantage of the free trial option provided by nearly every online project management vendor.

Back to the Buyer’s Guide

Thanks for coming back to the OnlinePMTools.com community. Don't forget to subscribe to updates (RSS or email) or follow us on Twitter!