If you like Basecamp, you’ll love Trigger. We don’t just offer to-do lists and simple project management. We offer a comprehensive project management and time tracking solution that helps you stop overservicing clients, so you can run a more profitable business. Compare for yourself!

A time tracking solution can genuinely mean the difference between losing money, breaking even or making a profit. Which means that if you’re a savvy business manager, tracking your team’s time can be critical for the success of your service-based business, where you need to know, for sure, how long it takes to complete tasks.

Unlike Basecamp, you do not need to pay a third party provider for time tracking in Trigger. Our built-in time tracking comes at no extra cost and it can help you stop overservicing clients and start increasing your business’ profitability.

The ability to see target hours versus logged hours (and not just a dummy bucket of tracked time) is also a godsend to project managers who need to keep projects on time, on track and on budget.

Basecamp offers some basic on-screen reports, but Trigger offers much more expansive on-screen and CSV management reporting options for today’s data-driven manager.

Current Trigger reports include:

• Company, Project, Task, Task Description, Status, Assignee, Due Date, Logged Hours, Total Hours, Employee, Employee Hours
• Tag, Company, Project, Task, Task Description, Status, Assignee, Due Date, Logged Hours, Total Hours
• Company, Project, Task, Billable Status, Logged Hours
• Uninvoiced Companies with Billable items
• Timesheets (by Company, by Date and/or Employee)
• Monthly revenue
• Billable hours
• My hours

Trigger has built-in invoicing functionality. Surprisingly, Basecamp does not, not even on their integrations page. This means if you’re using Basecamp and wanting to bill real clients, you’ll likely need to pay for an additional invoicing app.

Much to the delight of our small and medium sized business clients, Trigger syncs smoothly to the popular accounting application, Xero.

This means that if you combine Xero and Trigger, you never need to double-handle an invoice again!

Connecting Xero with Trigger will allow you to:

• Import Xero Accounts
• Import Xero Contacts as Companies
• Import Xero Tracking Categories
• Import Xero Currency
• Import Xero Employees
• Import Xero Leave Applications
• Sync invoices to Xero

No Xero account yet? Try Xero for free

Basecamp offers a group chat function, but it’s nowhere near as powerful as what Slack offers, so that’s why, here at Trigger, we integrated with Slack rather than spending money on building a new group chat platform. (For most small and medium sized businesses, Slack can be free, depending on usage.)

To see how our Trigger-to-Slack integration works, click here.

To see our top seven reasons for loving Slack, click here.

To see our full list of Trigger integrations (including an integration with Basecamp), click here.

Trigger offers a comprehensive tasks list view which can show every task in your account and/or just the tasks for one company or project. This is different from Basecamp, which focusses on a per-project view, rather than per-project and per-tasks views.

Trigger was built from day one as a full project management system. This means that from day one, we thought about the need for different businesses to filter and sort tasks in different ways.

Trigger currently allows you to sort by:

• By priority
• By due date
• By task number
• By task name
• By tag
• By assignee
• By author
• By status
• By company name
• By project name
• By total hours logged

Kanban boards are Trello-like card views, where you can move the cards around and get a more visual view of your projects. Trigger offers a Kanban board option, Basecamp does not.

But unlike competitors such as Asana, Trigger doesn’t marry you to one view of the other. Trigger allows you the ability to easily switch between a Tasks list view and a Kanban board view, at any point in time.

Trigger allows you to invite clients in to collaborate. (Clients don’t always have to log in to Trigger. They are welcome to reply to email notifications and their responses will feed directly into the relevant Trigger task, to keep all the conversations in one place.)

Trigger also allows you private status updates, so you can keep your internal conversations private and only make public the conversations you’re happy for your clients to see and collaborate on.

Basecamp only offers this in their “Clientside” feature, which is for subscribers on the US$79/month plan and the US$3000/month enterprise plans.

Trigger offers the optional ability to show clients their billable information (not your internal cost information), target hours and logged hours. Basecamp does not. So, if you’re a proponent of total client transparency, this Trigger feature might be perfect for you.

Basecamp has a “Schedule” view which shows due dates (which is similar to Trigger’s “Calendar” view), but Basecamp’s Schedule is only inside each project itself, it does not show an all-of-account (or all-per-person) summary of due dates, for easier reference.

Trigger offers an awesome team schedule for team organisation and capacity planning. Basecamp does not.

Both Trigger and Basecamp offer milestone (to-do) lists within the projects themselves. These are super-handy for team members who like to follow a list to get things done.

Trigger is a small team dedicated to your success. We’re incredibly responsive and can adapt quickly to customer requests for features and improvements. So if you have an awesome idea about how we can be even better than Basecamp and the big guys, we’d love to hear from you here.

Trigger integrates with Basecamp, so that if you connect the two, you can easily:

• Import Basecamp Todolists
• Import Basecamp Todos
• Import Basecamp Comments

Associated creators and assignees are retrieved and stored into one Trigger Company called "Basecamp Import"