SAAS heats up: GoPlan and Highrise launch
The small business SAAS space is starting to heat up quickly. This morning, WeBreakStuff launched GoPlan, a direct competitor to Basecamp by 37 Signals. Right on the heels of GoPlan comes the announcement at Signal vs. Noise that 37 Signals is launching their hyped contact management application, Highrise.
GoPlan has many of the same features as Basecamp including task management and real-time chat. GoPlan adds bug tracking and blogging to the project management mix. TechCrunch has a rundown on the launch and 5ThirtyOne has an in-depth comparison (between Basecamp, GoPlan and open source competitor ActiveCollab).
Highrise, at first glance, is a CRM application with a simple featureset. In typical 37 Signals fashion, the features are intentionally limited to reduce the learning curve and promote collaboration. 37 Signals designs great products but their business acumen is somewhat lacking in my opinion. If they were to come up with a comprehensive integration plan, they could easily bundle their services based on exact user requirements. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts… a segmentation strategy like this would allow users to extract more value and 37 Signals to generate more revenue.
The small business SAAS market is ripe for the picking. Who’s going to step up to the plate?
[...] on Highrise from 37 Signals Posted March 20, 2007 Earlier, I covered the Highrise launch. TechCrunch just covered the Highrise launch as well. I mentioned earlier that I thought 37 Signals [...]
I agree that it would be prudent if their services were ala carte in some ways. I for one would like things like archiving pages in backpack as basecamp has, a more meaningful contact/people management feature in backpack as highrise offers, and a centralized place for _my_ work. I can understand why some of the features should be in their own app - too many features would kill it. But I can’t justify spending $80/mo for our small business between Backpack, Basecamp, Highrise, and possibly Campfire later on.
My friend summed it up nicely, “the features overlap just enough to make it insulting.”
It surprises me that no-one has mentioned Copper Project in the mix, which offers the same elegance in its interface with a cohesive mix of functionality for small businesses. http://www.copperproject.com
IMHO, all these stand-alone SaaS application will be dead in a year or two once people start to demand for more cognitive and structured eWorking Facilities. I see http://www.workace.com as the most promising new SaaS application on the market today. My group of 35 people have used it for a month now and we LOVE it. It really puts us in control. I highly recommend it. -Pete
DeskAway (www.deskaway.com) is a simpler but more powerful project management solution for small businesses. These solutions are great for a few people collaboration, but a real business’s demand are more than cute looking apps - they want enterprise level functionality.