The word nifty means good, pleasing, or effective. It’s also the tool we’re going to review today for project management. 🕵️♂️
Nifty offers team collaboration, task management, reporting, time tracking, and more to help streamline, centralize, and modernize work operations.
But does Nifty project management really live up to its name? 🤔
Let’s find out!
In this article, we’ll discuss Nifty, its key features, advantages, and limitations. Not to worry, we’ll offer solutions for them too.
Let’s dive right into this Nifty review!
What Is Nifty?
Nifty is an agile project management software that lets you work on large-scale projects with multiple team members.
Like most project management software, it’s a collaborative workspace that helps you and your team organize tasks, track time, manage documents, etc., all in one place.
You can even work and enjoy workflow collaboration on the go with Nifty’s Android app and iOS app. 📱
So far, so good? Then let’s move on to the features that make it “nifty.”
4 Key Features of Nifty Project Management
Here are some key features that can be your key to easier project management. 🗝
1. Milestones for better planning
Every team and person needs a purpose.
If not, you’d have no idea what you have to do or why you’re doing it!
Like binging on a new Netflix show at night so that you don’t feel left out when all your teammates talk about it over lunch the next day! 🍩
And just like finishing that final episode, Nifty also helps your team set (and achieve) key milestones.
Nifty project is also useful for tracking business projects based on task completion.
You can add project milestones on their Gantt chart along with relevant details like name, description, start date, due date, etc.
The fun part: milestones are automatically color-coded depending on progress and due date.
2. Portfolio management
Nifty’s project portfolios are great for organizing projects into folders based on departments, locations, managers, etc. It’s easy to:
- Track each project’s progress
- Avoid bottlenecks
- Assign tasks
- And more
With portfolio overviews, project managers and upper management can see an overview of automated progress, timelines, statuses, overdue, and completed tasks.
They also have a portfolio dashboard that opens a world of insights into project members and statuses at a glance. 👀
3. Time tracking and reporting
Time tracking is as important for your business as dessert is for those with a sweet tooth. 🍬
You have to, have to have it.
Nifty offers a time tracking feature so you can track task duration, see who’s working on what, or for how long. This way, team productivity is always in check.
Remote project teams and freelancers will appreciate the ability to track exact time needed to boost productivity!
All you have to do is hit the start button to start tracking, and a time tracking widget will pop in the left corner of your screen.
Then, hit the stop button to stop tracking. Simple.
As far as the time reporting goes, you get insights like:
- Project or task name
- User who tracked time
- Date and task duration
- Start and end of tracked time
- Notes informing timestamp edits
4. Different user roles and permissions
Nifty is here to help you tell who’s who on your team.
The users you add to a project are the project members, and they can comprise team members, guests, or clients.
Different roles need different permissions.
You can decide the level of access every time you add someone new to a project with:
- Owners: manage all projects, teammates, and billings. You can have more than one owner at a time
- Admins: they’re project managers who can create and delete projects as well as manage other team members
- Members: people added to a specific project with access to collaboration in the project
- Guests: not an immediate part of the team. They can take part in project discussions and view progress, but they can’t manage teams or projects
Now that we know about Nifty features let’s find out if it’s beneficial for project management.
3 Advantages of Nifty Project Management
If you pick Nifty project management software, here are the key benefits you’ll love:
1. Effective team collaboration
Nifty believes in effective team collaboration. We can tell by its multiple collaboration functionalities. The tool offers:
- Discussions feature for project-specific talks
- Real-time collaboration on docs
- Interactive Gantt charts for transparency
- Task statuses
- And more
All these features ensure you’re always informed about the project’s progress.
2. Multiple project views to work with data
You may love the kanban board, but your accountant may be into spreadsheets, and your HR rep may dig calendars.
We’re all different. This is why Nifty has come up with a generous number of views.
Here are some of the views in this project management tool:
- List View
- Board View
- Gantt Charts View
- Calendar View
- Table View
With so many options, everyone gets to work how they prefer.
3. Imports and integrations
Nifty is not only generous with views but integrations too. You can easily connect with over 1,000 apps to automate a ton of your work.
Switching from an old app or project management tool to Nifty is simple too.
It lets you import from popular project management tools such as Basecamp, Asana, Trello, etc.
Is it safe to settle with Nifty to manage projects, then?
6 Limitations of Nifty Project Management (With Solutions)
It sure does what it says, but Nifty has a long way to go before it becomes a complete solution.
For a project manager, several basic features are missing. Let’s take a look:
Problem #1: no custom automation
Sure, Nifty offers automation like status automations, recurring tasks, project templates, and more.
But they don’t let you build your own automation.
What if you want to post a comment when a status or assignee changes?
You have to play by their automations.
Say hello to ClickUp. 👋
It’s one of the highest-rated productivity and workflow collaboration tools used by small, medium, and large businesses.
ClickUp solution: powerful no-code custom Automations
ClickUp is an automation wonderland. 🌈
You can either choose from the numerous pre-built templates or create your own custom Automations. To create an automation, set up combinations to to help automate repetitive actions:
- Trigger: decide what should initiate an Automation
- Condition: decide what must be true to continue the Automation
- Action: decide what happens as an outcome of the Trigger and Condition
Learn more about automated project management! 😊
Problem #2: no dashboard for visual insights
A project management app without dashboards is like Leonardo DiCaprio without an Oscar. Outrageous!
That’s Nifty for you—they don’t offer charts. Sometimes wordy reports don’t cut it. 🤷
ClickUp solution: visual and insightful Dashboards
This is where a helpful PM tool like ClickUp comes to your rescue. Our Dashboards are the ultimate mission control that provides you insights on people, projects, tasks, Goals… you name it.
You can even customize and build your own Dashboard to visualize your team-specific needs with the help of custom widgets.
Custom Widgets let you visualize your data in the form of:
- Pie charts
- Calculations
- Bar charts
- Portfolios
- And more
Problem #3: no PDF annotation
For a tool that has a pre-made project template for design, it missed out on an important feature that design teams can’t do without.
ClickUp solution: PDF proofing and image annotation
Unlike Nifty and other robust PM software, ClickUp did think it through. 💭
From providing clear markers on design mockups to highlighting markups on legal contracts, proofing in ClickUp is perfect for it.
You can easily annotate PDFs and images, even leave comments on them. It makes ClickUp a convenient remote collaboration hub for design teams.
Anyone can address your comments, or you can use assign comments and centralize your feedback system.
Problem #4: lacks idea management features
You’d think a project management solution designed to help remote collaboration and teams would have idea management features.
Nope! Wrong answer.
Nifty has no love for your ideas because it doesn’t have a whiteboard or mind map feature.
ClickUp solution: powerful Mind Maps
No matter what your brain thinks, ClickUp is here for you, and so is its Mind Maps.
Sketch out your ideas, do some solid project planning, or brainstorm in Blank mode.
You can even organize and create a workflow in the Task mode.
Need help with your project plan? Check out what a project plan is and how to create one.
Problem #5: lacks a native printing feature
Does a client want a printout of the project progress reporting page or the Gantt chart? Well, you’re in trouble. Nifty doesn’t have a native printing feature.
You’ll have to either download a report first or take a screenshot and then crop it before saving it as an image.
Then comes printing…
Looks like too much effort for something so simple.
And you may not realize, but these screenshotting and cropping minutes can add up to several wasted hours.
ClickUp solution: native printing in ClickUp
You, my friend, need ClickUp’s simple native printing ability.
Just open a task, click the ellipses… and select the print icon. 🖨️💕
You can also print List view, Board view, tasks, and more.
Problem #6: limited free plan
Nifty’s free plan only offers 2 projects, which is kind of disappointing for a small team or startup with low budgets. Pricing plans start from $49 per month.
Imagine how expensive their business or enterprise plan must be. Hint… it’s three digits per month.
ClickUp solution: Free Forever Plan
ClickUp has a feature-rich free plan that you can use FOREVER for free. No catch.
See it for yourself:
- Free Forever Plan
- 100MB storage
- Unlimited tasks
- Unlimited members
- Two-factor authentication
- Collaborative Docs
- Real-time chat
- Email in ClickUp
- Kanban boards
- Sprint management
- Native time tracking
- In-app video recording
- 24/7 support
But wait! There’s more.
Check out more ClickUp features that prove it’s a better solution than Nifty:
- Customize your workflow with custom statuses
- Send and receive emails right from our software with the Email ClickApp
- Watch your team work with you in real-time with collaboration detection
- Track task durations in ClickUp with native Time Tracking
- Enjoy easy team communication with comments and Chat view
- Save time on repetitive tasks with recurring tasks
- Keep client collaboration transparent with public sharing
- Set Goals and celebrate Milestones to finish your project task list successfully
- Integrates with your favorite software, including Basecamp, Time Doctor, Slack, etc.
- Protect sensitive information and control access with permissions
- Offers a mobile app (iOS and Android) and desktop app (Windows, Mac, and Linux)
Bonus: See how Nifty compares to ClickUp!
Nifty Isn’t “Nifty” Enough! 🤷
Nifty is decent project management software with task and time management abilities.
However, it’s far from being a completely centralized workspace because it lacks custom automations, no dashboards, no free plan, and no DASHBOARDS! (Did we say that already?)
If you want all of that and more, there’s only one solution. ClickUp!
It’s a smart and powerful project management software that’s also a truly collaborative workspace. Use it to track time, manage active project tasks, create internal documents, provide project insights, and much more.
We’re here to help you throughout your project’s lifecycle.
Join ClickUp for free and enjoy the “niftiest” features to manage multiple successful projects.
Questions? Comments? Visit our Help Center for support.