App+frica loves cyn.in – is the top scorer in their review of 15 Project Management Intranet applications

February 19, 2009

Jonathan Gosier of Appfrica.net, in his search for a simple, customizable self-hosted Project Management Intranet for his company, configured 15 popular applications and found cyn.in to be an invincible winner!

His requirement was pretty straight forward, an open-source self-hosted system that allows for internal messaging, group knowledge sharing, task assignment and works in countries where 'always connected' to the internet is still a luxury. In his quest,he first researched the possible options, shortlisted to the 15 and then went ahead and installed/signed-up/demo-ed/tested all the applications meticulously to see how they stand up to their claims.

Here's what he says about cyn.in:

Cynapse is an interesting initiative. They offer a free self-hosted open-source edition, a hosted SaaS (software as a service) version at $99 and a self-hosted enterprise edition that offers unlimited users and the option for doing things like running it behind company firewalls or cloud storage systems like EC2. The functionality goes a step beyond all the other products on this list by offering things like mind-mapping, instant messaging, and blogs. Beyond, that it’s hands down the best looking of the whole lot…

The applications compared are rated based on functionality, pricing, usability, design, ease of installation and delivery models. Below is the consolidated scoreboard for all applications compared by Appfrica - 1 is the lowest score and 5 is the highest.

ApplicationDesignUsabilityEase ofInstallationSelf-Hosted/Server/Offline EditionMulti-tiered PricingFunctionalityOpen SourceOverall Score Basecamp 5 5 5 1 5 4 1 3.7 Zoho 5 5 5 2 5 5 1 4 Google Apps 5 5 5 1 5 5 1 3.9 Zimbra 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 ActiveCollab 5 5 5 5 5 5 1 4.4 Project Pier and Open Goo 5 3 5 5 5 1 5 3.7 Dot Project 1 5 5 5 5 3 5 4.1 Cyn.in 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 Confluence 3 4 4 4 2 3 1 3 RockClimbr 5 5 5 5 5 4 5 4.9 Yammer/Noodle/Present.ly 4 5 4 1 4 4 1 3.3 Collabtive 2 5 5 5 5 4 5 4.4 Trellis Desk 4 5 5 5 5 4 5 4.7 Achievo 5 5 1 5 2.3 Product Planner 5 5 2 1 5 4 1 3.3

What makes cyn.in the winner according to him:

Zimbra, Cyn.in and ActiveCollab are definitely the top scorers and the two best self-hosted project management systems I could find. They all look good and have the features I need. What really sets the latter two apart is pricing, ActiveCollab is $99 per year while Cynapse asks $0.00 for their open source version which isn’t quite as easy to install. But if it saves me $100, I have no problem with that. So the winner, in my book, is Cyn.in (Cynapse)!

Do check out the extensive comparison here: http://appfrica.net/blog/archives/1519

Thanks Jonathan, for the detailed comparison. I am sure this will be useful to a lot of people looking for self-hosted project management / intranet applications.