Web App Review: Orchestrate

Orchestrate is a web application made by Elevensoft, who are based in the UK.  It’s designed to manage tasks for projects.  What makes it unique is the focus on scheduling conflicts and qualification management.

Orchestrate has a clean interface, similar to Lighthouse or Basecamp: the main page body is used to display information and forms, whilst the sidebar is used to issue commands or change the view.  It also has a prominent breadcrumb navigation, so it’s easy to jump back to earlier stages of a process.

The only tweak I’d like to see here is automatic field focus: I’m used to web apps putting careful thought into what field I’ll need to type in on a freshly loaded page.

Scheduling

Tasks can be assigned to locations and people.  It’s also easy to set up recurring tasks, then assign them to people based on a weekly schedule overview.  You can then see all of the events for a particular day in a summary by clicking on the day:

Qualifications can be created and assigned to people.  This makes it easier to decide who can perform a particular task.  This makes sense: in our company I’m the only person who can deploy apps to our servers, so I’d set that up as a qualification.  Other tasks like writing blog posts are accessible to more than one of us.

Once a task is ready to be signed off, there’s a set of standard outcomes that can be selected:

Pricing and Conclusions

There’s a free plan, and other plans start at $19 per month.  All paid plans give unlimited users so they’re pretty good value, and the top plan at $199 per month gives branding features.  Judging by customer feedback I expect branding will be dropped to other plans, but this will probably be determined by how many companies pick up the $199 plan.

The Help page is powered by Get Satisfication.  I’d much rather see a comprehensive help page with usage examples; despite Orchestrate consistently claiming to be easy to use and simple, it took me too long to figure out its terminology and features.  The interface is always clear and also provides inline help tips, but more detailed inline help would really get people going with less initial confusion.

I use project management software: I’ve used Basecamp since it was launched, and I still use it to manage client projects today.  The core feature that makes me stick with Basecamp is messaging, and Orchestrate doesn’t do this.  However, many business people I’ve worked with have wanted more sophisticated scheduling like Orchestrate offers, and it does provide client updates, so it may work better than Basecamp for  companies who want this type of scheduling.