Brightpod Review

Brightpod is a web-based project management and time tracking solution designed for marketing and creative teams who need planning and collaboration tools as alternatives to spreadsheets and emails. It combines a user-friendly interface and robust features that make it easy for teams to organize campaigns, track tasks, meet deadlines, and achieve milestones.

Table of Contents

• Brightpod Features and Strengths
• Brightpod Pricing
• Who Uses Brightpod?
• Brightpod Supported Languages
• Case Studies
• Why Choose Brightpod?
• Company Info
• Featured Partners: Project Management Software

Brightpod Features and Strengths

Task and Project Tracking

Brightpod provides a Kanban board-inspired Flow view to easily visualize tasks, priorities, work stages, and status. Users can switch to a list view from the flow view based on which is most helpful. Recurring tasks allow the creation and management of repeating tasks with automatic reminders. For team collaboration, every task has a comment thread that lets users track comments and feedback. Other features include custom labels to describe task statuses, adding tasks via email, and quickly converting a task to a project (pod).

The Pods view provides a bird’s-eye view of each project and its status. Users can add different types of Pods both for internal projects and client projects. The software also sends all team members a daily email digest notifying them of what happened the previous day and a list of overdue work. Other capabilities are personalizing projects by color, real-time monitoring from the activity page, and managing project access with permission-based resource management.

Workflows and Calendars

Brightpod workflows are ready-to-use sets of milestones, task lists, and tasks that teams can apply when setting up a new project. These templates include workflows for SEO checklist projects, email marketing, social media marketing, Twitter routine, and Facebook advertising. It also has workflows for LinkedIn Ads, Google Adwords Campaign, website optimization, WordPress setup, and a site launch checklist.

An interactive editorial and blogging calendar lets users drag and drop tasks and events to plan and organize content across all their projects. The calendar gives teams an overview of all tasks and projects in a monthly timeframe. It also includes 3 filtering options: by client, by task type, and by project.

Focus, Priority List, Time Tracking, Reporting, and More

Brightpod’s Focus view enables users to identify and concentrate on only a few important tasks. The software displays these starred focused tasks in its Focus section and allows users to move them around as they plan their week. Another view is the Work Priority List view for any team member. Admins can view a team member’s task list, rearrange the task priorities, and notify the team member by email of the new priorities. Each team member also has a Me page that displays all tasks, conversations, files, time, and pods that the user is a part of.

Other features include time tracking with quick add time entry, billable/non-billable time, task editing, auto timers, Harvest integration, and time estimates. Brightpod also ofers email integration, insights and reports, exports to spreadsheets and PDFs, file storage, integration with major file storage platforms, team messaging, request forms, and native mobile apps for iOS and Android.

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Brightpod Pricing

Brightpod pricing is available in several plans, with scaling price points based on the number of users, projects, and storage. All plans include unlimited task lists, tasks, recurring tasks, workflows, milestones, calendars, activity logs, files, messages, themes, and exports. Customers get a free month when they choose yearly billing. A 14-day free trial is also available.

• The Professional plan is $29 per month. It includes up to 5 users, 15 projects, and 10GB of storage.
• The Studio plan at $59 per month includes up to 12 users, 50 projects, and 100GB of storage. It also has time tracking and reporting tools.
• The Agency plan at $99 per month includes everything in the Studio plan, plus up to 25 users, unlimited projects, and 250GB storage.
• The Agency Plus plan at $199 per month has all the Agency plan features, including unlimited users, 500GB storage, 3 team training sessions, and a dedicated onboarding specialist.

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Who Uses Brightpod?

Brightpod is ideal for marketing teams, marketing departments, advertising agencies, web design agencies, and startups. It is for individuals, freelancers, consultants, and small businesses in need of project management and marketing workflow management software. Customers include Writing It Right For You, Cloudburst Marketing, SLD, Candour, Purple Cow Agency, Visible, Creative Net FX, and DK Media.

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Brightpod Supported Languages

Brightpod is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Hindi.

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Case Studies

Jenn Lisak was the Vice President and Content Director for a book and periodical publishing company in Indianapolis. She and her team work in a ‘results only work environment’ (ROWE) so they can work wherever and whenever, as long as they get the work done. They were using another PM tool before but its time management functionality is not what they need, so they switched to Brightpod.

As soon as they understood the idea of ‘pods’ or projects, there was a minimal learning curve, and they were good to go. With 5 teams and about 27 projects, Jenn and team manage everything in Brightpod, from content and design to development. They use the project management tool for anything they need to task. Jenn’s favorite feature is the calendar tab, which allows her to see everything laid out.

Edna Campos is a digital marketing strategist and coach based in Mérida, Mexico. She has clients based in Mexico, the US, and other Latin American countries, which she gets in touch with on a daily basis. Previously, she was using another PM tool but it was not user-friendly so it distracted and frustrated her and her team.

After reading about Brightpod, she switched and easily got a clear idea about how it worked. She uses project management software to manage several projects for her own business as well as for client businesses. The most used feature in Brightpod for Edna is its mobile app where she can easily reply to client comments and have all the discussions safely stored in Brightpod.

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Why Choose Brightpod?

Brightpod provides an intuitive and minimalist way to manage marketing projects. It is customizable and integrates with many popular apps and web services. Its combination of task management, calendar views, reporting, and built-in team communication features provide remote and distributed teams an effective tool to collaborate on marketing projects.

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Company Info

Brightpod is a product of Synage Software Pvt. Ltd., a privately held software company based in Mumbai, India. Synage was founded by Sahil Parikh in 2005, which started as a design and development agency. In 2007, it transformed itself as a SaaS provider with the launch of DeskAway online project collaboration software. In 2013, the company launched Brightpod collaboration tool for marketing teams. As of 2017, Synage has migrated all Deskaway customers to Brightpod.

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Featured Partners: Project Management Software