Instagantt vs. Notion: Which one works the best for you?

Spending time researching which of these brings better value for you will be helpful in the long term. So, if you are still using old-school methods of managing projects and collaborating with your teammates, then it is time that you know which Gantt chart tool to go for.

Instagantt Overview

Instagantt specifically focuses on project management with a Gantt chart. It makes creating, using, and implementing your timelines easier. It is a powerful and feature-rich tool with an easy experience, so every manager works like a pro in project planning.

Instagantt works as a web app, so anyone on your team, whether working onsite or remotely, can access it, and the whole team will stay on one unified platform. It is available for Asana users with an integration option, but others can use it as their standalone project management companion.

Practical features of Instagantt

Instagantt has a lot of valuable features packed for you. It can keep the whole team on one platform to ensure maximum efficiency whenever and wherever needed. Below are some of the best features you can use on Instagantt for maximum practicality.

1. Easy drag-and-drop chart designing

Instagantt is a powerful yet easy tool that can be used for managing all types of projects. It makes designing the Gantt chart easier with the drag-and-drop feature, so you can be productive and quick while designing your chart. It will be as simple as painting your tasks on a chart with all the options like labeling, color differences, etc.

2. Keep everything aligned between tasks with dependencies

Gantt charts are not all about design, as you must maintain a synchronized schedule to deliver all the deliverables on time. With Instagantt, you can set dependencies between tasks. It helps in keeping everything aligned. As one task is changed in your chart, everything with dependencies set against that task will automatically update in the chart.

3. Exceptional team management control over the tasks

As a project manager, you need complete control over the tasks you assign. With Instagantt, you can control every aspect of your task. Assign tasks split them, and plan them. Work on collaboration requirements for specific tasks and provide your coworkers with complete text descriptions.

The employees can also raise their queries effectively for every task or sub-task to maintain top-notch quality as they deliver.

4. Workload management helps track progress.

Instagantt comes with a workload management tool that helps track every user's total workload. It includes tracking users and resources simultaneously, so you get to know everything about the project along with the inventory of resources. The tasks are distributed across the timeline, with every user having their lane.

With Instagantt, you not only track, but it makes changing deadlines, duration, and switching tasks horizontally or vertically easy among assignees.

5. Board view for team engagement

Instagantt comes with both a board view and a Kanban view. The board view lets you engage the whole team when designing or working on a project idea. Here you can group different tasks and projects according to their specific ideas, and things regarding the workflow can be customized.

For a quick overview, Instagantt provides a Kanban view that works as a to-do list and provides important details about every task on the status board.

6. Powerful project management tools

With Instagantt, every project manager works like a pro because it combines tools and features. When you need to start managing a project, you can select a template or some clone projects. Customize it according to your project requirements and get estimated completion hours, budgeting, etc.

As you get estimates from the tool, comparing your expected options and updating the budget and deadlines according to the specific project requirements will be much easier.

7. Dashboard and reporting

The reporting and dashboard feature at Instagantt is extremely helpful when it comes to the meeting project deadline. You get a visual graph with all the statistics listed below so you can see how the progress is going and what factors are causing the delay in your progress.

Comparing the real-time statistics with the planned ones will make everything transparent so you can increase the resources needed to meet the original plan and its deadlines.

8. Collaboration among members is made easier.

Even when your team is working remotely, Instagantt makes collaboration and project sharing among team members easy. Everyone stays on one platform, and they can share their projects and ideas. Some additional features include:

·   Commenting

·   Assigning tasks

·   Splitting tasks

·   Accepting or rejecting tasks

The collaboration feature is not only for the employees, but your clients can also be on the same page as you. Instagantt lets you share public links, reports, PDFs, or Excel files along with image reports to keep clients updated about the project's progress.

9. Fixed or variable user costs to manage finances alongside

Different teams have different budgeting. Some employees get fixed prices, while some teams have variable prices for different employees and projects. Keeping the financing department separate can make this a hassle as a whole.

So, Instagantt provides this cost-managing feature right inside the tool so that project managers can set fixed or variable prices for all the employees. Those can then be forwarded to the finance department, resulting in easy payouts.

10.  Risk Assessment Matrix

With chances of mistakes everywhere, the risk assessment matrix from Instagantt provides insight after checking the probability of risks through logical and professional analysis of your company's risks. These risks can be related to financing, reputation, or environment, and with the most critical risks dealt with at the right time, the business progress can be maintained easily.

11.  Critical Path

A huge part of project management is defining the most efficient path to work on a project. You must start from one end and finish on the other because different project tasks take much longer than others. The critical path feature highlights the whole chain of tasks according to their complexity and tells which ones may affect the deadline. So you can plan tasks accordingly and ensure that your project is delivered on time.

Advantages of Instagantt

Apart from its technical features, it brings other advantages to enhance your user experience. Below are a few of those benefits.

Easier onboarding, even for beginners, with a simple interface

Getting started with Instagantt is like a breeze because of its simple and easy-to-use interface. Even if you are a beginner in project management tools and Gantt charts, you will love how easy it is to follow all your traditional project management practices with Instagantt.

You have the option to customize its user interface.

If you think the user interface has some features or elements outside your requirements, then you can customize them according to your requirements. This way, the tool can be made more powerful or simpler as needed. This customization feature will greatly help over the long run, especially when working on several projects simultaneously.

Simultaneously work with multiple projects and clients

Instagantt is not to work with only one project or one client. Here you can integrate several projects and tasks under one platform. Similarly, it allows you to collaborate with several clients on one platform by providing all the information they need.

The task summary feature helps track the whole team's performance

Instagantt provides information and statistics in an easily understandable manner. For instance, it comes with a task percentage update for every task, and there is a dynamic color update for tasks late from their due date. More importantly, it comes with an overall task summary feature that helps you monitor the performance of your whole team.

Asana integration is one of the benefits features here

One of the main use cases of Instagantt for many users is its Asana integration. This integration simultaneously makes project and task management easier for the project manager. So, if you use Asana and you integrate Instagantt, it will bring benefits both ways for enhancing your employee and project management experience.

Disadvantages of Instagantt

With all the goodies, there are a few disadvantages of Instagantt. These may only apply to some users, but here are the disadvantages of Instagantt that you must know.

Overwhelming and screen real estate

The real estate of the user interface screen might be overwhelming for some users initially. It is because there are so many features available on it by default. However, that is not a problem, as you can easily customize the interface to fit all your requirements perfectly. If a user stays with the default interface, getting familiar with all the features may take a little time.

PDF exports are not always crystal clear

Exporting PDF reports is an integral feature of Instagantt as it helps share progress with clients. Similarly, employees and assignees can get all the details in those PDF reports. However, it might be a software bug that the exports are only sometimes crystal clear. It is an issue that users rarely see and is only there sometimes.

Everyone being able to update their work percentage can be an issue for some teams.

Instagantt allows everyone to update their work percentage, which takes a lot of workload off the project manager's head. However, as the employees get to update their work percentage, there are chances of false progress that a project manager can only detect once he checks the progress himself.

Notion Overview

Notion is another platform to manage the whole team in one place. It is made to meet the requirements of any team with endless users. It is known for its note-taking capabilities that allow teams to organize projects and individual tasks for maximum throughout while working. Notion offers customizations to make the platform fit and tailor your requirements. So, you can make it powerful or minimal according to your requirements.

Practical Features of Notion

Notion may seem simple, but it brings a lot of technical features to enhance the workflow at your end. Below are some of the top features you may enjoy with Notion Gantt chart features.

1. Connect everything in one platform for higher work efficiency

Notion allows you to bring everything to one platform. So, you can bring all your teams, projects, documents, and stakeholders to Notion. It allows for busting silos with the whole team, and everyone on the team progresses as a unit. It exceptionally boosts your work progress while working on several types of tasks.

While everyone is on one platform, Notion allows the team to go through the recent presses, goals, values, and new updates about the projects they are working on.

2. Detailed and organized meeting notes make you never miss anything important.

A huge part of Notion's features depends on the meeting notes feature. There are no floating documents here, and teams who believe that stale wikis are not helpful for their project must move to Notion. Here you can maintain all the work knowledge in real-time and compare it with previous information. Thus, everyone on the team stays aware of the whole context of the project.

3. It offers drag-and-drop dashboard crafting.

Notion allows you to build your workflow your way. You can divide the project into smaller tasks and customize the roadmap according to your requirements. Doing so is as effortless as it gets because of the drag-and-drop functionality. So, you can drag and drop any task, document, system, or website from the tasks and build your workflow.

4. Notion has a customizable user interface.

Notion understands that all project managers have different requirements. Some work on complex projects with complex requirements, while others need an easier workflow management tool. So, Notion allows project managers to customize the user interface. Thus, the tool can exactly match their experience requirements. With nothing extra or missing in the interface, the tool will be most effective for every project manager.

5. Enjoy using a huge library of community-made resources

Notion has a huge community of global users who create templates, events, and integrations on this platform. If you need to go with any of those, you may use them, as some are free. Thus, you will always need more resources and support when using Notion.

6. It is not restricted to the requirements of a specific type of team

Notion is not specifically made for one type of team. It is made to host endless users across all types of teams. Every team can work on their specific requirements to solve their problems with Notion. From designers to engineers and everyone else, Notion serves every team.

7. You can start with a template and edit it to fit your requirements

Starting for the first time can be hard, so Notion allows you to use its templates. There are thousands of free templates and pre-built setups available. Select one that matches your requirements and then modify it to get a perfect experience. In this way, Notion Gantt chart platform offers the most innovative solution for most project managers.

Advantages of Notion

The advantages may vary from team to team, but there are some extremely valuable advantages of using Notion as your project planning platform.

It offers the flexibility to treat everything as a work block

it offers flexibility when it comes to managing information and documents that you want secure. Users can easily save their notes as pages, allowing them to manage everything as a block. The tool offers flexibility in managing marketing activity. It helps to manage strategy development and to-do list maintenance that generate better results.

It makes note-taking very easy.

Notion offers the best note-taking feature. Within seconds users can make all their notes. Integrating documents, spreadsheets, tables, and other note-taking features makes managing and sharing all the notes with team members easier. Users can also take notes as a journal and highlight or bold important things to make their notes more representative.

The Kanban board feature helps keep track of the to-do list.

The Kanban board feature is the biggest benefit of using Notion. Project managers often find it hard to manage their tasks efficiently because they cannot keep track of their to-do lists, which wastes time. However, with the Kanban board feature, project managers can easily and efficiently manage all their to-do lists and tasks, which allows them to enhance their productivity over time.

Sharing and collaboration are made easier with transparency.

Notion allows teammates and project managers to share all the details related to the project to ensure that everything will be managed according to the deadline. Moreover, Notion allows us to collaborate with the team without any issues easily. It also allows maintenance transparency while conducting team meetings and other activities to ensure no data is leaked.

Disadvantages of Notion

Notion may bring you amazing value, but it does not come without disadvantages. These can be critical for some users, so below are the details you need to know.

It is not as easy to onboard.

The onboarding process is very difficult and confusing. Managing customer-facing and internal aspects are very confusing. Various documents and information need to be complied with in one place, but at the same time, all of it should not be shown to clients, which often makes managing projects difficult, especially for newbies.

There are no tutorials or helping materials available.

If you are a new Notion user, you will have to spend time testing and checking each feature before learning to use it. There is no tutorial available from where you can learn to use this software. It makes it hard to use on the first attempt. Moreover, new members of the team who are new to Notion will find it hard to adjust to the functions of this software.

Massively lacks integration options.

You must deal with a lack of integration when using Notion. There are some amazing integrations, but most of the integrations that users look for are not easily available, which makes it hard to manage. If all integrations were available in the same software, managing projects would be easier, but users would have to adjust.

Which one offers the best value and experience?

When selecting one from Instagantt and Notion, your decision must not be based on your preferences about a tool. Instead, look for the requirements it fulfills and how it offers good value. A tool that brings good features and better value will be extremely beneficial in the longer run. Some of the features that you must look for are:

·   Ease of use

·   Customization and integration

·   Detailed control over tasks

·   Collaboration experience, etc.

Notion amazingly brings most of these features, and it may offer good value for you. However, if you want a more flexible platform in terms of features, then Instagantt is your way. Your team working together is the most important thing to consider, and the collaboration features with control are just better with Instagantt.

Tip:

Price is an important feature for many. However, consider price when looking for long-term results but never make it the deal breaker for you. You must focus on performance and features instead of saving some money.

Verdict

More than 84% of employees feel happier and more productive when working remotely. It makes efficient project management and collaboration much more important, as you cannot physically keep track of every employee. An efficient project management and progress-tracking tool, even when your team works onsite, will be a much better option.

So, start with Instagantt for free and see how it benefits your team.

Summary

The complete comparison of Instagantt vs. Notion makes it easier for you to pick the platform that works for them perfectly. Ensure that you compare features to understand the project management process offered by both platforms to get the best results.