Samepage - Review 2022 - Bravo Whowen

Going past its proper noun, yous might guess that Samepage is a collaboration app that aims to get a group of people on the same page. You lot'd be right, because that's exactly what the app does, giving you a single Page for every projection or type of work yous want to manage. Each Folio is modular, containing merely what you add together to information technology, be it uploaded files, a table, a meeting agenda, or anything else. It also includes some communication tools, letting y'all engage in text chat, sound calls, and video calls. Information technology's easy to utilize, flexible, and competitively priced, though not as powerful as other collaboration and work management apps we've reviewed. Podio remains our Editors' Selection in this category, however, because it edges out Samepage in power, functionality, and blueprint.

Pricing and Plans

Samepage has two programme options, Gratis and Pro. When you beginning sign upwards for an business relationship, you lot get the Pro account for costless for 30 days. If yous choose non to pay after the trial ends, your business relationship is automatically downgraded to the Costless plan.

With a Free account, you go all the main collaboration features, but with some limits. For example, you tin can but take ten teams or sub-teams (a team within a team) and x Pages, and your chat history only persists for 30 days. The free business relationship comes with 1GB of storage, which is decent, likewise equally back up for voice calls and one-to-one video calls, just not group video calls.

The Pro plan costs $eight per person per calendar month with a slight discount if you pay annually ($84 per person per yr, which works out to exist $seven per person per month). Pro accounts include everything in the Free account, plus grouping video calls, private teams, multi-team guests, file version history, advanced administrator options, and a few other perks. With a Pro programme, y'all too get unlimited teams, sub-teams, and Pages, plus your storage allotment increases to 1TB. Given all that's included, Samepage offers good value. Note that in that location are also discounts for nonprofits and educational institutions.

For modest businesses in particular, Samepage is competitively priced among collaboration apps. For example, the somewhat comparable squad collaboration platform Igloo starts at the aforementioned toll—$8 per user per calendar month for a Basic account—and increases to $12 for its Professional tier of service.

Podio starts at $9 per user per month for the baseline level service and goes up to $24 per user per month. Podio, nevertheless, offers a lot more than Samepage in terms of business organization features, as it comes with a whole Apps Market in which y'all can find components to add to your account that are already designed for typical business functions, such as Business concern Development or Customer Relationship Direction. In Samepage, you could manage that blazon of work, but you'd accept to figure out how on the fly, whereas Podio has options ready to get.

A few workplace collaboration services may toll you less, depending on the size of your team. With Atlassian Confluence, for case, you pay a flat monthly rate for a group of users. Confluence starts at $ten per month for up to 10 people. That'south an extremely low charge per unit. A squad of l, however, would take to pay $200 per month for Confluence. Dapulse uses similar group pricing. A team of ten pays $49 per month for dapulse'due south Basic plan, only 50 people needing a more advanced Pro program would be charged $730 per calendar month.

Generally speaking, the larger the organization, the more circuitous its needs and the more you can expect to pay. Workfront, for instance, is work direction and collaboration for enterprises, and its costs (which vary with team size) are in the range of $xxx per person per month.

What Is Samepage?

There are many team collaboration apps and non a lot of uniformity amidst them. Samepage falls into the category of general collaboration app and workspace hub. Like Igloo and Podio, it functions equally a hub for work or workplace concerns more than annihilation else.

Samepage borrows ideas from several subcategories of collaboration apps and lets you cull which ones you need. If your team needs a place to shop files, track tasks, and have an ongoing chat about it all, Samepage can handle that. If another squad in your organization needs a identify to brainstorm ideas and go along coming together calendar notes, you tin create a Samepage Page for that, besides.

To truly understand what Samepage is and what it does, it besides helps to accept a business firm grasp of what it isn't. For starters, Samepage is not a projection management app. While project direction apps do typically support collaboration and teamwork, they are specifically designed for projects, defined every bit piece of work that has a start date, an finish date, and a deliverable. Samepage doesn't have all the features y'all'd expect to find in a project management app, such every bit Gantt chart views, the power to create dependencies between tasks, or a rich array of scheduling tools. If someone who is assigned a task is suddenly out sick for a week, Samepage isn't going to assistance you easily readjust the squad's schedule of tasks based on availability. If that is what you demand, read upward LiquidPlanner, instead.

Furthermore, Samepage is not specifically a task-management app, although it does contain chore-management features. Asana is one of the best examples of a truthful task-direction app, as are nearly kanban-style apps, such equally Trello and LeanKit. Business-form to-practice list apps (Todoist Business comes to mind) are similar. Samepage has features for creating tasks, assigning them to individuals, and tracking their completion, but it'due south not hyper-specialized in this arena the way these other apps are.

Finally, Samepage is not specifically a squad messaging app along the lines of Slack, HipChat, or Twist by Todoist. Samepage does include some advice tools: existent-time text chat, areas for asynchronous word, video calling, and screen-sharing, but it'southward not as advanced as another apps that cater to team messaging specifically. For case, 1 of the biggest advantages of using Slack is its highly customizable notifications arrangement. You tin ready up your Slack account to notify you any time a certain keyword is used, fifty-fifty if no one intentionally calls your attention to the chat. Samepage doesn't have anything like that.

Samepage borrows ideas from many of these more than specific collaboration apps and lets you determine which of them you want to use, but it doesn't go equally deep as any of these more specialized apps.

Setup and Interface

Starting a new account with Samepage is a breeze. The signup process does not require a credit card or really much information at all. Yous tin invite anyone to join your business relationship, no matter whether their email domain matches yours, and you can besides manage permissions to give some users express guest admission only—handy for third-party collaborators or clients. I encountered one hitch in inviting more than people to join my squad. The app prevented me from calculation a person with an Outlook.com email address. Other free email domains worked fine.

Every bit yous get started, Samepage offers interactive tutorial material that teaches you a few basic functions and how to behave them out. There are online video tutorials equally well. For the about role, I didn't need much instruction, as the app is fairly cocky-explanatory.

The overall gist is that you take different teams, and those teams have different Pages. Call back of a Samepage Page equally being like to a shared Google Doc, as that's the closest equivalent. It's entirely up to you to determine what kinds of teams you want and how each Folio will be used. For the Pages, Samepage provides a few templates, but at that place aren't enough to requite you a sense of just how many different ways you could utilize the app. They're extraordinarily generic and there are merely three of them.

The interface isn't as sleek as I would like. Something most the typeface, color scheme, and use of space reminds me of children's alphabet blocks. More than importantly, one time I got rolling with Samepage, I institute that a single screen never displayed as much information at a glance I would similar to be able to see. While I don't retrieve every app needs to conform to grayness and blue business concern tones, I did expect Samepage to have a more than sophisticated await and a design that took better advantage of screen space. When yous spend a significant portion of your day looking at 1 app, information technology really needs to be something you want to see.

In that location's nada wrong with the construction of the app itself, however. Information technology has two nesting left side panels that dynamically expand or collapse every bit you demand them. These panels permit you lot to navigate between unlike teams and Pages. The leftmost panel links to a few commonly used areas of the apps, such as your job list, items pending your review, a agenda, and a list of people with whom you can chat.

Features

The meat of Samepage is the Page characteristic. As mentioned, a Folio can be for whatever you want, and it can contain different modules of data. The three templates I mentioned are chosen Meeting Agenda, Project Planning, and File Sharing, to give y'all an idea of some of the almost generic ways you tin can use a Page.

When y'all cull i of these templates—I'll utilise the Meeting Agenda equally an case—a collaborative workspace opens, populated with a few elements. In this case there is a Meeting Schedule header followed by an Event widget, showing the date, fourth dimension, duration, attendees, location, and so forth for the meeting. Beneath that is a block of text showing the attendees, and another block of text containing bullet points for the calendar. Under that is a infinite to upload files for the meeting. At the bottom is a Coming together Notes and Tasks header with an empty cake of text for you or ane of your collaborators to add together coming together minutes.

In that location are a range of other elements you lot tin can add to a Page, such equally an embedded video or map, a table, an paradigm, or a survey. It actually is a whole lot like shared Google Docs, only instead of selecting elements to add from a toolbar, Samepage gives you a little icon on the screen at the position of your cursor.

To the right of every page is a word area, called Page Chat, where team members can keep a focused discussion about the work. Additionally, yous can always privately message any squad member, whether they are signed into the account or non. In the Page Chat section, putting an @ symbol earlier people's names flags their attention, just as information technology does information technology nearly other collaboration apps.

At the very top of the Folio Chat area, you can click a video photographic camera icon to start a video chat. I actually similar that with Samepage's video conversation, y'all can start a video call on a folio, and anybody who is involved with that page automatically has the option to join. The phone call is open up and people can bring together on an opt-in basis, rather than you having to make sure yous individually invite all the right people.

Collaborating on images and PDFs is a challenging chore, and it's not one of Samepage's biggest strengths. The service lets you upload files, and anybody on the page can view the files right in the app, without having to download them (although you tin do that, too). Every member of the Page can comment on the files equally well. What Samepage doesn't have are markup tools for highlighting or cartoon on the uploaded files to show your teammates exactly what you lot mean.

Volerro, on the other mitt, has some of the best tools I've seen for collaboratively discussing visuals because y'all tin marking upward the files right in the browser. Igloo as well has a handy tool that lets people vote on files by marking them with stars. Say your team is deciding on a visual direction for a projection, and you take several files uploaded. With Igloo, yous tin have each squad member marker their favorite option with a star, and easily see which file got the almost votes. Samepage would do good from calculation a few features like these.

I do like that with Samepage, you lot can lock a page, preventing other people from editing it. That's handy for pages that need to exist closely monitored, such as pages with HR or legal information. With a Pro account, you also get a total-page history and then you can encounter exactly what has inverse. When you lot view a Page's history, each editing session is treated every bit one historical file. Changes are highlighted and easy to find. Unfortunately, y'all can't hands revert to a previous version of the page, making this feature less useful than it could exist.

Integrations and Apps

Samepage has desktop apps for Windows and Mac computers, as well every bit mobile apps for iOS and Android. You tin also use it in a web browser. No matter which app you use to admission Samepage, yous need an internet connection for it to work.

Samepage integrates easily with a wide, if somewhat eclectic, array of apps. You can connect to a variety of online storage providers, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Box, as well every bit the video-hosting services YouTube and Vimeo. You tin can also connect with a few other business apps you might already use, such JIRA and Slack. I am surprised that the list doesn't include a few of the most popular business apps—no Salesforce? No Mailchimp?—nor any accounting software, like Freshbooks or QuickBooks. For those apps and others, all the same, you tin turn to Zapier, a tertiary-party tool that lets yous connect disparate online services without requiring any knowledge of coding. Samepage is in the Zapier network, which is a big bonus.

Flexible and Competitively Priced

The more than I compare Samepage to other collaboration apps, the more it reminds me of one of the simplest solutions: a shared Google Doc. Samepage has added conveniences that Google Docs lacks, but the ii services have a remarkably similar view of how teams work together. Samepage is flexible and competitively priced. It's ideal for fairly small, tightly integrated teams. Its weakness, however, is that in offering a niggling bit of everything in a flexible setup, it doesn't have whatsoever of the specialization or ability found in more than advanced work-direction apps such equally Editors' Option Podio. Still, modest teams may very well appreciate Samepage's approach, especially given its free tier of service.