September 28, 2010
Teamlab - is a Latvian startup, launched this summer. It's a very interesting collaboration and project management solution, that takes on Basecamp. Teamlab is available as free SaaS service (almost without limitations), or (free) installable open-source system. Taking into account that Teamlab - is really well-made solution with functionality comparable to Basecamp, the question arises: why is it free? According to company representatives, Teamlab was created for own needs and they were so happy with the tool, that decided to share it with others. The company hopes to attract third-party developers to contribute to the product and gain popularity with the freemium model in order to compete with Basecamp on the global market. And then they plan to introduce paid features (with the promise that the open-source version will remain free forever).
It seams, that Teamlab developers for now don't have either monetization plan or marketing positioning plan. Comparing Teamlab to Basecamp, they call it the enterprise portal solution. Of course, now the functionality of a project management services is almost similar to intranet portals, but enterprise portals are mostly used by large companies, which prefer not to deal with start-ups (especially with free products). So, in our opinion, for now Teamlab should be referred as the project management and collaboration tool for small business.
Teamlab looks very cute and functional. Like Basecamp, it provides dashboard, project-tracker with milestones, tasks, discussions, files and reports, staff directory, wiki. BTW, soon it will allow to import projects from Basecamp. Additionally it contains forum, blogs, photo gallery, news, internal messenger.
Teamlab SaaS version runs on Amazon Web Services, and the only restriction - the max size of each uploaded file should not exceed 25 MB.
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