I am between jobs now, and while considering part time work/side hustles and doing a lot of home improvement projects, I have been looking at a many of these project management & tasking solutions. I have been using a bit of Trello and a lot of ToDoIst. Also dipped my toe into OneNote. I'm finding it hard to go back to see what I've been accomplishing and the ability to track costs, labor and expenses seems a little kludgy. Microsoft Project is pricey as mentioned, and feels too complex for my needs. OneNote is easy to create structure on, but it's too open range for me and I need some structure.
I've stumbled across a Windows 10 app called
Eclipse Manager. For a single user solution, it seems to do everything I need. The pay model is $2/month which will add cost tracking. I may come back to this thread after evaluating the paid version.
Some cons vs. many other solutions:
- it appears to really be for only one user. You cannot assign tasks or share the app. With the paid version, you can export to CSV. If collaborating you could use this tool for overview and simpler task sharing apps but you'll be doing a bit of duplicate labor.
- It is not multi-platform. With ToDoIst, I really like that I can add tasks from my phone (even using Siri while driving) and they'll be on the PC windows app when I get home.
- "Nobody" appears to be using it. There's a great guide on their website, but no blog, no forum, no active Reddit crew etc. etc. With zero user engagement, I can't expect any future improvements and this won't scale up should I find myself in a growing operation.
Still, for my current situation it seems like a good deal.
Since this topic is now a bit out of date, I'm wondering if others are using another/newer solution to track projects with costs or for which you could invoice?