Although been an explosion of cloud collaboration tools lately, Subtask is unique in that it combines a number of organizational tools together in a way that works well. You may think, from the screenshots below that Subtask is yet another mind mapping tool, that is not quite the case.
Subtask is in fact a sophisticated task/project management built for cloud collaboration and social media functions, with a mind-mapping front end. It combines various organizational elements into a single whole yet somehow manages to keep things simple at the same time, so that anyone can simply jump right in and use the tool, without much of a learning curve. Subtask offers a free plan that is restricted to two active projects.
While Subtask functions as you would expect as a mind mapping tool (drag and drop, etc.; see screenshot above left), a few small icons underneath each task let you do a number of interesting things, such as add a social-media style comments, attach a note, assign to a team member, or add a completion date.
You can switch to a calendar style view that shows the tasks and due dates without the mind map structure, which is really useful (see screenshot above right).
Filtering: a very nice interface device is the ability to filter assigned tasks by team member (see screenshot below left) or filter by due date (see below right). The screen will dim in order to outline the relevant elements, which is a very nice effect.
You can attach notes and attachments; as well as make social-media style comments/conversations (see below). There are daily email updates that Everything that you and your team does is documented and can be browsed on a timeline
Free vs. Paid: the free version of Subtask lets you work with two active projects (inactive projects can be archived) containing 55 tasks each at a maximum and 310 megs cloud storage space. While this is reasonable, we believe it is a mistake: most people are involved in many personal and work projects, and many will simply see Subtask’s free accounts as too restrictive and not bother sinking their teeth into it and growing their user base. A maximum of four projects would have been better, and their monetization strategy would probably work better if it centered around paid mobile apps.
The verdict:
If you’ve ever looked at a mind map and wondered if there’s really anything in this stuff that can really increase your productivity and make you more organized, you should check out Subtask. I personally have never been a big fan of mind mapping tools, even as I realize that there is value in organizing elements in a visual structure, but the marriage of task management and team collaboration tools is an excellent idea, and very well implemented in Subtask. The one thing that it should have that it does not are mobile apps (iOS/Android), but we are guessing that these will eventually come.
This is a potentially a winner. My only hope is that they increase the number of projects for the free version, which is currently too restrictive.
Go here to get Subtask (you can request a beta invite right now).
