Highrise Surprise

After a long wait, 37 Signals (makers of the venerable project management/collaboration tool — Basecamp) recently launched a new contact manager called Highrise. Although, I think there is room for a lightweight software-as-a-service (SaaS) contact manager, I am not quite convinced on this one yet. Although it offers basic contact tracking, tasks and a nice dashboard, the functionality is pretty limited for the price. On the plus side, in true web 2.0 fashion, the product does offer RSS feeds and the ability to tag your data. If you upgrade, you get additional “case” functionality (from what I can tell, this seems to be similar to the groups capability in other contact managers). If you decide to upgrade, the personal version is $12 per month (i.e. $144 per year for up to 3 users), but that only gives you 200MB of storage and 250 contacts. What do you do when you get that 251st contact? I know more than a few people with more than 250 LinkedIn contacts. The price goes up from there. Twenty-four dollars per month gets you in the game for 6 users, 400MB and 5000 contacts; for $49 per month, you get 15 users, a gig of storage and 20,000 contacts. If you are OK with the limited feature set, these plans may be alright for a small business.

Verdict: True to the 37 Signals reputation for usability, this product is easy to set-up and very easy to use use. However, compared to other options the product seems very feature light. In all, I love the concept, I like the interface and ease of use, but the free and personal editions are basically useless for anything more than freelancers or tracking job opportunities.

Update: I’m not the only one underwhelmed.  Stowe Boyd’s (no relation) review here.