SwiftKanban - Review 2022

One of the pleasures of using kanban is how unproblematic the system is at eye. Kanban is a method for organizing and managing work, and yous can use information technology for whatever kind of work, from planning a vacation to running an It department—I'll explain it in more particular below. Some of the all-time online kanban apps can be downright fun to use. Just not all are. SwiftKanban is an online kanban app designed with scrum work methodology (more than on this later) in listen, and although it has a low cost, it suffers from poor user experience. If your budget is tight and you need a kanban app that tin handle scrum, yous could consider SwiftKanban, although yous're better off paying a little more for a tool that's easier to apply, such equally LeanKit.

Pricing and Plans

SwiftKanban offers iii tiers of service: Squad (free, simply only good for two years), Group ($84 per person per twelvemonth), Enterprise ($180 per person per twelvemonth). Enterprise customers can too choose to upgrade some of their members to Enterprise Services Planning membership, at a charge per unit of $360 per person per yr.

The Squad account supports up to x members and four boards. You lot get basic metrics, standard templates, and only five types of cards to apply on your kanban boards. The Group account includes everything in Team, but allows for up to 50 members, 20 boards, and 10 types of cards. You get custom templates, advanced reports, the ability to create teams, and a few other features.

The Enterprise account includes everything in Group, simply allows for unlimited members, boards, and menu types. Information technology also adds dashboards, a total range of analytics, API access, and a few other perks. The selection to upgrade some members to an Enterprise Services Planning membership adds access to chance assessment tools, additional analytics, capacity forecasting, scope forecasting, and more.

If you contact Digite, the company behind SwiftKanban, you tin can request to have the kanban app installed locally rather than running it in the deject. Other customizations are also available.

Price Comparisons

Compared to other kanban board apps, SwiftKanban'due south prices are low. Trello, which is one of the most popular kanban apps, charges more: $119.88 per person per year. Editors' Choice Asana charges the aforementioned as Trello when y'all pay for service annually rather than monthly.

Mayhap the most apt point of comparison is Taiga because, like SwiftKanban, information technology has special tools for accommodating scrum methodologies. Taiga is open-source, and it uses an unusual pricing scale. At the low finish, Taiga costs $19 per month for an business relationship that allows up to 25 members per private projection, and y'all can have up to five private projects. At that rate, you're effectively paying $9.12 per person per year, bold y'all stop up with 25 team members total. Taiga has several other plans with varying restrictions that cost $29, $69, and $99 per month.

Nearly other kanban apps charge more. Volerro, which has some fantastic capabilities for teams that piece of work with visual avails costs $95.88 per person per yr a Business account. Wrike, another well-known kanban app, costs $117.60 per person per year for its Teams account, or $297.60 per person per year for Business.

LeanKit is another impressive app that costs a heck of a lot more than SwiftKanban: $228 to $588 per person per year. That said, Volerro, Wrike, and LeanKit are all much easier to apply than SwiftKanban, and LeanKit also handles scrum workflows pretty well.

What Is Kanban? What Is Scrum?

The simplest way to explain kanban is with an example. Imagine a board with vertical columns labeled To Do, Doing, and Washed. Now picture a stack of sticky notes, and each viscous note has a task written on it. All the notes are and then stuck on the lath in the To Practise column. When a person is assigned a task and starts working on it, the associated sticky note moves to the Doing column. When the chore is complete, the note goes to the Done column.

There are infinite means to riff on this concept, merely that'south the gist of it.

Kanban is a useful tool for creating a pool of work from which workers tin can pull tasks. Information technology's also generally seen as a useful for limiting how many tasks any one person can have assigned to her at a time. Some kanban apps allow you to enforce an bodily limit, called a work-in-progress or WIP limit, while other apps leave it to you to informally create rules for limits.

Every bit mentioned, Swift Kanban has some features and functionality for teams that use scrum as well. Scrum is a blazon of work methodology; more specifically, it's a type of agile evolution. When post-obit scrum, teams work in sprints. A sprint is a gear up number of days, such as one month or one week. During each sprint, the team has a clear goal, usually adamant by the client's or client'south priorities. The objective is usually to evangelize a working role past the end of the dart, and and so immediately start a new sprint. The resulting cyclic workflow with quick turnaround times seems to map onto kanban boards well.

People sometimes refer to scrum methodology used on a kanban lath equally "scrumban."

Setup, Interface, and Use

As with most kanban apps, setting up a new SwiftKanban lath takes niggling more than creating columns, labeling them, and inviting others to join your board. When creating new columns, you can divide them into two or more parts. Not all kanban board apps have this capability, and information technology exist helpful to meet a tutorial noting when and why that function might be used.

How to add cards to my boards wasn't immediately intuitive in testing, as the plus sign push that controls this action is subconscious in a left toolbar that'south always minimized by default until you hover over it and pin it open. Many of the basic functions you need to access are in this hidden toolbar, and then it makes sense to want to pin it open. When you exercise pin it open, however, the toolbar partially blocks the cards in the left-nearly cavalcade. In that location is no winning with this toolbar.

Every bit you tin can probably tell, SwiftKanban feels frustrating to utilise right abroad, and it doesn't get amend. Simply put, it doesn't offer a practiced user experience. The fine details of what makes an app feel simple to utilise, such as clicking near enough where yous're meant to click to get a button to work or finding the tools y'all need at your fingertips, are off the mark here.

Information technology can accept a while to discover even the most basic buttons. I spent several minutes trying to figure out how to delete a board so that I could bit it and outset over fresh. If you lot update any information in your profile, you are instructed to log out and log in over again to see the changes. You might presume that you tin modify the titles of the columns on your board past clicking on them, but no. You accept to go to a settings panel to make changes. When you lot use the settings area to make changes, be sure to click the icon of a floppy deejay to save the changes before you navigate out of there—how outdated is that? I expect business apps to work ameliorate than this.

While the user experience is poor, other functionality in the app are in fact broken. For case, a calendar view shows entries for tasks that are due on each day. Hover over the task, a larger view of information technology should pop up, not blink fiercely like a strobe light, which is what happens (it happened on both Mac and Windows and in different browsers). When y'all hover over any menu in the board view, most of the icons don't fit on the bill of fare and and then are shown falling off it.

Features and Integrations

If you lot don't mind figuring out all the quirks of the organization and overlooking the clunkiness of the design, yous practise get piece of work-in-progress (WIP) limits with SwiftKanban; not all digital kanban tools offering them. WIP limits aren't strictly enforced but rather show a count at the pinnacle of the column that turns ruby-red when you surpass it.

You also get the ability to carve up whatsoever column into multiple lanes. For case, allow's say nosotros take the columns To Exercise, Doing, and Done. We could turn the To Practise column into two columns, perhaps to separated Should Do and Ready To Do items. You lot can also collapse columns you don't need to see, which helps make better use of your available screen space.

SwiftKanban's integration options are confusing. In that location are no one-touch integration options, similar existence able to connect a Google Drive business relationship by only authenticating it. At that place is a way to create integrations, but information technology requires another tool called SwiftSync, which costs actress. With SwiftSync, you can connect a SwiftKanban business relationship to all kinds of popular office tools, such every bit Jira, Salesforce, and Zendesk. Simply like I said, information technology'southward a separately purchased product.

The merely other choice is to use export and import functions to motion data from one system to some other, but that inappreciably constitutes an integration.

Affordable Kanban and Scrum

SwiftKanban has the advantage of being affordable, and it may cheque two fundamental boxes for yous if y'all want to utilize kanban and scrum to manage your team's workflow. Unfortunately, its interface and lack of integration options count against information technology.

Look instead to those apps that scored higher in our testing, namely Editors' Choice Asana (which has kanban features only isn't often classified every bit a kanban app), Volerro, LeanKit, and Wrike. Taiga is also an inexpensive option for anyone looking for a scrumban solution specifically, although it isn't as straightforward and simple to utilize equally the other apps I mentioned.

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/software/19507/swiftkanban

Posted by: duvalldifors.blogspot.com

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