Nifty Project Management Review – The Good and Bad for 2023

Nifty is a project management software company that focuses on providing an all-in-one solution. Get collaboration features, discussions, document sharing, and reporting capabilities tied into one platform. With use cases in Agile development and legal case management, Nifty can completely transform how you manage projects across various industries.

Nifty Compared to the Best Project Management Software

Nifty’s project milestones, time-tracking features, and expansive use cases make it a compelling option. But we’ve reviewed several others in our list of the best project management software, and we’re highlighting a few Golden Eggs from there that would make excellent alternatives to Nifty. 

Monday.com is trusted by over 150,000 customers worldwide for its user-friendly interface that gives users ultimate control over their workflows. Try Monday.com on its free plan. 

ClickUp is one of the best solutions for remote project work because of its built-in collaboration tools like whiteboards, team chat, and the collaborative document editor. Get started on any ClickUp plan in seconds. 

Smartsheet is powerful software that delivers unlimited automations alongside unique features like a smart PDF builder, proofing workflows, and conditional logic. Try Smartsheet today on a generous 30-day free trial. 

Nifty: The Good and the Bad

Nifty is impressive in the array of industries, niches, and workflows it can accommodate. But any project management software option will have good and bad aspects to consider. Below, we’ll break down where Nifty rises above the pack and where we found it lacking, giving you the information to understand if it’s the right platform for you. 

What Nifty Is Good At 

Nifty’s software has several good features, ranging from excellent execution of the essentials you’d expect from project management software to its wide applicability as a PM solution for marketing teams, agencies, and many others. Let’s dive into this platform’s greatest virtues.

Project milestones: Nifty’s project milestones help you automate status reporting and make it easier to visualize your project. Use one of three views—including timeline, swimlane, and master—to visualize the campaign, sprint, or other project schedules more clearly. 

You can set bulk milestone dependencies and recurring milestones and never miss a deadline, no matter what project view you choose. You can also create custom fields to add additional information to your milestones. So, whether you’re a marketer juggling campaigns or a development team working on a new release, Nifty allows you to stay on top of things and on time.

Time tracking: Improve productivity, track costs, and balance team workloads with Nifty’s time tracking functionality. You can track billable hours and receive insights based on projects’ time logs. Each logged-hour spreadsheet gives details about all projects and tasks for any date range you set. You can also receive reports instantly with Nifty’s automated insights, allowing you to allocate and balance workloads on the fly. 

Project portfolios: Organize projects into folders based on operations, account ownership, and client delivery in Nifty, helping you maintain a steady hand on several projects at once. Set project folders to public or private or create invitation-based projects separately. To make management even easier, you can view the health of all your projects at once from a single dashboard. 

Features for development and product teams: Nifty lets you pre-plan everything on complex projects with its centralized communication and real-time reporting. You can create project specifications through documentation, define goal-oriented sprints as milestones, and break product features into individual tasks for the ultimate development flows. 

Product teams looking to reduce their product development cycle can bring everything into one place. Strategize product decisions with project stakeholder collaboration, define product milestones by building a visual roadmap, and prioritize product features by creating custom story maps using Kanban, list, or swimlane views. 

Reporting: Nifty offers quite an extensive reporting system, which includes pulling your workspace and project tasks into a dashboard-style visual report that you can export and share with stakeholders with just one click. Nifty lets you go deep into a lot of different project insights, from project statuses, milestones, and success rates to time logs, budgets, and expenses. 

Capability for legal case management: With Nifty, you can manage all your legal cases through portfolio creation and progress reporting. Create portfolios based on different attorneys or case types to track case statuses in real-time. Also, the legal case management organization hits a new level with Nifty’s dedicated projects, where you can create, store, and share files, documents, notes, and communication threads.

Nifty allows you to store individual cases in customizable templates, saving time and avoiding redundant onboarding and workflow creation. You can also set recurring reminders for different tasks, meetings, or check-ins and customize case views on project dashboards. To make casework easier, you can prioritize your caseload through your “My Work” tab, which lets you measure cases by the deadline, tags, or related milestones. 

What Nifty Is Lacking

While Nifty has excellent features, it still has a few areas to improve, including its rigid dashboard, low storage capacity, and fewer integration options. These factors can change how you interact with the platform, which isn’t ideal for users looking for full capability.

Rigid dashboard: While Nifty’s dashboard can pull a lot of custom information from the projects you’re working on in the software, many users claimed that Nifty’s dashboard was either not easy to or unable to customize to their needs. From changing the color scheme to rearranging elements, this can be frustrating for users, especially for agency workers who want the ability to apply relevant branding to dashboards when exporting them for client reports.

Expensive for custom roles: Nifty gives you a lot on both its free-forever and lower-priced plans. But if you want granular people management in the form of setting custom user roles and permissions and managing workloads by team instead of individual, you’ll have to pay for it. Those features only come on the Business plan, the most expensive option outside of the custom-priced Enterprise offering.

Weak support options: Another thing locked away on the expensive plans is user support. On every plan except for the most expensive one, you’re only given access to a self-service help center that’s really just more of a knowledge base. You’ll need to pay $16 to $25 per month just to get priority support, and only Nifty’s custom-priced Enterprise plan gives you access to a dedicated success manager.

Nifty Options and Pricing

Nifty has five different pricing tiers with a wide array of pricing, making it easy for teams of any size to find an option that can fit their budgetary and project management needs. 

It starts with a free-forever plan that comes with 100 MB of storage space and allows you up to two active projects. While that’s a bit limiting for many situations, small operations can tap into all of Nifty’s core features without paying a dime. 

That means you can use more than just the basics, like tasks, milestones, discussions, and file sharing. You can also try out Nifty’s native team chat feature, organize projects into portfolios, create recurring items, and even set dependencies for milestones and tasks.

So, it’s just a matter of how many projects you need to handle. If you need the ability to use Nifty for up to 40 projects, you’ll just need to pay $5 per user per month for the Starter plan. That rate is for a one-year upfront commitment and rises to $9 per user for month-to-month billing.

You’ll get a few advanced features in addition to greater project capacity. Nifty’s time and budget tracking and reporting become accessible on this tier. Starter also unlocks unlimited guest and client roles and expands your cloud storage to 100 GB, which is generous compared to similarly priced plans on other PM platforms. 

Pro is Nifty’s intermediate plan, starting at $10 per user per month on annual billing. You get more storage (250 GB), more projects (up to 100), and more features, like file proofing and portfolio overviews. This is also the first paid tier that allows you access to automations, which can be an important consideration.

Then, you have the Business plan, which is $16 per user per month when paying for the full year upfront, but a steeper $25 per user when paying month-to-month.  This unlocks two advanced features for people management: team workloads and custom user roles and permissions. 

A huge benefit of this plan is access to priority support, which is totally lacking in the preceding tiers. Plus, you get better control over security and account elements, including Google and Microsoft single sign-on and access to Open API. 

Last, there is a custom-priced Enterprise plan. This gives you access to the only advanced feature not yet accessible: native forms. Nifty will also assign your account a dedicated success manager. 

You’re allowed unlimited projects and unlimited file storage on both the Business and Enterprise plans. 

Nifty in Summary

Nifty is an expansive project management software with capabilities for various industries, from marketing teams and agencies to law firms and dev teams. It’s also quite affordable for the array of features you get at a smaller scale. 

While Nifty is excellent in many ways, something like Monday.com is more functional for some sales and marketing teams because of its built-in CRM. Or, tap into ClickUp to better support project work across a team that’s mostly or entirely working from home. And if you need more affordable access to automations from your PM software, Smartsheet is the choice for you. 

Want to read more about these brands and other options? We’ve done our homework on some of the best platforms on the market today, and you can learn all about them in our full post on the best project management software.