Basecamp is the closest thing on this list to what we are trying to do: chat and work in one place, one price, and a refusal to bolt on everything a salesperson asks for. The argument is about what that refusal costs a company once it stops being small.
Capability by capability
Every line about Basecamp was read on its own pages on 24 September 2026. Where we are still building something, the table says so.
| Basecamp |  |
|
|---|---|---|
| Conversation | ||
| Team chat | Yes — Campfire is real-time group chat and Pings are direct messages. Campfires are rooms inside a project, not company-wide channels. | Channels, threads, voice notes with transcription and translation, GIFs and meetings started from the chat’s top bar. |
| From talk to work | ||
| The free plan | One project, 1 GB of storage, five users maximum. | Eight people, two Boards projects, six months of chat history, surveys, kudos and the dashboard. |
| Guests and clients | Every person you add counts against the user limit, clients and contractors included — until the Studio plan, where users become unlimited. | Guests do not consume a seat: one per user on Free, two on Workspace, three on Business OS. |
| Gantt and timeline | Not in the product. Basecamp has Hill Charts, Card Tables, the Lineup and a calendar. | Boards in kanban, list, table and Gantt views. |
| Repeatable processes | Project templates from the Studio plan up. No workflow engine with owners and conditions. | Workflow templates with steps, deadlines counted from the start, a department answering for each stage and conditions that branch the path. |
| People and focus | ||
| Single sign-on | Basecamp states plainly that it does not support SSO or SAML authentication. Sign-in is email and password, Google sign-in, and two-factor authentication. | In development, on our roadmap rather than ruled out. |
| Culture, clients, tickets | ||
| Culture: kudos, surveys, eNPS | Automatic Check-ins ask the team a recurring question. There is no kudos, survey or eNPS layer. | Feedback Friday, kudos, leaderboards, anniversaries and surveys from Free; pulse surveys and eNPS from Workspace. |
| Where it runs | ||
| Where the data sits | 37signals is a U.S. company with its main data infrastructure located in the U.S.; transfers out of the EU rely on Standard Contractual Clauses. | European infrastructure at OVHcloud, on every plan. |
| Who you sign with | 37signals LLC, Oak Park, Illinois. Their terms of service contain no governing-law or venue clause at all. | HOMtu® sp. z o.o., a Polish company, under Polish jurisdiction. |
Sources: Basecamp pricing and plan limits · Basecamp features · Basecamp Campfire · Basecamp: logging in and out (SSO) · 37signals privacy policy. Checked against Basecamp’s own pages on 24 September 2026.
Giving the point away
Three of them, and none is a throwaway. If these are what your team runs on, Basecamp is the right answer and we would rather you knew now.
From the Studio plan up, Basecamp charges one price for unlimited users with no per-user fees. For a company of sixty that is a genuinely different economic shape from ours, and for some teams it will simply be cheaper.
Basecamp is small on purpose. Six tools per project, one way to do each thing, nothing to configure. If your team has been burned by a tool with too many knobs, that restraint is the feature, and we have more knobs than they do.
37signals has run this product for longer than most of this category has existed and has a record of not rewriting it out from under its customers. We are two years old. That is a fair thing to weigh.
Where the difference shows
Campfire is a room inside a project. In taos a channel can span the company, a department or a client, and a message in any of them becomes a task with an owner and a deadline without leaving the thread.
In Basecamp every client and contractor counts against the user limit until you reach Studio. Ours sit outside the count: one guest per user on Free, two on Workspace, three on Business OS, each with a named channel and a project on Boards.
A repeatable procedure becomes a template with steps, deadlines relative to the start, a department answering for each stage and conditions that branch. Basecamp has project templates; it does not have a process that carries itself.
Kanban, list, table and Gantt, plus every dated task in a shared calendar synced both ways with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Basecamp has Hill Charts and the Lineup, and no Gantt at all.
Kudos, leaderboards, anniversaries, surveys and — from Workspace — pulse surveys and eNPS. Basecamp has Automatic Check-ins, which ask a question but do not measure anything.
Basecamp’s terms carry no governing-law clause at all, and their infrastructure is in the United States. Ours is a Polish company on European infrastructure, under Polish jurisdiction, and we would rather that were boring than clever.