Zenkit is a lightweight and flexible collaboration suite with features for project management, relational databases, team chat, and documentation. With plans ranging from free-forever to enterprise-grade, it’s a versatile solution that can work perfectly for small, scrappy teams as well as more mature and elaborate organizations.
But is it the best tool for your team? Keep reading to learn what Zenkit does well, where it falls a bit short, and what platforms we recommend if it ends up not being right for you.
Zenkit Compared to the Best Project Management Tools
Zenkit is great if you’re looking for a flexible collaboration platform for a small team. However, it lacks a few key elements that prevents it from being one of our favorite project management tools. Here’s a quick look at the best general project management alternatives to Zenkit.
Monday.com offers a more affordable and customizable work management platform with many of the same features as Zenkit, which is why it’s our favorite overall pick for project management. Try it free for 14 days.
ClickUp has the most affordable collaboration features for remote workers, on top of a full-fledged project management solution. Sign up now and get your first 30 days for free.
Smartsheet is incredibly versatile and powerful enough to keep track of and automate just about anything, from projects and tasks to inventory, expenses, and clients. Get your first month for free!
Teamwork is a solid choice for service-based businesses because it comes with invoicing, granular permission levels for inviting clients, and reusable templates. Get started on Teamwork’s 30-day free trial.
Check out our full guide to the best project management software to learn more about our favorites, how we researched them, and how to find the best solution for you.
Zenkit: The Good and the Bad
Despite not making it into our top picks, Zenkit has a lot going for it—plus its fair share of cons. To kick off our review, let’s start by digging deeper into what it does well.
What Zenkit Is Good At
Start anywhere for free: With Zenkit, small teams and businesses have access to project management, task management, team chat, note-taking, and form building solutions, all without paying a dime. The free Zenkit Projects plan allows for up to 1,000 tasks, three projects, and three users. You can also tap into any of Zenkit’s other solutions—such as their Hypernotes solution for knowledge base creation or Zenkit Base for process management—on free plans as well, with accommodation for between two and eight users, depending on which module you select.
Flexible upgrades: Modular pricing lets you upgrade individual Zenkit products as your needs demand while continuing to use other tools at reduced cost (or none at all if you can get by on their free plans). For example, you may choose to upgrade Zenkit Projects and Team Chat for expanded PM and collaboration features and higher limits, but keep Hypernotes, To Do, and ZenForms on the free plan for the few team members that need to use them.
Agile capability: Zenkit is a flexible solution that adapts to your needs, not the other way around. Set it up for sprints or traditional waterfall workflows. Use it for simple to-do lists or complex inventories and resource management. Zenkit’s versatile feature set lets you visualize, prioritize, and collaborate however you see fit. You’re also getting multiple ways to visualize projects, from Kanban boards and tables to Gantt charts, mind maps, and calendars.
Need to track high-level roadmaps and granular details in one place? Create custom fields, smart filters, and nest tasks within subtasks. Want to sync deadlines across teams or keep an eye status updates? Zenkit’s contextual collaboration tools help bridge communication gaps with ease. Built-in calculations give you insights into key metrics so you can make data-driven decisions on the fly, while roadmap reports provide a holistic view of your project portfolio. And, with Zenkit’s smartphone apps, your team can work together from anywhere using the full power of the platform’s paid or free solutions.
Project views: You can visualize, organize, and manage all of your projects in one place on Zenkit. Plan roadmaps, allocate resources, track milestones, and identify dependencies all within fully customizable views like Kanban boards, Gantt charts, calendars, tables, and mind maps.
You can also gain a holistic overview of your business with global views that cut across tools and teams. See all files, tasks, and events in one place to reconnect what matters, or spot priorities or blockers you’d otherwise miss. Check global task lists and Kanban boards to understand work in progress across your company and shift resources to meet deadlines or key results. Sync team calendars into a global schedule to coordinate meetings, book travel, or plan initiatives involving multiple groups.
Built-in collaboration: Zenchat, Zenkit’s real-time team chat platform, allows you to hold meaningful conversations, share updates, and make quick decisions with colleagues. You can create, assign, and manage tasks directly within team chats, ensuring tight synchronization. Chat features like group chats, personal chats, audio and video messages, and file annotations help everyone collaborate effectively in real-time.
Contextual collaboration is woven into the fabric of Zenkit’s other tools. File sharing, commenting, and rich text editing give your team a shared space to work through ideas together. Customizable notifications keep all members of your team in the loop so no one is left out of the creative process. Zenchat also takes this one step further by allowing you to create and manage tasks directly from within your team conversations.
Relational databases: Zenkit allows you to seamlessly connect all crucial business information in one place. Link together tasks and clients, projects and teams, contracts and invoices, and so on. See how they relate and impact each other in real time.
For example, connect your project tasks to key results or objectives to ensure work is aligning with top priorities. Or, link clients to contracts so you know who has signed and who still needs to finalize terms. You can even tie inventory to purchase orders and work orders in Zenkit to stay on top of usage and avoid shortages or excess surplus.
All of this leads to better, more actionable information. Understand how long client projects actually take to complete or how much time is spent on non-billable tasks. Discover connections you never realized existed and collaborate more efficiently by breaking down silos between teams, tools, and workflows. You can tear down information silos and keep everything in sync with everything else.
Process management: In Zenkit, you’re able to create collaborative team wikis to document procedures, define each step in a process, assign responsibilities, set deadlines, and include relevant resources. Or, break down complex workflows into an intuitive series of tasks and subtasks with completion checklists.
For example, map out how you progress a new sales lead from first contact to closed deal or the lifecycle for delivering a client project from start to finish. See where the handoffs happen between teams and if there are any communication gaps to bridge or meaningless steps to remove. Easily spot when a step is missed or done out of order and make corrections on the fly to optimize performance over time. Your team has clarity on how to approach key processes and confidence they are executing efficiently.
Global search: With global search, you’re able to instantly find any information you need anywhere in your Zenkit workspace. Quickly search Zenkit when a contact, file, task, or other information eludes you. The global search function scans all of your content so you get what you’re looking for in seconds. For fast-growing businesses juggling many moving parts, global search is a lifesaver that keeps everyone effective and focused on priorities.
What Zenkit Is Lacking
Simplified access and usage: Zenkit aims to be an all-in-one solution for managing information and workflows in your business. However, its breadth of features and modules can feel overwhelming or convoluted. With so many options for structuring data, connecting ideas, and visualizing productivity, new users may struggle to configure Zenkit in a way that matches their needs.
For example, Zenkit offers separate products for project management and task management, with each having different pricing and feature sets. On top of that, each solution is entirely separate from the others and don’t connect quite as seamlessly as you might hope. In an effort to be ultimately versatile, Zenkit ends up lacking focus in some of its tools. The Zenkit suite often tries to do too much without specializing in any one area.
As a result, many of the tools feel half-baked—they work, but there are a few things about each solution that just feel a bit off. Getting information into the databases isn’t as intuitive as it should be, for example. You also can’t easily delete a single record. It’s little things like these that make it feel cumbersome and disjointed in comparison to other tools.
Automations: While Zenkit provides an intuitive framework to manage information and workflows, it lacks the automation features found in many other project management tools. There are no native options to create custom rules and triggers, so you won’t be able to automatically update or advance tasks based on pre-defined conditions, or anything like that. The only way to enable automations in Zenkit currently is through integrations with Zapier, an additional service that requires a separate setup and, potentially, an added cost.
Without this capability, Zenkit requires more administrative time to keep on top of daily productivity and key results. However, if your workflows are not yet complex enough to benefit from rules-based triggers and you value Zenkit for its relational database, task management, or other core features, the lack of automation may not pose an immediate problem. And you can always integrate with Zapier for more advanced needs down the road.
Storage space: If you frequently need to attach images, videos, or other media to your tasks and projects, you’ll quickly max out the 1 GB of storage offered in Zenkit’s free plan and 6 GB in the Plus plan. Compare this to competitors offering between up to 50 GB of storage (or even unlimited storage), and Zenkit’s caps will feel constraining.
Workarounds like linking to files stored elsewhere or frequently deleting older files you no longer need are options, but may disrupt your workflow and day-to-day efficiency. For startups and small businesses on a tight budget, Zenkit’s affordable, user-friendly platform is appealing, but the storage constraints require careful consideration.
Streamlined interface: Zenkit’s cluttered interface and lack of intuitiveness can make it frustrating to use. As your projects grow in complexity, Zenkit’s layouts don’t always keep things organized in a way that makes sense for you and your team. For example, list and table views don’t nest subtasks under parent tasks, making it difficult to see the big picture. For new users, navigating between Zenkit’s different task management, base, chat, and project tools may feel difficult.
Integrations: Zenkit lacks native integrations, which can be frustrating for teams looking to connect their tech stack together. And, in this era when most of their peers are building their own integrations into their PM platforms, the fact that you’re stuck with Zapier integrations makes Zenkit seem awfully behind the times.
While workable, using Zapier for Zenkit requires extra effort on your end to set up and maintain these connections and, in some cases, you’ll have to pay additional fees, too. In the end, the platform would benefit from building stronger bridges to connect the dots across any organization’s entire project management ecosystem.
Zenkit Products and Pricing
Zenkit is an entire suite of collaboration and project management tools. As we discussed, you can purchase the ones you need or bundle them together.
Zenkit Projects
As a small business owner or project manager, you need tools that make collaboration easy, help you gain control of task prioritization, and let you visualize progress. Zenkit Projects is an intuitive project management software designed with agility and efficiency in mind.
With customizable views like Kanban boards, lists, and calendars, you can organize items and see the direction of projects with ease. Share projects, comment in real time, and stay on top of updates with Zenkit Projects’ native collaboration features.
Whether you need a solution for task management, resource planning, or just staying on top of requests, Zenkit helps turn ideas into action and action into results. Why struggle with messy spreadsheets or clunky software when an intuitive, affordable solution is a click away? With Zenkit, you can collaborate, innovate, and thrive.
Zenkit Projects has four plans to choose from, including:
- Personal: $0 for up to 1,000 tasks across three projects with up to three collaborators
- Plus: $8 per month per user for 80,000 tasks across 80 projects and up to 50 users
- Business: $21 per month per user with up to 800,000 tasks and 500 projects
- Enterprise: custom pricing
The free Personal plan is a great place to start if you want to try Zenkit out or manage simple projects with just a few users. The Plus plan is an affordable stepping stone that unlocks additional customization options, Gantt chart views, and more.
If you want task dependencies and other crucial PM features, though, you’ll likely want to upgrade to the Business tier.
Zenforms
Zenkit’s tool for form building and data management can take your team’s efficiency to the next level. Its user-friendly drag-and-drop interface makes creating engaging forms a breeze.
Craft custom forms to gather exactly the information you need from colleagues, clients, and customers. Conditional logic allows you to show or hide fields based on user input, creating an interactive experience and ensuring all required information is captured.
Then, share your forms by sending a URL, embedding them on your website, or connecting them directly to your other applications. All submitted data is automatically organized into your Zenkit collections for convenient storage and management.
The free plan of Zenforms is sufficient for basic use with up to three forms, 100 responses per month, and one creator. The downside is that all of your forms will have Zenforms’ branding on them.
Paid plans eliminate Zenforms’ branding and include extra capacity and capability:
- Plus: $39 per month for up to 30 forms, 1,000 monthly responses, and three users
- Business: $79 per month for 200 forms, 10k responses per month, and five creators
There’s also a custom-priced enterprise plan with tailored quotas, response limits, custom API usage, and user seats if you need even more.
Zenchat
Zenchat, an instant messaging extension for Zenkit, helps your team connect, collaborate, and achieve more together.
With Zenchat, you can keep conversations related to your projects in one place, share updates in real time, discuss specific tasks, and exchange knowledge freely. Group chats, direct messages, and task-based chats provide dedicated spaces for every type of team discussion. Attach images, files, and documents directly within the chat to ensure everyone has access to what they need.
And, since Zenchat seamlessly integrates with other Zenkit modules, you can break down communication barriers between teams and streamline project collaboration across your entire portfolio.
With Zenchat, you can cut down on lengthy meetings and email exchanges while building closer team connections. This real-time messaging solution helps your company make progress faster through open conversations and improved transparency.
Zenchat, like Zenkit’s other products, has four plan tiers, including:
- Personal: free for up to five chats and 200 monthly messages
- Plus: $4 per user per month with up to 50 chats and 1,000 messages per month
- Business: $15 per user per month for unlimited chats and 10,000 monthly messages per user
- Enterprise: Unlimited everything
Zenkit To Do
Zenkit To Do is an intuitive task management app that helps you visualize, organize, and complete tasks. Create customized task lists to prioritize your responsibilities and deadlines. Set reminders for yourself or assign due dates for your team to keep everyone synchronized. Share lists with your colleagues and assign specific tasks to individuals to enhance collaboration. Add labels to categorize and filter tasks quickly so you can find what you need right away.
Whether you need to plan an event, organize content creation, or just manage your daily personal to-dos, Zenkit To Do gives you a simple yet powerful solution. You can access your task lists on the web, mobile, or desktop, so your information is always at your fingertips wherever you are.
A nice bonus is that the free plan of To Do comes with 10 times the number of tasks allowed as the free plan for Zenkit Project.
When you’re ready to pay, To Do remains less than half the price of Projects at the entry-level tier, starting at just $3 per user per month for annual plans. It has nearly the same quotas, and also allows up to 100 paid users before you have to upgrade to a higher tier.
The Business plan is also a few dollars per month cheaper than Projects’ Business plan price and includes 200,000 more tasks and up to 500 paid users.
Zenkit Hypernotes
As an entrepreneur or project leader, you know that knowledge is power. The ability to organize ideas, manage information, and facilitate collaboration with your team is key to success. Hypernotes, an innovative note-taking and knowledge management tool, gives you a flexible and intuitive solution to do just that.
With Hypernotes, you can craft hierarchical notes that mirror the structure of your projects and thoughts. Link related notes, allowing you to forge connections between concepts and create contextual networks of information. The powerful editor lets you format notes with images, tables, and more, bringing your ideas to life.
Best of all, Hypernotes enables real-time collaborative editing so you and your team can work together on notes, documents, or collateral simultaneously. Add tags to categorize and find notes in an instant using fast and accurate search functions. With Hypernotes, you’ll also have a single, shared space to build an internal knowledge base for your whole team. Say goodbye to siloed information and hello to transparent collaboration.
The free plan of Hypernotes allows for up to two notebooks and two users per notebook. You also get 200 monthly messages, 600 MB in storage, and up to 10,000 notes.
There are three paid plans to choose from, including:
- Plus: $5 per user per month for up to 30 notebooks, 6 GB of storage, and 80,000 notes
- Business: $15 per user per month for unlimited notebooks, 60 GB of storage, and 1 million notes
- Enterprise: Custom pricing for unlimited everything
Zenkit Base
Zenkit Base provides a customizable database solution to organize diverse data sets, gain actionable insights, and enhance team collaboration. Design fields tailored to your specific data requirements, then visualize your data in the format that suits you best. Robust filtering and sorting features allow you to arrange information quickly while built-in formulas perform calculations that can uncover key trends and metrics.
Share databases with your team to work together and track tasks, milestones, and resources in real time. You can even use Zenkit Base as a CRM to maintain a detailed database of customer information and interactions. Whatever your needs, Zenkit Base provides a powerful solution to collect, organize, and gain insights from your most valuable data.
The Personal plan is completely free for 500 items across up to 100 collections. You get 1 GB of storage, up to five folders (called Workspaces), and up to three users.
If you need more than that, the Plus plan is affordable at just $8 per user per month. It unlocks unlimited collections, 50,000 items, 6 GB of storage, unlimited members, and up to 20 workspaces. This plan also gives you access control, user roles, recurring items, and theme customization.
The next tier, the Business plan, includes 150,000 items, 50 GB of storage, and up to 500 workspaces.
Comparing the Best Project Management Software
If Zenkit doesn’t check all of your boxes, check out our guide to the best project management solutions to see our favorites, including how we researched the category, how to find the best option for your team, and a full review of our top picks.
Here’s the shortlist if you’re ready to try a different solution—and they each come with a free trial for testing them out:
- Monday.com – Best for project management software for most
- ClickUp – Best remote work platform
- Smartsheet – Best for flexibility
- Teamwork – Best for client and service-based businesses
- Asana – Best balance of power and simplicity
- Trello – Best Kanban project management
Although Zenkit isn’t one of our favorites, it’s a solid collaboration and work management platform for many teams that want a wide-reaching solution for project work, knowledge base creation, custom forms, and collaboration.
