I have tried almost every PM tool that appsumo has had on offer and am happy to report that BasicOps already ticks a lot of boxes for me. BasicOps is a very polished tool focused on frictionless task management and collaboration. Yes, it lacks the bells and whistles of some of the all-in-one-tools and personally I hope that custom fields and more granular access controls will someday find their way into the product but what it does it does very well - with a few unique approaches that set it apart from the rest:

- Tasks that are assigned to other people can be accepted or rejected by the assignee. I love this approach because it frames the interaction as cooperation and collaboration, not the delegation of a task in a hierarchical system. This is true for every interaction with this system: Collaboration is the foundation ever feature is built upon.

- Notes are an effective way to store information - and so much more: Every item in a note can be turned into a task - perfect for meeting minutes that contain actionable items. I previously used notejoy for collaborative note-taking around projects, this would totally eliminate the need for an external tool.

- Instant updates across all platforms. This is what immediately won me over. I tend to live in the pm tool of choice, have it open on one screen no matter what. I can't stress enough how satisfying it is to see instant updates pop up, whether in my feed, in a project, the tasks page, even in notes where multiple users can simultaneously edit the document that instantly pushes the changes to everyone. This even works in the mobile apps (I can only test the iOS version but would be surprised if this wasn't available on Android). No need to manually refresh anything, you are always in the loop.

Compared to other past and present deals on Appsumo the user limits are rather restrictive, especially since external users count towards the limit and the tier 2 and 3 step increases are unusually steep. But a tier 3 license grants you unlimited users and if BasicOps can deliver on what is already a very promising proposition, this license may soon be worth its weight in gold.

If you are looking for an all-in-one tool with CRM, sales funnel, marketing channels, customer portals, estimates, invoices, and what-have-you built-in, BasicOps isn't for you.

But if you are looking for an effective way to centralise information and collaboration around tasks and projects, I can highly recommend this tool.