Taskjuggler – Review

Taskjuggler calls itself a "Project Managers Delight" and to be fair, they're not far from the truth. It has a GNU general public license meaning its free and meaning other coders are free to edit and improve it as they see fit. Taskjuggler works on UNIX systems and was specifically developed for LINUX, although there should be some cross platform compatibility, this may be a blow for many people who use Windows based systems. On the technical side it has a Python or KDE front end, if you don't know what these mean it might be best to use either a simpler tool, or get an IT expert to install it. It also exports to both HTML and XML files making it very useful. Taskjuggler comes with all the standard features of most project management tools, including time lines, charts, resource management and contact lists. But it also has more than just that, it has some very useful features such as their "Resource Conflict Solver" which stops double bookings taking place, and you can also assign running costs to a resource, the only free project management tool that I know of that allows you to do this. It also has project tracking support, enabling clients to find out how far along you are, as well as allowing multiple time zone planning, great for those companies that outsource their work to consultants overseas. Taskjuggler is a text based system, you input a simple TXT file, that you can make in notepad and Taskjuggler will return you a report full of the statistics and data you'll need. It does have some issues however, the largest being that it is a static state system, and as such it is hard to update any changes halfway through. Overall however there are far worse tools than this, and you can't argue with the price.