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I downgraded my Basecamp account sometime ago, a little frustrated by some omissions and foibles.

Highrise initially looks promising but it's too early to say where it overlaps with Basecamp. Some users might find it ideally suited to managing day to day work while Basecamp gets used to log conversations and track milestones.

For the kind of work I do, centred on clients and new leads, Highrise looks alot better.


For the first time you can add follow-up tasks to Notes though it seems this can only be done at the time of creating the note. Finally though you can see a task, click through to the original note and it's associated comments. I wonder if anything like this is on the way for Basecamp.

Tagging makes an appearance for contacts. I'm almost surprised by this since 37Signals have steadfastly refused to implement this in Basecamp, meaning I have to be careful with my category naming, most of which refer to clients. However there is no tagging for notes or tasks. Tasks use a pre-loaded set of categories to which you can add as needed.

This is inconsistent behaviour. Why not be able to tag any item of information that you create? It's so useful to be able to bring up related information with one click and more so as the data increases in volume and you need to do some analysis or searching.

I don't know what you mean by;
"Notes, calls, and tasks can each have reminders set to them for easily remembering to follow up."

Only tasks can have reminders as far as I can see and there isn't an internal item named "calls" within Highrise.

Your last point;

"Highrise is a great compliment to the other online software packages that 37 signals offers, as data is communicated effortlessly between all of them."

As far as I can this is simply not true. There has been some integration e.g Writeboards within Basecamp but even so you couldn't hook your separate Writeboard account into your Basecamp or Highrise account. There is a a Basecamp API from what I can remember and you can import contacts into Highrise but that's it. If you require seamless interchange of information you will be in for a surprise or two I'm certain.

I see a problem in that the tipping point at which Highrise becomes useful is when you can use Cases. Cases allow you to group related notes together. It looks like this means users can collaborate on a given project - basically a messageboard, but you can also add a note about a contact and attach it to the Case.
You could also view a Case as a Project (a la Basecamp) and I think this is where the pricing becomes interesting. You have to spend $49 a month to get Cases. Will Highrise not manage increased complexity sufficiently well that one will need to spend this kind of money? Do they do anything else that might be deemed useful? Like linking to Tasks for that Case? How does the Dashboard show Cases?

Notes will look slightly lost without subject headers. Those should be optional.

I am very surprised that typing in the name of an existng contact does not immediately create a hyperlink to that contact. Having a popup showing the contact details when you hover over it would be useful as well.

Overall I get the feeling that they agonised over how far to go and how much to charge without providing a reason for paying Basecamp customers to migrate to a lower charging Highrise account. The danger is there.

It's a pity that tagging isn't implemented throughout as you could get genuinely useful overviews rather than a Dashboard showing a recent history of simply notes and comments (the Dashboard should be more powerful than this). I had bad experiences with 37Signals file storage - inaccurate storage count, poor handling of duplicate filenames etc, so I hope that has been improved.

So my initial impressions are of a nice looking web app, as always, but I worry about how it scales and how easy it functions with increased complexity. Basecamp didn't cut it in this regard. In terms of tracking and managing people and clients Highrise is a big improvement without having to delve into overly expensive CRM systems.

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