Isn’t it strange? How can we – the PickaForm team – say that Podio, one of our biggest competitor, is great?

Simply because Podio received the award of “Best online collaboration tool of 2016“!

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2489110,00.asp

This is really great! Congratulations guys, because not only you deserve it, but it also proves what we’ve been thinking for a long time now : flexible and polyvalent tools are a better way to collaborate than a stack of separated vertical tools.

If you look carefully at what happened in the PCMag comparison, you realize that you have a bunch of very good but specialized tools :

• Asana (tasks & workflow management)
• HipChat (chat, video, screen sharing)
• Slack (team chat with #channels)
• Igloo (customized intranet)
• LeanKit (tasks & kaban-style project management)
• Volerro (project management with chat collaboration)
• Workfront (project management)
• Confluence (discussion & ecm with nice integrations)
• Ryver (collaborative chat similar to Slack)

Compared to these great softwares, Podio is simply out of competition : it can do task management, project management, team discussion, document management, intranet news… and much more things because of its unbeatable ingredient : customizable forms.

With custom forms, you can store whatever you want in your app, and make your software answer any kind of problems.

We believe this is why Podio won this award.

Well, now, let’s be honest. Despite Podio and PickaForm are very similar for many aspects, we are not really competitors.

First of all, we’re so small compared to them that they have probably not even noticed we were competitors 🙂 There are a multi millions dollars company backed by the giant Citrix, whereas we are a small startup fighting to grow.

Secondly, if Podio is a very flexible platform, we think PickaForm has a better capability to build clean and powerful forms, according to our form features philosophy. In effect, with PickaForm, you can attach specific features to each form, which makes them even more flexible.

For example, once you have defined your custom form, you can decide if users can :

• attach files
• participate in a workflow
• drop comments
• send emails & links
• connect calendar events
• do multiple versions of the record
• see the audit trail (history of all actions)
• adjust record security (who can read / write)
• link the record to other records (to build relationships like Project > Tasks, or Lead > Actions…)
• generate office & pdf documents automatically filled from the form data
• transform the record into another type of record (i.e. Proposal > Order)

… and this list is growing all the time with new PickaForm releases

On top of this, the workflow engine of PickaForm is much more evolved and really allows to create complex processes… with a lot of simplicity.

With those capabilities, PickaForm is the Swiss Army Knife of collaboration tools.

And if Podio could celebrate this great PCMag award in front of very good softwares like Slack or Asana, that means softwares like Podio will get more and more traction. And *this* is a good news for PickaForm.

Enjoy your Xmas Holidays and see you in 2017!