Backpack grows into a good small-business intranet

We’ve been using Backpack from 37signals for personal organization and page-sharing with small groups since last year, but we’ve kept most multi-user projects in Basecamp because it’s the more robust system for lots of users.

However, Basecamp is often too cumbersome for simpler projects, or projects with fewer than four or five users.  So 37signals just rolled out a major upgrade to Backpack and changed its pricing plans to make it more of a group tool, rather than an individual tool.

Read their blog about the philosophy behind the switch. It’s clear that Backpack is moving into the project management space that Basecamp has clearly owned for so long, but Backpack does have more of the small-business intranet features, as they state.

We’re going to try it out with a couple of group projects and see how it works. It does feel like 37signals products are creating more overlap with one another, between Basecamp, Backpack and Highrise, but they are all cool, and we have yet to be disappointed with their simplicity of design and clarity of purpose.