Breeze is an alternative to Pivotal Tracker

If you’ve been looking for the perfect project management tool for your business, you probably know that there are plenty to choose from. What you might not know is that those tools fall into two categories: horizontal and vertical software.

Horizontal market software refers to application software that is useful in a wide range of industries. Developed with a broad audience and a specific business need in mind, this software generally lacks market-specific customizations. A few examples of this type of tool are word processors, web browsers, spreadsheet applications, and generic bookkeeping applications.

Vertical market software, on the other hand, targets a particular industry and, as such, offers features that address the needs of any business within that industry. This type of tool is easy to identify by the application graphical user interface, which is typically quite specific. A couple of examples of vertical software would be a point-of-sale tool or even the software your dentist uses to torture you with drills.

Are Pivotal Tracker and Breeze horizontal or vertical tools?

Pivotal Tracker is a project management tool meant for software developers and it is a primarily Scrum tool with very rigid processes, which means that it categorizes a vertical product.

Breeze is a project management tool as well, and it allows you to manage scope, cost, and time: three of the main constraints of project management. However, it is a bit more versatile than Pivotal Tracker, as it can be used for software development (such as Scrum or Kanban), or simply as a task list, independently of the industry that you play in. For this reason, we like to say that Breeze isn’t a horizontal product, nor a vertical one, but something in between.

The creation of Breeze was the aftermath of a lot of trial and error to choose a project management tool for our own business, that would help us solve our own problems. We kept trying new products, like Pivotal Tracker, and although they were good, they weren’t quite good enough. Something was always missing.

Since we couldn’t seem to find what we need, we decided to develop a tool that contained a lot of the missing functionality in other apps like Pivotal Tracker, so that we could finally streamline some of our everyday project management activities, boosting our organization and productivity.

So, what’s the difference between Breeze and Pivotal Tracker?

The main difference lies in the features that each tool offers and this table shows that perfectly:

	Breeze	Pivotal Tracker
Agile principles	✓	✓
Kanban/Scrum board	✓	✓
Unlimited users	✓	✓
Unlimited projects	✓	✓
Unlimited file storage	✓
Unlimited task lists	✓
Email notifications	✓	✓
Create task and comments via email	✓
Calendar	✓
iCalendar support	✓
Time tracking	✓
Reporting	✓
Budgeting	✓
Google Drive integration	✓
Dropbox integration	✓
CSV data export	✓	✓
Completed tasks analysis	✓
Resource management	✓

As you can see, Breeze isn’t packed with unnecessary features that most businesses would never use. Instead, it includes subtle things that are really needed and that not every other project management tool offers.