What is Basecamp?

Basecamp organizes your communication, projects, and client work together so you have a central source of truth.

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Instead of having stuff scattered all over the place — strewn across separate products, lost in inboxes, or scrawled on stickies or notepads — Basecamp brings everything your company’s working on under one roof. Organized, centralized, and clear so everyone knows what to do, everyone knows where things stand, and everyone can get what they need without having to ask around all the time.

Your Basecamp Home screen gives you a 10,000ft view of everything that’s happening across your whole business. You get an “HQ” for company-wide communication, dedicated spaces for your teams to work together, and private places to manage your company’s projects. You’ll feel back in control when you can see everything organized on a single screen like this.

Inside your HQ, your teams, and your projects

Inside every HQ, team, and project you’ll find six core tools. To-dos for tracking work, a Message Board for posting announcements and updates, a Campfire chat room for quick casual chats with the team, a Schedule for posting deadlines and milestones, Docs & Files for organizing all the assets and notes everyone needs to do their work, and Automatic Check-ins to get insights from the team on a regular basis.

Depending on how you work today, Basecamp may replace a bunch of separate products you use — allowing you to consolidate, eliminate cost and complexity, and rally around the only tool you really need: Basecamp.

Instead of messy, hard to follow email chains…

…you’ll use Basecamp’s discussion boards. Discussion boards keep the entire conversation about a specific topic together on a single page. No more digging through your inbox, trying to reassemble a story from a series of fragmented replies. Plus, if you ever want to include someone else, you can just send them a single link to the thread in Basecamp rather than try to forward them a mess of emails.

Instead of always reminding people what to do…

…Basecamp's to-dos keep everything on track. Organize the work, set due dates, and assign responsibility. If anything’s late or requires a follow-up conversation, Basecamp tells everyone involved and holds people accountable.

Instead of nagging people for status updates…

…Basecamp’s Automatic Check-ins automatically ask people to write up what they worked on every day, every week, once a month — it’s up to you. Completely automated, just set it up once and it runs forever. Information that used to be stuck in people’s heads will begin flowing into Basecamp.

Instead of wondering what’s going on…

…Basecamp reports cut across every team and project and summarize key activity whenever you need it. Know what’s overdue, who’s working on what, what work was added and completed on a given day, everything that happened on a given day, everything a specific person has been doing lately, the current status on everything you’ve assigned to other people, and what deadlines are coming up next.

Instead of using a separate group chat tool…

…Basecamp has group chat and instant messaging built right in. When you‘ve got a quick question for the group and you don’t know who to ask, pop it in the Campfire and get a quick response. No more flipping between different products just to say something to the group or to ask someone a quick question.

Instead of weekly stand-up meetings…

…Basecamp can reclaim those hours by regularly prompting people to write up if they’re blocked on anything, what they plan on working on this week, or whatever else you'd normally ask at the meeting. When people are done writing them up, responses are published back to Basecamp so people can review and follow-up if necessary — all without having to pull a bunch of people away from work and into a room.

Instead of people asking “hey, where’s that file?”,…

…they can grab it themselves inside the Basecamp project. Anyone who’s working on a project, or part of a team, has access to the same set of files so no one has to ask anyone else where anything is. Organize stuff in folders, even color code files so they stand out.

Instead of important emails stranded in an inbox…

…forward emails into Basecamp where everyone else can see them. You can even comment privately on the emails with your team, or reply to the original sender right from within Basecamp so the whole conversation is on the shared record.

Basecamp 3 is available on the web, iOS, Android, Mac, and PC.