The OP is truly missing the point of Basecamp, and some of the points don't make that much sense if I'm reading them correctly: "No time estimates" - if you up

The OP is truly missing the point of Basecamp, and some of the points don't make that much sense if I'm reading them correctly: "No time estimates" - if you upgrade to the next highest version of Basecamp you will get time tracking functionality for all tasks, which would work just fine for basic time estimation. If you don't want to upgrade to the next highest version, then just put your estimate for the time a task will take into the comments for that task. The idea is to figure out a way to make this simple system work for you, and that's why they can cast such a wide net to so many different types of industries without catering to them specifically. "Tasks have no correlation to Milestones" - this is not true, but probably mentioned because of the OP's brief interaction with the app. When you create a todo list you can choose which milestone it relates to. You can even set it to complete that milestone when all the todos have been checked off. "Too much Drag & Drop" - this point is really pretty nit-picky and more a matter of personal preference. I don't claim to be a UI expert, but I could make equally compelling arguments as to why the drag and drop functionality they have in place would be better than up and down arrows. "Why 6 categories of messages?" - This one is just laziness on the OP's part. Right at the bottom of the messages dropdown menu you will notice an "-- Add New Category --" option which allows you to customize categories. You can also globally customize categories so that they show up for other projects too. I'm really surprised this post hit the front page of HN. It iss a cursory glance at a piece of software and a seemingly offhand damning of it. I wouldn't doubt that a few of these up votes came from people just reading the headline and having a general feeling of bitterness towards 37signals, for whatever reason. There's been a spate of anti-37signals posts over at reddit.com/r/web_design too so it wouldn't surprise me. Basecamp is great software because it's extremely simple. They purposely keep the feature-set small and are very opinionated about how they do things. The result is a very solid tool that isn't bloated and can fit many different niches because of its accessibility. Before they came around you were stuck with overly complicated all-things-to-all-people solutions. Kind of like Rails and Apple products...