Fred from WeBreakStuff announced the launch of his GoPlan project, an online project management which enables users to take notes, calendar (is that a verb? now it is) (with iCal export), manage tasks, track issues, manage files management and chat online in real-time.

It’s an obvious competitor to 37signals and their Basecamp, Campfire and other products, as well as Zoho and their online productivity suite. Similar to 37signals, GoPlan’s pricing starts at free, but goes up if you want to be able to handle more projects, more people and more storage. Basically, you can try it out, but for serious work you’re going to have to pay a reasonable fee, which is to be expected since the service is mainly aimed at small businesses.

How does GoPlan differ from these solutions? Well, the folks at GoPlan say that other products “weren’t flexible enough”, so they’ve built their own. Here are the features they point out:

* Manage multiple projects
* Manage task lists
* Control issues with issue tracking
* Publish public facing project news
* Synchronize everyone with a calendar
* Chat real-time with project members
* Control who sees what and how
* Store project-related files safely
* High-grade encrypted connection
* Hosted, always-on application

The free account doesn’t support calendaring or the real-time chat, which is quite a letdown. It means that I cannot even test out these (to me very important) features without paying up-front. What I could test out looks simple, straightforward, and very usable: you create a project, add some tasks, blog about it, add tickets in case of bugs or problems, add files, and monitor the activity in a simple timeline. You can also monitor the activity of the project via an RSS feed. Addition of a collaborative drawing panel, similar to what Thinkature offers, would have been nice, but I guess it’s not a core feature for this type of service. Expect a more in-depth review in a full comparison of all online project managers soon.

*update: as Tiego kindly pointed out in the comments, there is a way to test all the features of GoPlan, by using the demo account. I haven’t had time to do a thorough review yet, but the chat and the calendar work fine - they’re both a bit bare as far as options go but I guess the idea is to keep them simple, not to compete with full-blown calendar and chat applications.