An In-Depth Review of Project Huddle, the Affordable WordPress InVision Alternative

If you’re a WordPress developer, designer, agency owner, or anyone who creates designs or websites for a living and needs to accept feedback from other people, you’re going to want to read this review.

Project Huddle is a WordPress plugin for “website and design communication. It’s kind of like InVision but self-hosted, completely brandable, and entirely under your control. It’s seriously neat. From interacting with the front-end mockups and designs, you’d never know it was a WordPress plugin.

For this Project Huddle review, we’ll discuss everything you need to know. From its key features, pricing, pros, and cons, up to the installation and setup process. So, let’s get started. 

Project Huddle Overview

Working with clients or a team needs a collaboration tool to progress with projects. Project Huddle is one of the alternative solutions for InVision. It is self-hosted so you can freely install it on your own agency website. In addition to that, you have full control over which is perfect for creating mockups and websites. It saves time and effort on both parties and this plugin surely helps you in meeting deadlines.

If this sounds appealing to you, Project Huddle offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. They have two pricing plans that may suit your needs and preferences which are yearly and annual plans.

• Regular – $109 a year good for 1 dashboard site. 
• Professional – $139 a year good for 3 dashboard sites
• Ultimate – $599 one time payment good for unlimited dashboards. 

The Regular and Professional plans have a 10% discount on renewals.

Project Huddle Key Features

• Unlimited projects and users
• Keep track of mockup changes
• Project Huddle has 1500+ integration with apps
• Markdown shortcuts
• User roles and accounts
• Multisite ready
• Developer friendly
• Child Template system
• Regular updates and in-depth documentation

Pros 

• File management is superb
• Allows multiple teams to collaborate in one place
• Seamless integration with Outlook
• High level security

Cons

• Too much expensive for its price in exchange for quality features.
• Quite difficult to maneuver and overwhelming. It will take a few days before getting the gist of it. 

Project Huddle Installation & Setup

Below, you’ll see an image of a design mockup. To comment on it, all you need to do is click anywhere on the mockup and leave your comment:

You can also see some previous test comments that we left, marked by the blue circle icons. All those comments are self-contained chains. That is, you can reply directly to each comment from the same interface:

Say there’s one particularly poignant comment that you want to share with someone. You can get a direct link to share that comment.

Anyone who clicks on that link gets sent right to the design with the comment open. It’s seriously cool. You can also jump between images in the project by using the menu bar at the top:

And there is, of course, that big shiny Approve button at the top that allows clients or coworkers to approve a mockup. If users click that, they’ll be shown a very official-looking popup that tells them exactly what’s going to happen:

Leaving Comments on Live Websites

Ok – so the above showed you how things work for a design mockup – but what about leaving comments on a live website?

Project Huddle lets you also collaborate over all types of websites – not just WordPress sites. All you need to do is add a JavaScript code snippet to the site in question. Then, users will be able to make comments just as easily as they did on image mockups:

As you’d expect, you can even click through to different pages and leave comments on those pages as well.

You can always see a list of comments for all pages by expanding the sidebar interface:

Seriously – super neat!

How The Backend of Project Huddle Functions

As Project Huddle is a WordPress plugin, you manage the entire backend directly through your WordPress site.

The backend is divided into three main areas:

• Mockups
• Websites
• Settings

In the Settings area, you can manage how your interface looks, the various text strings, and more:

In the Websites area, you can add new websites and choose which users have access to that project:

A Detailed Look at the Mockups Management Interface

The Mockups interface is especially neat because it lets you also manage the approval status of your various mockups. For example, on the main page, you can get a look at your projects and their overall progress:

If you drill down into a specific project, you can easily:

• Add mockup images
• Manage approval
• View comments
• Manage project members

Further down the page, you can also manage more nitty-gritty details:

One neat thing in these settings is the ability to add password protection to your project.

Using Version Control

Another neat thing that you can do is add new versions of existing mockups as you make changes. This allows you to track how things have changed over time and keep everything organized:

You can go even further and view a timeline of how things have changed:

Embedding Projects With Shortcodes

If you want more control over sharing your projects, Project Huddle lets you embed projects with shortcodes. For example, you can use a simple shortcode to generate a project summary page like this:

Combined with some password protection, you could use this to create an entire client area.

Verdict

Project Huddle is incredibly well put together. It’s amazing how smooth the entire interface is. No lag or glitches – it feels like a custom-built solution, not some “add-on” to WordPress.

Not only do you get more control in comparison to SaaS tools, you’ll also save a boatload of money. If you’re intrigued by the idea of Project Huddle, we encourage you to create a free demo site to play around with its features. If it impresses you as much as it did to us, you can then purchase it risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Try Project Huddle Today