What is Podio - And How to Better Structure Your Business

When evaluating collaboration and workflow tools, understanding your actual needs matters more than feature lists. Here is how we approach workflow management.

In an ever-increasingly connected world, many businesses have a similar problem. They must perfect the art of organizing the many facets of their operations.

Failure to structure a business results in poor communication, low motivation, and minimal productivity. Most seasoned professionals would agree that disorganization quickly translates to business failure. Podio aims to relieve this issue.

While many tools have been released to cure business disorganization, Podio takes a unique approach.

Podio organizes any aspect of business operations, from team communication to project management and even scrum-like software development. They do this through the use of apps, which can be custom built or downloaded via their app market.

When teams compare workflow and collaboration tools in our conversations at Tallyfy, platforms like Podio come up for specific use cases. From what I’ve seen evaluating collaboration tools, this flexibility comes with a tradeoff worth understanding. The same customization that makes Podio adaptable also creates complexity. Teams often spend weeks building app structures before realizing they need to rebuild them differently. The learning curve is real, and organizations regularly discover that simpler, more structured tools would have delivered value faster. Feedback we have received from real estate transaction companies is particularly telling - they often want Podio’s flexibility but need CRM functionality too, leading to awkward workarounds.

This approach ensures that the tool is flexible enough to organize any of your business’s needs. This article looks to give you a thorough understanding of Podio, even if you have never launched the app before.

What is Podio?

Podio is a cloud collaboration software that aims to structure most aspects of your business. This alone doesn’t make Podio very unique.

But how Podio does collaboration is what really sets them apart. The software tries to be as malleable as possible to ensure they are the right fit for any business.

An organization is broken down into three tiers:

• Workspaces
• Apps
• Items

Understanding what each of these are and how they work is crucial to getting a good grasp of how Podio can help your business. We are going to dive into what each of these does and how each relates to one another.

By the end, you should have a good enough understanding of Podio to begin implementing it into your business.

Workspaces

Workspaces are where all the collaboration happens in Podio. Think of it as a shared hub. These workspaces bring together a group of people and provide them with apps that are relevant to their group.

Every workspace has an activity stream that lets all members see what exactly is going on in their group.

Let us say you want to create a workspace that helps organize project management for a content creating team, i.e. organizing the article writing process. Your organization can create a project management workspace that has a number of apps that help coordinate your content-creating efforts.

Take a look at a high level demo of a workspace that manages an article-writing team.

Apps

Apps let us create items that help us see what is going on in our workspace. These apps are built from a number of elements, such as text boxes, drop down items, images, progress bars, locations, and more.

Users can create any sort of custom app to match what they want to organize. Also, Podio provides an app store so that users can make use of pre-made applications. This sharing of applications ensures managers can create a workspace that fits their business environment in a matter of minutes.

In our article project management workspace, we have three apps: Projects, Meetings, and Activity.

“Projects” manage each of the individual articles that our team is currently working on. “Meetings” is a calendar that tracks each meeting happening within our team.

“Activity” gives us a high-level overview of any major changes that have happened in the other two apps. Activity apps are seen in nearly all Podio workspaces. Take a look at how I can quickly add new articles to my Projects app.

Items

Items are the product of applications. Applications are created by users to generate a list of items.

An item can be anything. For example, a project management app will produce projects as items. An app that coordinates articles being created by a blog will produce articles as items.

Items are the reason you are using Podio apps in the first place and knowing how to structure them can bring great value to your Podio experience.

In our article project management app, the articles themselves are our items. Similarly, meetings are our items in our Meetings app.

Items can represent anything in your business. For example, let us say I want to track potential companies to write about. With Podio, I could build an app that lets us create items that represent whole companies.

Let us see how I would go about doing that.

The app market

Podio uses the power of their apps through their App Market. Instead of having to create an app for processes seen in most businesses, Podio’s App Market gives users access to tons of pre-made apps.

Let us take a look at just how easy it is to add apps to your Podio workspace through the App Market.

How much does Podio cost?

Podio is a collaboration tool that has a pricing tier for any size business. Their tiers are “Free,” “Plus,” and “Premium.” Let us take a look at what each one offers.

Free

Podio’s free plan is, of course, their most limited. But if your team is small enough it might not even make sense to need anything above the free plan.

For moderately sized teams though, the free plan just won’t be an option.

Podio is free to use for up to five employees, but the features available to your team will be pretty limited. Free users are only allowed up to 100 items for their organization. 100 may sound like enough, but it really is not when you consider how many workspaces an organization could have.

Podio free users also miss out on a whole slew of features that we will cover in a bit.

Features:

• Task management
• Apps and workspaces

Cons:

• Limited to 5 users
• Missing most of Podio’s better features

Price:

• Free (of course)

Plus

The Plus plan expands on the features offered in the free plan significantly. Plus adds a new user role, the light user role, to the user management feature.

A light user has a few less privileges than a regular or admin user. It is there just in case you are afraid some team members may screw up your workspace.

The plus plan also introduces workflow automation. I could dive into how that works, but you would probably be better off hearing it from the horse’s mouth.

The plus plan allows for the addition of read-only access.

As the name implies, read-only makes it so that apps can only be edited by team members with admin privileges. This concept is common in many business applications.

Features:

• More user management
• Automated workflows

Cons:

• Missing premium Podio features

Price:

• $11.20/employee per month (billed annually)

Premium

Premium is Podio’s highest-tier pricing plan. It gives you all of Podio’s great features, including some that the plus plan does not offer.

The only downside is that premium costs nearly twice as much as a plus subscription. Premium offers visual reports, contact sync, interactive sales dashboards, and advanced workflow orchestration - all features that the plus plan does not offer. Most of these features are actually free integrations that you would otherwise have to pay for individually.

The visual reports that the premium plan offers are pretty great.

All Podio plans have access to basic reports, but these do not do a very good job of giving the data any meaning. The reports simply aggregate data in a way where you can see it all, nothing more.

Visual reports give this data some more context by presenting it in either tables, bar charts, or line graphs. This feature doesn’t necessarily add any additional functionality, but it should definitely make your Podio experience better.

Contact sync allows you to integrate your organization with PieSync. Integrating with PieSync lets you transfer all of your contacts from other apps (like Google, Office 365, and Salesforce) over to Podio.

This can be especially useful for large organizations with hundreds or even thousands of contacts.

Upgrading to premium also lets you create an interactive sales dashboard by integrating with Plecto. Plecto helps you visualize your data through things like speedometers, graphs, and conditional colors.

This is just another way to give context to your organization’s data.

The last additional feature premium offers is advanced workflow orchestration. Advanced workflow orchestration is done through GlobiFlow. Integrating GlobiFlow lets users trigger events on certain dates or workspace changes and can probably save your organization a lot of time.

Features:

• Visual reports
• Free integrations with third party apps

Cons:

• Costliest plan

Price:

• $19.20/employee per month (billed annually)

Recap

So, what is Podio? Podio is one of the most trusted cloud collaboration tools available.

Its flexibility lets users create their own tools or download as many as they want from an App Market. Podio’s flexibility and great features come together to make a superb collaboration experience for you and your business.

When flexibility becomes a burden

In our experience helping teams choose workflow tools, the “build anything” approach sounds appealing until you experience the maintenance overhead. Custom Podio apps require ongoing attention. Fields need updating. Workflows break when someone modifies the wrong setting. Teams often find themselves managing their Podio environment more than managing actual work. In conversations we have had with companies evaluating workflow tools, a common pattern emerges: teams start with 4-5 users on Podio thinking they will scale to 40+, but find the customization overhead becomes a barrier to growth rather than an enabler.

For teams that primarily need to run repeatable processes - client onboarding, approval workflows, compliance procedures - the customization overhead may not be worth it. If your processes are relatively consistent and you need people following steps rather than building custom databases, structured workflow tools often deliver faster results with less ongoing maintenance.

Workflow templates for common business processes

Example Procedure

Client Onboarding

1Gather Basic Information

2Send Welcome E-Mail

3Conduct a Kick-Off Call

4Conduct a 1 month check-in Call

5Request Feedback

+1 more steps

View template

Example Procedure

Employee Onboarding

1HR - Set up payroll and send welcome email

2IT - Order equipment and set up workstation

3Office Manager - Prepare physical workspace

4IT - Create accounts and system access

5HR - Welcome meeting and company orientation

+3 more steps

View template

Example Procedure

Blog Post Creation & Publishing Workflow

1WordPress

2System 1

3System 2

4Choose your topic

5Research and outline

+5 more steps

View template

I hope you enjoyed and learned a lot from this read. Feel free to reach out to us with any cloud collaboration questions!