Cage: Project Management and Media Collaboration Tool

How does it work?

I was able to create a presentation site for cinema5D, somewhat matching the looks of the site in just a few minutes. You can upload your own logo (or your client’s logo for that matter) and adapt text-alignment, as well as the main color choices, and choose between a few layouts for the files you chose to be displayed in your presentation. You will also get a special login screen for your client, which is a really nice touch.

You can create custom login pages for your clients

Other than that you can set permissions, allowing the client to review the files that are part of the presentation, mainly by posting text comments or adding some shapes or drawn markers. These features of the Cage project management tool are very well implemented and work all the way from your desktop to smaller mobile screens.

Video features and some downsides

You can include videos in your presentations and have them reviewed by the client. However, neither the comments nor the markup is time-coded. This means writing a change request regarding second 0:23 in a clip will require your client to actually write out “0:23 Please change this.” or something similar. In my opinion, the markup features can’t really be used for video: For example, drawing a box around something the client wishes to be masked out, will result in that box staying in that position throughout the runtime of the entire video clip. It seems like these features are geared more towards static image files, where they would be more helpful. We hope that the Cage team can improve the video features, to catch up to similar offerings by Vimeo Pro and Frame.io.

A markup like this will stay throughout the whole video

Personally, I didn’t like the fact that once a client has logged into his presentation with the password you gave him, he still has to sign up with Cage, in order to be able to leave comments. I wouldn’t want my clients to have to jump through as many hoops, as they are confronted with here. After reaching out to the Cage team, they confirmed that this will be changed very soon though. Clients will only be required to enter an email address then.

Pricing and availability

Comparing the application’s pricing to the main contenders, the Cage project management tool starts out with a monthly fee of 25 USD, with 2 team members, unlimited projects and reviewers, as well as 25 GB of Storage. The same price will give you 25 collaborators, no team members, but 50 GB of storage as well as unlimited projects on Frame.io, while Vimeo Pro will only set you back 16 USD per month, for a weekly 20GB, 3 team members and unlimited projects.

On the whole, the Cage team has made an commendable effort here and we hope they will be able to gear their video-specific features to attract even more happy customers from our field of work.

What do you think? Would you like to try the application yourself with a free trial and share your thoughts? Let us know in the comments.