Kantata Reviews - Pros & Cons, Ratings & more

Smartsheet

monday.com

Asana

Wrike

Adobe Workfront

Kantata is purpose-built technology for agencies and professionals services organizations with 50 to 5000+ employees. Automate resource management and project management best practices for creative and professional service providers.

Kantata

Web-based

Windows

Easy to use, good loading times, simple but effective design, great reporting capabilities.

I really love the ease of tracking time and the multiple options you have as a user of the system. The system is intuitive and there are great resources for reporting.

We basically had to figure it out on our own. THe "integrations" through thier integration tool are very poorly built and the tool is terrible.

Our team is so happy to have made the switch to Mavenlink. The sales and support team have been outstanding.

Mavenlink helps me track the progress and budgets for my projects. It's easy to use and I like the many different reports that I can pull from the tool.

Nice tool with powerful reporting that needs significant improvement on usability.

It's a work in progress, there's a world in Mavenlink still to discover and we're hoping to get there one day. It's still one of the best tools out there, in comparison.

Overall it had been good so far. Working had been flawless and as expected.

Many ways to do similar things and often so many features you’re unaware of. I find it is intimidating for new users and not as intuitive as other products.

API Documentation and API Implementation is very good. Integration is key for effective use of the tool.

Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, no other application sends me so much email. The color scheme is also boring.

Once you are using it, however, it is pretty good for resource management and reporting.

For the price, and for what we THOUGHT we could do, very disappointed with the tool to date.

It is great to have all of our tools in the one place that integrates with the rest of the business.

Mavenlink is a great way to keep track of everything you need for multiple projects across various areas. Budget burn is clear to see, it's easy enough to add and message people on a project.

I love the easy UI of Mavenlink. The side menu bar is very easy to navigate.

Effective tool with ease of use and a broad range of features.

Overall I feel that Mavenlink is average. The people I've worked with there have been kind, helpful and have average to good customer service.

Harvest

Workamajig

We've been using MavenLink for over a year now and we are constantly learning new and better ways to utilise all the tools it has to offer. We use it as our core method of communication with our clients, it helps to have all the information in one place. The Time tracking tool is easy to use and we are hoping to take full advantage of the Resource Allocation and Gantt chart in the near future

Great Project Management Tool

The product has brought our processes to the next level and the overall experience has been positive.

Great company and product - still room to grow but on the right track!

Disappointed

We are sorry about your disappointing experience and appreciate your feedback. Our CSC is working with your team to help provide more support and training to help with your utilization/capacity hardship that you are facing. We hope that this will help resolve and make things better. We always strive to do better moving forward. Please feel free to reach out to us directly if there's anything else that we can assist you with. You can reach your CSC here at 800- 860-9544 or our support team at support@mavenlink.com. Thank you.

Tiffany Nguyen
Senior Manager, Customer Advocacy

Overall, Kantata is an excellent resource management solution that can make resource management effortless. It is intuitive, easy to use, and offers a variety of features that make it a great choice for businesses of all sizes.

A Comprehensive Resource Management Solution

Mavenlink has been great to work with from conversion to ongoing support.

One Source of Information 

Good Project mgmt tool linking to NetSuite but lack of customizations to cater to business needs

Powerful tool that needs minor improvements to be a powerhouse

My overall experience has been pleasant using Kantana. I continue to use their product today.

Kantana

Kantata Review

Too complicated as an end user just trying to get my time entered.

Too complicated time entry

I have been using Mavenlink as the primary account administrator for two different companies over the course of four years. The suite has proven to be an integral tool in my everyday professional life within the Marketing industry. It allows my teams to see only what they need to primarily be involved with for any particular day and clears away other clutter they may not be associated with. However, most importantly, it allows many different views when it comes to upcoming work capacity and profitability. This is the feature we were primarily after when signing up for Mavenlink. The instant-update gantt charts allow us to see both all of our current projects and each individual project. This, in addition to the robust resource management tools that are constantly being improved, as enabled our Production team to kick project input and scheduling into overdrive! Our Copy and Design teams love the real-time proofing module as well. The comparison tools are really slick.

Achieve that 30,000 ft view!

It's a work in progress, there's a world in Mavenlink still to discover and we're hoping to get there one day! It's still one of the best tools out there, in comparison

A tool that encompasses meany features and functions

My overall experience with Kantata software has been positive. The extensive feature set and seamless integration with development tools provided a comprehensive solution for software development projects. The software proved to be a valuable asset in managing code, collaborating with team members, and ensuring version control. While there was a learning curve associated with some advanced features, the software's capabilities justified the initial investment of time and effort. Overall, my experience with Kantata software has been productive and beneficial in facilitating efficient software development processes.

RESOURCE ALLOCATION
Resource allocation is critical in our line of business and it was a major component missing from Active Collab. It is the norm for us to have multiple projects at varying phases of completion and up to 10 team members working on various tasks. As you can imagine, it can become very hard to keep track of workloads and schedule new tasks appropriately. Mavenlink has been a game changer for us in terms of resource allocation! With the click of a button we can now view every team member and get a detailed view of their workload. 
FINANCIAL REPORTING
While Active Collab was not void of financial reporting, we needed a solution that was more robust. Once again, Mavenlink did not disappoint. From financials to projects to people, there's a report for that! As the Business Manager, I really appreciate the ability to create custom reports. Every client is unique in their needs. Mavenlink helps me satisfy clients' needs as well as our own internal needs.

USER INTERFACE AND EASE OF USE
We really love Mavenlink's visually pleasing interface and the ability to custom brand it. We liked that the company utilized features similar to some of the popular social network sites. This helps to give it a familiar feel to new users. We also like that it does a good job being intuitive to users' needs. This makes it pretty easy for new users to navigate without much instruction. Although we did put some how to videos together for our clients to ensure that everyone is comfortable using it.

CLIENT COLLABORATION
Our clients' perception is our reality. It is essential that our clients be able to collaborate with us on their project every step of the way. We were very surprised at the number of solutions that did not allow this. Mavenlink really goes above and beyond in this department. Clients can even use their free profile to create and manage their own personal projects outside of their CommonPlaces project.

COMMITMENT TO IMPROVEMENTS
No one solution is going to land a check mark for every requirement on your list. The one thing that really put Mavenlink ahead of the other solutions we considered was the company's commitment to improving their product. Along this journey we heard over and over, if you notice that there is something that we can improve upon, please take a moment to email us with your suggestions.  In the 3 months that we have had Mavenlink, we've already been notified of 2 great improvements!

The Top Reasons We Chose Mavenlink

Software Implementation Process  with Mavenlink 

Used Wrike for ~8 months and moved to Mavenlink over a year ago. In write you can't track time and expenses. The wrike issue tracking isn't great too. 

Before moving to Mavenlink, I looked at ~12+ project management tools. It's a pain to move platforms. So we didn't want to make the wrong move. There are so many tools out there. For us, a big priority was being able to track time and projects all in one place. Mavenlink does that and more. It's an awesome tool esp. for design teams and if a lot of your team is virtual.

WRIKE to MAVENLINK USER

I really like both the time tracking and invoicing modules.  I find them to be pretty flexible and easy to use.  Some other areas require more manual work than I'd like, but overall, we are happy with Mavenlink and can live with the things we don't like.

Increased capabilities for our company as a whole

We use Mavenlink to project management all new school openings and are now starting to use it for all of our large national events. Mavenlink has definitely helped us open more schools worldwide efficiently and effectively. 

Before Mavenlink, communication and documentation were major issues around our projects. With Mavenlink, we are able to document our calls and follow ups within the system itself. Tasks linked to communications are also very helpful. The features I like best are ease of use, Dashboard view of all projects, Templates, sync to Google Apps, and Gannt.

Mavenlink Rocks

Difficult to reconcile with our accounting software - rounding issues

Very easy platform to engage with clients and to manage reports.

Easy to use, reliable in terms of saving data but this tool feels outdated due to the manual staff allocation process. Also the finance and staffing reporting doesnt work for me. Im not a fan of that. 

Reliable tool but not ideal for Finance Reporting

Benefits include matching estimates and budgets to tasks and breaking apart milestones with tasks and sub-tasks.  Activity communication is pretty good.

The basics are there, but too many features fall flat.  

Thank you for your insight and feedback regarding your experience. We have forwarded your feedback to our product team and will continue to strive to do better. Your CSM has reached out out to you to learn more and continue to advocate on your behalf, regarding these product enhancements and all your concerns. We look forward to continue to working closely with you regarding your experience. Have a nice day and happy holidays.

Since our startup we've used basic spreadsheet tools to capture and analyze data. It was possible to generate project metrics and profitability, but the process was cumbersome. That information is just a click away now. We've also eliminated much of the possibility of our employees entering time to the wrong codes with the task assignment functions.

Great Product to Bring the Team Together

We took on Mavenlink when we needed a 50,000 foot view of our department's capacity. The levels of organization that Mavenlink has brought our team's creatives have gone way beyond our expectations. People know exactly what they need to be working on when they come in in the morning. Plus, it allows us to monitor our team's capacity so we know when we need to add more than one creative to a job or even gives us backup when we need to prove why we need to hire more staff.

Upped Our Utilization!

Practice Manager

Mavenlink review

Mustafa C.:                                            Hi, I'm Mustafa. And I work in the Information Technology industry for a SAS company, and I give Mavenlink four out of five.
                                                       Mavenlink is using an organization to solve a couple of problems. The first one is resource planning. Organization gets all the resource information for various projects for the professional services function onto Mavenlink. And then that helps them evaluate how much bandwidth that they have for future projects, what sales [inaudible 00:00:30] they have that can be applied to projects, and really is a robust tool for the source planning and managing a portfolio of projects. The other piece that we really use it for is project management itself for our professional services team. We are obviously a SAS company that's deploying the solution for clients, and we want to be able to use Mavenlink to manage those deployments. So I, as a project manager have a portfolio of number of projects ranging from 10 to 15 that we have to manage on Mavenlink. essentially we set up the work breakdown structure, set up the tasks, resources, the schedule on the Gantt chart and manage that on day-to-day basis.
                                                       We also use Mavenlink for recording our time sheets and time entries. And that enables us to get a view of how the resources are consuming time on the project and how much has been the billable and non-billable time. And we also then finally use Mavenlink for reporting on the projects so that we're able to produce a health dashboard for each project, to be able to gauge how that's performing against its baseline indicators and give the client an indication of how well they're doing on a winner deployment.
                                                       What I really like about Mavenlink is its ability to get everything that's relating to a professional services, project management environment in one single place. What that means is you have an activity feed that enables you to really drag and interact with your team about various things that are happening like risks and issues, progress on tasks, et cetera, anything that relates to communicating with your team.
                                                       It also gets the task tracker in the same view, so that you're able to add all project deliverables and the work breakdown structure onto the task tracker and assign resources and put in dates, but also put in the budgeted amount for each task. And then it gives you a view on a Gantt chart, which would enable you to really schedule those tasks out. So essentially it's bringing all these functionality to one single place. The interface is really user intuitive so that you can flip between various aspects very quickly and giving you access to all information, either at a portfolio level or at a project level in one single place. That's something that's really good about Mavenlink. It also enables you to track the health of the project through a very easy to input a health panel on the right-hand side, that gives you quick information, but also enables you to jot down quick notes on the health of the project. So those are the couple of features that are really strong about Mavenlink that a user will enjoy.
                                                       Some of the opportunities that Mavenlink really has to take the solution to the next level is, one is especially producing status reports that we send out to clients. We have found that those are not in a ready format. So we usually have to take out snapshots from Mavenlink to produce status reports. However, if we are able to get a status report in the format that we required to send out to clients directly, that will be really helpful. The other thing that we really would want Mavenlink to do is on the Gantt view, to be able to not only show baseline on the Gantt chart itself as snapshots, but also have columns so that we can track and manage baseline of the schedule. Those are the two aspects that Mavenlink could really improve upon.
                                                       And just the task tracker is also going through a revamp on Mavenlink. But we have found that, that is a bit clunky when we have to move tasks around or add resources or move columns in the task tracker, it is not as flexible as you would anticipate it to be. So those aspects if improved on really make Mavenlink a much more powerful tool.

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