Solve Reviews

Pros
Works superbly with other cloud platforms. VERY flexible. Two versions to choose - Solve CRM and Solve Client Manager. Lots of great features - Google sheets report integration (slice, dice, geo-reference, and pivot the data anyway you want), click to call, easy to navigate activity window, flexible workflows and follow-ups, individualised task lists and on and on. We've implemented Solve360 in three companies and recommended it to dozens of others and never been disappointed. Of course we always consider other products on the market. Many of them promise to deliver great things, but when you get into the detail, they lack key features that are essential, or are prohibitively expensive.

Cons
Really difficult to find cons with the software. Being really picky, perhaps some lesser used functions are not immediately obvious, but there are plenty of guides and the customer support is outstanding. The inclusion of a Gantt chart function would be great for project work, but there are work arounds for this.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Solve Client Manager that is extremely flexible which allows you to build it the way you want it. It is extremely easy to navigate and you can quickly lookup clients and contacts on the mobile app which makes collaboration on projects very easy. I rely heavily on their data export to google sheets to run reports. Their integration with google products like gmail, docs and sheets works fantastic.

Cons
The biggest con for us (which we have found a workable work around for) is that since we have clients with multiple service locations having a hierarchical CRM would allow us to better organize and sort data. Other than that there are only small things like the ability to upload files like a PDF to a record. Solve CRM has a 'activity' report that allows you to view your or your employees activities at a glance that Solve Client Manager does not have yet.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Google integration, value, and customization options

Cons
I tried the new Solve Client Manager, which seems to be the product that the Solve team is putting most development resources towards, and I prefer the legacy CRM. The Solve CRM mobile app leaves much to be desired; it is basically not usable. I would use the new mobile "client manager" except that it is a separate license and out of our budget. I also dislike that Solve required you to be in a higher pricing tier to use a transactional email service, which makes sending bulk emails from Solve unreliable.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
We love how easy it is to organise an entire client's workload and hours into 1 place. The customer support offered by Solve has been fantastic and they've gone above and beyond to sort out even the smallest issues we've had with the software. The software is easy-to-use from an admin's perspective. It's easy to add new users and remove old ones.

Cons
The UI could use an update, as it can feel a little bit counterintuitive and dated at times. It would be amazing to be able to modify time logs after they've been made without having to delete them and make a new one. We recently had a problem with a project blog becoming too big. I believe this was because we had used the project blog for many years, but it would be useful to not have to worry about this issue. More analytics that provide feedback on time logs and staff usage would be useful.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
I use this everyday and find it really easy. It takes some time to set up correctly and put all your custom fields but once you have you can make it your own. I use it for large company structures which have multiple shareholders and directors, it is a very easy way to see the links between companies and how they are related to projects. We are a real estate debt fund and we have a lot of projects with many investors in each, Solve allows me to link each investor to each project. Also I can tag each investor to say if they have a manager and tailor my distribution lists to send to those specific people. By using "access webmail" I can send bulk emails to my tagged contacts.

Cons
The face of it seems a little outdated. I can honestly say there are not many cons I can think of. I have been using this software for 2 years and haven't encountered an issue.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
We have been using Solve360 since 2009. We have tested many CRMs and they all lack one thing or another but Solve 360 is completely customizable to fit any organizations needs. The customer support is superb, friendly and always willing to help. We've started using the Solve Client Manager and are extremely happy with its ease of use.

Cons
We use both the CRM and Client Manager and there are still a lot of areas that need to be cleaned up between the two systems. Some of the functionality that we like in the CRM hasn't been moved over to the client manager, such as the webmail functionality. Both systems need more functionality with tagging features so that different workgroups/users can have different tags. I'm looking forward to the next version of the CRM that I've been told is coming soon.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Solve is highly customizable and does everything we need it to do. The API also allows us to integrate Solve easily with other programs that we use to operate our business. What you get for the price is such a great value.

Cons
Mobile site is glitchy and could be improved.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
I mainly use the contacts section. There's a project's blog that comes in handy for large projects, but mostly I just use the contacts. It keeps everything very well organized. A customer will call me and say something like, "I don't know if you remember me..." and I'll be able to pull up their profile in Solve360 just by looking up their phone number. Before they even finish their sentence, I can reply with,"Oh, yes! You called me a few months ago to ask about..." It leaves a really good impression with my customers.

Cons
It doesn't always respect the "reply-to" in the webmail section. So I always have to make sure that the TO field is correct when replying to emails. That gets really annoying, so I end up just using Thunderbird most of the time to send emails. It does take quite a bit of time for the profiles to load, because it doesn't cache anything. It has to search through your email every time you open a contact.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Very short learning curve for new users - almost no need for instruction, just give them an account and they can start using it immediately.

Cons
Limited built-in reporting capability. Necessary to export to Excel or use google-sheets integration.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
This software is more powerful than how we are using it. It is great to track all the emails you write to each client and to track your phone calls and messages with them as well. We have multiple and different tags for our clients and we can easily send an email to them specific to their tag. It is great that we can sync our contacts with Constant Contact.

Cons
We can only send basic emails. I would need to know HTML if I wanted to do better looking emails but I don't know HTML. So we will stick with Constant Contact. But you take the chance of them unsubscribing with Constant Contact and then not receiving any more communications from you.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
The flexible and all-encompassing nature of what Solve has in its wheelhouse is unparalleled being about to hold all aspects of business. I used Solve in my own business, which was heavily customer-service oriented, then contracted with other small businesses to set up their systems in Solve. I have found it to fit all the needs of a diverse array of businesses, with greatly different needs, including a custom tailoring business, school, small retail business, and international spiritual teacher.

Cons
Being dependent on Solve for so many years in "larger" (2-5 people businesses), it has been cost-prohibitive for me to use privately, just for myself as a contractor.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
A CRM is only as good as when it is actually part of the workflow of your business. Solve helps me keep track of all my interactions with my contacts and track all the workflow of my projects. It is the backbone of my business. I especially like how it incorporates into G Suite for a powerful platform. This is the only CRM I could find that seamless works with Gmail where I don't have to bcc the system to have all my emails display in a contacts timeline.

Cons
It doesn't have many integrations with other systems, but tech support is very helpful in figuring out the best solution for what I want to do.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Basically, I like everything that Solve360 has to offer a business like ours. It is extremely customizable , offers a full download of all data we have entered and has excellent customer support if and when needed.

Cons
I really haven't found anything at all that I dislike. We are in the process of adding other lines of business to our database because of its flexibility.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Flexibility. Also, with the right combination of the filters, we are able to produce the administrative reports that we were not able to produce with the Access program we used in the past.

Cons
We were not aware of the amount of capabilities Solve360 had, but when asked, they were able to fix our problems....

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
We looked into many CRMs when we decided to move away from our previous provider and found that Solve provided us with a great basic CRM experience. We looked at Sales Force because of it's standing in the market but found that for our needs the product was way overkill both in functionality and pricing. If you're looking for a product for basic sales tracking and follow-up you won't find anything better in terms of value for the investment.

Cons
We had to compensate for not being able to pull all reports in the order wanted but resolved this by exporting to Google docs and manipulating the data to suit our idiosyncrasies. Otherwise it has all the functionality of the products that cost a lot more!

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Ease of Use, integration and cost effectiveness

Cons
Choosing between the two UIs..I like features of both..

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Unlike Salesforce or Zoho, with Solve you have direct access to the team who created the product. They care about their users, and are interested to hear how you are using the software and what they can do to make your experience better.

Cons
The interface is perfectly functional but the web has moved on a bit stylistically and Solve is looking a little long in the tooth as result. Also, I don't believe it has the API connections for easy pipes in / out through services like IFTTT or Zapier for connecting easily to other tools.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
It is super easy to customise in regards to fields and tags. In particular, I like the thought that has been applied to making it easy to customise the look of the 'forms' so that when you add a lot of fields (we capture a lot of data), you can easily find what you need.

Cons
The reporting from this software and lack of sales dashboard outside of that reporting is a bit clunky. It does make reporting on the content a bit more difficult than it probably has to be. The workaround, however, was fairly easy to set up.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
We have been using Solve for 8+ years now. We just recently started using the app. Integrates with Google Sheets! Talk about Awesome! Ease of Use. The best customer service EVER. Their CS Team sends me email regarding upgrades or new tools proactively!!!!! Give it a try, you'll be hooked!

Cons
The only feature I believe Solve is lacking is the ability to build forms and pull contact/company information in.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Super Powerful. Search is wicked. Info assembly in one spot pretty tight. Cloud based access is easy. Mobile App is pretty good.

Cons
I think I over built it for my staff and the management to keep it up was a little to onerous. There was a feature whereby you could auto-sync to and scrape the clients website linkedIn etc to get a fast start on data population. I think that went away.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
Very easy to enter information. Easy to add additional data fields. Nice integration of contacts and project blogs (which we use to manage all implementation docs & pictures) Very reliable. Can't remember the last time we encountered an error or the software crashed.

Cons
Not easy to do complex searches and reporting. Have to typically export data to Excel.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Software is very capable and reasonably easy to use. The things that were not immediately intuitive were resolved with an email to tech support.

Cons
No real negatives other than limits on that data usage. I would love to import more photos and documents without a thought of data limits, but as a small business, keeping my costs down is more important that than feature at this moment.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Mostly intuitive Wide range of features we need.

Cons
Would be great to link it to live feeds, like Bloomberg or other news service, or an email address finder. Not easy to find a print format that suits. We do have to download to Google Sheets (and then Excel) for certain monitoring tasks.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
User friendly, Customer Service is top notch, it seems like it would be confusing but after a few days on the program I could use it in my sleep.

Cons
cant complain about anything, except for the fact it makes you type 40 characters in the complaint field when I do not have one to give!

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
We have spent $1000s to customize Sugar CRM and Salesforce prior to using Solve. Our business has 2 sales processes, first to get a client whose business we are selling. Second to sell the business to a range of potential buyers from different entities. Solve required no customization and was easy to handle the configuration.

Cons
None its a great tool. Perhaps some to the terms could be changed, "project blog" for example. We like "Opportunity"

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10