Float Reviews

Pros
As a busy audio and visuals studio the biggest advantage we have seen with using Float is the scheduling feature. This allows us to schedule when projects and tasks need to take place, and who is working on and responsible for each project and task. As we have a number of people on our team and often numerous projects on the go at one time, Float has allowed us to better coordinate everything and has become vital in ensuring that projects and tasks are completed on time by each individual team member. As a team we can view the overall workload and time frames involved, while as an individual you can keep track of what tasks or projects you are working on and what projects you can or can not take on due to scheduling.

Cons
Sometimes the administrator /account owner has certain scheduling permissions and can add projects for individual team members int he scheduling feature. This is great but when these scheduled tasks or projects need to be changed or reshuffled it can only be done by the admin person / account owner and not the individual. There have been times when the admin person has not been available and I have needed to change the scheduled projects created by the admin person but have not been able to and have had to wait for the admin person to do it. This is the only downside so far that I have experienced using Float.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
I like the ease of use for bandwidth calculation. Before Float, it would be very difficult for us to understand Trainer occupancy, and it was also a challenge to schedule trainings far in advance over several regions. With Float, I can see what's coming up at a glance and provide accurate reports to stakeholders so that they know how busy we are and will be. At the end of the quarter, I can easily calculate and show how much time we spent, and on what.

Cons
For my specific use, access can be a challenge. I need something between "Project Manager" and "Member." For me, it would be ideal if there are a "Department Manager" role where people who had this level of access could modify the schedule for anyone in their department, but not see or edit the schedule of other departments.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Easy to use. We can view the schedule of the entire team in one screen and make instant changes if necessary.

Cons
When creating tasks, the difference between creating projects and clients can be annoying. Also: provide more colours! ;-)

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
How easy it is. To book resource or edit time range you only need a few clicks or drag and drop.

Cons
It will be nice to get notifications about not booked time of some resource and small tool for moving all booked resources for a given project in time.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Kudos to you guys! I love the newer faster Float! You are making my job much easier & faster. Love the faster navigating/scrolling and the changing of a task’s time by scrolling on the schedule up or down beats the hell out of having to open the task and do it from there. Love the new feature that you can hover over the work task and the notes appear without having to open the task. Great job, keep it up!

Cons
Would like to be able to move a task to the afternoon (or lower in the cell) for a day where it is not a full days worth of hours and there is nothing else for that employee that day. Example, I have a technician on a 4 hour training course and it is in the afternoon. He has nothing else scheduled that day but I can't move the task lower in the cell so it looks like it is scheduled for the morning. It would be nice if you could hover over the "Time off" cells and see the notes associated with it , like you can for a work task, without having to open the "time off" cell.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
With Float, I love that you can make instant decisions on capacity management. I can assign someone a scheduled task and easily move the task back and forth between two team members if needed. It's a great visual tool to see how long people are spending in a certain area and to help plan ahead for the future. It gives a full visual picture of capacity and resource management, which can be hard to do. I love that you're able to assign color coding and different notes to each project, so you can monitor the health of the project properly and understand how many people are actually touching it.

Cons
Sometimes, there are some small glitches that happen, where you make an update and it either disappears or adds additional time to someone's schedule (making them fully at capacity). There aren't many cons to this application other than that because sometimes it can just take a lot of refreshing and some rework because sometimes the refreshes can cause a loss in information inputted.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Float is an incredibly intuitive piece of software to use, with a simple calendar-like interface that everyone can understand. I have found that this aspect of the software is helpful in promoting its adoption within our teams. The experience is consistent across the product, which has allowed me to discover more and more features in and enrich the experience of using the product.

Cons
The performance of the software is occasionally a bit lacklustre. For example, I often find myself accidentally clicking somewhere on the screen which prompts a dialogue box to open to enter a new task. This problem is especially pronounced when using a trackpad, and isn’t something that I experience elsewhere. Additionally, the interface seems to have a strange way of ‘splitting’ tasks that occur across multiple days. I have found that it often leaves blank gaps that give the illusion that a team member is working more hours per day than they actually are. There are a few features that I would like to see when going forward. Firstly, I think it would be good if there were different options when ‘resizing’ a task. Currently, the task can be resized independently across both axes (i.e. how many hours per day, and across how many days). I think it would be good if there were an option for these to affect each other – i.e. the total number of hours allocated to the project remains the same and could be allocated fewer hours across more days, or more hours across fewer days.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Float's user interface and logic are inspirational. They have made the activity of coordinating multiple resources on multiple projects about as easy as it can be. They have paid a lot of attention to usability, efficient use of screen real estate and simple navigation. However the killer feature is the intuitive yet clever way that searching and data navigation work. All searching and filtering is done using a single search field, which offers indexed word search on pretty much everything including tags. There is also a well-worked out protocol for handling union and intersect searches.

Cons
The only real bugbear is that any user that can enter data into the system can define new values for any field. It isn't possible to centrally control lists such as task names, clients, job descriptions etc. This means that if you have more than one person using the system, very quickly you get different versions of the same thing being defined (e.g. job roles being slightly different) which makes it difficult to analyse across records. Not a dealbreaker, but I do think it should be possible to lock down lists of values. Also it would be good if you could zoom out the view a little more - if you're dealing with more than a dozen resources/projects.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
- Easy of use - Performance - Interface - Good visibility into my resources and their load

Cons
- There were couple glitches and numerous updates in January but that is resolved now - Previously performance was not great, but there are great improvements recently on that part - Adding holidays could be easier - When grouped by project I'd like Float to show all assigned project for people, not only specified project

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
The simple usability of the software. How quick it is to add jobs, extend and move jobs around to different people. Flexible scrolling through the weeks. So easy to set someone up and get started with very minimal training. Report system very useful for monthly reports. For top line project management this is the perfect tool.

Cons
The search bar sometimes doesnt work or show particular jobs on occasion. Search seems to only work within the month you are viewing, rather then showing a job from a previous month. This is intermittent and sometimes works to find what you are looking for when refreshed. Still need to test this after the software update to see if it has been resolved. Doesn't refresh for designers, so we have updated and moved jobs around and they aren't aware as their float has remained the same, unless they manually refresh the window. Would be great to see more in depth project management potential, such as uploading briefs, designs and signing them off all on this software.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
I like that I (as a project manager) can manage time easily for our team of two, but can easily add contract workers, and that visually it works for my designer as well -- he struggled with really seeing how his week needed to flow when just using tasklists, like Basecamp.

Cons
Anything I haven't liked has been added (e.g. ability to do recurring tasks, reordering tasks). It's a small thing, but we also spend way too much time trying to figure out colors for all of our projects after using the default ones. I would love to be able to add a project from the schedule interface -- like when I go to schedule time and I type in a project, it tries to find it; if it's not there, it would be nice to just have "add this project" without having to exit out of the scheduling box and go into Project.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Can easily see the whole stream of work. We were using excel, not ideal, especially when it came to needing to change it and others had it open. We'd done this for years, not great. This tool means we can react faster to the needs of our busy studio. Adding milestones has been invaluable because we can easily see where pinch points will happen. Handling employee leave and work hours is now super seamless as float deals with it for you using the 'time off' feature.

Cons
It can be fiddly to arrange work in the correct order if you're doing less than half a day block at a time. Fortunately, this doesn't typically affect us, as we deal almost exclusively with long term, large projects.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Easy, Easy, Easy! Uncluttered and extremely intuitive user interface. Basically no learning curve, even for unexperienced users. Despite its clean and tidy interface, Float is still ideal for enterprise use. It sports a very powerful team manager platform, perfect to assign and follow tasks, instantly spreading any update with team members. Automatic reports allow to keep under control time consumption.

Cons
Float run in cloud, there's no possibility to implement a self hosted solution.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
It's really really REALLY easy to use with a very intuitive interface. Float is continuously tweaking features for the better to further improve upon the UI/UX. My project management team did a lot of research on resource management tools and Float was the only one that allowed for such a granular view (i.e., instead of planning sprints in 2 weeks, it's day by day). We needed that for our business as we are run day-to-day with sometimes very small tasks (0.5-1hr) and Float was the only one allowing us to get that granular. Further, whenever we've had an issue the Support team is very quick and responsive to helping us!

Cons
The Reporting tools aren't as great and well-organized as our Finance/Billing team would like. But the front-end is superior to the other tools my team considered so we are still using on that front.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Float is very easy to use and makes you activities for the day very insight-full. As project manager it is possible to see all the activities for the team in a blink of an eye. The sorting functions are great; by project, by team and more. Also adding repetitive tasks and scheduled items is very easy. This tool improved our daily workflow greatly!

Cons
For now we really don't have any dislikes at all. All our requirements for good planning/team management software are met in Float.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Being able to make changes and have those changes reflect live on my teams phones is a HUGE benefit!

Cons
responsiveness of the website. Would be great to have local instance for a faster response when making changes

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Float is a really helpful piece of software, especially for running studio resourcing. The flexibility of being able to move jobs between different resources is great. Definitely one of the easiest resourcing tools i've used.

Cons
After doing a a few resource moves the system gets a bit buggy and you have to refresh or sometimes log out and log back in again to see the changes you've made.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
I love that this is an affordable, web-based, easy to configure and use tool that is extremely flexible. There's a lot of power in only asking for as much information as is needed in order to be useful. It's a great visual way to manage projects and people and to get a sense of how people's workload is at any given moment. As an end user, it's great to be able to see how my week is looking at the start so that anything that comes up can be managed and it's a burden to try and juggle it all.

Cons
Float very much purpose-built to schedule work, but there are a number of features that are present in more project-focused solutions which are lacking-- namely time tracking and dependencies. However, adding some of these features might sacrifice that which makes Float great at what it does, simplicity.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
I love how simple the interface is. Everything is clear and on one page, useful reports, labels and additional features such as tentitive work or team views make resourcing much easier. I really like using this tool, I use it everyday at my work. It is easy to manage the pipeline and resolve clashes easily.

Cons
I love how simple the interface is. Everything is clear and on one page, useful reports, labels and additional features such as tentitive work or team views make resourcing much easier. I really like using this tool, I use it everyday at my work. It is easy to manage the pipeline and resolve clashes easily. It works well for a lower amount of people. As the buisness grows it is more effort to maintain. However for companies with less than 100 people this is a great solution. One negative is they removed the alt click drag to copy fundtion which I really found useful. Genreally it is a great tool!

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
Float is visually very easy to read and allows users to be succinct but detailed at the same time.

Cons
Float tends to not register all our changes and tends to not be completely "LIVE" as it requires multiple refreshes at times to attain the most updated information. This is mainly happens when there are multiple project managers. The export report is not as detailed as I would like it to be. It would be more beneficial to have monthly exports with breakdowns per job, per person and per week. I need to use the raw data more often than referring to the online report so it would be good to see some improvements on this.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
Easy to use Collaborative Efficient for each project manager

Cons
Difficulties to follow each budget for every project we deploy Smartphone apply very limited

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
It allows for very transparent capacity planning within the company. Every employee can see their own and co-workers schedule in advance and make changes to it. Also it forces project managers to do capacity planning since this is our “single source of truth” for planned work. We also like the focus of Float to solve only one business problem.

Cons
There are a couple of things that we discovered in the past weeks: - Milestone tooltips are buggy – they sometimes don't disappear - Horizontal scrolling with a classic mouse does not work as expected (SHIFT + scroll) - It would be nice to have an iCal address for team members to see all “time off” entries in Google Calendar or other calendar apps - Working with recurring tasks is a real pain (Rescheduling within weeks, splitting etc.). We chose to not use this feature alltogether. - It would be nice to have a sync with GitLab to be able to select GitLab issues instead of defining “tasks” in Float all over again. - It would be nice to automatically sync “time off” and G Suite's “Out of office” functionality - Due to the horizontal view it's quite difficult to get a long-term view of capacity. It's only great for short-term (~1 month) planning.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
I've only been using it for about 6 months but I love how clean and to the point it is. I find my name and find out what my duties are for that day. I travel a lot so its really nice to be able to look at a week and see where in the country I may be. It allows me to start planning my travel and some sightseeing with plenty of time to spare so that once the time comes, I just get on a plane and go to work!

Cons
There's no Android app. That's a big turn off but I manage. I'd really appreciate this functionality in the future. I'm not sure if its just me but when I log in on my computer, each area takes up the whole screen. its quite strange. I have to scroll to the next person even though they should be smaller boxes. on my phone they are almost too squished to read and I haven't found a way manually size the boxes.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Easy to navigate and setup. Integration with Outlook. Out of office functionality. Administration module to access invoices etc. Team setups

Cons
More fluent way of connecting to JIRA. Financial management and time tracking would be great.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Float is made for resourcing at a high-level view. They do this well and in a visually appealing manner. Float is constantly improving as well with adding more helpful features. They are not trying to be a project management tool or something else, which I truly appreciate as I don't want too many bells and whistles on top of their core product.

Cons
I'd like the ability to clean and audit it a bit more, as we use it for a very large network, but that may be more on my company than Float to manage.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10