Kantata Reviews - Page 3

- Time tracking integration. Don't have to use a third party tool. - Smart project task management. - Easy to track if "to do" is a "task" or an "issue" (very helpful for website projects where you have a TON of issues to deal with). - Easy to move tasks around and see the overall items you're working on. - Google docs integration. - You can track conversations all in one feed-- on more email. - You can respond via email.

- So many features. I don't use all of them. - They add on cool features... but want you to pay for them. - Expensive -- but worth it when you're managing a team and don't want to login to a ton of applications. - No dropbox integration. - Takes awhile to get used too. - You can't rename the issue or task items. For example, sometimes I want to change the status title from "needs info" to "client review" -- and I can't edit the status (I could do this in Wrike).

I believe that the best part of Mavenlink is that it's an all-in-one program. One could use this for the day-to-day management of their projects without having to use outside programs. It combines project management, resource management, budget management, estimating, time-tracking, reporting and so much more.

I think the learning curve can be pretty steep. I attribute this lack of intuition to the robust nature of the service, but it could do with a revamp of the UI/UX. I also dislike the format of the resource management. There are currently two ways to manage resources: Master Planning and Resource Planner. The two work together but are also very separate features. The entire reource management system could use an overhaul to reduce confusion and to make resource changes easier.

I like the ease of updating time tracking and making changes after the fact. I like the ability to quickly see project run rate and status. Our last CRM had very limited skills and resourcing capabilities, and so this was both one of the big reasons why we switched to ML and one of the best things about the product.

I don't like the limitations on setting boundaries on projects. Mavenlink requires much more manual work than our last CRM in the invoicing and expense categories. There are some things that just don't make sense to me, like having the ability to mark expenses as paid. We've had to create a tracking system outside of ML in order to deal with expenses. I also don't like that administrators can't update/edit expenses.

Coming from a large tech company, we built most of our project applications in house. After starting with a small business back in November, I spent my first couple of weeks finding the right tool to fit the projects that we manage. Most of the tools we found had something we liked and a lot that was overkill for a small company like us. Mavenlink has several product offerings that cater to different-sized businesses. For example, a lot of other products have an 'enterprise edition' that is expensive for only 3-5 users and is overkill (employee timesheets, etc), however, if we were to downgrade to their lower edition we would lose project essential tools like time-tracking and budget management. Mavenlink's 'professional' offering has everything we need aside from an appointment calendar. However it does integrate with my Google calendar! As a small company, we are able to assign out tasks and see where the project stands at every moment with budget tracking, time tracking, and current priority. Their chat support is also very helpful.

The fact that you cannot pay month-to-month and have to commit to a year is a bit disheartening for a small company, but we spent lots of time trying it out to make sure it's what we wanted and it has been great so far. I was also disappointed/ confused on the way their users work. You pay for a set amount of users, however, you can add outside users to individual projects as a part of the company and they have access to track time, etc. When we asked support about this they seemed very confused and told us we'd have to pay for more users so we stopped doing that. However, I don't think we'd actually be charged if we did it that way since those 'users' on individual projects don't show up under the user management section.

Ease of use and communication. The ability to start threads regarding specific tasks, upload/share google docs, post messages that also go to email, etc. has been critical to successfully completing projects.

The only dislike I have is that I cannot push a change across multiple projects at one time. We use templates for almost every project we launch. Sometimes those templates get updated and those changes need to be applied to current projects.

The UI is simple to use most of the time. It's easy to see your projects listed out, even though the organization tools are pretty weak.

The software is slow. Updates happen at a snails pace. Our team worked directly with the development team at Mavenlink and their process is just plain slow. The program is bogged down and sluggish. It lacks sub-tasks beyond 5 layers, the estimating feature is a joke and they only just recently implemented a basic WYSIWYG in the activity section. You also can't undo activity unless you go back to the feed. Talk to PMs who actually use this product!

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.

There's a lot of functionality at the higher up space

As a user who enters their time the time entry screen is an extremely overcomplicated experience. It should be as simple as picking a project, sub-code and then entering time. My experience so far is vastly overcomplicated with different places and ways to enter it. I came from using harvest to track time and their weekly view with a row of the project and code i use frequently is most excellent.

The workspace was professional, branding gave the sense of personalization. The file space seemed to be unlimited at the time.

They don't have an app, the mobile equivalent site is not as user friendly as an app would be. Some of the screens are not responsive on a desktop.

Easy for resources to book time against multiple different projects - good data contained in time entry exports (granular, gives lots of information that I can pivot off of to provide different views to the end customer)

Mavenlink rounds time entries billed at an odd number (such as $171.77/hr) that are logged in half-hour or quarter-hour increments differently than Sage IntACCT - this makes reconciliations arduous when it's time to invoice the customer.

Ability to track hours, tasks, and projects at a high-level view. I like how this tool helps our team on track and on the task in our virtual environment.

Downtime, site errors, slow load times and site crashing

When a client assigns a project to our team we add a new page to our Mavenlink platform and share that with client and all the team members who will be working on the project. Clients can see updates, modifications and even daily reports. Our team don't have to update each time with the client or send them an email at the end of each day. Even if a client has different projects, they will see it on different pages which avoids confusion. The Gantt charts are the best feature included to avoid keeping multiple tabs open.

One of the main cons is that it will take considerably more time setting everything up. One has to dedicate for at least 4-5 hours to learn everything pretty well. The date format is given only in US standard and troubled us a lot in the beginning.

Absolute perfect customer support. We have put resource planning somewhere easily accessible for the whole company. Even before Mavenlink, we had Microsoft Project for this, and it was not as easy-to-use as Mavenlink. The support we've gotten from the Mavenlink team is awesome. Whether it's getting questions answered, prioritising potential feature enhancements, or giving feedback on the product road map . I always know that our voice will be heard and considered.

Everything is fine, it is just we use custom fields on almost all tasks we create, so when created templates with these task lists because we re-use a lot of the same tasks. Unfortunately, templates do not save custom fields so we've had to add these each time we apply a template. It could be improved.

I like that my staffing projections are easy to access, view and share across digital teams.

Forecasting hours by the week/month needs to be automated - this is too manual and time consuming at the time. Need to be able to drag and drop hours, or somehow more speedily be able to populate staff allocations. Also finance reporting / utilization reporting is incredibly difficult of not impossible due to my current access level. I have to rely on the finance and resourcing department for all reporting - this is not sustainable for project management.

Kantata software is very good software for task management. Not only do I save time and productivity, but its user interface is easy as well as the prices which are proportional

The disadvantages of kantata are that it does not have a free version and despite the easy access of its user interface, the latter remains a little customizable

I can add a project, estimates and budget and track overall progress. It has given us a more robust look at what is happening across all projects.

Too many features feel incomplete. The invoicing, estimates and user permissions are convoluted and lacking enough that our company cannot use them. Resource Management requires duplicate entry of information between planned and scheduled time. It should be easier to link the two together and plan around exceptions.

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.

The ability to keep up with each individual project, its tasks and subtasks and everything else involved, without worrying about it getting lost in our Google Drive or desktops. It's a good place to store information, communicate with coworkers, and stay up-to-date on the project's status.

The recurring projects (which make up about 75% of our company) sometimes have trouble repeating correctly each month. The dates will be off and we have to go in and manually adjust a few things, which isn't a huge deal but it's an inconvenience that we'd prefer to avoid.

The tool is quite easy to learn and is very intuitive. It was easy to set up and customer support was great (at least in 2016 - we've been clients for almost 5 years). It integrates with a few other platforms like Salesforce and can be customized using API. In addition, it provides client access and we see constant improvements.

Two biggest concerns: 1. You can't perform mass actions on tasks/milestones/issues. I.e. if you need to update multiple tasks with the same dates or status or assignee - you can't do it. You'll need to edit each task manually. 2. There are issues with email notifications - there were a few outages last year that resulted in delayed notifications which impacted our work.

Our organization includes some office staff, but is mostly made up of remote employees on our client's project sites. Mavenlink has given us a great tool for communicating with our team, as well as capturing time and expense entries via the Cloud. Our employees really like the interface and the ability to log time and expense from their mobile devices. Also, we've found the online workspace to be of great value in transmitting and archiving information and files. Our implementation included support from Laura Pierce and her BIASS team. Laura led us thru integrating our processes with the capabilities of the tool via a weekly meeting. Action items were identified and quickly addressed. Laura was always there to assist with answering questions and being a sounding board for my ideas. It was also a neat experience to have the BIASS team use the Mavenlink tool to setup and manage the BIASS project.

Most of the opportunities I see with the tool could be considered enhancements to the time and expense processing function and invoicing processes. These include: * More flexibility in the Admin's abilities to review, edit and approve project charges in the invoicing cycle would be helpful. *The ability to provide greater detail of expense charges on the invoice (which is a current action item with Mavenlink for us), and * The ability to push transactions that are not time and expense entries, such as taxes, unit bill amounts, etc. to QuickBooks would be helpful.

I dont think I can think of one thing in Mavenlink that another tool did better. It is simply inferior in so many ways, even to free project management tools.

It is extremely slow! Every click results in a loading.gif. In comparison to Asana which is INSTANT no matter what you click. I cant find my projects where I need them, I cant find my tasks where I need them, I cant get to important information without clicking 10 things and sifting through scrollable windows and sliding boxes. They are HIDING content behind and Show More; links. They are using PAGINATION on lists of projects... omg. No. Show everything, list everything, please stop making us bob for apples every time we need to find something. Oh yeah, and the proofing system doesnt even notify you or the task about a conversation happening within it. Changes to your proof? No clue. You cant mention someone in each area, only in the activity feed.

Thank you for your feedback. We value your insights and I have shared your comments with the team to help us improve. I see you have some concerns and would like to address those a little more directly in order to improve your experience with us. We would like to have your CSM reach out to you, but due to the anonymity of this review, we are unable to do so. Please feel free to contact our support team at support@mavenlink.com, for further assistance or to give us more information on how we can connect with you to assist you with your concerns and answer any questions you may have. Thank you.

I love the way Mavenlink automates communication as the project moves on down through the workflow. By using dependency arrows on the gantt chart, our creatives are automatically notified when their tasks are ready to start. It's pretty slick!

How unforgiving the gantt chart is. I realize it's web-based in a browser, but it really needs an "undo" button.

simple to you use, assigning tasks, creating templates, mobile friendly, integration with google apps.

not much we can think of.

Mavenlink has saved us a TON of time that we were using communicating and threading multiple products together. It gives one single source or truth for project planning and management and has eliminated many meetings and replaced multiple softwares.

Every task takes a LOT of clicks. I have very basic needs and it takes a lot of clicking to get the PM info that I need just to monitor my projects. It's there but, I'm always about 7 clicks away from it. Also, the scheduling of tasks is very labor-intensive. It's so complicated that only 3 of us are trained on it and I am glad to not be one of them.

It has been a good ally to improve project delivery times, by being able to divide the tasks into different groups and having the follow-up of each one makes time work and gather all the final information already finished. Since I used kantata I manage my way of working better with improved administration with my colleagues and thus we all work more organized and fix in real time what needs to be changed with the monitoring of the progress that is updated

There is nothing to change or to say that I dislike it, personally the entire system has always worked well for me.