Kantata reviews

Awesome platform that's only getting better

Opmerkingen: Overall, using Mavenlink has been great - it has made a very positive impact on day-to-day functions as a business. I would recommend it highly to agencies for its flexibility and extensive functionality to manage resources and projects.

Pluspunten:

The reporting functionality Mavenlink offers is extensive and has enabled us to get much better visibility to our project, program, portfolio and resourcing data. Which in turn has allowed us to set/adjust our KPI/KRIs and better inform business decisions with the data we have available. In using Mavenlink how it's meant to be used, not only have we improved our business practices but our PMO has gained valuable insight into important aspects of the business that were previously siloed. The fact that Mavenlink actually continues to improve its platform based on user feedback is a massive plus, as new functionality becomes available to better utilize the platform.

Minpunten:

There are some small (very small in most cases) problems we have with some functionality i.e. the naming/categorization of metrics in the reporting suite could be clearer, when approving/rejecting timesheets, adding a comment to a specific entry would be preferable, rather than the comment being published to all entries.

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

Opmerkingen: Very good. We have made suggestions that have been listened to and implemented, we have worked with their customer success team extensively to our benefit. Their help support is excellent when you encounter problems and the software was adaptable to all our needs.

Pluspunten:

There is a lot to like about the product. Easy task management with lots of capabilities, time and expense tracking that is simple. Extended resource management options for minute details or broad allocations and a really engaged Customer Success team.

Minpunten:

Not a lot to write here. I think the only issue is that it is hard to use at a hourly scale where you need to set time deadlines in the day.

Good system but some frustrating issues

Opmerkingen: Useful overall, but the more time I spend with it the more I realize it is missing some key functionality that would save a lot of time. It's much more difficult to update a project in Mavenlink than past systems I've used, and I think there are some beneficial tweaks that could be made

Pluspunten:

From an ease of use standpoint, time entry and project creation is fairly straightforward. It's also nice to have access to so many reporting features, although I imagine that's even more valued by the leadership team rather than staff.

Minpunten:

Three major issues stand out to me and my colleagues: 1- the software is very slow at times, and the more time I spend making edits to a project the longer it takes. In some cases, the lag is so bad that a task that should take 10 minutes ends up taking 30 since I wait so long for the system respond. The more tasks and individuals assigned to a project, the worse it is. Customer service suggested I delete my cache, but this was a temporary and fairly ineffective solution 2- It'd be great to have a simple place where I can see exactly how many hours a team member has on a project. Right now, we can only see time assigned to individual tasks, and then need to calculate the total manually 3- When tasks get extended or shortened, it'd be great to have a way to have Mavenlink automatically distribute time accordingly. For example, if I have 1 hour assigned for a 1-week long task, it'd be nice if I could automatically change this to 30min/week if that task were extended to being 2 weeks long. I know time can move automatically if the gantt is updated, but that only works if the task stays the same duration and hasn't started yet. Other systems offer this feature

Avis kantata

Pluspunten:

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

Minpunten:

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

Kantata has transformed project and cost management

Opmerkingen: Using Kantata , we finally have a way to track the time and effort put in by our engineers across all of the projects they're working on. We were able to respond to questions from our leaders much more quickly, which helped us avoid certain personnel problems.

Pluspunten:

Kantata has revolutionized our approach to budgeting and task management. The opportunity to centralize all of our initiatives in one place and provide individualized reports that tracked our development in relation to our key performance indicators is something we are really grateful for. We also take pleasure in learning where we may be under- or over-allocating our engineers, so that we may swiftly adjust our course.

Minpunten:

As far as we can tell, employing Kantata does not come with any major drawbacks. Reports are not sorted alphabetically or numerically, however these are minor issues.

OK for the basics, advanced functionality is either missing or not well implemented

Opmerkingen: Implementation was not very well executed. 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. It gets the basics right but more advanced features like the Insights reporting add on are poorly executed.

Pluspunten:

Ease of use, Reporting, Project Financials

Minpunten:

M Bridge integration platform is a complete failure. Its terrible. Training during implementation was not good. We've learned more on our own in a few classes. Time entry is weak and poorly designed. Lacks subprojects. User permissions are all or nothing in most cases.

Disappointed

Opmerkingen: Not great.

Pluspunten:

Very robust. And I like that time tracking is integrated into the software.

Minpunten:

For the price, and for what we THOUGHT we could do, very disappointed with the tool to date. Good chance we're moving away from Mavenlink before the next renewal.

Maximizing Operational Efficiency.

Opmerkingen: Project planning is great and business intelligence in a single platform is tremendously powerful. It has allowed me to have a clearer view of how resources are allocated and how projects are performing in real time.

Pluspunten:

I like the ability to access detailed financial data and time tracking in the same system helps tremendously with project planning and budgeting.

Minpunten:

While customer support is helpful there have been occasions where responses to specific queries have taken longer than desired or when system updates have introduced changes that require an adjustment period.

Simplified Project Management United and Effective.

Opmerkingen: I like the time tracking functionality has made billing to clients more accurate and transparent which has led to better trust and relationships.

Pluspunten:

I really like the ability to unify all phases of a project from planning and time tracking to team collaboration and finances in one tool is extremely valuable.

Minpunten:

What I might like less about the platform is if at some point I find its learning curve relatively a bit complicated especially for new users who may not be familiar with integrated project management systems.

kantata is the best way

Pluspunten:

Best in project management and data analysis

Minpunten:

It's hard to say there's anything I don't like about kantata

Great Project Management Tool

Pluspunten:

I love the easy UI of Mavenlink. The side menu bar is very easy to navigate. I like the time entries/timesheet interface. It's easy to create invoices and expense reports as well.

Minpunten:

Reporting isn't always that intuitive - I have the most questions for our admin when it comes to pulling reports. Maybe I just need to be better educated on this though.

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

Pluspunten:

Be able to link to NetSuite record with integrations and view utilization and project budget vs. actual.

Minpunten:

Lack of some task tracking features like assignee commit date with taskes. Task role on time entries does not display on list view and task columns are hard to adjust for different usage of different team member.

The Ultimate Services & Operations Management Software

Opmerkingen: The only way to describe this would be "It has been and still is fun to work with". It's a great piece of software, and once you get used to its logic you will be able to do great things - and by great things I mean measure exactly how much you sell your services for and how much resources you are actually using.
This, plus see employee performance, project performance, you can create custom fields to cover for any special requirement.

Pluspunten:

- Integrations and API - An excellent Salesforce bridge is available and can be fully customised (if you know Java!). You also get other connectors for Jira, Slack, and an API that allows you to do virtually anything. - Integrated GoodData reporting - If you are technical enough you can improve your workflows by adding custom fields and creating custom metrics. I used this solution to monitor the performances of the entire Professional Services team at Emarsys. - The software itself is essentially like Microsoft Project but online and with conversations & invoices generation - you can manage anything from a very small and basic project to a massive 2 years project thanks to the versatile task management interface. GANTT charts are available and, of course, if you know how to use GoodData you can dig even further into the project reports. - Resourcing wise it has a Master Planning tool which looks a bit like Resource Guru but completely integrated with the software, so you are really buying the full package with Mavenlink.

Minpunten:

I believe the biggest flaw in Mavenlink is the absence of a "real" administrator. Essentially, you can be an admin but if a project is set to "Invitation only" you cannot join it unless someone invites you. So being a Mavenlink admin is not like being a Jira admin where you can do anything you want, you are more of a "open projects administrator". The workaround is to have an integration user creating the projects and a good integration with your CRM that allows you to update fields that would be otherwise not accessible. Mind that you can still remove the integration user from the project, and at that point the only way to re-enter the project is to ask the project lead to invite you. This should clear any security concerns, if your projects require extreme privacy.

Our Next-Generation Project Management Tool

Opmerkingen: Our overall experience has been wonderful over the past few years. We were able to enable our PM team to become more metrics and data-driven, expanding their capabilities. Change Orders are a big business process that we solved by using Mavenlink. Approval and communication have been GREATLY streamlined! Before, we were managing change orders through written communication and supporting documentation, but now we are able to have the discussion in project meetings, then pass through the Change Order approval as a budget change and there is an affirmative action on their part. It's great!

Pluspunten:

The activity dashboard is the best part of Mavenlink. A feed that allows you to keep track of official communications and notes is perfect, plus it keeps clients involved. The API is also very strong and allows us to generate reports FAR beyond what is offered by Mavenlink. Our ability to manage projects and people has greatly increased due to the features that have been implemented since we switched to Mavenlink.

Minpunten:

The Gantt chart needs a lot of work. The interface is slow and clunky, plus it is not a great view for the executives and sponsors, visually speaking. The purpose of this chart is not really to "manage" the project, but instead show a high level overview of everything. There is currently no great way to show this to execs and sponsors. There needs to be a better mobile experience as well. We need a fully functional way to log time, complete tasks, post activity and generally manage projects from Android and iOS.

Software well tailored for our business needs

Opmerkingen: Overall, the experience is become better and better. I'd say the UI still has some usability issues.

Pluspunten:

Great master planning for resources and allocations.

Minpunten:

Two biggest pet peeves are the following: 1. It's irritating that you must delete a recreate a time entry if you enter it on the wrong day of the week on the Timesheets view. Should be able to just change the date of the entry. Other similar software allows this. 2. On Master Planning, I want to see how many hours are represented in the allocation every week not just how many hours by percentage across the span of weeks the allocation runs. This make it hard to determine quickly how many hours the resource has for each allocation for that week.

Mavenlink feedback

Pluspunten:

The reporting and overview of the project is very helpful. .I also like how you can budget towards individual tasks/milestones. It's also good to see an overview of staff's availability and schedule them on specific days for projects.

Minpunten:

It's very frustrating when you need to allocated in the same amount of time per user across a long period. You have to go in individually to each week to add that time. When you have to do this for multiple users across different projects, it takes a lot of time!!! Should be able to do a recurring staffing - define the time period, how many hrs for which user and project. If there are changes to hrs or staffing for a project, you then have to go in and change across the board - should be able to change that recurring staffing to a different number/person

Mavenlink is a Great Project Management Tool

Opmerkingen: Mavenlink has allowed us to track everything coming in and out of our department on a daily, monthly and yearly basis. This has shown the demand for our services and how well we manage our time with this demands. We are also able to easily invite those outside of our department to join in and collaborate, which has simplified our daily request process. Everything can be found in one place.

Pluspunten:

Mavenlink allows for our team to easily collaborate on projects from beginning to end. We can cater our tasks to our specific needs and show the progress along the way for everyone to see. The updates that are sent via email keep me on track with the numerous projects I have at hand. The time tracking integration is beneficial to us when we are working with outside clients. This function is simple to use!

Minpunten:

I find it difficult to access archived projects when I need to refer back to them. It appears that you need to know the exact title of the project in order to search it. Even though the time tracking function is simple to use, I do wish I could pause my time on one project without tracking it and move to another project where I start tracking time as well. I feel that I have to submit small increments of time often because I cannot do this.

Mavenlink is a very advanced project management tool for medium as well as huge enterprises.

Pluspunten:

The application is very stable and you will find a lot of features to work with. In comparison to other tools, the features provided are more advanced and data-driven with high emphasis on metrics. I just love the dashboard, it helps you to keep track of all the official meetings and interactions and with mavenlink, you can build superb reports. It helps in collaborating with tasks from start to end of each project. You can set updates as notifications to your mail id, so you would get to know of the status o different projects. We can set these notifications for clients too, so they would get to know the proceedings and status o each task.If you hate opening multiple tabs like me, you can use this Gantt chart tool which I should say is the best feature!

Minpunten:

One of the biggest turn off is that we take a lot of time to get started with the system like to set up and install. The date has been set in US formats which had been an issue to us, hope they do something about it. I found it really difficult to trace back archived projects cause you have to know the exact name of the respective project to get them traced back!

WRIKE to MAVENLINK USER

Opmerkingen: 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.

Pluspunten:

- 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.

Minpunten:

- 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).

Mavenlink Rocks

Opmerkingen: 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.

Pluspunten:

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.

Minpunten:

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.

Abruptly changed pricing.

Opmerkingen: Long story short, I had been paying a certain amount for 6+ years, they kicked my credit card, made me reenter the info and told me that plan wasn't available anymore (no prior notice). Then I was faced with the decision to upgrade to a plan that was 6x more than my original plan! I talked to 2 reps and they both told me "we don't offer that plan anymore". All of this happened in the middle of the week while I am trying to deal with my clients. Anyway, I began using zoho projects which I like much more, it has an app and it integrates with a lot of other zoho products. I would highly recommend since the pricing is similar. I left Mavenlink mainly because of the inconvenience, but ZoHo truly provides the same service plus more!

Pluspunten:

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

Minpunten:

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.

Great for project management, not great to interface to any other system.

Pluspunten:

This system does it's main job well, which is to manage projects.

Minpunten:

Attempting to interface this system into any other system is extremely difficult. Mavenlink staff don't seem to have a lot of experience with interfacing their system. We eventually had to come up with our own solution that relied only on a simple data download. Their pricing model is such that you end up paying a lot of money for relatively little value add i.e. in the area of time keeping. A more extensive licensing fee is charged for people to approve time. Mavenlink would be well served to change their model to charge less for the functions that are not their core competency and more for project management functionality, which is.

Mavenlink makes time tracking and resource planning easy

Pluspunten:

Ease of use, allocating shared resources, identifying resource gaps and planning for new projects, time sheet approvals of direct reports

Minpunten:

Nothing to speak of in particular, its been a good tool and great improvement for me over the last few years from other tools I have used previously

Kantana

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

Pluspunten:

The features I like and use the most on Kantana are the project planning features. It is reliable and well put together.

Minpunten:

I don't think there is anything about Kantana that I don't like. It is put together well and reliable.

Upped Our Utilization!

Opmerkingen: 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.

Pluspunten:

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!

Minpunten:

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