Apptivo provides small and medium sized businesses with applications that include CRM, project management and invoicing solutions.
$10
Per User per Month
OpenAir PSA
Score 6.2 out of 10
N/A
NetSuite OpenAir is a cloud-based Professional Service Automation (PSA) product which includes capabilities around project management, resource management, project accounting, etc.
I would absolutely recommend Apptivo! We have used Apptivo for years, and we wouldn't consider another platform to keep all of our contacts together in one place. It's easy to export certain lists for certain mailings and to add/remove new contacts and move things around as needed over time. There's freedom to adding new contacts and the pricing is phenomenal
This product is well suited for an organization that is focused on client services, project delivery, time tracking, expense reporting, and revenue recognition. From a pure project management perspective, this product is not as feature rich as say Microsoft Project Server. For organizations that are looking for detailed complex project plan and resource management (along with resource leveling, etc.), this is probably not the best suited product
Netsuite OpenAir PSA is highly configurable and has a large ecosystem of assets to work with.
Tasks are easily designed to automate processes in your business workflow.
OpenAir is designed in such a way that it can communicate and receive information from external systems without having to re-engineer your systems to make them work if you are following standard business practice.
Compared to QuickArrow, setting up reports to reflect the data accurately seemed to require a bit more consultant time and collaboration. Getting the numbers correct is essential, so budget extra time for this iniative. We also learned that certain calculations can not be displayed in the executive dashboards. Ask these questions upfront to ensure your dashboards are complete for your needs (again, working backwards in the preparation stages).
Compared to QuickArrow, NetSuite OpenAir PSA falls short in the resource management capabilities. UI, flexibility, and scheduling options all could be improved. This is on their roadmap, timeline yet to be defined. Scheduling is vitally important to our company and this is THE area where we feel is the applications weakest. However, the application does provide everything critical to scheduling and provided the elements we needed in order to be successful. We altered our scheduling process accordingly.
During our System Administration 3 day online training, when a question was asked about detailed functionality, sometimes the trainer would share..."Yes, OpenAir has a configuration for that. Just inquire with your consultant and they can flip that flag in your instance." The responsibility for obtaining these special application configurations was placed on the System Admin [in training] to ask and to take notes. If your company needs the application to work a certain way, speak up and ask your OA consultant. There seems to be MANY flags that can be flipped in the background to allow for the system to meet your needs. My complaint is that these are not published, rather made available if one inquires.
OpenAir is able to generate invoices directly and we strongly encourage using this feature to keep everything housed under one application. However, this did not work for our organization and we leveraged a financial integration. A bit of a pioneer integrating with Softrax -- the integration works well, however is quite fragile. We do receive appropriate support when needed, but would prefer the integration to be a bit more stable. We recommend integrating with their stated supported financial systems, as staying the course will likely net a more stable integration.
It all depends. We are still looking at moving our consultants to Oracle PAC, in order to get our financial systems in line (we use Oracle Financials currently). We are feeling a lot of pain with integration and segmented systems.
Ultimately,it depends on how much pain is felt there. OpenAir has given us a path to follow on from QuickArrow. I foresee either moving onto Oracle PAC by end of calendar, or staying on OpenAir.
OpenAir to Oracle integration is not easy. From a reporting and process perspective, there’s been pain from being in different systems
Without a doubt, the best thing about Apptivo is that it has become a perfect internal and external communication platform. This platform will allow you to know who is taking care of certain tasks with clients and control all projects with your clients. With very affordable plans for your pocket, it has a free version for up to 3 users. It far surpasses quite a few CRMs in the same category. Apptivo CRM allows you to customize many details and work with it does not consume time or resources. You are faced with a very comfortable software to use, simple and well designed.
In this day and age I should not have to read a manual to understand a product. It should be intuitive to administrate and perform basic tasks. It feels like a ton of intelligence was poured into making OpenAir feature rich but no where near as much attention was given to the user experience.
Apptivo is always quick to respond whenever we have had a problem over out time of using the program. The customer service reps are always very polite and professional in their responses and are very knowledgeable! I have never gone to them with a problem that they don't do everything in their power to help solve, and most times they have (abbreviating states is the only issue we weren't able to solve).
As an admin, I've had more contact with OA support than most. I've found their response to tickets typically timely and helpful, however many of the responses to tickets are "we will file an enhancement request" and then I never hear about it again. So not terrible, but not a very fulfilling experience.
Very knowledgeable and able to articulate how other customers configured the solution to meet their needs as well as the best practices they recommended.
We did a 3 day online remote course back in April. NetSuite prefers training to occur before migration. We went over the functionality of tool and three months later we migrated. Personally, I didn’t find it that beneficial. Certain parts of it were beneficial as they applied to me – talked a lot about invoicing capabilities that didn’t apply to me. They also have knowledge base / e-learning assets, but I haven’t referred to them
If you are starting a business and want a free app or nearly free app that can grow with you....then apptivo could be for you. However if you grow faster than them then you will be quickly seeking alternatives
It went fine. Everything came over the way we wanted. In addition to migrating the current projects we wanted to migrate historical data – did that seamlessly. The finished product looked pretty good – just needed to tweak – and they helped us with that
The price was right for what we needed to use Apptivo for (the CRM and the contact management/project management models). And, we needed something basic and easy to implement so we could get up and running with little down time. The other systems we evaluated didn't seem to have the exact pricing and features/functionality we were looking for so we made the determination that Apptivo would be the best fit.
OpenAir accurately reflects changes in real-time as well as lends itself to see where a draw is at, when payment is expected and what percentage of the contract has been billed or approved to date. This helps with project billing and tracking as well as cash flow. Quickbooks lacks the ability to show progress draws, approved changes, and pending changes on a given project where OpenAir excels.
