Likelihood to Recommend BQE CORE is well suited for a firm trying to get a better understanding of their project performance as a whole as well as better manage time and project resources. It is not the greatest for client management through a project or through invoicing, but it is do-able within the system.
Read full review Planview AdaptiveWork is by far the most flexible project management tool we've ever used. The ability to customize and create solutions to fit our needs is beyond capable. We often find ourselves creating new workflows that make automatic actions in parts of a project, or send notifications, or add users, or update statuses... the list of things goes on and on. Essentially the ability to create an IF statement on pretty much EVERYTHING you can do in the system is unparalleled. If you can imagine it, you can achieve it.
Read full review Pros Invoice Collections within Billing is a great tool because of the ability to take notes and track contact. Invoices are professional looking and easy for our clients to understand the overall progress within each phase of their project. Dashboards are the best tool EVER! The Contact List feature within Clients setup is the perfect way to track multiple project managers within a large company that also has multiple contracts with us. Read full review Highly customizable, can develop organization specific workflows, modules, etc. Interface (in most instances) is easy to use. Timesheets, project details, and report modules are fairly easy to navigate and understand. Good comms tools like discussions, group pages, automatic reminders and notifications. Read full review Cons Customizable Reporting Linking Project to Payment all together Assigning contacts to particular roles - such as Invoicing, Contracts, etc. Accounting Functionality - they are basically a project management accounting software, so in my opinion, they could learn some things from other accounting software such as QuickBooks etc. Read full review Yes, Clarizen has time tracking functionality. But in the end, so does much other software, and they do it with a better, less confusing interface which is one of the reasons our organization ended up switching. The platform was crowded and made it confusing for users who only used it to track time (like me). Our organization also wanted software that would better house PTO information, in addition to time tracking, and Clarizen's program wasn't efficient enough. The point above also goes with expenses. We wanted a more diligent and robust expense report system. For our needs, Clarizen wasn't it. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have been using Core for a few years now, and honestly started to look at other software systems to see what was out there. What we chose was a nightmare for migration so we never left Core. Now we have added invoicing and payments from Core instead of double entry with QBO. Still only a few cycles in but looks like it will be up to speed soon and working smoothly.
Read full review I give my renewal of this product a 9. It's only because we never know what product may come out next and how other factors in our office political environment may cause impact upon this. If I always had my way, this is what we'd settle on as our de facto project management system.
Read full review Usability The foundation is awesome, like I have said before, however the house being built on it, the educational resources being provided to us (more of sales pitches that don't work), and flexible workflow opportunities, is making us look elsewhere for how much we will be spending on per user. It's crazy to think how flexible they are not when it comes to user settings. Lack of integration with other sources is awful.
Read full review It is easy to configure, intuitive. The customization process is in some ways better than Salesforce.com. It has a great UI. It does however depend on how it's implemented. The design of it is generally fine, however the ability to data upload people from a spreadsheet is an obvious miss.
Read full review Reliability and Availability I can only remember a couple of times in 4 years that Core has been unavailable.
Read full review Sometimes it is slow when everyone is entering their time on Fridays or Mondays but other than that we rarely see downtime and maintenance notifications are well in advance.
Shel Hankley Information Systems Analyst, IT Project Manager and Clarizen Administrator
Read full review Performance This is one area that does need some improvement. It can be slow at time, so we had our IT look at it from our side and we had no issues, so it has to be some slowness on their side.
Read full review Reports: Quick to Reasonable Most Ancillary Pages: Quick to Reasonable (By "ancillary" I mean lesser used/master data maintenance pages - e.g. People, Customers, Individual Tasks, Milestones, etc.) Work Plan (with 100 sub items): Reasonable to Slow
Read full review Support Rating As a new employee and CORE user, I talk to support on a weekly basis. I have never had to wait for more than 3 min to get connect with a support rep, and all my questions have been answered. The support representatives are polite and eager to help no matter how simple your question is.
Read full review Read full review In-Person Training • We worked with a Project Manager on their side. He was very good about developing a project plan to hit our goal. I think we had weekly or twice weekly calls – very steady cadence over 3 month period. • Their PM skills were great – kept us on task. For the last week, they sent 2 people on site and they did training for power users. After that a couple of them revisited here
Read full review Online Training Make sure you have someone training you that fits your style of learning.
Read full review Our trainer, Alex, is exceptional and knows the product really well. I swear he must have wrote the product himself! His manner with training is very easy going, gives you homework that is applicable to what you need to learn and stages it correctly for you. It was a pleasure to be trained by him.
Read full review Implementation Rating It does take some time to understand the options and to find the best invoice template.
Read full review I performed the implementation with our Clarizen provide trainer, who knew the product 100% and it went quickly and without a problem. It was a pleasurable process without the problems other software implementation often encounter. Kudos to the Clarizen team for making this a worry free process for their clients because it is worry free.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Deltek Vision is far more advanced, more encompassing and offers more flexibility with what you want to do. However, it's also quite difficult to use, whereas BQE CORE is intuitive and user friendly. The trade off is worth it in some arenas but overall it's not suited for a larger fast paced company. Great for smaller companies.
Read full review Planview AdaptiveWork was the right size, at the right price point that fit our customization and integration flexibility. It is intuitive to use but allowed us to add complexity as our needs grew
Read full review Scalability This software works on a small and large scale.
Read full review Return on Investment Quick setup of new tasks under a parent project, with immediate hourly billing to it. Monitoring of details of non-chargeable efforts in appropriate detail Validation of hourly cost, billing cost, benefit cost, profitability by person and role Company tracking of write-off's included in corporate and project reporting, no data is "lost" Can track excessive work time as +PTO in lieu of pay for use as future vacation Read full review We use the time tracking reports to help identify types of projects for which we're under charging for implementation fees We use the notes tracking for assisting with post mortems when projects go off the rails We use the tracking of ARR and implementation fees to pull together reports based on go live that let us know how we're tracking towards our yearly goals Read full review ScreenShots Planview AdaptiveWork Screenshots