BQE CORE vs. YouTrack

I would recommend this for our industry: architecture, engineering, or construction. I would recommend this for any larger firm with many employees or high number of projects. I would particularly recommend this for a company with projects that have budget constraints and where time tracking and expense tracking is very important. I would not recommend this complicated software for a small firm with a small amount of income or number of projects.

We use it for both support and project management alike. It's not as bloated or indeed as expensive as Jira, so unless you have particularly complex requirements, YouTrack fits the bill in pretty much the same use cases as Jira does.

The interface is also a good deal nicer on the eye and less clunky than a lot of the Open Source (eg. Redmine) and enterprise (eg. Remedy).

It does have a customisable workflow for things like ticket age alerts. We don't make a great deal of use of this and had found that it can take a little fiddling if you want something very bespoke but it is clearly quite powerful.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Customization of fields that helps us report on what's important to us
• Notification options for issues followed so I never miss an update
• Filtered views for focused work

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Displaying Data
• Custonization
• Organic

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It is very intuitive. Its not hard to pick up learn. I learned it pretty quickly at the first startup I cofounded and love to use it when working on my other ideas.

Incentivized

I can only remember a couple of times in 4 years that Core has been unavailable.

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.

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.

Incentivized

Make sure you have someone training you that fits your style of learning.

It does take some time to understand the options and to find the best invoice template.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

YouTrack is more cost effective than all the commercial options. It's way more powerful and easier to use than the Open Source ones. It's a good middle ground and it does everything we need. Our software projects are of moderate complexity and YouTrack handles them well. Likewise, when it comes to external users, we've had good feedback from clients. Many of these clients are non-technical and have expressed their relief at not having to use something like Jira which is often quite impregnable for such users.

Incentivized

This software works on a small and large scale.

• 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

• By documenting and prioritizing issues that impact our customers, we're able to deliver fixes that prevent customer churn.

Incentivized