ConceptDraw PROJECT vs. Kintone

For small and medium companies or independent departments of large companies where usually an individual plans the projects this is the best tool without all the overheads of complex software like Microsoft Project and without any privacy concerns of all online project management tools being used today. Not that convenient when you want your employees to update timesheets, etc., as everything needs to be fed into the tool by the project manager.

I recommend Kintone for companies that need the ability to customize standalone applications or to provide a 'hub' to employees as a jumping-off point. I also recommend Kintone for any company that is drowning in spreadsheets, or is using 10 apps for 10 different purposes - you can consolidate everything into one place. Kintone, I think, needs a larger team for customization as your company grows. If you are a small office of 20 people, using it out of the box will likely be just fine for your needs. If you're working with 200 people out of an office, it'd likely be good to have someone with a bit of CSS, Java, and API experience in order to maximize what you get out of it - though you won't need that if you're keeping it simple.

Incentivized

• PROJECT is tightly integrated with Diagram and MindMap, the two other tools in the CD Suite. This allows me to do initial scoping in MindMap and then switch to PROJECT and go back and forth as new requirements are exposed and tasks are developed.
• For projects that entail the development of mechanical or electro-mechanical systems it is necessary to develop a topology of the system. By using MindMap I can define the required elements of the system, switch to Diagram to develop an initial layout of the components of the system and then switch to PROJECT to start defining the task to develop the system. Once the system has been defined I use CD Solutions to generate presentations that incorporate the reports and dashboards generated by PROJECT.
• PROJECT is cross platform (Mac and Windows). We are a Mac shop, so the ability to import Microsoft project and Visio charts and export to those formats as well saves a lot of heartburn when so many of our partners and potential customers are Windows users.

• Flexibility. You can build apps (without coding) to serve a wide range of processes and projects.
• Ease of use. The interface is intuitive.
• Training. There are resources readily available to train new users. Even starting from scratch, I felt like I was up to speed in just a few hours.

Incentivized

• We had to spend a good amount of time to understand all the features so some interactive built-in tutorials would have made getting started easier.
• The UI does not look so good in macOS Catalina Dark Mode and I often switch to light mode when working on this software.
• Multiple people working on the same project at a time cannot update as there is no way to synchronize changes so we put the file in our code repo but manually co-ordinate to make sure only one of us is changing the plan at a time.

• I feel that Kintone is not well enough known yet. This means that other apps/APIs are not necessarily easy to connect with Kintone. Yes, you can use Zapier though for interfacing with other apps.
• It would be great if it could give more customized options to change the look and format of certain things. You can make price quote apps, for example, but have to rely on 3rd party apps or programming skills to customize the look and fields.
• If you make a table as an input field, it cannot connect to other internal Kintone apps for lookups and such.
• I think there is more potential to make more customized data graphs.

Incentivized

We have been quite happy with our use of Kintone thus far. We looked at several options before choosing Kintone and believe it had the best value and best features, while allowing for complete customization, rather than being locked into preformatted apps that may not address exactly what we need or be more than what we need.

Incentivized

Kintone is extremely user friendly and self explanatory. Very little knowledge is needed to build or use the apps. Kintone has a very robust help section to guide you through anything you might need assistance with while building out apps. The process of building apps is basically drag and drop, making it easy for anyone to create what they need.

Incentivized

Yes, it is always available

Incentivized

No issues.

Incentivized

Customer service from the ConceptDraw sales team is relatively quick and they do a good job of answering basic questions. However, the user base for ConceptDraw products is not huge so finding answers online for anything beyond basic help-file questions is difficult

Incentivized

I am very happy with Kintone and support it fully. I think that it is a great place for any company that wants to create a platform for better management. It is easy to use and pretty affordable. It is straightforward and has many tools that can be used by anyone. There are many helpful tutorials available too to guide users

Incentivized

The training was seamless and easy to follow

Incentivized

Everyone has their own tastes of things and way they want to work. Asking them to adapt to the changes with the new tools or apps is always difficult. We would want to start with a very small but best example within the organization, which in our case was that the employees will not be bothered by the bosses by being asked to find the documents, status of the progresses, or major things/requests/projects.

Incentivized

Microsoft Project is a typical Microsoft product - too much programming overhead, poor graphics, confusing and fussy interface. OmniGraffle is close to CD PROJECT but has its own fussy parts, plus it is a lot more expensive than CD PROJECT; it is in the middle between Microsoft and CD.

I don't know if this is the right Salesforce platform we used, but it was way too clunky and not built for the metrics we actually wanted to collect. Kintone doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Salesforce, but I don't really need them. For our small organization's needs, we needed something a little smaller and a little more versatile.

Incentivized

I could see this work for all departments if implemented correctly.

Incentivized

• Inexpensive way to present a professional project plan when needed

Incentivized

• It used to take us 15-20 minutes to create a quote for a client. It now takes less than 3.
• It allows a few of our employees to work remotely, which was essentially impossible prior.
• We can see raw data for success/failure rates, which we actively use in our employee review process.

Incentivized