Contractor Foreman vs. Jonas Enterprise Construction Management Software

In this case, CF is the best of the 'OK so far' category in my mind. NONE of the software available today gets close to a truly effective, user friendly GUI and functionality set. I have used 7 different systems over the years, with the top 4 big names having the largest hours operating. Most have less functionality, others are severely overpriced and under featured. Still others are so complicated you need an entire IT department to implement them. Contractor Foreman does much of what it does the absolute best for the money, meaning this is probably the best value for construction management software I'm aware of. I believe I can say with confidence, that if CF does it, it strives to do it well, and continues to strive to get it better. Picking a feature or two that excels is rather pointless in a company with that outlook. THAT is a company I can get behind...

Incentivized

If you are looking for several features under one roof, this is your place. No need to try to integrate third-party applications for the most part. If you are a construction company with job costing and/or a service department, I can't think of a reason that it would not be appropriate. If you are primarily retail then I think another software would be more appropriate.

Incentivized

• Estimates
• Project management
• Lead management - tracking where they are in the funnel and having web lead automatically pull into the system.

Incentivized

• Payroll - upload Union reports are quick and easy saving time with manual calculations
• Service Billing - create service calls and invoice direct from module, saving duplicate data entry
• Job Cost - Tracks costs and revenues for analysing departments, project managers and techs

Incentivized

• Some of the modules like checklists and forms are confusing and hard to use
• some of the training videos or versions of an old outdated version of the software
• Would like to see a more efficent way of creating a submittal log generated from a specification book

Incentivized

• Contact management. Clumsy and not user-friendly.

Incentivized

Eliminated the need for our team to log into multiple systems to do their jobs which aligns to our Lean approach

Incentivized

I think it depends on how much you want to put into it. It is a very powerful program, but sometimes learning everything is overwhelming. There are hidden tricks that you learn when you attend webinars and conferences.

Incentivized

I rarely give anyone a 9 or 10 rating for service. The main reason for this rating is Contractor Foreman's dedication to improvement. To be completely frank, CF has fallen down on their tech help with me several times, but I am an exceptionally difficult user to service as I tend to use a product up to it's limits and want more. CF has actually addressed these wants several times (after waits that seemed interminable, but were actually pretty damn fast in the reality of software development)

Incentivized

Most of the time they are pretty quick to respond

Incentivized

I've used Buildertrend and Conconstruct near daily for a little over 10 years. They were both pretty solid. But the price kept going up without much value being added to the software. As they grew, they didn't upgrade with the growth, so the sites became slower. Contractor Forman has all the functionality of the others, and several other tools that they don't. There are several tools our company doesn't even use yet that look great. It's not perfect, and the learning curve due to its increased capability is a bit of a challenge. But overall, it is superior in every way that mattered to us, and more affordable.

Incentivized

I feel Jonas was more equipped to handle multi-state, multi-union payroll as well as multi-jurisdiction sales tax. I wasn't interested in third-party support.

Incentivized

• We don't have to double enter our job information anymore (estimates, bills, labor hours) to show employees what they need to see. Specific access within Contractor Foreman does that for us.
• It's taken us longer to learn how Contractor Foreman works within itself than we thought it would, so implementation is taking a little longer than ideal. However, we have been learning a lot along the way about the easiest ways to use the workflow that Contractor Foreman has.

Incentivized

• With our service department module now being fully integrated (wasn't before), information is more reliable and current. Jonas has helped our bottom line by saving us over 1,000 hours annually in administrative duties.

Incentivized