Likelihood to Recommend 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...
Read full review Kanban is well suited for a fast-paced working environment for larger teams who want continuous communication with users. Kanban is good for rapid development and daily meetings for updates and statuses. Kanban is less suited for smaller teams or groups who don't require collaboration and constant communication with involved users. Kanban is time-consuming and it takes additional effort outside of your regular work to maintain and manage the tool.
Read full review Pros Estimates Project management Lead management - tracking where they are in the funnel and having web lead automatically pull into the system. Read full review It provides a good basic overview of where tasks are on a timeline (particularly helpful for a pull-based approach). It provides a good collaborative space to have multiple folks commenting on multiple tasks. It does a good job of managing very basic visual elements of an agile development cycle. Chris Carpenter Staff Project Manager, Awesomizer, Fixer, Maker, Collaboration Enabler
Read full review Cons 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the modules like checklists and forms are confusing and hard to use some of the training videos or versions of an old outdated version of the software Would like to see a more efficent way of creating a submittal log generated from a specification book Read full review Kanban does not show the task or story clearly. You have to open the project separately to view the details of the project. Kanban gives a higher level project management view but it lacks customization and personal settings features. I would like to see Kanban provide mobile access to their tool, data, and board. This would be very useful for all companies and provide an increase in efficiency and productivity. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Eliminated the need for our team to log into multiple systems to do their jobs which aligns to our Lean approach
Read full review We are more likely than not to renew our use of Kanban. Even with its limits, it still is a good product that fulfills our needs.
Read full review Usability Again, this is a strong tool for software teams using Agile that are distributed across multiple geographies. It can be good for co-located teams too, but there are better platforms on the market like
JIRA that provide a more built-out story.
Chris Carpenter Staff Project Manager, Awesomizer, Fixer, Maker, Collaboration Enabler
Read full review Support Rating 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)
Read full review This is the best tool I had a chance to work with- since I started to use it I saved a lot of time and I made my work go smoothly.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review We've only tried JIRA Agile and KanbanFlow before. Kanban Tool was the one that our team actually liked and enjoyed working with. Also - it's been much easier to get started with and to understand than some of the other two (JIRA in particular). Although JIRA has many more features that we would have possibly used, the user feedback on it was so poor we were afraid that the negativity would create time wasted and less "job satisfaction" amongst the team.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Better communication and organization of ongoing projects. We are a very small team, with many areas to work on. Having everything in one system gives us a lot of visibility. Greatly reduced costs from using other tools that were much more expensive. Read full review ScreenShots Contractor Foreman Screenshots