Contractor Foreman vs. Kanban Tool

Contractor Foreman has been a great tool for managing a variety of projects, from home remodels to large-scale builds. It works especially well for keeping everything organized in one place, whether it’s estimates, schedules, or job costs.
One scenario where it’s been really useful is in managing multiple jobs at once. With several remodels and new construction projects happening at the same time, having a centralized system to track progress, store documents, and communicate with subcontractors has helped keep everything on schedule. It’s also great for estimating—being able to quickly generate and send professional proposals has made bidding much more efficient.
It’s especially well-suited for projects that require a lot of moving parts, like tracking permits and compliance documents. For larger jobs, like school construction, it helps ensure that all approvals, budgets, and schedules stay on track without getting lost in a mess of paperwork.
Where it’s less ideal is for smaller, one-off jobs where a full project management system might be overkill. If it’s just a quick repair or a simple remodel, sometimes it’s easier to just handle things manually. The mobile app could also be a bit more intuitive for on-site use, especially for field updates and quick changes.
Overall, it’s a strong tool for contractors managing multiple projects, budgets, and teams. It keeps things organized and saves time, especially on jobs that require detailed tracking and coordination.

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.

Incentivized

• The service is top notch. You would be hard pressed to find other options with this kind of service.
• The ability to have your project flow through the modules makes it a breeze to use.
• Being able to track time as well is a key feature.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Security and sensitive file visibility. Users with no permissions can have access to some hidden files.
• Daily log navigation. Users now need to exit one log entirely to view or check another, resulting in a significant waste of time and reduced efficiency.
• Customization options for reports. No options to set up and automatically send reports by email to specified users.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

We have compiled so much information on CF it would be counterproductive to move to another software. We have also sold a lot of clients on the client portal feature. It is crucial for our communication between customers. The only reason we wouldn't renew the service is if somewhere offered the exact same service but at a lower cost

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Overall, Contractor Foreman is a great product, and I’m sure we’ve only scratched the surface of everything it has to offer. It can be a little quirky at times, occasionally displaying a 'Bad Gateway' message, but we haven’t experienced any timeout issues in the past few months. As we continue to use it, I’m confident we’ll uncover even more ways to streamline our workflow

Incentivized

The integration with Teams is well suited. This works wonderful for my
company. Our team can easily prioritize tasks based on their importance.
It help our team identify and reduce inefficiencies in workflow. With
great visibility in data our team can make informed decisions. Ensuring
clear accountability and responsibility of team members

Availability was good, FUNCTIONAL availability was more spotty

Incentivized

Many times we had issues that turned out to be errors and bugs. At first, we would be told forcefully that there were no bugs, then we would document them, and we would get an acknowledgement but no apology for essentially either gaslighting us or being ignorant of their system

Incentivized

We have only had one issue the entire time we have had Contractor Foreman and that was that we had the hardest time getting the platform to allow us to log in, but we called our support and within 5 mins we able to log back in

Incentivized

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.

The team that does your implementation is amazing. They're skillful, kind, they will take as much time as you need, and they have a sense of urgency

Incentivized

There's just no comparing these two. I'm actually going to suggest we keep CE to my boss, and here's why: Clearestimates is perfect for what I just described. You have a little job that you just BOOM it's done? Put it into Clearestimates. That system does not care at all if you did it "properly." Now Contractor Foreman does so. much. more. than CE. It just does. You can do everything on CF (just not anything haha). Most businesses wouldn't need anything else, but since we're still growing, we do some handyman stuff every now and again that CE is perfect for, and we don't have to go through CF's really picky system to make sure every little tiny thing is correct

Incentivized

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.

We had just 2 users

Incentivized

• Positive return for invoice/change order tracking
• Great price
• Prior to using Contractor Foreman we had to wait until the end to capture all change orders in one summary. Now, with the client portal, we can capture in real time and the client has visibility.
• We have been trying to reduce administration time in tracking field expenses and with Contractor Foreman our field crew can uplaod reciepts and track expenses right from their mobile phones.
• Punchlist - the punch list and To Do features are so robust we have drastically improved getting punchlists and small tasks completed in single trips without the wasted time and travel of multiple trips due to missed/forgotten items.

Incentivized

• 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.