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 I use Kanbanery for web app projects, customer support, and for my personal tasks. I think it would be perfect for DevOps, too. It might get a little tricky if there were hundreds of developers on one project, but with just ten to twenty people per team it's perfect.
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 I really like how easy it is for my clients to use Kanbanery. That's the most important thing for me in a project management tool, because I don't want the tool to get in the way of working with clients. I can see really quickly what needs to be done, and more importantly, what doesn't need to be done. Having a clear view of all my tasks takes a lot of stress of off me. Kanbanery is also good for communication with clients. If I have a task card that represents a component, we can talk about it in comments, or we use the project chat for general stuff. It keeps my email from getting cluttered. 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the modules like checklists and forms are confusing and hard to use some of the training videos or versions of an old outdated version of the software Would like to see a more efficent way of creating a submittal log generated from a specification book Read full review I'd love to see some improvements in the Scrum burn down chart, but it works okay as it is. It would be nice if we could adjust the width of the columns. It's fine on most monitors, but on a small screen I have to scroll sideways. 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 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 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 Kanbanery is the easiest to use with the best visibility. It doesn't have a lot of features I don't need, like
Basecamp or LeanKit, but it's much more robust than
Trello or
Pivotal Tracker . It's just the perfect balance of ease of use and collaboration tools for me. I also like the UI better than the others. It's sleek without a lot of bright colors and rounded corners that make some tools look plastic and unprofessional.
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 I feel like we're much more efficient. I spend more time working on tasks now and a lot less time digging through tickets. Since we can see when there's a problem in our team really easy with Kanbanery, people get help when they need it sooner. That has to be good for productivity. Read full review ScreenShots Contractor Foreman Screenshots Kanbanery (discontinued) Screenshots