Contractor Foreman vs. Redmine

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.

Redmine is a perfect solution for businesses that are looking for a FREE and open source solution for project management. It is great for teams that are managing numerous tasks or projects at one time. Redmine is easy to set up and is fairly self-explanatory for anyone who is semi tech-savvy.

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

• Issue Tracker - Redmine allows in-depth issue tracking complete with workflows and customization.
• Release Tracker - Redmine allows releases to be tracked by milestones, collecting relevant issues in each milestone.
• Agile Management - With a few free or low-cost add-ons, Redmine becomes a great tool for Agile project management

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

• The design and user-interface are a little outdated. It looks like a product that was designed ten years ago and doesn't have a polished look and feel like newer apps have.
• It's not particularly designed to support agile-based project management methodologies such as Scrum.

Incentivized

Broken promises for 3 years. I'm done waiting for basic improvements to bring the app into anything close to an industry standard

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

Redmine is a great product to have in an organization. It's extremely flexible, costs much less to maintain than other alternatives, and as a tool, it is relatively fast to get experienced with. The primary advantages of working with Redmine are: flexible platform, API, open-source and highly configurable, stability.

Incentivized

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

Redmine is free, easy to use and it's everything you could want in a free project management program. The fact that it has wiki integration and that it can track on such a granular level is amazing. Assigning tasks to other users, such as our development team, is fantastic and ensures we are always up-to-date on where we are what - on what projects.

Incentivized

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

Jira is a great project management tool for software product life cycle management for an agile environment based on agile methodologies. Jira is an intuitive and modernized user interface design compared with Redmine but Redmine is a lightweight and affordable project management and task tracking solution with its essential features and functionalities.

Incentivized

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

• Customers receive updates on all progress made for their issues -- this results in an informed customer who is being given transparency on all steps of our process.
• Customers have responded well from being able to not have to track down emails and instead come to a central place for requests.

Incentivized