Dexi.io with Mozenda vs. Projector PSA

The Mozenda platform is well suited to some specific scenarios that may work well for your organization. It is especially helpful for basic scraping of information from simple websites. If the information you need to obtain is clearly stated on a website, then Mozenda is a simple solution to capture that data quickly and easily.

Incentivized

We think Projector PSA is a great tool to track and manage people in a professional service environment like management consulting. This system is easy to set up, easy to understand and should easily suit the needs of smaller and medium sized firms. It may be less appropriate for firms that rely very heavily on project management through another system (like MS Project) or firms that rely very heavily on a sales pipeline tracking system. While still very much possible to use, you would (I believe) have to do some re-keying between systems

• Action Items. Mozenda is broken down into a series of actions that can be performed on a page. Some actions take you to other pages. The action list, while short, provides a comprehensive set of tools for scraping just about any website (I haven't met one where it didn't work yet).
• Error Handling. I've used some scraping tools that have virtually no error handling. Mozenda has great error handling; the software almost always pinpoints the exact action where the agent failed and why.
• Speed. Mozenda is very fast at obtaining results. Other "bot" software can be slow and cumbersome but Mozenda plows through pages rapidly and accurately aggregates information.
• XPath compatibility. One of the most powerful features of Mozenda is the integrated ability to use XPaths to get at the exact bits of information we're after on a particular website. Access to visible information is only limited by imagination.

• Projector is a very well designed tool for project management. It has allowed us to eliminate a number of auxiliary tools for project timelines and WBS for the vast majority of our projects.
• Time and expense entry is intuitive and quick for our staff.
• Our forecasting and resource management capability has improved greatly with Projector and allows us to grow our team efficiently with minimal additional administrative burden.
• Reporting is extremely robust. It does require some time to really get a handle on the full functionality of the reporting tool, but once you do, you can get almost any kind of report you want out of the system!

• The user interface for managing agents can be improved
• When websites change, the agents could be better at dynamically updating
• The "credit" usage can be confusing

Incentivized

• Release management process needs to be improved. Currently no facility is provided to test the impact of new releases in a sand-box. This introduces business risk if there are interfaces into Projector PSA as part of it's use in the business.

We have been using this tool for a year now and find our use of it continually evolves and broadens. We are also very excited about the overhaul that's under way and feel many of the improvements being put in place will help make us that much more effective and efficient. The Projector team is also very responsive and collaborative in terms of user feedback and improvement suggestions, which helps us know they will work hard to help us get what we need out of the tool.

Desktop interface feels complex to new users.

In 5 years of use we have never experienced an unscheduled outage.

I'm only personally experienced with UBot Studio and Scrapy. UBot Studio isn't a bad application, though it has quite a large number of bugs when compared to Mozenda. UBot touts itself as low-code, but requires a significant understanding of programming logic to use the program effectively. Using UBot, we were able to get virtually all the results we wanted, but at a much higher labor cost than Mozenda. During initial implementation of UBot, it took me a full week to develop a particularly complicated agent. Using Mozenda, I was able to recreate the same agent in 4 hours. The ROI has been remarkable, and Mozenda really is a low-code platform.

We did pursue Quick Arrow another tool that was similar. We found that be in inflexible in use. Projector allows a lot of flexibility in setup. Our organization has very specific business processes and we were able to set up Projector to work with those processes. Several other systems we tried were not as flexible in allowing set up to our needs.

• Stay relevant in the market
• Ensure product placement against competitors
• Dramatically enhance profitability

Incentivized

• Even in the small time that I stayed to see Projector PSA reporting I saw ROI projections become more realistic. There was real data to analyze that proved we were spending way too much and charging way too less on some projects.
• Although employees were not used at entering their hours, this single reporting improved operations management and validated employees concerns that more people were needed to manage workload
• Project proposals were more realistic because they were driven by real data.
• Decision making overall for the department became more efficient and effective

Incentivized