Expesite (discontinued) vs. Kantata PS Cloud

Expesite seems to be a good program for a client to communicate with their general contractor. It allows the GC to log in to one portal to handle all forms of communication rather than having to email certain things and use DocuSign for others and follow up via email to make sure that tasks are completed.

Incentivized

It is appropriate and even exceeds expectations 90% of the time. It makes project tracking very easy and visually accessible for most cases. The only occasion where Mavenlink came slightly short was for a special project that required more interaction options among project members. I am certain there are ways to work around that issue, but we did not find them.

Incentivized

• Provides a dashboard where you can see all jobs that are going on with a particular client.
• Makes submitting and tracking change order requests simple.
• Makes tracking the status of pay applications simple.

Incentivized

• With Mavenlink when starting to assign tasks to people, set deadlines and milestones, and add files to our projects we can look at it all from a variety of perspectives, including a task tracker view and a Gantt chart view
• Through Mavenlink each project also includes an activity stream where we can view all project details as they come up, as well as an activity feed for all the projects it is linked to.

Incentivized

• User-friendliness. My biggest gripe about Expesite is that nothing is intuitive. I wouldn't intuitively think to look for anything in the place that I can actually find it. For example, why would I go to my "inbox" to see where all of my jobs are? I would think that would be what the dashboard would be for.
• I understand it's a security measure, but changing the password so frequently gets challenging and this is the only program that I use that it changes as often as it does..
• Finding documents on Expesite is a nightmare. As a GC I need to be able to quickly log in and see if there are any brand new documents that I should be aware of, and perhaps I'm just using it wrong, but I haven't found any easy way to do that. It's very frustrating to have to dig through all of the files to figure out what has been updated.

Incentivized

• The Gantt chart does not allow for baselines to be stored
• There is no means to upload an excel task tracker and build a plan using an upload
• The schedule does not allow for planning of holidays
• The status report functionality needs to be improved

Incentivized

Although the company I currently work for does not use the product I have recommended that we do switch to Mavenlink. We will be opening some new sites internationally this year and I can see that Mavenlink would be a great product for us to use

I think Kantata is one of the most robust and best project management tools out there for an organization like ours. However, some of our staff feel like it isn't as user-friendly as it could be. From a Director point of view or a Project Manager point of view, Kantata is exceptional. From the point of view of a task-doer, it could be more visually appealing. Also, the mobile version isn't great.

Incentivized

Mavenlink gives advance notice for system upgrades, and they're not during our business day. Mavenlink has always been available when we needed it.

Very good integration with Google apps. Some complexity is called however in the synchronization between Google Tasks and Maven links tasks. This can sometimes lead to duplicate records in Google Tasks. It has been dissolvable that becomes cumbersome if not properly curated.

Kantata support is fantastic! Any issues that arise are always handled quickly and efficiently. Granted, we haven't had many issues to report. Typically, my team tends to only reach out to support if they need assistance remembering how to do something or asking about an improvement. We had Kantata build an integration when we first started using the software, and the support team worked hard to listen and improve the integration.

Incentivized

We prepared questions in advance, and our trainer was an expert in what Mavenlink was and wasn't able to do. We were able to have multiple people trained at once.

The training was very well-organized. We were able to send questions in advance so the instructor knew what to cover, and the brought up related topics to maximize the usefulness of what they were teaching us.

Dedicate as much internal time to the implementation effort as possible, even if you're using a 3rd party or Mavenlink services. Your team knows your processes the best

We have since switched over to JIRA and let me tell you, it was probably the best decision we have made as a company. We chose Mavenlink based on promises from the sales team about future roadmap work that really never happened. We thought Mavenlink would easily integrate with our billing software but we couldn't have been more wrong. We ended up never utilizing Mavenlink invoices as they don't even allow you to fully customize your invoices that go out to clients!

Incentivized

It's very easy to add users and contractors into Mavenlink. There's also an option that let's you manage access for teams in multiple locations.

• It has made communicating with our important clients easier by centralizing the communication.
• It has made submitting change order requests quick and simple.
• It has helped to speed up the accounting process because we can log in at a glance and see a status.

Incentivized

• Manvenlink is perfect for showing expenses and income over time and across people.
• Manvenlink is adaptable for the integration and automation of the processes of each of our projects in order to optimize resources and improve operational performance.
• Mavenlink allows us to determine if our projects are profitable or not, as well as save significant time by automating components such as recurring tasks and having templates, among other things.
• Manvenlink is advantageous for our operations due to its simple portfolio management of our projects: manage several projects at once and receive a complete perspective of the development of each one at a glance.
• Manvenlink kindly provides us with robust discussion threads, access restrictions, and built-in document management, allowing us to contextualize communications.

Incentivized