Harvest vs. OpenX vs. WorkflowMax

Harvest is ideally suited for a variety of scenarios, particularly in the realms of freelance or consulting work, where accurate hour tracking for billing is crucial. It excels in small to medium businesses managing team projects, allowing for effective resource allocation and time management across multiple concurrent projects. For budgeting and forecasting, Harvest provides valuable data, aiding in accurately estimating the duration and cost of future projects based on past data. It's also highly beneficial for remote or distributed teams, thanks to its cloud-based platform that facilitates seamless coordination. Additionally, its detailed reporting features enhance client transparency, fostering trust through clear communication of time spent on projects. However, Harvest may be less suitable for larger enterprises with complex integration needs or specialized industries requiring more niche features. Small startups or individuals on tight budgets might find the cost challenging, especially if they don't fully utilize all its features. Lastly, for those needing only basic time tracking, simpler or free tools might be more appropriate, making Harvest an unnecessary expenditure for basic needs.

Incentivized

What are the best ways to integrate it with salesforce.com? What are the best ways to target our users with this tool? To segment the users? How can I integrate my ads with your adexchange-what sizes are you looking for in terms of banners, skyscrapers and so on. In this way I can plan my in house ad and those for the exchange to be the same size, to avoid duplication of work.

WorkflowMax is very well suited for a business that wants to track time billed by project, to have an easy way to generate invoices for those projects, and to keep track of overall productivity and invoice status. I imagine it can also be adapted to different types of businesses that deal in goods rather than services and time. I am not sure for which scenarios or businesses the program is not appropriate.

Incentivized

• Offers several options on using the tool, for example, you can use the app on your phone, the app for desktop, or simply have the website open.
• The timer integrates with other platforms. For example, our team uses Asana as our project management tool. Now, in real-time, I can know which projects my team is working on and whether we're implementing good time management strategies to meet our goals.
• The summary break downs are wonderful! You can view an individual's hours as well as project hours. There are even notifications you could receive when your team is getting close to reaching the allotted time for a client's project.

Incentivized

• OpenX is a system that was designed to scale as is evident in some key design decisions found throughout the platform. The multi-server setup that was chosen at Mail.com allowed for a distributed server architecture which separated the front end web delivery nodes from the backend MySQL Database master which replicated data back to each front end delivery node mysql slave. This eased the ability to horizontally scale as needed due to the ingenious separation of the ad impressions data tables on the delivery nodes which were being collected locally on each ad impression and then processed periodically back to to the master database which replicated the aggregated statistics back to the delivery nodes. The ability to load balance across the front end web delivery nodes, add caching at many different layers, utilize a CDN for the static ad images, implement PHP accelerators, and hit memcached instead of the MySQL master made the OpenX platform a service that was very resilient to failures.
• The ability to optimize the platform is also something that OpenX does very well. This is evident in many of the config key parameters available. In addition to OpenX specific tunable's, optimizations can be made at many different levels in which the system sits. These include hardware and operating system level optimizations, tcp and networking stack optimizations, web server/php-cgi configurations, and database (MySQL InnoDB) tunable's. There are many different optimization knobs that can be tuned to help scale the application for the best performance possible
• The documentation was simple, to the point, and well written which led to an easy initial implementation and roll out of a multi-server setup. The installation and upgrade procedures were straight forward even for the complexities of the multi-server setup. I also found the OpenX team to be accessible and even got a chance to meet some of the team at their Up Close and Personal events at Cal Tech in Pasadena. Core developers were on hand to answer technical questions and also made themselves available to us via email and irq channels.
• The open nature of the OpenX platform allows for flexibility in the choice of web serving platform to use (Apache, nginx, Lighttpd) and also the database management systems (MySQL, PostGreSQL)

• You can customize the notifications and this has helped us enormously to schedule dates that we overlooked. Also the templates are customizable which gives the company its own branding on its reports.
• It is integrated with the Xero platform which makes it very useful to streamline the processes of billing, accounts payable, accounts receivable, petty cash flow and all the accounting and administrative area.
• It also has a very complete mobile version, where we can be present and monitor the progress of projects in real time, no matter where we are.

Incentivized

• I’m still trying to figure out how tasks best associate to a specific project. There’s a couple different places to edit that and I’m a little confused as to best practice.
• Does not integrate into basecamp which is our project management system

Incentivized

• Propagation could be improved; ad units that need to go live immediately could take up to 45 minutes to propagate.
• Over-complexity can be confusing. There are multiple tiers before assigning ad units per order and it seems unnecessary.
• Real-time reporting or a status dashboard would be great.

• Currently the timesheet function allows staff to input time for overlapping periods which can cause some headaches when it comes to payroll and invoicing. We understand this is being addressed.
• The amount of flexibility in the product can create some challenges when setting up the jobs database at the onset. It is a daunting challenge but worthwhile when completed correctly and rolled out across the firm. Adding new jobs is much easier.
• No search function to find a specific job, you have to scroll through all jobs allocated to you.

Incentivized

I no longer work at the company where I was using OpenX, but if I were then I'd certainly stay aboard. Frankly, there are a lot of sunk costs involved with building all of the infrastructure we had put in place, the system was working very well even if reporting was a hassle, and our team was trained on it. Also, I'm not aware of another product that does everything else we'd need it to.

Because we can't imagine being without it!

Incentivized

Again, just a minor compatibility issues using with other platforms such as Basecamp, but it does do everything promised. The only downfall we have found is having to create a job in both platforms and then connecting them later vs being able to create a project once and having them automatically connect.

Incentivized

I was given the system to use as part of setting up a whole new site from scratch in less than 2 months, with a large number of specialty hub pages to run ads on and lots of content I needed to run disease specific ads on. The system was easy for me to learn on the fly in a very compressed time frame. I would have loved more chance to really dig in under the hood to see all that it could do, but given how fast I had to work, I got everything up and running and looking great. And I did it ahead of my launch deadline too. My only reservation might be for people who are not as patient as I am in picking things up, or as hands on. Customer service was great if I needed them, and a quick start guide with the essentials would be ideal for those people.

It's easy to use and provides me with instant online access to the management of my business whether I am at my desk or overseas

Incentivized

They're very responsive and do their best to answer whatever questions we've had. Sometimes, the question or request we've made is for a feature that doesn't yet exist, however in most cases those features have been built later and did eventually address our need.

Incentivized

They went above and beyond without ever asking for additional money and we met our launch date and immediately started to meet and even surpass our business goals. Nothing was too much trouble, which really stood out compared to other companies I had and was at that time also working with. Customer service can really make or break any business; if i expect my staff to give good customer service, I expect to get it too, and Open X gave it.

The support team are excellent. The only downside is that you can't phone them!

Incentivized

Decide how to breakdown your ongoing jobs - are they monthly recurring or annual broken into chunks? What are you going to give clients i.e. how will your proposals and invoices look?

Incentivized

Harvest is significantly better than Jira. I think Jira's is not originally intended to be used as a time logging/management system, but we had been previously using it as that. It was much clunkier, and many employees had a difficult time using it as a user interface goes. Harvest is much more user friendly and has simplified the daily time-logging process for everyone in our office

Incentivized

OpenX is less focused than MoPub and it has a bigger reach as it is not limited to the mobile app. Unlike MoPub that focuses on performance, OpenX comes from the branding world and is pushing into CTV and other areas of the industry more catered to traditional media agencies and not pure ad tech players.

Incentivized

WorkflowMax is much much easier than Streamtime, much more affordable and easier to try out and see if it meets your needs. Streamtime is a great comprehensive product but we lost a year's subscription in investment because we couldn't get answers to the support questions we needed and they had a no refund policy!

Incentivized

• Harvest has improved our payment schedules. Since we switched, we get paid for projects much sooner.
• Harvest has saved us a ton of time with payroll. We are able to track our users time and pay them appropriately based on their billable hours.
• Harvest is becoming a lifesaver around tax time. The reporting features have allowed us to pull reports for our tax accountant.

Incentivized

• OpenX made it easy to manage online advertising. At the time I used the product I was the lead developer in charge of implementing the solution but quickly was put into the role of managing the traffic and training other users. It was really easy for a technical user to become a traffic manager. Getting other users trained and up to speed was very efficient.

• Max enables Loan Assistant to invoice very quickly and easily and integration with Xero for card payments brings our cashflow forward.
• Max enables the Loan Assistant team to manage their workflow in an efficient and productive way. The team all work from home. It is the centre of our Loan Assistant universe.

Incentivized