Harvest vs. SUSE Harvester

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

It's great for provisioning any kind of virtual servers, but for now, we use it to provision only servers for Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters. But we are considering to provision also virtual servers for all kinds of needs on SUSE Harvester in the near future, as it's getting more and more mature with every release.

• 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

• Fast to deploy new virtual machines
• It's easy to use
• Stable and ready for production
• Free and open source
• Has a strong community

• 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

• It takes expertise to set up SUSE Harvester for production
• You need to get used to SUSE Harvester to be as "fluent" as in VMWare ESXi
• You need to well prepare for system upgrades

Although Harvest is excellent for the functions that we are currently using it for, including Estimate Tracking, Invoicing, Project Management and receivables - I would like to be able to easily upload Payroll/Time Information to each project, as well as a bulk Expense report to each project on a weekly or monthly basis

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

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

We used ESXi for years and were happy with it. Then we implemented Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters with nodes provisioned on VMware ESXi. Later, when SUSE Harvester came out, we started to provision SUSE Rancher nodes on Harvester. Both VMware ESXi and SUSE Harvester are great products, and I think - we are keeping both, at least for now, when SUSE Harvester is a young project.

• 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

• We can provision more virtual servers
• It's cheaper than competitor products (tbh - it's free, if you don't need support)
• It's easy to manage when you get used to it