Kantata Cloud (formerly Mavenlink + Kimble) provides project management and collaboration software for small to mid-sized professional services companies. Features include resource management, project dependencies, time and expense tracking, file sharing, versatile user permissions, private messaging, planning and reporting.
N/A
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft BI is a business intelligence product used for data analysis and generating reports on server-based data. It features unlimited data analysis capacity with its reporting engine, SQL Server Reporting Services alongside ETL, master data management, and data cleansing.
$14
per month per user
Deltek TrafficLIVE
Score 4.0 out of 10
N/A
Deltek’s TrafficLIVE is a cloud-based agency management
software solution. The vendor says that the solution provides unmatched
visibility into an agency’s entire business; improves business processes and
drives efficiency that sets an agency up for success and increased
profitability. TrafficLIVE is designed to help agencies to be more connected,
productive and profitable. The vendor says that with TrafficLIVE agencies can start:
Attacking
Over…
N/A
Pricing
Kantata PS Cloud
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Deltek TrafficLIVE
Editions & Modules
Premier
Contact Sales Team
per month per seat
Enterprise
Contact Sales Team
Power BI Pro
$14
per month per user
Power BI Premium
$24
per month per user
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Kantata PS Cloud
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Deltek TrafficLIVE
Free Trial
No
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
No setup fee
Required
Additional Details
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TrafficLIVE offers solutions for small to large agencies. Our prices range based on number of users and requirements.
Project and Resource Management Systems Expert | Founder | Speaker
Chose Kantata PS Cloud
Mavenlink is the only platform that gave me a balance between a great, intuitive user experience with good reporting, good templates, and resource/capacity planning.
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.
Microsoft BI has a lot of features and is a very powerful tool, especially if you have folks on your team that know how to utilize all of its capabilities. To truly unlock all that it can do, it does require people to have a deep understanding of its capabilities. That's where the software really shines. If you are looking for a simpler, more basic reporting tool, there are other programs available that do not require such a steep learning curve.
Traffic is suitable for most agencies, regardless of size. You don't need to use all of the features in order to get good results. And it can be linked to Maconomy which is useful for larger agencies. We have around 80 employees and it works great.
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.
The time sheet area is really good - it's easy to drag and drop and fill in time sheets with allocated tasks quickly, which makes it more likely that people will actually do it!
It's invaluable to be able to see the time spent on different tasks across a job - both for keeping track of ongoing projects, but also to plan resourcing and costs for the next time.
It's useful to be able to mark parts of a job as 'complete' before the full job is finished - this makes it easier to track which tasks still have to be finished, and makes sure that people are tracking time to the correct task within the job.
Job templates are very useful to make sure the same set of tasks is added to each job automatically.
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
Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.
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.
The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant 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.
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.
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.
MSBI natively has a site that allows you to vote on user enhancements and bug fixes. This allows the largest nagging issues to float to the top and the development team can prioritize accordingly. As mentioned earlier, the large community base of MSBI developers assist technical resources in handling technical questions.
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.
I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.
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 are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.
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!
We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.
Deltek TrafficLIVE was the pre-existing system when I joined the company. When we decided to purchase a new system, we considered a number of options such as Kimble PSA, Oracle NetSuite & Mavenlink. We decided to go ahead with Kimble PSA because we felt that as a package, it provided all the functionality we need against its competitors. It had far more functionality than TrafficLIVE and was more suited to the scale of our business.
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.
As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.
Much more clarity as to how much time each different type of brief should take to complete as we can back reference as to how long it took last season.
It has lead to better customer service. We can visibly demonstrate where we are with jobs and who has been assigned. In the past verbally confirming the different stages did not always convince the project leaders that they were being given the actual real time.
From the Studio users point of view it has empowered them to manage their time more efficiently. If they receive a request to move onto another job their calendars can be reviewed to see if they are available or not.
