Novatime (discontinued) vs. Zoho Projects

We continue to remain the only professional baseball team that utilizes NOVAtime for our scheduling of staff, mostly because it was designed to schedule hospital workers. The lag time when updating the ASM is extremely time consuming and the inability to work in multiple internet tabs or windows makes it that much more inefficient. I am sure it is a fantastic system for other organizations but it continues to be a challenge for us.

Incentivized

My work involves projects of 5-15 people with numerous projects running simultaneously. Prior to Zoho, I did not have a central location from which to view all project statuses at once. Zoho looks to provide this and also looks like it will deliver. I am anxious to see how our organization's use of it develops. At this time, I feel I am likely to recommend Zoho Projects because my organization has made great software decisions in the past so I have a level of trust already that the research has been done that Zoho is the best solution for our line of work.

Incentivized

• The report database is very extensive--there is a report for everything
• Easy to use
• Various ways for EEs and supervisors to access information

Incentivized

• We use it to manage our sales orders as there are lots of moving parts which are necessary to get client orders done properly.
• I use it anytime I have a new idea I want to put into motion. As I can create a list for brainstorming, feedback, specific actions necessary in order to test and or implement the idea.
• Unrelated to business, it's a great way to plan travel in order to make sure you don't forget those important things like passport, flight arrangement, client meeting confirmation, and meeting prep as far as what specific documents or things do you need to bring with you.
• And since everyone is on the go and expected to keep up with work, the mobile/tablet app makes it a breeze to keep up, work on, and create new projects.

Incentivized

• There does need to be more support and knowledge when it comes to alternate workweek schedule types (9/80, etc.), as there have been a few unique challenges with those.

• There is no ability to add custom fields in the "Bugs" module - for example, if we want to add fields such as Version Number.
• Reporting is not integrated - its a fairly expensive add-on.
• There is no easy way to track actual and completed dates for tasks - so historical variance analysis is not easy.

The overall satisfaction within the organization has been luke warm, at best. The software may be more conducive for a hospital but I believe there is a reason why we are the lone baseball team utilizing it.

Incentivized

I've reviewed about 8 other project management solutions and Zoho Projects is the best I've seen without being overly complicated. Zoho Projects keeps getting better! Recent new enhancements makes it even easier to navigate. There are new keyboard shortcuts that cut my time way down. The tools are very easy to use.

On the employee's side of things, Novatime is pretty intuitive and fairly easy to use. All they have to do is either press a button to punch in or punch out. If they are entering in their hours, all they have to do is type in the number of hours per day. On the manager's side of things, Novatime is also fairly easy to use. It highlights in red any missed punches and in green any OT that the employee has. There are links on the homepage of the manager's page that will lead them to a list of all their employees' missed punches for a pay period and they can fix them all before payroll is due. Novatime becomes a bit more complicated on the administrator's side. The issues I have run into with Novatime normally come after updates/upgrades to their system. They have been getting better, but the administrator's side is still a bit clunky and takes a while to find what you are looking for. It is not as intuitive as the other sides and takes a bit of computer knowledge to figure it out.

Zoho Projects is an easy project management tool to use. It provides all the functionality that we required for handling projects. We can easily create personal forms for projects and tasks, allowing us to add and report on our own desire. Apart from this we can create and edit documents in real time which saves our time. This allows us to share text docs, presentations, tables with the whole team and we can work on them together

Incentivized

Has not been down to my knowledge.

Speed meets my expectations.

The program itself can be customized in many different ways to meet the needs of the company/organization that it is working with. The charts/graphs on the new homepage are somewhat helpful and link to useful information. It has some really nice scheduling features that allow managers to see the difference between hours expected to work and actual hours worked as well as overtime, absences, and non-scheduled shifts. Processing payroll is quite simple. PTO request off is straightforward.

Incentivized

Although it might lack intuitiveness, once you get a hang of how Zoho Projects works, you can do a LOT. The impact good project management has on profitability is huge, and it has helped not only improve communication and coordination when working on a project, but more importantly have adequate tracking of time, due dates and potential bottle necks

Incentivized

The product is easy to use, and everyone picks up on it quickly. It is less expensive, and has more to offer than any other product I’ve found.

Zoho Projects provides a more limited set of functionality and customization options than other task/bug trackers on the market, but what it lacks in functionality it makes up for in ease of use. It probably has 80-90% of the features of its competitors but takes about a third of the time to get up and running and realizing value.

Incentivized

• We have had a few scenarios where the PTO accrual dropped off and it did take 3 attempts of reaching out to customer service to get it sorted.
• The customer service team has collaborated with me in creating new PTO categories to automate certain needs to save me some time.

Incentivized

• We needed a system to organize our growing business, so anything was better than what we had, which was nothing.
• Recording time spend is a huge reason for using project software. It has made me aware of the tasks that are taking too long and where we are not being profitable as a company.
• It has kept our team accountable for what needs to get completed and when projects are not in motion or completed timely. It's helpful to know in order to get billing out faster.

Incentivized