Kantata Reviews

The activity dashboard is the best part of Mavenlink. A feed that allows you to keep track of official communications and notes is perfect, plus it keeps clients involved. The API is also very strong and allows us to generate reports FAR beyond what is offered by Mavenlink. Our ability to manage projects and people has greatly increased due to the features that have been implemented since we switched to Mavenlink.

The Gantt chart needs a lot of work. The interface is slow and clunky, plus it is not a great view for the executives and sponsors, visually speaking. The purpose of this chart is not really to "manage" the project, but instead show a high level overview of everything. There is currently no great way to show this to execs and sponsors. There needs to be a better mobile experience as well. We need a fully functional way to log time, complete tasks, post activity and generally manage projects from Android and iOS.

Robust reporting, integration to NetSuite, hierarchical team management, Activity feed

Ease of use needs significant improvement. Needs user configurable workflows and fields. User roles and security have no flexibility. Interface and reporting designed by someone who never has to use the application to run their day.

The UI is simple to use most of the time. It's easy to see your projects listed out, even though the organization tools are pretty weak.

The software is slow. Updates happen at a snails pace. Our team worked directly with the development team at Mavenlink and their process is just plain slow. The program is bogged down and sluggish. It lacks sub-tasks beyond 5 layers, the estimating feature is a joke and they only just recently implemented a basic WYSIWYG in the activity section. You also can't undo activity unless you go back to the feed. Talk to PMs who actually use this product!

We are new to having a PSA and PM tool. So it was great to go from each department having their own spreadsheets to one point of truth and full visibility across the project. But as well - all the in built finance management and integrations we setup has streamlined so many additional administrative elements of managing our work. And the real time visibility to project performance (timelines and finances) is great.

Navigating some of the integrations has been a little longer than I would have hoped for the roll-out. The support to get things implemented was not as timely as we would have hoped.

Customization of task lists, project fields, etc.

Gantt Schedule (hard to display), Reporting (albeit powerful, application for creating reports is not user-friendly in the slightest)

- Time Entry
- Management of individual projects
- Integrations w/ Jira
- Forecasting/Planning
- Happy to have approvals, but they could be more flexible.
- Managing budgets against project timelines.

- Invoicing
- Reporting
- Happy to have approvals, but they could be more flexible.
- Granularity of permissions

Budget tracking is easy and effective, although depending on configuration, it can differ between the finances and budget tabs within a project. Gantt view is super helpful for changing timelines and communicating with client.

The task tracker sometimes is really slow to load when moving tasks around within a given project. There is often a huge number of notifications, but you can configure those to limit them significantly if necessary.

Ability to track hours, tasks, and projects at a high-level view. I like how this tool helps our team on track and on the task in our virtual environment.

Downtime, site errors, slow load times and site crashing

A comprehensive solution for companies that provide professional services, Kantata delivers an extensive variety of features and functionality, such as resources planning, money planning, project planning, teamworking, data analytics, assimilation, and workflow automation, according to some of the greatest critics of the software I have seen. It also integrates with other systems and offers several different tools.

Kantata may have hefty upfront and annual maintenance costs, like other enterprise-level software, which might be expensive for some personal services companies.

Kantata's intuitive and user-friendly layout, which makes it simple for anyone to get started with the application, is one of its most notable features.

Additionally, users can customise Kantata in a number of ways to suit their unique requirements and work processes.

There's a lot of functionality at the higher up space

As a user who enters their time the time entry screen is an extremely overcomplicated experience.

It should be as simple as picking a project, sub-code and then entering time. My experience so far is vastly overcomplicated with different places and ways to enter it. I came from using harvest to track time and their weekly view with a row of the project and code i use frequently is most excellent.

Depth of data analysis and business intelligence, gantt charts, deep task detail options, resource scheduling tools, built-in expense and budget tracking

There is an intermediate learning curve and may come across as immediately complex to the uninitiated creative. However, 10-15 minutes of poking around and taking advantage of the learning tools and startup tutorials offered by Mavenlink's stellar customer service program will address this minor concern. Mavenlink is a fantastically powerful information source, and with that power comes some proper approach and learning. It's all intuitive, though!

The product is easy to use, and it provides capabilities that with the right onboarder, can implement the tool strategically into the company, to meet the companies needs.

With a tool this sophicasticated I think the integration team could provide more support, without a cost attached to it. With the price tag, the team is forced to learn it and integrate it themselves which in turn results in improper use of the tool.

Project management function, it's tedious and doesn't provide the support needed. There is room for improvement here.

The reporting and overview of the project is very helpful. .I also like how you can budget towards individual tasks/milestones. It's also good to see an overview of staff's availability and schedule them on specific days for projects.

It's very frustrating when you need to allocated in the same amount of time per user across a long period. You have to go in individually to each week to add that time. When you have to do this for multiple users across different projects, it takes a lot of time!!! Should be able to do a recurring staffing - define the time period, how many hrs for which user and project.
If there are changes to hrs or staffing for a project, you then have to go in and change across the board - should be able to change that recurring staffing to a different number/person

Project task management is a huge improvement over our legacy product. The user interface and the various task types have made this my go-to tool, no longer needing MS Project on the side to replicate our task tracking efforts. I like that Mavenlink has included issues into their task types, not just tasks and milestones. Best of all is the user interface to make changes in the GANTT view and for contributors to self-assign a task and log time to it. As a PM, I am spending far less time making in task management activities, instead able to monitor what others have permission to do on their own.

Still waiting for the golden feature of copy/paste similar tasks to save me even more time.

Mavenlink allows for our team to easily collaborate on projects from beginning to end. We can cater our tasks to our specific needs and show the progress along the way for everyone to see. The updates that are sent via email keep me on track with the numerous projects I have at hand. The time tracking integration is beneficial to us when we are working with outside clients. This function is simple to use!

I find it difficult to access archived projects when I need to refer back to them. It appears that you need to know the exact title of the project in order to search it. Even though the time tracking function is simple to use, I do wish I could pause my time on one project without tracking it and move to another project where I start tracking time as well. I feel that I have to submit small increments of time often because I cannot do this.

I like the ease of use and the simple layout of mavenlink

I wish there was a way to put non-billable time into projects such as accountants time on invoicing, marketing, and finance. These items are the bleed on a project if you don't factor them into the profitability margin.

Coming from a large tech company, we built most of our project applications in house. After starting with a small business back in November, I spent my first couple of weeks finding the right tool to fit the projects that we manage. Most of the tools we found had something we liked and a lot that was overkill for a small company like us. Mavenlink has several product offerings that cater to different-sized businesses. For example, a lot of other products have an 'enterprise edition' that is expensive for only 3-5 users and is overkill (employee timesheets, etc), however, if we were to downgrade to their lower edition we would lose project essential tools like time-tracking and budget management. Mavenlink's 'professional' offering has everything we need aside from an appointment calendar. However it does integrate with my Google calendar! As a small company, we are able to assign out tasks and see where the project stands at every moment with budget tracking, time tracking, and current priority. Their chat support is also very helpful.

The fact that you cannot pay month-to-month and have to commit to a year is a bit disheartening for a small company, but we spent lots of time trying it out to make sure it's what we wanted and it has been great so far.

I was also disappointed/ confused on the way their users work. You pay for a set amount of users, however, you can add outside users to individual projects as a part of the company and they have access to track time, etc. When we asked support about this they seemed very confused and told us we'd have to pay for more users so we stopped doing that. However, I don't think we'd actually be charged if we did it that way since those 'users' on individual projects don't show up under the user management section.

Ease of use, allocating shared resources, identifying resource gaps and planning for new projects, time sheet approvals of direct reports

Nothing to speak of in particular, its been a good tool and great improvement for me over the last few years from other tools I have used previously

I like that my staffing projections are easy to access, view and share across digital teams.

Forecasting hours by the week/month needs to be automated - this is too manual and time consuming at the time. Need to be able to drag and drop hours, or somehow more speedily be able to populate staff allocations. Also finance reporting / utilization reporting is incredibly difficult of not impossible due to my current access level. I have to rely on the finance and resourcing department for all reporting - this is not sustainable for project management.

- Mavenlink works fantastically in the background to give the whole organization a seamless front end view that allows for efficient project management, time tracking, managing client billing to technical teams receiving their tasks & tickets.
- The functionality works well for all different roles in the business and provides a top-level view.

- Around the end of the month when the majority of the organization is completing scheduling for the next calendar month, reaction time on the site tends to be lower than usual. It still works well but just the speed can be slowing down especially when you need to schedule time for multiple different projects and tasks.

The ability to keep up with each individual project, its tasks and subtasks and everything else involved, without worrying about it getting lost in our Google Drive or desktops. It's a good place to store information, communicate with coworkers, and stay up-to-date on the project's status.

The recurring projects (which make up about 75% of our company) sometimes have trouble repeating correctly each month. The dates will be off and we have to go in and manually adjust a few things, which isn't a huge deal but it's an inconvenience that we'd prefer to avoid.

Our organization includes some office staff, but is mostly made up of remote employees on our client's project sites. Mavenlink has given us a great tool for communicating with our team, as well as capturing time and expense entries via the Cloud. Our employees really like the interface and the ability to log time and expense from their mobile devices. Also, we've found the online workspace to be of great value in transmitting and archiving information and files.

Our implementation included support from Laura Pierce and her BIASS team. Laura led us thru integrating our processes with the capabilities of the tool via a weekly meeting. Action items were identified and quickly addressed. Laura was always there to assist with answering questions and being a sounding board for my ideas. It was also a neat experience to have the BIASS team use the Mavenlink tool to setup and manage the BIASS project.

Most of the opportunities I see with the tool could be considered enhancements to the time and expense processing function and invoicing processes.

These include:

* More flexibility in the Admin's abilities to review, edit and approve project charges in the invoicing cycle would be helpful.

*The ability to provide greater detail of expense charges on the invoice (which is a current action item with Mavenlink for us), and

* The ability to push transactions that are not time and expense entries, such as taxes, unit bill amounts, etc. to QuickBooks would be helpful.

I dont think I can think of one thing in Mavenlink that another tool did better. It is simply inferior in so many ways, even to free project management tools.

It is extremely slow! Every click results in a loading.gif. In comparison to Asana which is INSTANT no matter what you click.
I cant find my projects where I need them, I cant find my tasks where I need them, I cant get to important information without clicking 10 things and sifting through scrollable windows and sliding boxes. They are HIDING content behind and Show More; links. They are using PAGINATION on lists of projects... omg. No. Show everything, list everything, please stop making us bob for apples every time we need to find something.
Oh yeah, and the proofing system doesnt even notify you or the task about a conversation happening within it. Changes to your proof? No clue.
You cant mention someone in each area, only in the activity feed.

Mavenlink has saved us a TON of time that we were using communicating and threading multiple products together. It gives one single source or truth for project planning and management and has eliminated many meetings and replaced multiple softwares.

Every task takes a LOT of clicks. I have very basic needs and it takes a lot of clicking to get the PM info that I need just to monitor my projects. It's there but, I'm always about 7 clicks away from it. Also, the scheduling of tasks is very labor-intensive. It's so complicated that only 3 of us are trained on it and I am glad to not be one of them.