Kantata Reviews

I love that it has given our agency a central place to track all projects/tasks as well as time/budgtes.

You have to constantlty seek out information that pertains to you. Email is outdated in the digital world so this being the primary means of notification is not helpful for us. Things like push notifications and in application notifications are a simple feature that would be massively helpful fo the user.

Also, the mobile version of this project is basically unuseable, it seems like as a whole this software is very slow to update and integrate new features that are requested by its users.

We needed a unified system that did: task tracking, budget tracking, project schedules, time entry and resource management. MavenLink nails it in those arenas! Finally we have a tool that doesn't require another 15 tools!

There are a lot of features and options for how to do things, and not enough "how to" videos that their competitors have.

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

I love the easy UI of Mavenlink. The side menu bar is very easy to navigate. I like the time entries/timesheet interface. It's easy to create invoices and expense reports as well.

Reporting isn't always that intuitive - I have the most questions for our admin when it comes to pulling reports. Maybe I just need to be better educated on this though.

Be able to link to NetSuite record with integrations and view utilization and project budget vs. actual.

Lack of some task tracking features like assignee commit date with taskes. Task role on time entries does not display on list view and task columns are hard to adjust for different usage of different team member.

The best thing about Kantata is the ability to see project burn rates at a glance. The time-tracking system is a huge part of that being accurate as well. There are multiple options for our team to track their time so that we can see project burn rates.

There are several things that haven't been improved at all in the 6+ years that we've used this software. For example, basic things like not being able to customize your task statuses (or at least new options being added), being able to mark a task as complete even when none of the checklist items have been checked off, and not getting a notification when a due date is coming up to remind a team member of a deadline before it is missed, etc. The mobile version is pretty much useless which is sad now that the working world is mostly remote.

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.

The application is very stable and you will find a lot of features to work with. In comparison to other tools, the features provided are more advanced and data-driven with high emphasis on metrics. I just love the dashboard, it helps you to keep track of all the official meetings and interactions and with mavenlink, you can build superb reports. It helps in collaborating with tasks from start to end of each project. You can set updates as notifications to your mail id, so you would get to know of the status o different projects. We can set these notifications for clients too, so they would get to know the proceedings and status o each task.If you hate opening multiple tabs like me, you can use this Gantt chart tool which I should say is the best feature!

One of the biggest turn off is that we take a lot of time to get started with the system like to set up and install. The date has been set in US formats which had been an issue to us, hope they do something about it. I found it really difficult to trace back archived projects cause you have to know the exact name of the respective project to get them traced back!

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

This system does it's main job well, which is to manage projects.

Attempting to interface this system into any other system is extremely difficult. Mavenlink staff don't seem to have a lot of experience with interfacing their system. We eventually had to come up with our own solution that relied only on a simple data download.

Their pricing model is such that you end up paying a lot of money for relatively little value add i.e. in the area of time keeping. A more extensive licensing fee is charged for people to approve time. Mavenlink would be well served to change their model to charge less for the functions that are not their core competency and more for project management functionality, which is.

- Mavenlink allows us to bill times to projects and individual tasks.
- Can see time spent against the project budget

- The task assignment and updating via Outlook is clunky, and it feels like it could do with some refinement.

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.