Accelo vs. Workamajig

The best services management, easy operations reporting, and data analytics features from Accelo are impressive and easy on data visualization and workflow management software. Accelo was very helpful in collaboration and easy to collect feedback from integrated platforms and the scheduling ability is very unique. The Automation tools are also cost-effective and the ability to manage time through Accelo is perfect.

Incentivized

I think this holds true to almost any CRM, but if you want to truly utilize it you sort of need to go all in. This can become tough with WMJ because it doesn't offer some critical options that many other CRMs do, like the ability to create and send emails, e-newsletters, to throttle and invite outside clients to look at projects, etc. As such we're pairing Workamajig with Hubspot (and slowly phasing out Mailchimp) and trying to keep the data clean and flowing between them all is pretty tough. I'm also not aware of any API bridge from Wordpress to Workamajig so while I can program and feed my leads from my site into the other spaces, Workamajig remains a manual entry for any insertions you want, even if simply as a CSV import.

But - if you're not worried about that and simply want to manage projects, budget time, and scope things, it's a robust system allowing you to do so.

Incentivized

• Tracking customer interactions. Nice integration with G Suite, could be a lot better if they acknowledged that contacts may actually have more than one email address.
• Support Ticket system is integrated, so we can view support history and other email correspondence easily. It's cheaper that Zendesk.
• Support is reasonably good, usually prompt and responsive.
• Constant development - lots of updates, just not often to areas that we use.

Incentivized

• WMJ is a full-stack solution, so you can track the life of a project from beginning to end, and all of the financials associated with it.
• Time entry is easy.
• Project management is robust and yields a tremendous amount of information.
• WMJ has a "sheets"-based interface, which makes navigating thru modules easier.
• There is more than one way to complete any particular task.

Incentivized

• The client portal needs to be improved. It does not have the same user interface as we have within Accelo and we get a lot of client complaints about it.
• It needs more executive-style reporting and the ability to create your own reports and filters.
• It needs to be faster. With all of the things Accelo is doing to give you all the data, it is kind of slow compared to other systems in the browser.

Incentivized

• Auto-schedule population - The most inconvenient thing about using JIG was that the dates wouldn't auto-populate. Example: I move the review date but the rest of the dates stay the same. Depending on each project level, if one date is adjusted the rest should update as well. That way we aren't spending a lot of time moving dates around manually.
• Notifications - JIG should have desktop notifications so we can see when tasks are on us even when we aren't in JIG.

Incentivized

Looking forward to seeing more refinement of features provided and upcoming features promised :)

From the beginning the Accelo team has been very invested in ensuring our success and overall happiness with the platform. The initial implementation specialists and trainers did a fairly good job of learning our company and needs, and tried to tailor the trainings accordingly. However, once we made the formal switch to the platform, meaning we no longer were using our legacy systems, we found that we had a lot of questions....and a lot of ideas and recommendations. The support team is extremely responsive and seemingly happy to receive our continual feedback. And if we encounter an issue that seems to be a system issue, they work diligently to fix it (we've actually had an engineer join a call with us to learn of the issue - and subsequently fix it)

Incentivized

Harvest and Asana combined don't even scratch the surface of what Accelo can do. Harvest is nothing more than rudimentary time tracking. It's about as easy to use as they come, but it stops there. There's no tie in to project management, invoicing, capacity planning, etc. and the reporting isn't great. Asana we found to be very difficult to use for complex projects with multiple deliverables, multiple deadlines, multiple teams - and it didn't tie back to budgets and hours worked. So the deficiencies of those two tools are what led us to Accelo. In terms of more comparable systems, I had previously used Workamajig. The sophistication of Workamajig was there, but it didn't seem to have quite as much flexibility and customization. ProWorkflow we evaluated just based on sales and marketing information available on the platform and felt it wasn't quite as good.

Incentivized

We've used QuickBooks and it didn't align well with our business, so there were a lot of insights I wanted from the numbers, but couldn't get. We use Basecamp, which is easy, but can get disorganized pretty quickly and takes discipline to stay structured.

Incentivized

• Save Money on Lost Time. You won't go over your client retainers in any given month if you use Accelo properly. This ultimately saves your company time and money.
• Lost or Broken Communications. They need to get it together with their email system, aka "request inboxes" ... There are too many lost or broken emails for them to be trustworthy with this. My suggestion is to make sure you know everyone you communicate with (including outside sources like Google or other companies) and set them up in Accelo, then send test emails. Also, when in doubt, use your Outlook or other primary sourced email when you want to make sure an email goes through with all appropriate files.

Incentivized

• The subscription expense and IT overhead has been substantial. That being said at the time of implementation, most other competing platforms were in line with their pricing.
• As more competitive alternatives have come to market we would have probably gone with an entirely cloud base alternative at a lower price.
• We ended up with ClickUp as our primary project management platform. If our finance/accounting software wasn't already so integrated with Workamjig we would probably switch to it entirely.

Incentivized