BQE CORE vs. Brightpod

I would recommend this for our industry: architecture, engineering, or construction. I would recommend this for any larger firm with many employees or high number of projects. I would particularly recommend this for a company with projects that have budget constraints and where time tracking and expense tracking is very important. I would not recommend this complicated software for a small firm with a small amount of income or number of projects.

Brightpod is best suited for someone that needs a project management software with recurring projects that can be templated. I'm not sure of a situation where this would be a good fit. There may be some features that are required that brightpod doesn't have like Gantt chart. Some teams may not want a Kanban style view

Incentivized

• Invoice Collections within Billing is a great tool because of the ability to take notes and track contact.
• Invoices are professional looking and easy for our clients to understand the overall progress within each phase of their project.
• Dashboards are the best tool EVER!
• The Contact List feature within Clients setup is the perfect way to track multiple project managers within a large company that also has multiple contracts with us.

Incentivized

• The design is well-thought out and easy to use for managing the team planning and execution for our company marketing projects.
• We use Brightpod for blogging and marketing.

• Customizable Reporting
• Linking Project to Payment all together
• Assigning contacts to particular roles - such as Invoicing, Contracts, etc.
• Accounting Functionality - they are basically a project management accounting software, so in my opinion, they could learn some things from other accounting software such as QuickBooks etc.

Incentivized

• They really need a chat or instant messenger feature.
• iOS app would be nice.
• The option to remove the delay for sending messages on a task.

Incentivized

We have been using Core for a few years now, and honestly started to look at other software systems to see what was out there. What we chose was a nightmare for migration so we never left Core. Now we have added invoicing and payments from Core instead of double entry with QBO. Still only a few cycles in but looks like it will be up to speed soon and working smoothly.

Incentivized

It's working very well for our organization.

The foundation is awesome, like I have said before, however the house being built on it, the educational resources being provided to us (more of sales pitches that don't work), and flexible workflow opportunities, is making us look elsewhere for how much we will be spending on per user. It's crazy to think how flexible they are not when it comes to user settings. Lack of integration with other sources is awful.

Incentivized

Brightpod is easy to use. We have several levels of users, some are from outside the USA and some are here. We needed something that could be used by programmers, coders, technical project managers, marketing individuals, and administrators. We get a thumbs up from all these user types. The system is hardly ever down, so we are able to use 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

Incentivized

I can only remember a couple of times in 4 years that Core has been unavailable.

This is one area that does need some improvement. It can be slow at time, so we had our IT look at it from our side and we had no issues, so it has to be some slowness on their side.

As a new employee and CORE user, I talk to support on a weekly basis. I have never had to wait for more than 3 min to get connect with a support rep, and all my questions have been answered. The support representatives are polite and eager to help no matter how simple your question is.

Incentivized

Customer Support was fast and helpful.

Make sure you have someone training you that fits your style of learning.

wont let me skip

SaaS is the way forward :)

Deltek Vision is far more advanced, more encompassing and offers more flexibility with what you want to do. However, it's also quite difficult to use, whereas BQE CORE is intuitive and user friendly. The trade off is worth it in some arenas but overall it's not suited for a larger fast paced company. Great for smaller companies.

Incentivized

It has been a while, so I don't recall specifics, but we started with Basecamp about 10 years ago and it was not meeting our needs, so we moved to Box, and again were driven to find another solution. We moved to DeskAway, by the same company as Brightpod, and when that product was sunsetted, they migrated us to Brightpod.

Incentivized

This software works on a small and large scale.

• Quick setup of new tasks under a parent project, with immediate hourly billing to it.
• Monitoring of details of non-chargeable efforts in appropriate detail
• Validation of hourly cost, billing cost, benefit cost, profitability by person and role
• Company tracking of write-off's included in corporate and project reporting, no data is "lost"
• Can track excessive work time as +PTO in lieu of pay for use as future vacation

• We don't measure the ROI of this product.
• Previously, we used Box and Basecamp and we find this product superior for our needs.
• We think the simplicity of the product increases usage.

Incentivized