BQE CORE vs. Redmine

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
BQE CORE
Score 9.3 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
BQE CORE is a business management solution built specifically for professional service firms. BQE CORE is a combination of a billing assistant, project management, and accounting solution. CORE is designed to do the hard work of delivering actionable insights directly to the user's dashboards or inbox. BQE CORE replaces the products Engineeroffice, Archioffice, and BillQuick; the functionality of these applications is now found in BQE CORE.N/A
Redmine
Score 6.2 out of 10
N/A
Redmine is a project management web application written using the Ruby on Rails framework. It is cross-platform and cross-database, and free to download and use as an open source project available on the GNU 2.0 license.N/A
Pricing
BQE CORERedmine
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BQE CORERedmine
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
BQE CORERedmine
Features
BQE CORERedmine
Project Management
Comparison of Project Management features of Product A and Product B
BQE CORE
7.6
Ratings
1% below category average
Redmine
7.7
Ratings
1% above category average
Task Management9.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Resource Management8.50 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Gantt Charts8.70 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Scheduling8.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Workflow Automation7.10 Ratings5.80 Ratings
Team Collaboration5.20 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Support for Agile Methodology7.40 Ratings6.90 Ratings
Support for Waterfall Methodology4.60 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Document Management7.90 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Email integration6.30 Ratings9.10 Ratings
Mobile Access7.80 Ratings5.50 Ratings
Timesheet Tracking9.50 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Change request and Case Management7.10 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Budget and Expense Management8.60 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Professional Services Automation
Comparison of Professional Services Automation features of Product A and Product B
BQE CORE
7.5
Ratings
1% below category average
Redmine
7.5
Ratings
1% below category average
Quotes/estimates6.30 Ratings7.30 Ratings
Invoicing8.10 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Project & financial reporting8.30 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Integration with accounting software7.30 Ratings7.90 Ratings
Best Alternatives
BQE CORERedmine
Small Businesses
Stackby
Stackby
Score 9.0 out of 10
Stackby
Stackby
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
InEight
InEight
Score 8.3 out of 10
InEight
InEight
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprises
InEight
InEight
Score 8.3 out of 10
InEight
InEight
Score 8.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
BQE CORERedmine
Likelihood to Recommend
9.3
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.1
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.4
(0 ratings)
6.5
(0 ratings)
Online Training
6.4
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
2.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
4.5
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
BQE CORERedmine
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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It is a tool that does not is only for this use but with its great power of integration with other tools, we realized that in one solution we could cover many solutions. For instance, it is very well suited for git integration. Besides that, the quality team can assign tasks to the corresponding department. Maybe it is not very appropriate for very large and complex projects, where deeper monitoring of human resources, task deliverables, and deadlines is necessary.
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Pros
  • 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.
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  • Easy to upgrade and or change to your own particular use-cases.
  • Straightforward set-up and easy to create custom fields and workflows.
  • Communication between multiple teams.
  • Track multiple sprints through their chart views.
  • Keep a historical record of changes done to instances.
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Cons
  • 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.
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  • The design and user-interface are a little outdated. It looks like a product that was designed ten years ago and doesn't have a polished look and feel like newer apps have.
  • It's not particularly designed to support agile-based project management methodologies such as Scrum.
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Likelihood to Renew
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.
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No answers on this topic
Usability
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.
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Redmine is a great product to have in an organization. It's extremely flexible, costs much less to maintain than other alternatives, and as a tool, it is relatively fast to get experienced with. The primary advantages of working with Redmine are: flexible platform, API, open-source and highly configurable, stability.
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Reliability and Availability
I can only remember a couple of times in 4 years that Core has been unavailable.
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No answers on this topic
Performance
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.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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.
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Redmine is free, easy to use and it's everything you could want in a free project management program. The fact that it has wiki integration and that it can track on such a granular level is amazing. Assigning tasks to other users, such as our development team, is fantastic and ensures we are always up-to-date on where we are what - on what projects.
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Online Training
Make sure you have someone training you that fits your style of learning.
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No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
wont let me skip
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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.
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Redmine is much for granular than Trello. The detail and record tracking in Redmine can't really be compared to that in Trello. While they can both track things and there is a record of changes... Redmine is more detailed and more geared toward long term projects where Trello is great for short terms notes and tasks.
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Scalability
This software works on a small and large scale.
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • 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
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  • The "free" bit definitely has a nice impact on ROI. Granted, there are other factors, but not shelling out a ton of cash at the outset is definitely a plus.
  • Once everyone gets into the flow of things, Redmine quickly becomes a huge factor in ensuring proper communication and quality in projects. Having everything centrally located reduces the time and effort needed to gather necessary information to proceed forward.
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ScreenShots

BQE CORE Screenshots

Screenshot of Core powered by BQE SoftwareScreenshot of BQE CORE Project Dashboard ViewScreenshot of BQE CORE 360* Firm Performance ViewScreenshot of BQE CORE Reporting & AnalyticsScreenshot of BQE CORE Project Time EntryScreenshot of BQE CORE Project Expense Tracking