Harvest vs. Hiveage

Harvest is ideally suited for a variety of scenarios, particularly in the realms of freelance or consulting work, where accurate hour tracking for billing is crucial. It excels in small to medium businesses managing team projects, allowing for effective resource allocation and time management across multiple concurrent projects. For budgeting and forecasting, Harvest provides valuable data, aiding in accurately estimating the duration and cost of future projects based on past data. It's also highly beneficial for remote or distributed teams, thanks to its cloud-based platform that facilitates seamless coordination. Additionally, its detailed reporting features enhance client transparency, fostering trust through clear communication of time spent on projects. However, Harvest may be less suitable for larger enterprises with complex integration needs or specialized industries requiring more niche features. Small startups or individuals on tight budgets might find the cost challenging, especially if they don't fully utilize all its features. Lastly, for those needing only basic time tracking, simpler or free tools might be more appropriate, making Harvest an unnecessary expenditure for basic needs.

Incentivized

For a very small business or a freelancer this is an excellent billing/invoicing system. Easy to get set up and configured quickly so you can get paid online quickly. It works very well for what it is intended. But for a growing small business it doesn't have the more complex accounting/bookkeeping features you might need. There is some limitation to customization as well.

Incentivized

• Consistently making updates to better serve their wide variety of users
• Allows for a decent amount of customization - you can put in different tasks for different departments, you can put in project costs on a one-time or recurring basis to compare time to money, etc.
• It's pretty easy to pull customizable reports to fit what data you want to look at.

Incentivized

• Setting up to receive online payments from a number of payment processors was quick and easy, and the range of processors was excellent.
• Invoicing and recurring invoicing were easy and straightforward to use, and clients liked it as well.
• The entire system is user-friendly and very easy to use for anyone. It has all the basics you need for billing/invoicing for a small business and is especially ideal for freelancers.

Incentivized

• We would love to see Harvest build a feature for more detailed proposals that could be signed by the client and then automatically be turned into a billable invoice. The estimate falls short of this for larger projects.
• Sending an invoice directly to the client from the Harvest dashboard can sometimes fail. Because it's coming from a spoofed email- some clients never get the invoice because it get's trapped in their spam folder.

Incentivized

• Mobile app still needed some work, but they were going in the right direction.
• Would like to see them add more accounting/bookkeeping functions.
• Preferred the old pricing structure vs the current one.

Incentivized

Again, just a minor compatibility issues using with other platforms such as Basecamp, but it does do everything promised. The only downfall we have found is having to create a job in both platforms and then connecting them later vs being able to create a project once and having them automatically connect.

Incentivized

I have not actually had any customer support issues as the product just works for me and I have not needed it. So using that as the basis of making my assessment on support I would reckon the team are pretty responsive and attentive to customer needs. I have only used the solution on Chrome and Android so have no idea what the experience is like on other browsers or phone operating systems.

Incentivized

Everhour is just very rudimentary and ugly. It did the okay for time tracking and basic reports — but it wasn’t very intuitive and could’ve been a lot more elegant. You couldn’t edit other users time or make corrections it was just a data pull and that was it.

Open air is even worse. it’s like something out of 1985. Extremely ugly and not at all easy to use. It fulfilled the basic requirement of tracking time and we did not use it for anything else. When they raised the price to eight grand a year, despite our limited use of it’s functionality. We quickly dropped them.

Incentivized

Hiveage and FreshBooks are actually pretty comparable. I tested both before choosing Hiveage. At the time that I chose Hiveage, the reason for choosing it was that the pricing was cheaper with their old pricing structure (you could select what features you did and didn't need as "modules" and just pay for what you used). The pricing is now comparable and both offer the same features, and similar ease-of-use.

Incentivized

• Better tracking of time for projects = better quotes for clients! In turn, they trust us more, because we're only billing for the time used and projects completed.
• We can also have clear conversations with employees about productivity and provide feedback with real numbers that the employee has control over.

Incentivized

• Hiveage was perfect for my small business when I was smaller, and it worked well to get invoices paid online from clients quickly and easily.
• The invoices were professional-looking, and the ease of use to make payments made clients happy.
• Keeping track of time for billing to specific projects was advantageous as well.

Incentivized