Novatime (discontinued) vs. Zoho Projects

NOVAtime is an excellent choice for employers who need a timekeeping solution with an easy-to-use and understand user interface, great user experience, and great support from the Ascentis user support teams.

My work involves projects of 5-15 people with numerous projects running simultaneously. Prior to Zoho, I did not have a central location from which to view all project statuses at once. Zoho looks to provide this and also looks like it will deliver. I am anxious to see how our organization's use of it develops. At this time, I feel I am likely to recommend Zoho Projects because my organization has made great software decisions in the past so I have a level of trust already that the research has been done that Zoho is the best solution for our line of work.

Incentivized

• It has some really nice scheduling features that allow managers to see the difference between hours expected to work and actual hours worked as well as overtime, absences, and non-scheduled shifts.
• There are easy ways you can transfer a manager's caseload/employees to another manager temporarily if that person is going to be out of the office for an extended period of time without giving away too much personal information - just what would be needed for payroll or time off requests (this can be customized by your administrator).
• The program itself can be customized in many different ways to meet the needs of the company/organization that it is working with.
• The charts/graphs on the new homepage are somewhat helpful and link to useful information.

• Swiss Army Knife: The suite of Zoho projects can be tailored to fit the needs of any business. It's great to have a bunch of different software offerings that will work together seamlessly.
• Task Customization: Zoho allows you to customize your tasks more than other platforms (add start dates, due dates, dependencies, subtasks...)

Incentivized

• For people who don't use it often, they often forget how to navigate the site
• Be able to narrow down PTO options by company

Incentivized

• More flexibility on making the user interface more compact (like Excel or MSP). Current interface is well spaced, but some users may like a more compact view.
• More simplified Gantt Charts that help us understand progress and dependencies.
• Ability to export projects to Excel for sharing with others we can't/don't want to bring on to Zoho projects

Incentivized

The overall satisfaction within the organization has been luke warm, at best. The software may be more conducive for a hospital but I believe there is a reason why we are the lone baseball team utilizing it.

Incentivized

Zoho has been able to fit the needs of our Engineering organization. The employees and management that are using it have not found a 'catastrophic' reason to discontinue use. Although certain features and better support mechanisms would be much better, it has been able to keep with both basic needs and more advanced ones. A majority of the company has enjoyed the basic interface it offers, the apps it has for iPhone and Blackberry, the mobility of updating a project without needing to be connected to any type of server. There are still improvements that can be made in future releases but as the person who originally purchased the solution for our company, I have found it to be an excellently priced solution in the functionality it offers.

On the employee's side of things, Novatime is pretty intuitive and fairly easy to use. All they have to do is either press a button to punch in or punch out. If they are entering in their hours, all they have to do is type in the number of hours per day. On the manager's side of things, Novatime is also fairly easy to use. It highlights in red any missed punches and in green any OT that the employee has. There are links on the homepage of the manager's page that will lead them to a list of all their employees' missed punches for a pay period and they can fix them all before payroll is due. Novatime becomes a bit more complicated on the administrator's side. The issues I have run into with Novatime normally come after updates/upgrades to their system. They have been getting better, but the administrator's side is still a bit clunky and takes a while to find what you are looking for. It is not as intuitive as the other sides and takes a bit of computer knowledge to figure it out.

Zoho Projects is an easy project management tool to use. It provides all the functionality that we required for handling projects. We can easily create personal forms for projects and tasks, allowing us to add and report on our own desire. Apart from this we can create and edit documents in real time which saves our time. This allows us to share text docs, presentations, tables with the whole team and we can work on them together

Incentivized

Has not been down to my knowledge.

Speed meets my expectations.

The program itself can be customized in many different ways to meet the needs of the company/organization that it is working with. The charts/graphs on the new homepage are somewhat helpful and link to useful information. It has some really nice scheduling features that allow managers to see the difference between hours expected to work and actual hours worked as well as overtime, absences, and non-scheduled shifts. Processing payroll is quite simple. PTO request off is straightforward.

Incentivized

Although it might lack intuitiveness, once you get a hang of how Zoho Projects works, you can do a LOT. The impact good project management has on profitability is huge, and it has helped not only improve communication and coordination when working on a project, but more importantly have adequate tracking of time, due dates and potential bottle necks

Incentivized

They actually ended up joining forces to make one platform for all timekeeping solutions. With Novatime and all other modules we have from Ascentis, everything flows very easily.

Incentivized

Zoho Projects provides a more limited set of functionality and customization options than other task/bug trackers on the market, but what it lacks in functionality it makes up for in ease of use. It probably has 80-90% of the features of its competitors but takes about a third of the time to get up and running and realizing value.

Incentivized

• We have had a few scenarios where the PTO accrual dropped off and it did take 3 attempts of reaching out to customer service to get it sorted.
• The customer service team has collaborated with me in creating new PTO categories to automate certain needs to save me some time.

Incentivized

• Unfortunately, prior to creating Project Task Templates we'd occasionally miss a step and something that was necessary would be overlooked.
• The creation of the Project Templates was a team collaborative effort to make sure that everyone had some input as different people was integral to specific projects.
• It took a little while to learn some of the more tricked out features like task dependency but even starting out with the most basic of features was very significant.

Incentivized