Zoho Projects vs. Zywave PlanAdvisor

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

We utilize only one of the four components available because the other three are either too time consuming for what you get or just don't deliver what we need. The renewal estimator is the real star here and worth the cost of the tool (even if you don't use the other components, although we hope Zywave PlanAdvisor puts some money/time here to further develop them). It accurately projects renewals which help employers budget as they prepare for renewal. It is invaluable in our marketing and carrier negotiations because it is a an underwriting tool with the science and language that will speak to an underwriter... it's not a best guess, but accurate and respectable analytics.

Incentivized

• 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

• Renewal projection - forecasting renewal rates is accurate and has been very beneficial to our clients and business.
• Single period report is decent, but not as user friendly as we'd like it to be. It really only works with certain carriers.

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

• Single Period Report: We hoped it would be like a "DMW lite" but it is only usable with a few carriers, and it's clunky/time consuming to use. We stopped using it.
• Plan Modeler: It's a good idea, but we don't use it much. It needs more development and modeling options.
• Plan Selector: It's a good idea, but it's too time consuming to add the info. If we could import it easily, we'd use it much more.

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.

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.

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

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

• 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

• The renewal estimator has helped us win new business!
• The renewal estimator has successfully helped us with marketing and carrier negotiations, i.e., it holds weight with underwriters and is hard to argue against.
• The renewal estimator has helped us prepare our clients for their upcoming renewal by forecasting cost changes well in advance so that there are no major shocks or surprises.

Incentivized