TrustRadius Insights for Kantata PS Cloud are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
Mavenlink is a versatile project management software that is vital to the daily functioning of organizations. Users utilize Mavenlink for a range of tasks, including project management, time tracking, expense reporting, resource planning, and collaboration across departments and organizations. With Mavenlink, users can create and manage projects, track progress, assign tasks, and effectively manage time. The software provides transparency and organization to projects, allowing users to see who is assigned to each project and manage their weekly time effectively. Mavenlink also offers better visibility on projects, resources, and tracking, enabling users to make informed strategic decisions. Additionally, the software integrates with other tools like Salesforce and Netsuite, further enhancing coordination among different functions within an organization. Despite its powerful features, some users find Mavenlink difficult to navigate and expensive. Nonetheless, it remains a valuable tool for managing complex projects and improving project management efficiency.
Mavenlink is used for project management across all service teams. We have integrations with our CRM so pipeline projects are automatically created so we can directly manage capacity within Mavenlink. We also have integrations with our finance system so ACV is automated. For each project we track pace, margins, and workload balance.
Pros
Logging time
Outstanding/upcoming project tracking
Capacity planning
Cons
Custom reporting
Gantt chart
Likelihood to Recommend
Mavenlink is a great tool managing a project's entire lifecycle including pipeline, capacity, margins, etc. Whenever I have any questions their support staff is always quick to respond! I've seen their new availability match for team builder and love the ability to drill-into people availability so I can better staff my projects based on project specific needs.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Professional Services (Computer Software company, 10,001+ employees)
Managing the entire lifecycle of a project from the conceptualization phase to the termination phase is critical and requires a powerful project management software like Mavenlink. We tend to rely on Mavenlink to manage tasks, deadlines and financial perfomance and we use it as an online workspace that features latest activities, team members and future tasks.
Pros
Sorting of active projects using the project cards
Estimation and management of project resources using the profit margin modeler
Timesheets and expense reports to track time and expenses
Cons
Most advanced features are included in the Enterprise plan
Can take some time to learn but gets easier once you get used to it
Likelihood to Recommend
Mavenlink helps any size of a business in managing projects, team activities and collaborating with clients globally especially in the services industry. It brings convenience and an easy way to control workflow quality and organizes all files in one place plus project managers enjoy the time and budget tracking feature.
We use it internally to track project hours & milestones and billables vs non-billable tasks. 3 of our departments use it. We are able to provide a breakdown of utilization hours for the client and also identify internally where the majority of hours are being spent (ie. troubleshooting, integrations, etc.).
Pros
Track hours granularly
Provide detailed project plans
Easy timesheet view for hours tracking
Cons
UI can get a tad overcomplicated.
External client facing links are static.
Older UI
Likelihood to Recommend
Combo PM and financial recording tool. We choose to purchase a tool that checked a few boxes rather than one where it was solely PM focused.
VU
Verified User
Project Manager in Professional Services (Computer Software company, 201-500 employees)
Mavenlink is being used to track time within a large portion of our sales and support organization to track time, both productive and nonproductive, for all projects, both internal and external. Management uses it to determine if a given team is being utilized well and/or needs additional head count.
Pros
Doesn't require page refresh.
Works in Safari.
Text input is flexible.
Cons
Entering PTO is a UX nightmare.
Logs out too frequently.
Searching for tasks is a pain.
Likelihood to Recommend
As far as time tracking software goes, this is on the better side. However, like most time tracking software, it's focused (in terms of UX) on the folks consuming the data, not the folks entering the data. It's still a royal pain to use. So it's above average for what it does, but there's an extremely low bar for this type of software
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Professional Services (Computer Software company, 201-500 employees)
For the last two years, our company has utilized Mavenlink as it's primary Project Management tool. Unfortunately, this tool fails in a poor user experience, bloated software, dated UI and very poor support from the professionals over at Mavenlink. We were met with promise after promise about exciting new features that are not detailed in any form of roadmap. We gave it two years and in the end, Mavenlink just couldn't keep up with modern day project management software.
It's incredibly slow and it's difficult to get the information that you need quickly and efficiently. As a person who has used it for 2 years, I can safely say that it lacks any real support. It hasn't received any kind of facelift since we adopted the program. Also, ITS INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE! I'm talking tens of thousands of dollars a year to get your company utilizing this system. It's simply not competitive and does not justify the cost.
Pros
Offers visuals on project budget
Has a decent interface for managing your team
Email notifications, though difficult to filter can be good indicators of tasks starting and finishing
Cons
Where to begin. The email notifications are next to impossible to get right. Your team will be bombarded with notifications that carry no real weight.
The cost is just too high. Compared to other PM software, this one is in the tens of thousands of dollars for a company to utilize for such a dated piece of software.
There are so many layers to this tool that it is difficult to decipher permissions for users.
You can't add photos in comments! Seriously it's 2019 and they can't implement a simple field that allows for images to be pasted right in with the comments. Everything has to be an attachment, which is cumbersome and slows progress.
Likelihood to Recommend
I honestly am not sure where Mavenlink would be suited. Perhaps in the manufacturing industry, but not a service based industry. It's just too convoluted when it comes to getting your settings, project bill rates and reports out. I consider it a glorified spreadsheet that hasn't been updated in some time.
All in all, we were ultimately really just frustrated with the slowness of the system. It just didn't make sense that page load was over 5 seconds for projects. Everything just felt bloated.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Corporate (Computer Software company, 11-50 employees)
Mavenlink is used for tracking time and projections. It is used by the Customer Success department mostly, but Sales also uses it. Before Mavenlink, we would spend a variable amount of times on projects and so it was difficult for management to decipher why this was happening. We used to use Salesforce before in order to track updates for all the projects.
Pros
It allows a lot of customization in regards for projects if you want them to be extremely detailed on tasks
Master planning feature gives a great overall view for me planning my projects out
The design looks better than Salesforce, color coding certain projects indicating for their statuses
Cons
Our team has to put all of our project updates in before a certain time before our meeting starts. Very annoying to remember that.
Our current process is extremely tedious in regards to marking each task as complete as I work throughout the day. As an engineer, I don't want to be thinking about marking tasks all day, I want to make it as streamlined as possible.
Extremely difficult and time-consuming to search for specific projects and tasks. Very frustrating for me as a worker when I need to do it quickly.
Likelihood to Recommend
Probably well suited from an analytics perspective for a management team. Asking questions like how many hours have each team member in a project spent in total? Are the hours being spent on certain projects optimal?
From a worker's perspective, it's a nightmare. Every single day I have to go into the timesheet and mark my time. If the project's task is not on there, I have to click "Projects". I have to search for my project. I have to go to the tasks. I have to add the task. Then I have to go back into my timesheet. Then, sometimes I'm not even assigned a project, so I have to ask someone to assign it to me.
It's possible that my company hasn't fully optimized Mavenlink to the point where it's not annoying to workers anymore. But it should just be easier, I don't know how to help there.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Customer Service (Internet company, 51-200 employees)
We use Mavenlink within professional services at my company to track project tasks on launch services. We have all the team members using Mavenlink to assign and track billable and non-billable time to help determine our gross and net utilization. Furthermore, we use the platform to understand if the time spent on actual projects is in-line and consistent with the projected project hours.
Pros
Mavenlink is an easy to use tool out of the box that requires very little training for new team members, usually, no more than 20 minutes of coaching is required by a peer to get someone using the tool effectively.
Reporting functions are powerful and the ease with which you can set up and run custom reports is great. We spent a little time developing, automating and scheduling reports which have saved us a tremendous amount of time and effort every week.
Mavenlink allows our team to use the tool in real-time to track the amount of time spent against given tasks, this allows us to accurately bill time against projects and track employee utilization.
Cons
Albeit intuitive, the user interface can be complex at times requiring time to learn the platform before being able to harness the many features.
Unless a project has tasks already assigned, you can't track time against a project and create a new task at the same time. This is a minor but annoying detail which forces one to go to another part of the portal to create a task and then revert to tracking time against the said task.
Some things seem to be missing from the dashboard like a real-time project utilization for hours like a widget.
Likelihood to Recommend
We find Mavenlink to be very well suited to track launch programs and projects. Mavenlink allows us to see how many hours were billed overall and for which specific and various tasks they were billed for. The reporting function is also easy to use and very granular, allowing our team to easily and quickly see utilization.
VU
Verified User
Project Manager in Professional Services (Internet company, 201-500 employees)
Mavenlink is our entire company's project management solution. As a music production company, we struggled to find different solutions that would work for our team. We needed a highly customizable tool that did not come off as too cumbersome or "corporate" looking for our creative departments to be able to utilize. Mavenlink provides a simple and clean user interface that is easy to navigate, has clear data visualization tools, and lets our project managers see the exact information they need.
We use it across all our departments. Our operations team sets up the backend information, from budgets to planned hours, and goes over it with our creative and account teams. The account team manages the project hours and milestones, where our creatives manage their own expenses. We've set it up in a way that allows for checks and balances for approving invoices, and have also customized several reports ourselves. Mavenlink even provided me with their training tools they give to report building employees so I can learn and create them on my own.
Pros
Graphical User Interface - it's extremely easy and intuitive to navigate
Customization
Rate Cards and Budgeting
Integrations
Cons
Timesheets - cannot push previous week's projects/tasks to current for easier entry. You have to manually select the projects/tasks each week, every other time tracking software has a push previous week feature
Bulk editing - cannot bulk assign users to tasks. Makes it extremely tedious to do each project
Rate Card Issues - you cannot choose which roles are active/inactive on rate cards. Causes several duplicates/zeros for unused roles on rate cards.
Timesheets - there's no accountability for having people track their time. No option to lock accounts or notifications that they're behind on time tracking
Too robust in areas - there are several areas in Mavenlink that I would likely want to take advantage of but just don't know how to operate. Did not get adequate training on newer features. Maybe webinars?
Tasks - no hours tasks vs. expense tasks. Hard to prevent user error from tracking hours to expense tasks which causes the budget to burn.
Likelihood to Recommend
Mavenlink would be well suited for smaller companies I feel since it does seem to lag a bit when it's having to process a lot of information. With individuals who only have a smaller number of projects, this might work well. But Mavenlink seems to be constantly pulling from all the data from the company and not just what's relevant to that specific user.
As a tech and telecom PR, marketing and event planning firm, we use Mavenlink to manage all of our projects that involve design and/or outside freelancers to help us all have one easily accessible, easy to use, organized portal to keep projects in motion, and for a simplified way to keep track of all tasks, revisions, pricing, invoicing and more.
Pros
Great user interface
Portal allows us to easily stay organized for projects
Portal allows for easy collaboration
Cons
None I can think of right now
Likelihood to Recommend
Mavenlink is the ideal tool for all business-related projects that involve a lot of planning, task-oriented details, team collaboration and more.
Mavenlink is used by our Branded Department. We use the tool to track the production of all projects our department receives. We rely on the Timeline tab to track our deliverables to be sent to clients so they understand the length of a project and when they are responsible for feedback. We use the time tracking tool to help up understand how much effort is being put into a project. We use this as a gauge for if we are over spending or meeting the mark on a project.
Pros
Create custom fields specific to our department.
Easily track time on projects and tasks.
Creating timelines with templates so we aren't starting from scratch each time.
Cons
A better resourcing tool. Its difficult to schedule time to a person.
Cleaner section for communication.
A better reporting functionality. No way for someone not on every project to see the big picture.
Likelihood to Recommend
Mavenlink is well suited for a company looking to create schedules for projects and help teams stay on track. It becomes less helpful for when the quantity of projects increases. If you need to tool to understand how much work is on your team's plate it is not as useful unless you have great reporting skills.
VU
Verified User
Analyst in Sales (Internet company, 1001-5000 employees)
