Accelo provides cloud-based Professional Services Automation (PSA) software designed to unify and streamline client, project, resource, and financial management for service-based businesses. By centralizing operations into a single, intuitive platform, Accelo eliminates the need for fragmented tools, delivering a comprehensive solution that improves efficiency, transparency, and collaboration across teams. Serving industries such as consulting, engineering, architecture, IT…
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Kantata PS Cloud
Score 8.5 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Kantata Cloud (formerly Mavenlink + Kimble) provides project management and collaboration software for small to mid-sized professional services companies. Features include resource management, project dependencies, time and expense tracking, file sharing, versatile user permissions, private messaging, planning and reporting.
Harvest and Asana combined don't even scratch the surface of what Accelo can do. Harvest is nothing more than rudimentary time tracking. It's about as easy to use as they come, but it stops there. There's no tie in to project management, invoicing, capacity planning, etc. and …
We switched from Teamwork to Accelo. Teamwork outperforms Accelo when it comes to tasks and email communications. However, Accelo does exceed Teamwork when it comes to impeccable time management. Being able not to overspend time on a client has had a significant benefit in ROI.
Accelo doesn't really exceed any competitors in any one area of their product, but in 2015 when we made the move this was the best option that included all the tools we wanted. However, user adoption was low in some areas due to the UI, so we scaled back Accelo and added other …
We used Workfront prior to using Accelo, mainly for project management and retainer management. There is no comparison between the two as Accelo blows it away.
Smartsheets is a great tool but it was missing the client communications piece. That has been the best part of Kantata where I don't have to search back for emails anymore and it's very easy to find notifications and signoff for deliverables within Kantata. Smartsheets does …
I have not had much experience with this other product, It was only for a few months during a part-time so I did not have to interact with the product on a regular basis. However, Mavenlink is much more intuitive and requires little to no training prior to using it. It is also …
Mavenlink is unique in that it provides a time audit summary that compares the actual
hours worked against the capacity of the work weeks or how many they could work
in a week; it also allows us to track the progress of work hours and the authorized
It was selected as it provides a central base for us to manage to business. The project management tools along with resourcing tools allows us to make the best use of our resources. User interface is intuitive and as it is browser based there is no need for installing any …
For holistic project management and finance, Mavenlink blows these competitors out of the water, at least that was the case when we made the switch, though I'm sure both programs have been continuing to improve. As far as time tracking, Mavenlink is so much faster and easier …
The biggest benefit of using Mavenlink is that the vendor allows you to pay for only what you use. Mavenlink is capable of connecting projects with people, unifying projects and financials and provides teams with technology and methodology that enable them to complete projects …
Prior to Kimble, we were using a system called Deltek Traffic Live. This system was sufficient in handling simple small data but was extremely not user-friendly. It required a lot of manual adjustments with exported data since we couldn't tailor the system to our business …
While Trello is very visual, it doesn't have the same, robust abilities that Kantata has for time-tracking, burn rates, and timelines. My design and development teams love the visual aspects of Trello for QA and for Content Layout of website builds, but Trello lacks all the …
Note: I used these in other agencies and other companies before coming to Golden Spiral. While the interfaces and mobile functionality for Asana and Trello are much nicer than Mavenlink, they just don't have the power and connectivity of MVL. Microsoft Project requires a slide …
Project and Resource Management Systems Expert | Founder | Speaker
Chose Kantata PS Cloud
Mavenlink is the only platform that gave me a balance between a great, intuitive user experience with good reporting, good templates, and resource/capacity planning.
We have since switched over to Jira and let me tell you, it was probably the best decision we have made as a company. We chose Mavenlink based on promises from the sales team about future roadmap work that really never happened. We thought Mavenlink would easily integrate …
I preferred Salesforce better. In Salesforce, I would have a query view of all my projects on one page that I'd bookmark. Then, I'd update each project when needed (that's 3 clicks, from bookmark, to clicking on project, to description). Mavenlink, it takes so much more. There …
We performed an in-depth review of Wrike and Mavenlink and found Mavenlink to outshine Wrike in every category which mattered to our organization and business units. We looked at several case studies in similar companies as ours and found that Mavenlink best aligned with our …
Mavenlink is much more robust than other project management platforms that we have used in the past. The ability to match each task to a preset time, budget and invoice objective is better than their competitors. It is also worth noting that Mavenlink has the built-in time …
We have evaluated about 15 different project management platforms and narrowed down our list to only five (Celoxis, Sciforma, Podio, Mavenlink, and Teamwork). Other solutions we evaluated were not able either to meet our vendor security requirements or were not flexible in …
Mavenlink is not a creative agency specific system which Workamajig is. Mavenlink could use more updates to their resourcing tool, time tracking and reporting in order to be more beneficial to a creative based company.
The best services management, easy operations reporting, and data analytics features from Accelo are impressive and easy on data visualization and workflow management software. Accelo was very helpful in collaboration and easy to collect feedback from integrated platforms and the scheduling ability is very unique. The Automation tools are also cost-effective and the ability to manage time through Accelo is perfect.
Mavenlink is useful for planning and maximizing our resources. Improved resource visibility and control. It helps us determine who is accessible in terms of skill and competency, as well as the amount of work they are capable of handling. Mavenlink is beneficial for forecasting resource needs and reallocating resources to meet goals. Mavenlink is useful to have a control over the work minute by minute, without having to wait for answers. It's flexible to monitor how time, money and margins are managed from anywhere at any time. Mavenlink allows us to examine and act through an industry-leading business intelligence layer that provides you with dozens of well-crafted reports to solve pricing, profit, usage, and availability issues.
Tracking customer interactions. Nice integration with G Suite, could be a lot better if they acknowledged that contacts may actually have more than one email address.
Support Ticket system is integrated, so we can view support history and other email correspondence easily. It's cheaper that Zendesk.
Support is reasonably good, usually prompt and responsive.
Constant development - lots of updates, just not often to areas that we use.
The client portal needs to be improved. It does not have the same user interface as we have within Accelo and we get a lot of client complaints about it.
It needs more executive-style reporting and the ability to create your own reports and filters.
It needs to be faster. With all of the things Accelo is doing to give you all the data, it is kind of slow compared to other systems in the browser.
Although the company I currently work for does not use the product I have recommended that we do switch to Mavenlink. We will be opening some new sites internationally this year and I can see that Mavenlink would be a great product for us to use
Only the app is bad; everything else is fantastic. It has a logical user flow and I barely needed any guidance on how to use it when I first started. As with most softwares there are unseen capabilities I've needed to be shown in order to use, but for my day-to-day tasks I could have figured it out without any training
Very good integration with Google apps. Some complexity is called however in the synchronization between Google Tasks and Maven links tasks. This can sometimes lead to duplicate records in Google Tasks. It has been dissolvable that becomes cumbersome if not properly curated.
From the beginning the Accelo team has been very invested in ensuring our success and overall happiness with the platform. The initial implementation specialists and trainers did a fairly good job of learning our company and needs, and tried to tailor the trainings accordingly. However, once we made the formal switch to the platform, meaning we no longer were using our legacy systems, we found that we had a lot of questions....and a lot of ideas and recommendations. The support team is extremely responsive and seemingly happy to receive our continual feedback. And if we encounter an issue that seems to be a system issue, they work diligently to fix it (we've actually had an engineer join a call with us to learn of the issue - and subsequently fix it)
Kantata support is fantastic! Any issues that arise are always handled quickly and efficiently. Granted, we haven't had many issues to report. Typically, my team tends to only reach out to support if they need assistance remembering how to do something or asking about an improvement. We had Kantata build an integration when we first started using the software, and the support team worked hard to listen and improve the integration.
We prepared questions in advance, and our trainer was an expert in what Mavenlink was and wasn't able to do. We were able to have multiple people trained at once.
The training was very well-organized. We were able to send questions in advance so the instructor knew what to cover, and the brought up related topics to maximize the usefulness of what they were teaching us.
Dedicate as much internal time to the implementation effort as possible, even if you're using a 3rd party or Mavenlink services. Your team knows your processes the best
Harvest and Asana combined don't even scratch the surface of what Accelo can do. Harvest is nothing more than rudimentary time tracking. It's about as easy to use as they come, but it stops there. There's no tie in to project management, invoicing, capacity planning, etc. and the reporting isn't great. Asana we found to be very difficult to use for complex projects with multiple deliverables, multiple deadlines, multiple teams - and it didn't tie back to budgets and hours worked. So the deficiencies of those two tools are what led us to Accelo. In terms of more comparable systems, I had previously used Workamajig. The sophistication of Workamajig was there, but it didn't seem to have quite as much flexibility and customization. ProWorkflow we evaluated just based on sales and marketing information available on the platform and felt it wasn't quite as good.
I have not had much experience with this other product, It was only for a few months during a part-time so I did not have to interact with the product on a regular basis. However, Mavenlink is much more intuitive and requires little to no training prior to using it. It is also more flexible in its ability to display project status in a variety of ways.
Save Money on Lost Time. You won't go over your client retainers in any given month if you use Accelo properly. This ultimately saves your company time and money.
Lost or Broken Communications. They need to get it together with their email system, aka "request inboxes" ... There are too many lost or broken emails for them to be trustworthy with this. My suggestion is to make sure you know everyone you communicate with (including outside sources like Google or other companies) and set them up in Accelo, then send test emails. Also, when in doubt, use your Outlook or other primary sourced email when you want to make sure an email goes through with all appropriate files.
Manvenlink is perfect for showing expenses and income over time and across people.
Manvenlink is adaptable for the integration and automation of the processes of each of our projects in order to optimize resources and improve operational performance.
Mavenlink allows us to determine if our projects are profitable or not, as well as save significant time by automating components such as recurring tasks and having templates, among other things.
Manvenlink is advantageous for our operations due to its simple portfolio management of our projects: manage several projects at once and receive a complete perspective of the development of each one at a glance.
Manvenlink kindly provides us with robust discussion threads, access restrictions, and built-in document management, allowing us to contextualize communications.