Kantata PS Cloud vs. CommUnity by Personify

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.

Incentivized

You can tell from the CEO and all staff that this is a very competent company that wants you to succeed with integrity. There is a strong
support and services team that works collaboratively with us to make
sure we are always getting what we need. They provide
24x7 emergency support, online ticket support, email support, a client
community, and the ability to call and talk to the same account manager or
community consultant every time (I even have Mariano's skype and he replies on weekends!). They recently launched a client community - so they are now even practicing what they preach. Our questions in the client community are always answered quickly.

• 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

Incentivized

• Design of your community through the admin panel is very easy to pick up. Drag and drop functionality on the site admin allows you to make quick changes to your community on the fly. Easy to modify the look and feel of the site and keep pace with the changing needs of our membership.
• The platform is updated on an ongoing basis with new exciting functionality added with each release.
• The mobile version of the platform is very easy to use and looks great on all devices and operating systems.
• Feedback on enhancements to the platform are taken very seriously and often suggestions from customers end up on the roadmap for the platform for future enhancements.

• The Gantt chart does not allow for baselines to be stored
• There is no means to upload an excel task tracker and build a plan using an upload
• The schedule does not allow for planning of holidays
• The status report functionality needs to be improved

Incentivized

• Not much to say in this section. Anything that the product doesn't currently do is quickly identified and prioritized appropriately on their road map.
• Chat room functionality doesn't exist yet, but has been placed on roadmap.
• Instant messaging between users doesn't exist yet, but is roadmapped.
• We're unable to run a couple of specific reports, based on what's available in the reporting tool. There's a workaround that our community administrator can perform that is a little more time consuming.

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

Small World Labs has been a great partner in relaunching our community. They have had great ideas of new ways to use our community to better service our members. They are very knowledgeable in the world of online communities and are forward thinking about new functions to enhance the user experience.

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

Incentivized

There are a multitude of options to configure the exact user experience you want and what you want to emphasize.

Mavenlink gives advance notice for system upgrades, and they're not during our business day. Mavenlink has always been available when we needed it.

Uptime has never been an issue.

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.

Speed is not an issue.

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.

Incentivized

The people at Small World Labs are very accessible. I can email, open a ticket, or call and they are there. I'd also point out that senior management is quite available too. We frequently have talks about potential strategies and new things we might be doing, which is great. I think the whole organization genuinely likes what they do and likes helping us succeed.

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.

In-person training is more ad-hoc based on if they are traveling to you or you are going to visit them. I imagine that if I paid for in-person training that it would be set up as well, but I've just used the standard training that comes with the initial set up and ongoing support.

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.

Online training is through online webinar & how-to posts and videos in the client community.

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

We had staff turnover at our own organization during the implementation. We were able to get the community up and live in a good timeframe even though that happened and we had to switch some people around for managing the project on our side.

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.

Incentivized

We evaluated a few different community platform vendors over the course of a couple of months. I believe we also evaluated Jive, Lithium, KickApps, and Powered.

It's very easy to add users and contractors into Mavenlink. There's also an option that let's you manage access for teams in multiple locations.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Our community has had more than 100,000 interactions within the first 7 months of launching - and the product has been stable.
• Small World Labs even contributes to the conversations in the community by participating with our community members and moderating, when necessary.
• Our community experiences a high level of knowledge sharing (one of our goals), and is resulting in more informed and creative volunteers.