Kintone vs. OpenAir PSA

Kintone is great if you want a software that will help you in managing your data, and keep track of which tasks are assigned to whom. It also helps to streamline communication and information in one central place. However, it is not for you if you are looking for something complex that has to manage a lot of data.

Incentivized

I would only recommend OpenAir if you are a company of 100+ with complex business processes and have a need to integrate into multiple external systems. I think most project managers find it cumbersome and irritating until they are trained on what not to use. It needs a more simplistic obvious approach rather than having every feature exposed all at once.

Incentivized

• Flexibility. You can build apps (without coding) to serve a wide range of processes and projects.
• Ease of use. The interface is intuitive.
• Training. There are resources readily available to train new users. Even starting from scratch, I felt like I was up to speed in just a few hours.

Incentivized

• We had a specific process down pat with QuickArrow and wanted similar functionality. It gave us that and more.
• It has a lot more reporting functionality than QuickArrow. There are hundreds of options for layout, what is reported, etc. I haven’t played too much with those reports yet. We more or less just replicated reports I had in QuickArrow. We needed the professional services/transition team at NetSuite to help me. There are too many options at this point. I imagine we won’t use all of those reports. Quick Arrow had a lot less.
• Mobile Capabilities – There wasn’t a mobile concept for QuickArrow. OpenAir has been beneficial for iPhone users for time sheet submissions. There is no app for Droid users yet. There are not a lot of users out there, who really know how to use it yet. Managers are not using the app for dashboards/reporting, etc. The field has been pretty quiet but they do really like the mobile app feature. They like not having to go to laptop to enter their time. That’s all we require of them – just time entry. We ran into some glitches - some of the time sheets submitted via iPhone did not get to the tool itself. That happened in one instance. I made QA aware of it. I am not sure what the resolution turned out to be.

• I feel that Kintone is not well enough known yet. This means that other apps/APIs are not necessarily easy to connect with Kintone. Yes, you can use Zapier though for interfacing with other apps.
• It would be great if it could give more customized options to change the look and format of certain things. You can make price quote apps, for example, but have to rely on 3rd party apps or programming skills to customize the look and fields.
• If you make a table as an input field, it cannot connect to other internal Kintone apps for lookups and such.
• I think there is more potential to make more customized data graphs.

Incentivized

• The UI of many parts of the system is really poorly designed. Inputting and updating forecasts is a very time-consuming and difficult process for our PMs and it doesn't allow any type of upload from a spreadsheet (which might be easiest in absence of a decent UI).
• I have extensive experience with the reporting piece of OA and have a list of notes and improvements. The entire module is very inflexible at least pieces of it are not intuitive. Easy example: If you create a custom calc with a filter on Project Type to only include hours from our customer projects (Impl and MS), but then create a report with a filter to only show hours from MS, that custom calc won't work properly. The filter logic is unable to handle multiple filters on the same field.
• Specific example of a ticket we've filed but not heard back on: When you close a project, any remaining forecasts from that project remain active and show as "committed hours" against those individuals which doesn't make sense on projects that are closed. Why would you not give an option to delete any remaining forecasts when closing a project as default behavior?

Incentivized

I still think that there's a room for Kintone's future, and high expectations for them in additional features and innovative tools and supports. Truly hope that they will support email features, and standardized supports for various plug-ins with the 3rd party software and apps. In the meantime, we will have to consider our ways of doing our work in all aspects

Incentivized

We plan to continue our use of NetSuite OpenAir for the reasons cited already. Outside factors, behond our control, would be the only reason we would not renew -- such as an executive mandate to use the same platform going forward. If such were to happen, our Services processes would need to be revamped, as other PSA solutions do not support our current have-to-have criteria.

Kintone is agile app and most of the time we can easily come up with new apps. However, there should be more feature-based drag and drop and or a visual-based usability, as we all want to minimize the number of clicks and dropdown menu selections as much as possible. Thanks.

Incentivized

In this day and age I should not have to read a manual to understand a product. It should be intuitive to administrate and perform basic tasks. It feels like a ton of intelligence was poured into making OpenAir feature rich but no where near as much attention was given to the user experience.

Incentivized

Never had an issue with this.

Incentivized

We have not had any outages.

No issues.

Incentivized

The performance was acceptable. If you had a very large data set you were working with it might take a little longer, but within reason.

The support from Kintone has been excellent. On numerous occasions, customer service representatives have proactively reached out to us to see if we needed help with anything. They also scheduled Zoom calls one month after we went live to go over any questions we had. Additionally, they assigned a local account representative to check in on us periodically to provide any necessary help.

Incentivized

As an admin, I've had more contact with OA support than most. I've found their response to tickets typically timely and helpful, however many of the responses to tickets are "we will file an enhancement request" and then I never hear about it again. So not terrible, but not a very fulfilling experience.

Incentivized

Very knowledgeable and able to articulate how other customers configured the solution to meet their needs as well as the best practices they recommended.

We did a 3 day online remote course back in April. NetSuite prefers training to occur before migration. We went over the functionality of tool and three months later we migrated. Personally, I didn’t find it that beneficial. Certain parts of it were beneficial as they applied to me – talked a lot about invoicing capabilities that didn’t apply to me. They also have knowledge base / e-learning assets, but I haven’t referred to them

Everyone has their own tastes of things and way they want to work. Asking them to adapt to the changes with the new tools or apps is always difficult. We would want to start with a very small but best example within the organization, which in our case was that the employees will not be bothered by the bosses by being asked to find the documents, status of the progresses, or major things/requests/projects.

Incentivized

It went fine. Everything came over the way we wanted. In addition to migrating the current projects we wanted to migrate historical data – did that seamlessly. The finished product looked pretty good – just needed to tweak – and they helped us with that

Kintone is the easiest product to create from and the cost is the lowest I believe. In addition, reconfigurability and extendability are great. If you look for a low code tool, you can try Kintone. But as same as another low code tool, don't expect too much.

Incentivized

It was our goal to be on a single vendor solution for all aspects of our business: CRM, Project Management, and Finance. By choosing NetSuite with OpenAir PSA, we were able to eliminate the need for three other vendor solutions that required external integration among the disparate systems (Salesforce.com for CRM, MS Project Server for Project Management, and MS Dynamics for finance).

Incentivized

I could see this work for all departments if implemented correctly.

Incentivized

Once the system is setup, it's easy to manage and maintain.

• It used to take us 15-20 minutes to create a quote for a client. It now takes less than 3.
• It allows a few of our employees to work remotely, which was essentially impossible prior.
• We can see raw data for success/failure rates, which we actively use in our employee review process.

Incentivized

• It covers our requirements for time tracking and project/resource management better than the previous solution we used.
• Project managers are happier having this tool for their job and also because it is running on the cloud as opposed to running on-prem.
• It doesn't help in any way improving the "chasing" of the people that don't submit their time-sheets in time. This one stayed the same as before.

Incentivized