Kintone vs. Projector 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

We think Projector PSA is a great tool to track and manage people in a professional service environment like management consulting. This system is easy to set up, easy to understand and should easily suit the needs of smaller and medium sized firms. It may be less appropriate for firms that rely very heavily on project management through another system (like MS Project) or firms that rely very heavily on a sales pipeline tracking system. While still very much possible to use, you would (I believe) have to do some re-keying between systems

• 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

• Time tracking. For a service company that typically bills retainers, it is very important to be able to assign a direct cost to your resources at all levels and analyze your profitability.
• Expense reporting. Projector easily tracks expenses of all types and allows you to categorize them under non-billable projects, client billable projects and/or client development ventures.
• Reporting. Projector has a large list of standard reports right at your fingertips. These reports can be extracted as Excel docs, mdp files and other useful formats. They are intuitive, clear and easy to analyze. For those you need on a standard basis, you can set them up to pull on a recurring basis. It should be noted that all reports are easily customized and Projector's support team is always there to help get you the information you need.

Incentivized

• 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 split between the desktop and web environments was awkward at times.
• While the reporting modules are powerful, creating reports can be complex and required a fairly deep knowledge of the product.
• The appearance and interface of the desktop application appears somewhat dated.

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 have been using this tool for a year now and find our use of it continually evolves and broadens. We are also very excited about the overhaul that's under way and feel many of the improvements being put in place will help make us that much more effective and efficient. The Projector team is also very responsive and collaborative in terms of user feedback and improvement suggestions, which helps us know they will work hard to help us get what we need out of the tool.

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

Desktop interface feels complex to new users.

Never had an issue with this.

Incentivized

In 5 years of use we have never experienced an unscheduled outage.

No issues.

Incentivized

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

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

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

We switched to Projector from Open Air. While Open Air was a good tool, we found it wasn't really designed for project management at the level of detail we needed from our PSA and used MS Project and Excel to supplement Open Air. We also struggled with the invoicing side of it, manually combining invoice summaries with custom time and expense reports in Acrobat. Projector however, was designed for project management. We are able to manage projects, track time and expenses, and invoice all out of one system. The project setup can accommodate a wide range of complexity, including milestones, dependencies, etc. Project and resource dashboards also help see the services portfolio and team at a summary level and allows us to zero in on particulars easily and more meaningfully than we were ever able to with Open Air. Invoice templates are also easily customized and we were able to get several set up quickly to meet our needs. Lastly, Open Air required us to purchase and pre-pay licensing for a year, so if we lost staff mid-way through the year, the unused seat was not prorated. Projector licensing is paid monthly based on actual number of active users that month, which makes more sense for a team with fluctuating headcount.

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

Incentivized

• 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

• Even in the small time that I stayed to see Projector PSA reporting I saw ROI projections become more realistic. There was real data to analyze that proved we were spending way too much and charging way too less on some projects.
• Although employees were not used at entering their hours, this single reporting improved operations management and validated employees concerns that more people were needed to manage workload
• Project proposals were more realistic because they were driven by real data.
• Decision making overall for the department became more efficient and effective

Incentivized