OpenAir PSA vs. Todoist

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

[Todoist: To-Do List & Task Manager is] fantastic for small teams or for personal use. Really simple and easy to use so requires very little in the way of onboarding and gets people engaged quickly in the tasks they need to complete. May not be perfect where more complex usage is required but integrates with other tools so time tracking and other add ons are more than possible through other tools.

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.

• Being able to manage tasks across multiple devices and platforms is absolutely critical to me. If I am out of the office, the tasks will be on my phone. But they are also readily accessible on the web, on my desktop, and on my iPad.
• There are several ways to organize your tasks... via Projects, Labels, Boards, Lists, etc. that allow users to use Todoist to fit their productivity workflow. I use them all and I have been delighted to see how Todoist has continued to improve and advance the Todoist application over the years.
• I rely extensively on recurring tasks which allow me to never forget a birthday, monthly submission, chore at home, etc. Todoist offers many ways to manage recurring tasks, such as, "every week", "every April 8", "every fourth Thursday in November", etc.

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

• Task Dependencies - Particularly for business projects, I'd love if we could make one team member's task dependent on another's where we could say "do this task 3 days after another one is complete"
• No Two Factor Authentication - For me personally, I like to keep all my passwords secure and backed up by two-factor authentication. Just wish this was something Todoist offered!
• Adding Start Date & End Date - Sometimes I set an end date farther in the future, but I'm not alerted that I need to be working on it before then to achieve that due date. If I look at the "Next 7 Days" section, I can see upcoming tasks, but ideally, I'd love to be able to set a start date and an end date so it could appear in today's tasks without needing to be completed today.

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.

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

Excellent features and concept, simple implementation, but the software is not very clear in training new users and communicating features. The occasional unexplained crash or freeze is not handled gracefully by the desktop software, requiring either the user or tech support to manually restart.

Incentivized

We have not had any outages.

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.

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

I've been able to find answers to any questions I have in the support documents. You can explore key features and view ideas and best practices for getting organized with Todoist. You can also fill out a support form to submit a request for customized help if you run into anything not covered in the support documents.

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

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

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

Todoist is more focused on its goal than Google Keeps and is far more intuitive to use. For example, with just a click we see immediately that Todoist provides a way to distill tasks so that we only see what's immediately pertinent to us, via the Filters (which can be customized and set to various priority levels). Also, Todoist's project board is something Google Keep doesn't even offer, it really can't even compete with Todoist simply because Todoist does so much more and was obviously designed with the business professional in mind.

Incentivized

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

• 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

• A good project management tool for daily completing/recycling my customers' project line items--time to value.
• Incomplete items stay on the list where I can see them and reschedule easily if needed--time to value.
• Built-in completion metrics for reviewing project completion success--time to value, and indirectly, customer satisfaction.

Incentivized