Paymo vs. Planview AdaptiveWork

Well suited: tracking time, making notes to share with clients, live reporting. Less so: tracking and bookkeeping - they don't market it as a bookkeeping app, though they do allow for invoicing through it. Still, my needs are such that I use a separate app for tracking receipts against a project and then invoicing clients.

Incentivized

I've been an AdaptiveWork (Clarizen) admin for the past 14 years, so I've seen much improvement since I started working with the product. I'm very happy we can utilize the hybrid mode by using the cards, I think this was long overdue but it works very well.

Incentivized

• Time tracking. As long as you set up everything correctly on the front end, you don't have to think about it again and it will run in the background.
• Job management. Organizes jobs intuitively and can easily archive jobs.
• Support. If you ever have an issue or questions, they have a chat feature and will usually respond in a couple hours.

Incentivized

• Many ways to acclimate to the system; documentation, videos, community, and contacts.
• Planview provides scalable customization options tailored to the unique needs of each business unit or department. Easily add or remove fields in the system. As the admin, it was easy to learn how to configure.
• Offers flexibility to adapt to existing systems and align with organizational workflows and processes. There are multiple ways to customize each part of the system to meet our needs.

Incentivized

• The main area for improvement is exportability of data. It's tough to get full data out of Paymo. You can export most things in CSV format, but if you were to start with Paymo and want to switch to another project management and accounting platform, there would be substantial manual effort involved.
• There also aren't as many integrations for Paymo as some of the more mainstream project management suites. This isn't necessarily Paymo's fault. It's just a function of them still being one of the "little guys." Something to be aware of before you select this platform though.

Incentivized

• Planview AdaptiveWork's ability to create relations between work estimates, resources, and time is one of its strengths but also one of its drawbacks. The average user is a little less considerate of the way these things interact with each and the automatic way in which Planview AdaptiveWork will affect one or the other can occasionally create a confusing scenario if the user is unaware of how changing one will affect the other

Incentivized

I give my renewal of this product a 9. It's only because we never know what product may come out next and how other factors in our office political environment may cause impact upon this. If I always had my way, this is what we'd settle on as our de facto project management system.

It is a complete, a bit overambitious app but with many features that are needed. I didn't need most of the features but managed to make the most of the two I was using. Also, I think it is a well-rounded app and I am considering moving some team collab there.

Incentivized

It is easy to configure, intuitive. The customization process is in some ways better than Salesforce.com. It has a great UI. It does however depend on how it's implemented.

The design of it is generally fine, however the ability to data upload people from a spreadsheet is an obvious miss.

Sometimes it is slow when everyone is entering their time on Fridays or Mondays but other than that we rarely see downtime and maintenance notifications are well in advance.

Reports: Quick to Reasonable

Most Ancillary Pages: Quick to Reasonable
(By "ancillary" I mean lesser used/master data maintenance pages - e.g. People, Customers, Individual Tasks, Milestones, etc.)

Work Plan (with 100 sub items): Reasonable to Slow

Good! Fast, excellent, speedy responses. They always wanted to know why and how they could improve on something (good on receiving feedback, too). Not that they were much needed, but my limited experience with them is good; they were really keen to understand what the problem was really about and how they could help with it.

Incentivized

It's a good experience overall. Clarizen was useful when needed. It's mostly needed for advice on how to do more sophisticated actions or how to change something that was set up administratively. It's seldom used otherwise. The product consistently works, the documentation is acceptable, and the generally intuitive product is easy enough for most staff to pick up without much issue.

Incentivized

• We worked with a Project Manager on their side. He was very good about developing a project plan to hit our goal. I think we had weekly or twice weekly calls – very steady cadence over 3 month period.
• Their PM skills were great – kept us on task. For the last week, they sent 2 people on site and they did training for power users. After that a couple of them revisited here

It's easy to access and frequently offered. Often I'm amongst only a few people on the call and get virtually individual attention. I also learn and share with the other attendees and we can see how we've each solved similar challenges.

We have been able to implement AdaptiveWork pretty easily but it requires updating of resource availability and continuous training as roles change and new people join the company. Other documentation is used such as spreadsheets for longer range planning and project approval

Incentivized

Similar in almost all project management aspects... Paymo seems to have a slight edge in invoicing and reporting. They are also adding new features regularly so that (in our opinion) makes the investment worth it. Customer support has also been terrific. Easy onboarding process and we found this solution the easiest to get started doing actual work with.

Incentivized

Planview AdaptiveWork was the right size, at the right price point that fit our customization and integration flexibility. It is intuitive to use but allowed us to add complexity as our needs grew

Incentivized

• It helped us to realize that our actual spend for events like trade shows was actually higher with our manpower included

Incentivized

• Planview AdaptiveWork allows us to report out on the status of our real estate projects on a regular basis. We have internal objectives that need to be met for on-time delivery and Planview AdaptiveWork provides us the data to be able to show how the teams are tracking on delivery.

Incentivized