Deltek TrafficLIVE vs. Whimsical

On a scale between 1-10, I would score Deltek TrafficLIVE as a 4 in terms of recommendations. This is due to the fact that as a Finance Analyst, I found it a very difficult system to use when all I could get from the system was raw data. It was almost impossible to create reports within the system. It was good, however, for users to input their time.

Incentivized

It's extremely well-suited for rapid wire-framing of concepts, as product teams can quickly collaborate on any idea and create a visual blueprint of it. Whimsical could provide more intuitive feature prioritization templates. The current templates lack the necessary detail and could be further enhanced from a UI/UX standpoint.

Incentivized

• The time sheet area is really good - it's easy to drag and drop and fill in time sheets with allocated tasks quickly, which makes it more likely that people will actually do it!
• It's invaluable to be able to see the time spent on different tasks across a job - both for keeping track of ongoing projects, but also to plan resourcing and costs for the next time.
• It's useful to be able to mark parts of a job as 'complete' before the full job is finished - this makes it easier to track which tasks still have to be finished, and makes sure that people are tracking time to the correct task within the job.
• Job templates are very useful to make sure the same set of tasks is added to each job automatically.

Incentivized

• Simple to use
• Tons of uses
• Can be customized with themeing
• Can organize all your boards pretty much however you want

Incentivized

• One of the main features I would like to see added is another permissions option that allows Studio/Traffic Managers to the see the 'blue' time added that currently only the user can see when they have added their actual hourly time. This would give the option to view quickly the progress of a job, and to see if its still live or completed. There is the option to look at the 'weekly timesheet' but this in my opinion is not nearly as user friendly as being able to look at a glance each calendar.
• It would be hugely beneficial if along the grey bar on the bottom of the homepage another notification is added that a job had been added to Deltek TrafficLIVE. A simple number would alert you that a new job has been added and needs your immediate attention.
• The job search has been conveyed to me by a number of users as not working efficiently enough. If you have the job number then it works perfectly but if you try to locate a job by the account managers name or project name it will not reliably respond in your search.

• It can be a little frustrating trying to line things up exactly right but that's probably more user error than anything

Incentivized

Whimsical is overall very easy to learn and remember. One issue with the usability occurs when you attempt to move connected boxes around the workspace. Frequently connections break or do not add easily, causing further disconnects. You can manually fix these issues, but it's a oprobem that seems would have an easy fix

Incentivized

I reached out to support, as I was interested in possibly investing in the organization, and they quickly and happily informed me they are a bootstrap organization and do not take on investors at this time. The swift response and information readily available for my consumption was extremely helpful and shows how solid the team behind it is.

Incentivized

Synergist - does the same thing, but the interface was far more complicated to use. Looked like a bit of a nightmare to use. Didn't get too far reviewing this one. Was too concerned about on boarding with our workforce.

Paprika - saw a demo, looked 'OK', heard bad reviews from friends in the same industry. Appeared to be plagued with the same issues as Synergistic. Paint to use.

Streamtime - Tested this thoroughly. Loved the interface, and very nearly bought this software over TrafficLIVE for that very reason. In the end it did not allow us to separate time into distinct categories such as 'estimated', 'quoted', 'scheduled', and 'actual'. In Streamtime, if you stretched the time next to a task, it seemed to also adjust the estimate as well. In contrast, Traffic separated time into these dimensions for every task, resulting in a far more useful data set for reporting.

Finally, Traffic was cloud based, which meant that I didn't need the added hassle of hosting and maintenance. In my opinion, Streamtime is suited to a smaller business, maybe 5-20 employees. It might have improved now but it's been two years since I reviewed it.

ClickUp's mind mapping tool was very basic and hard to use from my perspective. Whimsical was by far easier and did what I wanted for a SaaS/cloud-based mind mapping tool. Xmind is fine as a desktop app, but updating the app was a pain whereas, with Whimsical I don't have to worry about that. Also, I wanted to continue working on a mind map wherever I was, even if I didn't have my laptop or device with me and Whimsical allows me to do that.

Incentivized

• We use Deltek TrafficLive in an in-house studio environment, so we don't use all of its features. However, we couldn't function as efficiently without it.

Incentivized

• We've been using free version, so it's a no brainer.
• As it helps us focus on the information organization process, we don't lose time redoing work due to the lack of planning before doing design or code.
• We can collaborate on the same project, so it's easier to get things done as we're working from home as well.

Incentivized