Deltek TrafficLIVE vs. Workamajig

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

I think this holds true to almost any CRM, but if you want to truly utilize it you sort of need to go all in. This can become tough with WMJ because it doesn't offer some critical options that many other CRMs do, like the ability to create and send emails, e-newsletters, to throttle and invite outside clients to look at projects, etc. As such we're pairing Workamajig with Hubspot (and slowly phasing out Mailchimp) and trying to keep the data clean and flowing between them all is pretty tough. I'm also not aware of any API bridge from Wordpress to Workamajig so while I can program and feed my leads from my site into the other spaces, Workamajig remains a manual entry for any insertions you want, even if simply as a CSV import.

But - if you're not worried about that and simply want to manage projects, budget time, and scope things, it's a robust system allowing you to do so.

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

• WMJ is a full-stack solution, so you can track the life of a project from beginning to end, and all of the financials associated with it.
• Time entry is easy.
• Project management is robust and yields a tremendous amount of information.
• WMJ has a "sheets"-based interface, which makes navigating thru modules easier.
• There is more than one way to complete any particular task.

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.

• Auto-schedule population - The most inconvenient thing about using JIG was that the dates wouldn't auto-populate. Example: I move the review date but the rest of the dates stay the same. Depending on each project level, if one date is adjusted the rest should update as well. That way we aren't spending a lot of time moving dates around manually.
• Notifications - JIG should have desktop notifications so we can see when tasks are on us even when we aren't in JIG.

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.

We've used QuickBooks and it didn't align well with our business, so there were a lot of insights I wanted from the numbers, but couldn't get. We use Basecamp, which is easy, but can get disorganized pretty quickly and takes discipline to stay structured.

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

• The subscription expense and IT overhead has been substantial. That being said at the time of implementation, most other competing platforms were in line with their pricing.
• As more competitive alternatives have come to market we would have probably gone with an entirely cloud base alternative at a lower price.
• We ended up with ClickUp as our primary project management platform. If our finance/accounting software wasn't already so integrated with Workamjig we would probably switch to it entirely.

Incentivized