Productive

Great software that has everything I need to run a profitable business.

Pros:

Productive is great because I have an overview of every segment of my company in one place. From sales, scheduling projects, communication management, employee management all the way to the reporting. We were paying multiple software apps, which was not only expensive but also confusing and time wasting. With Productive costs were cut down significantly. The support team is very responsive, always available and fast in helping us solve our issues.

Cons:

It takes some time for setting up the organization and getting everybody on board, but with Productive help center and their support team that was done in a jiffy. The software is a bit robust due to its wide pallet of functionalities, so it has a bit steep learning curve.

Perfect even for a small company

Comments: Really great, we'll keep using it as we grow bigger.

Pros:

It has everything you need - from task management (including subtasks and workflows!) to reporting and time management. The price is very reasonable, regardless of the number of users. Some project management software has affordable pricing for a small number of users, only to rip you off when your company grows.

Cons:

Filters for tasks could have more options (e.g. date filter has only equal or not equal). It would be perfect to have a single overview of tasks across all projects. Currently, that is somehow possible but lacks more powerful filters.

Fatal bugs ruin an otherwise promising product

Comments: Productive could be a very promising product but there are bugs littered throughout the product especially in critical modules like timesheets and invoicing which makes us very hesitant to switch over to it. Their support team is slow to answer if you are in the US since they are in Europe, and they don't fix bugs quickly.

Pros:

In theory, Productive has the perfect set of tools for the modern agency. Powerful project budget tools including weekly or monthly budgets for retainer clients make it easy to make sure you are utilizing 100% of budgeted time but no more. Reporting tools are in theory very flexible and easy to spit out exactly the right data you want - from team utilization to billing to profitability, task completion - you name it! Productive is also pretty easy to set up and the UI is very clean, modern, and not clunky in the least bit like many competitors.

Cons:

There are SERIOUS bugs that totally defeat the purpose of using this product. All of these I've brought to their attention but they have dragged their heels on fixing. Here are some of the top bugs: #1: When you/your team logs time and goes to create an invoice from it, the date for every single time entry is off by one day as it appears on the invoice, vs. the date you actually logged that time. You can get the accurate dates with time logs from the reporting module and when you compare, you'll see every date on the invoice is incorrect and your customers will start questioning why you logged time on the weekend... #2: When you go to download a custom report made in the report module, e.g. the hours report mentioned in #1, you get a blank PDF. Try CSV format? Also blank file, with only the header row filled in, 0 rows of data. #3: Invoice formatting - if you use Productive with Quickbooks Online, when your invoice syncs over you will end up with some random HTML code as part of the descriptions e.g. <ul><li>Notes about this time entry</li></ul> on each line of the invoice. Have fun manually cleaning these up!

Fantastic Support Team

Comments: I love it. I've looked at other tools, and turned them down simply because of their lack of reporting and all-in-one capabilities. Despite smaller features like automation, note taking, and dependency being really attractive.

Pros:

We love that this tool is agency management in one tool! We can track projects / tasks, as well as record employee PTO, schedule work to manage capacity, and bill ALL IN THE SAME PLACE. Customer support is responsive and immensely helpful. Especially for explaining the parts of the tool that applies to areas outside our expertise (like finances).

Cons:

The list layout leaves things to be desired in terms of design and organization of information. Would love to see automation, and the ability to mark tasks as dependent on / blocked by others come to the tool. The note taking tool is really basic and not co-write-friendly.

Productive Has Made Us More Productive

Comments: It has been a good experience and I recommend it to many people. It can get a little cumbersome once you have a lot of data in there and we still haven't been able to transition over our Quickbooks sync to Productive. I would like some more training during times we can attend.

Pros:

I love that we can set up project budgets and track our progress against them in real-time so we can better allocate resources and determine our profit margins. I also appreciate that the company has a robust roadmap and is constantly adding new features. It is fundamentally easy to set up on the project side. There is a ton of flexibility with different views you can have for tasks. The ways you can slice and dice your data in here is a major win for agency owners.

Cons:

The biggest thing we need is a way for our clients to submit tickets to our team so that we can tie it back to the project and if needed, add a new project scope, but there is no interface for clients to submit requests to us via Productive. We haven't found any ticketing software that will integrate with Productive either (maybe by Zapier, but we'd really just prefer to stay in Productive as much as possible).I would also like to be able to see more history on staff time off/vacation time. Once a year has been completed, the data got removed when their new allocation was given. The Dashboard view can use some improvement based on the priority of actions. I would also like to see time chronically from when my timer was started so I can see when it happened during the day, but if you use the timer feature and then switch to the calendar view, it throws all the entries to the top of the day for some reason.