Gusto isn’t the best fit for all businesses, however. It lacks support for global payroll, and its accounting features are limited. Keep your business’s unique needs in mind as you compare the top Gusto alternatives. If none of these seem like the right fit, use our HR Software Guide to browse other options.

What Are the Top Gusto Alternatives?

1. ADP Workforce Now
2. Paychex Flex
3. Paycor
4. Rippling
5. BambooHR
6. Namely
7. Worknice

1. ADP Workforce Now

ADP offers real-time reporting and allows HR to compare its offerings to competitors within the business’s industry, which helps attract candidates. This feature, in comparison to Gusto’s relative simplicity, allows for optimal compensation matching in a competitive labor market.

ADP is full of data gathering and reporting features. Its real-time insights make use of the information gathered by operating day-to-day to keep business up to date and ahead of the curve at any moment. The analytics and reporting functions within ADP’s Workforce Now portal blend data held internally with industry data to give the clearest possible picture of the competitive landscape.

APD Workforce Now is versatile when it comes to pricing and scalability. Its customizable pay structure allows businesses to add and subtract features as they become relevant, and is built to provide a reasonable price no matter how much a company expands.

Why choose ADP Workforce Now over Gusto

• Advanced analytics
• Scalable pricing model
• More options for third-party integrations

2. Paychex Flex

Paychex Flex is an all-in-one, adaptable HR management software that can run payroll, administer HR functions, and manage benefits all while staying compliant with federal regulations.

Paychex works to save businesses money by looking for tax credits that may have been overlooked. For example, Paychex automatically and proactively looks for opportunities to flag businesses that are eligible for the Employee Retention Tax Credit, giving teams a leg up on confusing tax codes.

Why choose Paychex Flex over Gusto

• Simplifies compliance
• Affordable tax support

3. Paycor

Paycor minimizes the number of applications HR teams have to juggle by offering a broad range of built-in features. These include payroll, recruiting, onboarding, performance management, time tracking, learning management, benefits administration, and more.

Compared to Gusto, Paycor’s selling point is its analytics tools, which provide actionable insights and help HR teams make intelligent decisions. The analytics features provide benchmark comparisons based on the business’s industry, as well as predictive analytics for concerns like employee turnover, compliance risks, and pay equity.

Why choose Paycor over Gusto

• Comprehensive built-in features
• Advanced reporting capabilities

4. Rippling

Rippling allows businesses to easily manage payroll, benefits, and HR all in one platform, but its highlight features are its API and automation features.

Through its interconnectedness with third-party apps, Rippling allows businesses to quickly set up an employee’s payroll, health insurance, email, and other key HR functions each with a few clicks. All of this makes the onboarding process quick and straightforward whether employees are local or remote. Rippling saves HR teams time by simplifying employee onboarding without the need for an IT team or a high degree of technical knowledge.

Why choose Rippling over Gusto

• Robust tools for managing remote teams
• Streamlined onboarding

5. BambooHR

BambooHR’s enables recruiting and hiring on the go with its mobile app for iOS and Android devices. While Gusto provides employees with access to their payroll information in its mobile app, BambooHR’s app gives HR administrators more tools to manage crucial work functions.

BambooHR also helps HR teams make data-driven decisions about company culture. By monitoring employee engagement and identifying inactive employees, BambooHR is able to provide information on employee satisfaction. The platform also helps make sure contractors or employees with otherwise irregular schedules do not fall through the cracks.

Why choose BambooHR over Gusto

• Native mobile app for iOS and Android
• Company culture and employee engagement analytics
• Support for contractors and irregular work schedules

6. Namely

Namely is highly customizable to a company’s needs but it has strong features for benefits administration, time tracking, reporting, and more.

Namely serves as a more flexible, lightweight version of Gusto, built specifically for mid-size businesses. This flexibility allows Namely to operate as the solution that fits many of the unique circumstances that face mid-sized companies, such as rapid growth, issues of scale, and compliance across state lines.

Why choose Namely over Gusto

• Highly customizable
• Social media-like user experience
• Flexible pricing model

7. Worknice

Worknice‘s performance management features automate the review process according to custom timeframes. It also allows companies to set clear, attainable goals for employees to ensure personal and professional growth. When employees achieve their goals, the software tracks those accomplishments and shares their wins company-wide.

Worknice’s HR reporting software produces actionable insights with its report generation and data visualization tools. It helps HR teams understand their workforces, with various metric and demographic views that can be configured to answer specific questions.

Why choose WorkNice over Gusto

• Automated performance reviews
• Goal tracking that encourages employee recognition
• Strong reporting and data visualization capabilities

Choosing the Right HR Software for Your Business

The right vendor for your company will ultimately depend on a few different factors, including the software’s feature offering, integrations, user experience, and cost.

Gusto is a strong contender for businesses that need flexibility, affordability, and innovative features, but it may be too basic for some companies. If your business needs software that supports broader HR functions like recruitment, performance management, and workforce analytics, it’s probably time to look for a new solution.

Consider your business’s size, budget, and HR goals when evaluating the Gusto alternatives on this list. If these options don’t seem like the right fit, check out our HR Software Guide to browse other vendors.

The post Top Gusto Competitors & Alternatives appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

• A workforce’s mobility is one of the most important factors in FSM. That’s why most FSM systems have extensive mobile features for scheduling, job management, and route planning.
• Predictive analytics will illustrate when parts need to be ordered and when they need to be postponed, allowing field service managers to more accurately distribute budgets.

Field service companies generate massive amounts of data from technicians, assets, equipment, customers, and logistics. If that data is not used to improve a business’s workflow, then it has been effectively wasted.

Using pen-and-paper methods to gather, organize, and deploy field service technicians, it may serve a fledgling business just fine in the short run. Just don’t expect it to last long. A successful small business will quickly outgrow analog data solutions. Investing in field service management software gives teams access to analytical reporting tools and work orders that both centralize and automatically interpret data on behalf of field service managers.

We’ve outlined three major ways to use the data field service operations are already generating to make insight-driven decisions and improve your field service outcomes. If your business is looking for FSM solutions to house and serve this data, we have outlined a few of the best Field Service Management tools on the market today.

1. Schedule Dynamically

First-come, first-serve is an extremely inefficient method for field service scheduling. Both customers and employees will feel the consequences of it. Distance, routing, and prioritization must all play a part in the process of efficiently scheduling field service appointments. A business scheduling multiple appointments at a time will quickly find itself wasting time and money with first-come, first-serve scheduling.

Route planning

Use the data provided by your FSM software, such as IndusTrack, to identify the best course of action for scheduling. This data takes into account:

• The technician best-suited for the job, considering factors such as work skills, work areas, SLAs, and inventory
• The optimal route for your field resources
• What parts are available and when they can arrive
• How the status of work in real-time will be communicated to the customer (estimated time of arrival, delays, updates, etc.)
• Using this data will ensure that the right field resource will be assigned to the right job at the right time with the right equipment. To make the most of dynamic scheduling, intelligently plan your routes, share the data with your team, and make the most of mobile data.

A workforce’s mobility is one of the most important factors in FSM. That’s why most FSM systems have extensive mobile features for scheduling, job management, and route planning.

The data a business currently has can be used to plan intelligent routes. Route planning uses algorithms that consider the distance of the technician, accessibility, and geolocation data. It creates work rules based on the scheduling priorities outlined and interacts with real-time traffic services to suggest the best route. Route planning minimizes the time technicians spend on the road, decreases delays, and improves overall efficiency.

Share the data

Big data is not just for top-level leaders within the FSM industry; every level of a business can use the insights your analytic reporting tool provides. RazorSync is an application that helps field service managers and their teams by opening the lines of communication while technicians are out in the field gathering crucial, real-time data. A company’s most valuable data is sourced directly from your technicians on the front lines.

For example, dispatchers benefit from being able to see technician response and travel times. RazorSync uses this information to share GPS-tracked location data and customized routing.

Use mobile application data

Using an FSM system that operates a mobile app, such as IFS, allows mobile workforces to log all work order, scheduling, work estimate, checklist, and troubleshooting data they might encounter on the field. This allows technicians to fire off reports in real-time without interrupting from their tightly-scheduled calendars. This remotely collected data can then be used by dispatchers and other field service managers to make informed decisions about where a field service technician can most efficiently be sent to next.

2. Be Proactive About Arising Problems

By using predictive analytics technologies, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, statistical models based on historical data can be defined. Combine this with the use of the internet of things (IoT) where connected devices sense each other, and suddenly the ability to predict and prevent problems before they emerge becomes a huge asset.

Predictive analytics will illustrate when parts need to be ordered and when they need to be postponed, allowing field service managers to more accurately distribute budgets. This eliminates the need to compensate for knowledge gaps by overstocking for the entirety of the year.

Find inefficiencies

Oracle Field Service Cloud provides early warning notifications and diagnosis of equipment issues days, weeks, or maybe months before failure. Monitoring your equipment can save loads of time and money on the front end.

In addition to preventing potential problems, the technology built into field service management software can identify recurring problems or service bottlenecks, and subsequently isolate any possible causes. If dispatchers find that their technicians are consistently double-booked or a particular part of a work order has not been completed correctly, an FSM like Oracle can alert them to these issues, empowering them to make actionable decisions.

Using data to solve these problems eliminates subjectivity, reduces downtime, and saves time by spotting the exact pain point instead of manually sifting through what-ifs.

3. Create A Better Customer Experience 

Customer satisfaction is critical to FSM success. A bad customer experience can lead to a bad online review, leading to a potential dip in new or returning customers. Using data can create new dimensions for customer satisfaction.

Make use of the predictive analytics we mentioned earlier to understand the needs of a customer base. It can access data including a client’s service history, equipment monitoring records, or other relevant issues and deliver the data to the appropriate person.

With this data, a technician can arrive at a job site with a good idea of what the problem is, how to resolve it, and what parts are needed. This leads to less time spent on solving the problem, and an overall better customer experience than if the field resource went in with limited knowledge.

Share information with customers

Vague windows of service and lack of communication will frustrate customers. Vcita’s focus on event scheduling allows dispatchers, field workers, and technicians a simple view of calendar events. This scheduling can be easily shared with customers awaiting service, giving them peace of mind and the ability to communicate last-minute changes with relatively little disruption.

Find the FSM Tool to Make the Best Use of Your Data

A business that is not making effective use of its data in an appropriate field service tool is wasting time and money. Finding valuable field service insights can be as simple as looking through our list of the best field service management tools of the year.

Trending FSM Software

The post 3 Ways to Use Current Data to Improve Field Service Outcomes appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

• This high level of functionality means that Tableau comes with a high price tag relative to some other options on the BI market. If your organization needs a lot of data analysis and visualization, then it might be worth the investment. But if your business intelligence needs are more occasional, the platform might not offer the return on investment you would like.
• These products are by no means the only Tableau alternatives. There are plenty of viable solutions in the business intelligence software market, but a high learning curve keeps many buyers from doing enough research.

Tableau is a data visualization tool and one of the market leaders in data analysis and business intelligence. It offers numerous products, all of which do something slightly different but each of which still falls underneath the umbrella of data discovery, analysis, visualization, and business intelligence. Tableau’s main offerings are:

• Tableau Desktop: The flagship product, Tableau Desktop, is a downloadable computer app that lets users analyze large amounts of complex data and turn it into charts, graphs, and other visualizations.
• Tableau Server: This function is used to share workbooks, reports, and other files created in Tableau Desktop across an organization.
• Tableau Cloud: Formerly known as Tableau Online, this product is a fully cloud-based version of Tableau that allows users to do everything without having to download an additional app.
• Tableau Public: This free version of Tableau allows users to create data visualizations at no cost and then publish them to Tableau’s public cloud; although, files cannot be saved locally or privately due to the free nature of the service.
• Tableau Prep: This self-service data discovery and preparation tool helps to clean, sort, and combine data to get it ready for use in one of Tableau’s other products.
• Tableau Reader: This free desktop application allows users to open and interact with data visualizations made in Tableau Desktop.

What Does Tableau Do?

Tableau is a data visualization tool and one of the market leaders in data analysis and business intelligence. It offers numerous products, all of which do slightly different things but still fall underneath the umbrella of data discovery, analysis, visualization, and business intelligence. Tableau’s main offerings are:

• Tableau Desktop: The flagship product, Tableau Desktop is a downloadable computer app that lets users analyze large amounts of complex data and turn it into charts, graphs, and other visualizations.
• Tableau Server: This function is used to share workbooks, reports, and other files created in Tableau Desktop across an organization.
• Tableau Cloud: Formerly known as Tableau Online, this product is a fully cloud-based version of Tableau that allows users to do everything without having to download an additional app.
• Tableau Public: This free version of Tableau allows users to create data visualizations at no cost and then publish them to Tableau’s public cloud; although, files cannot be saved locally or privately due to the free nature of the service.
• Tableau Prep: This self-service data discovery and preparation tool helps to clean, sort, and combine data to get it ready for use in one of Tableau’s other products.
• Tableau Reader: This free desktop application allows users to open and interact with data visualizations made in Tableau Desktop.

Most businesses opt for the Tableau Creator plan, which bundles together Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep Builder, and one one license for either Tableau Cloud or Tableau Server for a comprehensive solution.

Why Tableau May Not Work For Your Company

Tableau is a business intelligence industry leader for a reason, and it regularly receives high marks for its eye-catching data visualizations, powerful analytics, and relative ease of use. Given the platform’s popularity, you may be wondering why it’s even worth it to consider a Tableau competitor, but there are plenty of reasons to look at other BI software.

For starters, Tableau has a less steep learning curve than some other competitors in the BI space. However, it still requires a certain level of technological know-how to make the most of the product, most notably with an understanding of SQL queries. This is a big roadblock for small companies or teams which don’t have access to an in-house SQL expert.

In fact, Tableau’s offerings are often too robust for companies just starting to experiment with data analysis and visualization. Tableau competes with BI offerings from Microsoft, SAP Analytics Cloud, and other enterprise-level software designed for multi-national companies. If you’re working with huge datasets and need to run complicated analytics on them, Tableau is a great option. But if you just need to turn last quarter’s metrics into a simple chart, it will likely be overkill for your business’s needs.

This high level of functionality means that Tableau comes with a high price tag relative to some other options on the BI market. If your organization needs a lot of data analysis and visualization, then it might be worth the investment. But if your business intelligence needs are more occasional, the platform might not offer the return on investment you would like. On the other hand, a Tableau competitor such as Qlik Sense or Zoho Analytics could make a better option.

Best Alternatives to Tableau

GoodData

GoodData offers two major products: an end-to-end data platform and embedded analytics. These two work on the GoodData security structure that runs the gamut from HIPAA to GDPR and financial data regulations. The platform gives companies a full data management and analysis system that runs on any data source. This software provides the architecture for data integration, cleansing, analysis, and publication to reporting tools and apps. The scalable enterprise platform lets companies use their data to grow in new, stable, and innovative ways that protect the company’s data but drive analytics toward insight.

Why choose GoodData over Tableau

GoodData’s embedded analytics are perfect for smaller corporations looking to improve data analysis and access but who can’t commit to a full end-to-end data management system. The analytics use the GoodData platform as a service model to get companies up and running quickly, sometimes within a matter of days, and without hiring data scientists. Because GoodData encourages quick setups with minimal additional staff, it makes for a great upgrade for businesses looking to expand regardless of limited access to resources.

InsightSquared

InsightSquared is a sales-focused data visualization company that aggregates and provides a platform for business users to better understand their data. The software is split into two main products, Tiles and Slate, which are built to scale to a business’s needs.

Why choose InsightSquared over Tableau

InsightSquared, as a sales-focused data visualization tool gives teams incredibly detailed insights into their sales metrics. Small businesses and enterprises looking to make data-driven growth will find utility in the predictive analysis tools that InsightSquared provides. These insights use the rates at which team members close sales, the quality of leads that have been gathered, and historical data to project out the rate at which a business can expect its revenue to grow or contract. InsightSquared can very easily aid in building quarterly business plans and market redirections.

SAS

SAS Business Intelligence and Analytics (also called Visual Analytics) is just one of the many data processing and analytics tools available from SAS, which specializes in building enterprise-ready tools for users across industries. Choose the right tool, or set of tools, from SAS based on your business and technology needs and the maturity of your data program.

Why choose SAS over Tableau

Look to the Visual Analytics program to gain business analytics without tying up IT resources. The system is built for business leaders and technical data analysts to work in tandem, with IT controlling governance but business guiding the data visualization process. SAS also integrates with MS Office programs like Excel and Outlook to keep data in the hands of those who need it most.

The focus on AI-aided forecasting and data analysis will be the main draw over Tableau to users looking for something new. While Tableau is easy to use and generates perfectly serviceable data views, it cannot be understated how the additional processing power provided by the AI can help along the data analysis process. Staff members finding themselves bogged down in the volume of data they have to comb through for work may find that SAS and its AI-aided visual analytics program will ease the burden of work.

TIBCO Spotfire

Spotfire aims to democratize data across an organization by giving access to all employees, rather than forcing you to make requests through your IT or data teams. They provide cloud, platform, enterprise, and AWS-focused systems for BI from lots of disparate data sources.

Why choose TIBCO Spotfire over Tableau

Spotfire’s extensive capabilities include both big data and what they call “big content.” With big content searching, analysts can easily view all user-generated text across multiple platforms, including email, chat, and search terms. Big content searches help identify customer pain points and possible solutions. To sweeten this deal even further, Spotfire provides predictive analysis from your data, so businesses can be proactive rather than reactive. 

Tableau users would generally be able to spot these same trends using its visualization tools, but Spotfire’s proactive predictive analytics make this process less time-consuming and labor-intensive. This gives analysts more time to work on their actual analysis rather than spending their work days on finding insights.

Viur

Viur’s major strength comes in the form of dashboard-to-email automation that gives users scheduling capabilities over your report data. With Viur, data runs and aggregates silently and publishes when needed based on preset rules, rather than forcing analysts to run a new report.

Why choose Viur over Tableau

Like other options in this category, Viur offers responsive reports that look good on every device, as well as a visual dashboard creator that offers a wide range of report types. This software requires some SQL expertise for greater customization than the out-of-the-box reporting options, but educational resources and contract analysts will help you learn and maximize use of the software. In the short run, this makes Viur a little less user-friendly than Tableau upon installation, but once the learning curve has been overcome, Viur offers a much more robust customization experience.

The Viur team understands security, so data is stored in a personalized secure location that suits the needs of each specific company. The software encrypts connections from those user-selected databases all the way through the reporting process to keep every client’s information safe.

Zebra BI

Zebra BI’s interface resembles a plug-in more than a separate platform that connects to data sources. The entire system bolts onto Excel, so a spreadsheet-heavy workplace doesn’t have to learn new tools. On the downside, if data does not exist in an Excel format, analysts will need to go through the process of importing it.

Why choose Zebra BI over Tableau

Zebra provides new chart types that can’t be found in Excel, which means generating these views is as simple as selecting data and choosing the chart from the Tables option. Zebra also offers data scaling to ensure data isn’t skewed when generating these new views. The data skewing Zebra BI uses is a nice touch that works to avoid common chart distortions and detrimental chart misrepresentations. 

Presenters that need to update a chart shortly before a meeting will have no problem at all. Zebra automatically updates linked PowerPoint slides when changes have been made to a chart in Zebra BI. Zebra works for companies new to BI or those who do a majority of their work in Microsoft Office. 

Tableau may be more complex than a business needs for its data analytics, and companies that primarily use Microsoft Office will find a transition to Zebra BI fits right into their workflow.

Infor Birst

Birst’s multi-tenant cloud architecture aggregates data in the cloud, with AWS, or locally. Infor Birst also offers a desktop client. The company employs strict security standards throughout its  data centers and encryption in the cloud to keep client data safe.

Why choose Infor Birst over Tableau

Because data travels between the cloud and your local databases, analysts can access all of their data and visualizations from any device. Run your analyses with visual discovery dashboards that make data more accessible. This reduces the need for IT interventions or extensive training to use the product. Tableau offers similar mobile access, but Infor Birst’s increased focus on security and ease of use makes it a more attractive choice for security-minded organizations.

Microsoft Power BI

Part of the Microsoft suite of business tools, Power BI is built specifically for data analysis and visualization. While providing the usual dashboards and reporting features, Microsoft’s Power BI also gives analysts the ability to embed data within their apps—an integration that others on this list don’t offer.

Why choose Microsoft Power BI over Tableau

With 60 data sources, the native connectors aren’t overwhelming, but analysts can search and combine data with question-based analytics. Microsoft Power BI offers a free trial with an upgrade to the business version. This tool can be used in conjunction with other Microsoft Business Application systems including PowerApps. The integration with familiar Microsoft tools also makes it an easy fit in many offices that already use Microsoft tools in their daily operations. There is much that can be said about a gentle learning curve and familiar software design.

Looking for a new BI software? We’re here to help

These products are by no means the only Tableau alternatives. There are plenty of viable solutions in the business intelligence software market, but a high learning curve keeps many buyers from doing enough research. Feeling confused? Looking for the latest in Data Visualization solutions? Check out our Data Visualization Software guide.

Featured Business Intelligence Software

If you need a way to jumpstart your research into business intelligence software, here’s a quick list of the top BI tools.

The post Top Tableau Alternatives For Visualizing & Analyzing Data appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

• When comparing Insightly vs. Zoho, the two prove to be evenly matched in sales automation and contact management. The two CRM software systems differ most in task management and reporting features.
• Insightly’s project management feature is a clear advantage for businesses of any size or level of experience. Zoho’s scalability with territory management and add-on modules quickly growing and projects a similar rate of expansion.

Insightly vs. Zoho CRM makes for an interesting matchup. Both sell their products in subscription tiers with affordable rates while offering an impressive amount of contact management, workflow automation, and reporting capabilities.

Also Read: Zoho vs. Salesforce

To help you make a more informed decision, this post will compare the two CRMs based on systems and pricing, features, mobile capabilities, and integrations.

What Zoho Offers

Zoho is an incredibly scalable CRM solution with broad territory management features and add-on modules. This gives Zoho the ability to quickly grow and change in response to rapidly expanding businesses.

If a project taken on by a small business requires new software or a reporting perspective that base Zoho does not include, the broad suite of modules grant small businesses the flexibility to try new things in the pursuit of growth.

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What Insightly Offers

Insightly is a cloud-based CRM that gives small business teams the ability to collaborate on projects distantly and gives everyone the opportunity to work from anywhere. Insightly comes with a variety of robust automation features that streamline customer pipelines, daily tasks, and optimize workflows.

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Insightly vs. Zoho: Systems and Pricing

Insightly and Zoho employ the standard software-as-a-service (SaaS) model and offer subscription tiers priced on a per-user, per-month basis.

Zoho’s tiers are divided into Standard, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate, with each tier corresponding to added features that allow Zoho to manage the needs of increasingly larger businesses.

• Standard includes access to reports and dashboards, a conversion workflow, email marketing insights, and a 100,000 records limit.
• Professional offers webhooks, inventory management, Google Ads integrations, and unlimited records.
• Enterprise adds a conversational AI tool, mobile SDK, custom module creation, workflow automation, and custom applications.
• Ultimate edition provides a dedicated database cluster, automation suggestions, email sentiment tools, and data enrichment.

Insightly offers three subscription types: Plus, Professional, and Enterprise. Each tier includes the CRM basics, such as project management tools that track progress on deliverables, calendar synchronization, and the ability to access Insightly from any device. The professional and enterprise tiers offer access to all of the automation tools.

Enterprise increases the number of templates and mass emails, adds custom fields, space for storing records and files, better business intelligence tools, and unlimited records. It should also be noted that Enterprise is the only tier that includes access to serverless lambda functions.

Both companies also offer free trials with limited functionality.

Insightly vs. Zoho: Contact Management

Zoho has a territory management feature that assigns leads and contacts to different sales teams based on geographical location, product line, and industry. To provide another level of organization, a territory manager can be assigned to act as an admin for the accounts under them.

Insightly, on the other hand, utilizes tags to offer a distinct method for directing contacts once they’re inside the system. Custom tags can be created to represent a geographical region, product line, and any other important information specific to a business’s needs, making it a much more flexible and simple system to organize.

Also read: 8 Zapier Alternatives for Seamless Data Connections

Both systems also include web-to-lead forms which can be embedded on a business’s website. When someone fills out a form, their information will automatically be added to the CRM.

Insightly vs. Zoho: Task Management

To help salespeople develop a better contact follow-up cadence, many CRMs now offer task management features. These tools use automatic reminders to streamline tasks that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle. Instead of guessing the best time to call a person, users can set a reminder to follow up after a period of time.

Zoho and Insightly each provide some form of task management, though this is one area where Insightly has a definite advantage.

Insightly uses a horizontal pipeline to visualize sales stages instead of the traditional vertical funnel. This is great for lead management, but the value of the pipeline feature extends beyond sales stages and into full-blown project management.

Pipeline stages can be customized to represent different project stages. Sales opportunities can be managed as projects from end to end. Projects can also be sorted by stage or assigned to a user.

Zoho, on the other hand, offers standard management features like a bulletin board-style view and color-coded bar charts that compare the reported progress of different projects in a clear, but simple manner.

Insightly vs. Zoho: Reporting

The reporting in Zoho vs. Insightly differs significantly, although both products have full capabilities for CRM data reporting, analytics, and dashboards.

Zoho classifies its available reports in sales, marketing, and activity reports. For each report generated, a spreadsheet can also be downloaded as a .csv or .xls. Once these reports run, the data can be visualized in charts or graphs.

Zoho comes with more than 40 pre-built reports, like pivot tables or summary views. The system also allows users to build custom versions if a hyperspecific view is required for a certain report. More data analytics capabilities can also be unlocked with a subscription to Zoho Analytics.

Insightly includes business intelligence reporting and dashboards within the product and — depending on the subscription plan — can build customized chart cards and share them with anyone. This software also offers 40 chart types, but lacks the same robust classification and granular tools as Zoho.

Insightly vs. Zoho: Sales and Workflow Automation

Getting salespeople to consistently use a CRM has long been a major roadblock to achieving ROI. That reticence stems from the amount of manual work that older-generation CRMs required. The software vendors that were smart enough to respond to this opportunity equipped their CRMs with automation features that reduce laborious data entry.

Zoho also has task management capabilities provided by workflow automation tools. Build custom process automations with the Blueprint tool or set custom approvals to quickly route tasks through team members and sales stages. Zoho also offers a more comprehensive task management system in Zoho Projects, which is available as an add-on.

Zoho also integrates a powerful suite of customer tracking tools that provide businesses with a wealth of information. This is a strong benefit that Zoho offers, but it can often be more data than a small business is prepared to work with.

Insightly automates the entire customer journey, making it an excellent fit for small teams that may find themselves pushing up against the limitations of their staff’s capacity. Insightly takes a simple, but effective flowchart approach to the customer journey, triggering customizable actions dependent on the behavior of new and potential customers. This offloads a great deal of work from the shoulders of the workforce, freeing them up to tackle new leads. 

Insightly vs. Zoho: Email Marketing

Zoho offers dynamic email campaigns with A/B testing and simple, clean templates. In addition, it features advanced email automation and tracking tools to make robust email marketing a simple task regardless of a small business’s level of experience.

Insightly makes this process less labor-intensive by integrating its email marketing features into its marketing automation suite. This integration makes it easy for an individual making dozens of sales to trigger a cascade of routine customer retention missives, ensuring nobody falls through the cracks in the fast-paced small business environment 

If a business is looking to connect its CRM to a third-party email marketing software, each system has a different solution. Insightly integrates with Mailchimp, and Zoho connects with Zoho Campaigns — the company’s own email marketing tool.

Insightly vs. Zoho: Extras and Integrations

Both vendors offer Android and iOS apps. Insightly’s app lets users view and convert records, create tasks, and call, email, or text any record in their database. There is also a map feature making it easy to get to that next in-person sales call.

Zoho’s mobile app offers a similar array of features, including the ability to call directly from the app and geolocation for finding a prospect’s office. Zoho’s app works offline, so even if mobile signal is lost, contact information can still be edited inside the CRM. The app will sync the changes once internet access is recovered.

In terms of integrations, both products offer a similar set of options. Insightly integrates with over 30 apps, including Dropbox, Outlook, and Google Apps (full list here). Zoho integrates with Mailchimp, Unbounce, Evernote, and others (full list here).

If an office wants to sync either of the two CRMs with an app not listed in their native integration list, Zapier can be used to build a trigger automation.

Zoho’s base CRM can be combined with any of the other apps in its “online office suite,” including Zoho Projects, Zoho Invoice, Zoho Support, Zoho Books, and others. That means it can be customized and expanded as a company’s needs change, which may make Zoho more appealing for a fast-growing or mid-sized company.

Which CRM is Right For Your Business?

Insightly vs. Zoho is a close contest. Both systems at a similar price point and get similar contact management and sales automation capabilities. Insightly’s project management feature, however, is a clear advantage for businesses of any size or level of experience. This means a small business can take advantage of Insightly and its suite of features without having to pay for tools it may not need. Zoho’s scalability with territory management and add-on modules quickly growing and projects a similar rate of expansion.

Trending CRM Software

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Trello and Jira each take a unique approach to bringing the Agile framework to workplaces. They both offer automated task management features, and both platforms are now owned by Atlassian, which means they can be integrated to leverage the most efficient workflows.

However, each platform has distinct benefits that make them ideal for different use cases. Trello remains the lightweight, kanban-focused tool for a variety of project management needs, while Jira enables software development teams with fully-featured and powerful agile software. Jira and Trello are two of the most popular project management tools, but they may not be the best fit for everyone. Our Project Management Software Guide has more options to choose from, so you can find the right software for your project needs.

Trello vs. Jira: Task management

Task management is the heart and soul of every project. Break down the project into smaller pieces, then decide what needs to get done and who needs to do it. This is true whether working on a piece of software, planning a marketing event, or designing a new branding guide for your company.

Trello

Trello excels at task management; it’s also one of the easiest platforms on the market to learn. Tasks and project work are logged using a three-part hierarchy: Boards, Lists, and Cards. These elements can be organized in whatever way is appropriate.

A Trello board is a simple kanban board users can customize. These boards feature interactive cards that can be dragged into different categories. Each board is used by team members to manage any number of tasks, limited only by their imagination and personal organization skills.

The only potential downside here is a lack of prebuilt workflows. Existing boards will have to be copied, and customized processes will have to be built from scratch for any work managed in Trello. Adding new project tasks is simple but requires time and manual effort to manage.

Trello’s kanban board feature is a visual representation of task status and progress for an entire project. Source: Trello

Jira

Jira takes a different approach to task management, although with some of the same features.

Most out-of-the-box Jira workflows are designed to help teams build, test, and release software, but custom workflows for use in other product development and Agile scenarios can be tailored to the project’s specific needs. Then again, Jira’s task management features are baked directly into an Agile framework, so teams that aren’t developing software will likely have less flexibility than they would with Trello.

As with Trello, Jira allows teams to create task cards, assign them to team members, and move them between custom kanban swimlanes such as “To Do,” “In Progress,” and “Done.”

Jira’s approach to task management offers powerful customization options for software developers. Source: Jira

Which to choose for task management?

It’s a tie. Here’s why: When it comes to task management, it’s hard to beat the tactile satisfaction of moving Trello’s cards from column to column. The kanban-centric approach Trello takes to task management makes it a straightforward option for many teams.

However, Trello’s simplicity can be a trap of sorts. Complex projects will suffer from Trello’s lack of automation capabilities and organization on the scale of Jira’s. The complexity trade-off here is one to be carefully considered before picking one management tool over the other.

Trello vs. Jira: Team collaboration

While it is important to move tasks toward completion, it’s also important for team members to communicate about progress and requirements along the way. Both platforms offer a number of features to make this possible.

Trello

With Trello, a team can invite any number of people to share the same board, which means everyone will have the same visibility into project status and tasks. Users can comment directly on cards, share attachments, and mention other teammates to direct their attention to a particular card. All users assigned to a particular card, list, or board will receive notifications via email, SMS, or push based on their preferences.

Trello’s approach to collaboration makes it easy for large teams to stay on the same page about each project’s tasks. Source: Trello

Jira

Jira also offers the more traditional collaboration features when it comes to tagging issues and boards, such as team member task assignments, notifications, file sharing, and messaging. These tools, next to Trello’s reactive cards and friendly design approach, are comparatively spartan, but they are exactly as robust as they need to be for software development teams that are working on complex projects with dozens of moving parts.

Additionally, Jira’s project centralization and automation capabilities gives teams a clear view of the project process without the use of a cluttered spreadsheet, keeping progress communication clear and open.

Jira’s Dependency Map is a visual representation of task dependencies at a high level. Source: Jira

Which to choose for collaboration?

Jira. Here’s why: At the end of the day, Jira is a much more fully featured project management tool than Trello, especially in terms of collaborative functionality. Delivering products that require a lot of plate spinning with Jira is much more collaborative than Trello’s simplistic task pings.

With Jira, teams are able to centralize tasks, so teammates are able to view the same information simultaneously from all over the world. Files can be shared with a few clicks, removing massive barriers to collaborative work in remote or in-office workspaces alike.

Trello vs. Jira: Agile-based features

Trello

While Trello excels as a flexible, visual kanban task management platform, it doesn’t offer most of the Agile-based features a traditional software development team would need. These include scrum and sprint planning, a backlog of user stories, detailed project reporting, issue tracking, and code repositories.

Although these features aren’t native to Trello, they do have several Power-Ups and app integrations that could mimic what team members need. What Trello lacks in features, it makes up for in usability, flexibility, and integration with Jira.

Trello’s calendar view allows teams to handle sprint planning in a visual way. Projects with very few interdependent moving parts could be planned out on Trello’s calendar and broken down into individual task cards that are then distributed to teammates.

Trello’s calendar view helps teams conceptualize due dates with daily, weekly, and monthly views. Source: Trello

Jira

Jira was built specifically to serve Agile software development teams and offers a full suite of features to that end. Whether building code or tracking issues (available in Jira’s Service Desk edition), Jira can support scrum methodology, kanban, or a mix of the two.

Jira also includes the ability to draft and visualize new roadmaps. These roadmap views keep teams up to date no matter how many changes are made. Even in the face of creeping scope, developers will have a clear understanding of how much work lies ahead.

Jira’s Sprint View showcases an at-a-glance view of sprint progress, bottlenecks, and teamwide performance metrics. Source: Jira

Which to choose for Agile-based features?

It’s a tie, depending on the team. Here’s why: Trello manages brief user stories, and issues marked in Jira can be turned into Trello cards, so project managers can quickly distribute tasks among teammates. These tasks can be tracked with Trello’s kanban board, which is a valuable feature for non-development teams that want to leverage the Agile methodology.

However, in the face of Jira’s Agile-based reporting features like burndown charts, sprint planning, and editable roadmaps, Trello lacks many of the capabilities software developers need. With the lack of powerful Agile tools, a software development team is more likely to use Trello as a supplement to Jira rather than as its primary Agile tool.

Trello vs. Jira: Pricing

The best project management software offers all of the right features without being cost-prohibitive. Since Trello and Jira are both owned by Atlassian, their approaches to pricing follow a similar structure.

Trello

For teams looking to spend as little as possible to get a basic Agile-based collaboration tool up and running, Trello’s free option may be enough. The free version of Trello gives users access to most project management features, supports up to 10 boards, and doesn’t impose any limits on the number of cards or users.

If all a team needs is an independent productivity tool to keep tasks organized and share work between team members, the free version will most likely suffice. If the team is working with code from a repository or data from another business system, they are going to need a paid edition of Trello.

Trello’s three paid versions — Standard, Premium, and Enterprise — give teams unlimited boards; the ability to sync data with other business systems like Slack, Github, and Salesforce; a board collections feature; and administrative tools. Trello Enterprise offers a tiered pricing system per number of users and supports two-factor authentication, single sign-on, premium customer support, and onboarding assistance in addition to all the Business Class features.

Trello’s focus on simplicity extends to its pricing as well. In general, Trello’s pricing structure is more straightforward and affordable than Jira, as indicated below:

Jira

Jira also has a free option for up to 10 users, whereas Trello supports unlimited users for free and paid accounts alike. What Jira lacks in flexible pricing, it makes up for in flexible deployment options. In addition to cloud-based software, Jira also offers on-premises deployment for organizations that want to customize their installation on their own hardware; though, it comes at a higher cost.

Jira’s Agile software comes in three different versions: Standard, Premium, and Enterprise. Standard includes many of the features a team looking to use Agile methodologies for their work structure would need, including roadmap visualization, kanban boards, and dependency maps. Enterprise comes with ideation tools and strategy rooms for company-wide collaboration, and Premium aims to offer businesses a generous middle ground between the two extremes.

Because Jira offers more advanced Agile-based functionality than Trello, it’s easy to understand why Jira is priced slightly higher. Jira’s pricing structure is broken down below:

Jira’s Enterprise pricing is notably more complex than Trello. Whereas Trello’s Enterprise tier has a transparent price per month based on the number of users, Jira’s highest tier is only available for businesses with more than 800 users on an annual billing cycle.

It’s also worth pointing out that Jira’s pricing is based on the volume of users who need access to the software. After a company reaches a certain threshold of user seats, the annual cost per user increases. The lack of flexibility when it comes to pricing may be a disadvantage for smaller teams that have significant growth plans or want access to Enterprise-level features.

Which to choose for pricing?

Trello. Here’s why: Trello’s straightforward pricing is more affordable and flexible than Jira’s complex user tier-based approach. Though Jira’s higher price point is reflective of its advanced capabilities, growing project management teams that want to control costs as closely as possible will likely favor Trello’s simplicity.

Trello vs. Jira: Which is right for your business?

Trello is a simple, customizable kanban board for teams that want visual workflows. Trello supports a few different task management views, such as its handy calendar view, but this alone is not enough to support more complicated projects like software development.

Teams that are interested in Agile as a work structure but aren’t working on software-related projects will most likely find success with Trello. Conversely, large organizations with complicated webs of stakeholders may find Trello’s feature set limiting.

Jira, on the other hand, is a project management tool for by-the-book Agile teams that are building, fixing, and releasing software. Its customization and robust set of Agile-based features make it a strong solution for software development teams and other projects like product development that require an iterative approach.

In particular, Jira is an excellent tool for medium to large Agile teams, but it may be overwhelming for small teams that can easily track their tasks with a kanban board and calendar alone.Keep in mind that Trello and Jira aren’t the only two viable products in this category. While these options offer many of the tools teams need for successful project management, a different solution might be a better choice. If neither Trello nor Jira fits your organization’s project management needs, review our Project Management Software Guide to explore other options.

The post Trello vs. Jira: Top Agile Project Management Tool (2023) appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Wrike and Basecamp are project management tools that make the process of organizing, delegating, and tracking tasks as simple as possible, each in its own way. While many similarities exist, like at-a-glance scheduling and simple file management, the two differ in terms of customizability and scalability.

If you’re shopping for a new project management platform, how do you choose between Wrike and Basecamp? Start by answering one question: Is your organization best served by a system built for power and customization or a straightforward system that’s easy to learn?

Keep your business’s unique needs in mind while comparing Wrike and Basecamp on task management, scheduling, collaboration, and reporting capabilities. If neither option seems like the right fit, explore other solutions in our Project Management Software Guide.

Wrike vs. Basecamp: Task management

All project management begins with task management. The easier it is to assign and manage tasks, the simpler it is to complete projects.

Wrike

In Wrike, users organize tasks under “folders” which refer to different projects. You can nest subfolders under top-level folders to better organize related tasks. Clicking on a folder pulls up an adjacent panel with a list of all tasks in that folder. Clicking on each task summons yet another panel where users can do some detailed editing — assign due dates, attach files, leave comments, track time, and add dependencies.

If you need to make changes to an entire group of tasks, you can do so at the folder level. Wrike also has search functionality at the folder level to help locate specific tasks. Folders function as a kind of dashboard: the left navigation that displays them is ever-present and acts as a filter in other views.

Basecamp

Basecamp’s approach to task management is somewhat more basic than Wrike’s folders. The platform displays tasks in to-do lists organized under their respective projects. Next to each task is the assignee’s profile picture or initials and a checkbox signifying if it’s complete or not. The to-do lists don’t offer nuanced statuses like “On Hold” or “In Progress,” which means Basecamp might be better for very small teams that can get by with just a checkbox.

Clicking on an individual task takes you to a new window where you can comment on the task, upload a file, change the due date, and otherwise edit the task. Whereas Wrike’s interface makes it possible to view one task’s details in the context of all other tasks in the project, Basecamp focuses on only one to-do list or task at a time.

Which to choose for task management?

Wrike. Here’s why: Wrike’s folder approach creates a familiar nesting visualization that stacks related tasks. The ability to quickly edit a group of project tasks also grants a lot of flexibility to teams that find themselves needing to pivot quickly. Basecamp is similar to Wrike, generally providing the same suite of tools Wrike provides but with a few features missing when looked at more granularly.

Wrike vs. Basecamp: Scheduling

The approach that Wrike and Basecamp take to scheduling is similar, but the ability to automate task dependencies and the difference between project-wide schedule views will have a distinct impact on project teams with different needs.

Wrike

One of Wrike’s most unique features is the interactive Gantt chart available in the timeline view. Using folders as a filtering tool, users can visualize each task in the folder as a horizontal bar spanning days of the week, giving project managers the ability to survey a week of work at a glance.

Users can also create and adjust task dependencies by dragging one end of the task’s bar and connecting it to another. This view can also be used for creating milestones that indicate higher-level deadlines for a project. Wrike also allows users to connect tasks directly to their calendars, making it easy to integrate visual confirmation of timelines into a team’s workflow.

The timeline view is one of Wrike’s biggest differentiators. Gantt charts are a time-tested way to visualize the moving parts of a project, and Wrike’s version gives users a substantial amount of control over tasks.

Basecamp

Basecamp’s scheduling feature displays upcoming task deadlines like a simplified digital corkboard organized on a per-month basis, which can be a little more cluttered or confusing than Wrike’s task management.

Basecamp also includes a calendar that can show project deadlines or function as a stand-alone, personal calendar. The calendar can be used to create tasks, email stakeholders who need to know about tasks, and set deadlines. Though it’s not quite on the same level as Wrike’s Gantt chart, the Basecamp calendar is a handy tool for keeping track of deadlines.

Which to choose for scheduling?

It’s a tie. Here’s why: If a team simply needs a calendar of due dates and a way to quickly knock out time-dependent tasks, Basecamp provides a streamlined and intuitive solution. On the other hand, Wrike offers the ability to not only create a calendar of work but dependencies that automate the work accountability process, ensuring team members work their way down the task list in exactly the order required to minimize delays.

Wrike vs. Basecamp: Collaboration

Project collaboration features usually come in two broad forms: collaborative updates and file management. In terms of file collaboration, both systems have native text editors, which makes tracking changes to text documents relatively straightforward, but a few key differences set the two apart.

Wrike

Wrike has several functions for activity updates — the most prominent of which is its news feed that keeps a stream of updates on all project activity, treating workflow much like the easily parsable social media timelines that workers are accustomed to. Wrike also lets you call your colleague’s attention to a particular task via email update by tagging them on the task level. Wrike also allows users to live edit documents, streamlining the process of offering critique and collaborating on complex design documents.

Basecamp

Basecamp uses a message board as the center for all of its activity updates and a centralized messaging app called Campfire. This gives teams, no matter the size, a place to slot in concerns or work-related conversation starters without clogging up email inboxes or creating distracting conversations during the workday.

Basecamp also has a client view function that lets you invite clients to a project and send them notifications. Project managers can specify what clients can see and access, thereby maintaining a level of privacy between the internal team and the external customer. Field service management and design projects that require regular input from stakeholders will find this feature useful.

Which to choose for collaboration?

Basecamp. Here’s why: Basecamp’s friendly approach to collaboration gives teams the ability to communicate with stakeholders and clients without surfacing too much internal information. They are able to do so with very little additional training. Wrike, on the other hand, requires a bit of customization and onboarding before an external party would be ready to take a peek into the more insular workspaces. Basecamp is an easy option for operations that spend much of their project time face-to-face with clients and external stakeholders while Wrike is much more well-suited to internal collaboration.

Wrike vs. Basecamp: Reporting

After a project is in motion, stakeholders need to keep an eye on progress. Strong reporting features are critical to identifying bottlenecks in the project workflow and adjusting accordingly.

Wrike

Wrike’s reporting features come in a few varieties. Filters can be used to create reports on certain types of tasks, like overdue tasks within the quarterly email campaign folder, giving project managers the ability to quickly pop into Wrike and pull information relevant to any routine check-ins.

Additionally, every Wrike folder has a burndown chart on the far right side of the screen, so teams can see how many tasks have been completed relative to how many were assigned.

A task digest view below the burndown chart visualizes all of the different types of tasks within each folder: completed, overdue, and backlog. This effectively removes the need to seek out data for reporting, as it is constantly presented to project managers.

Basecamp

Basecamp’s reporting mostly takes place in the Progress view, which shows a list of all of the completed tasks for each project in chronological order, but this reporting lacks the degree of detail and automation Wrike provides at a glance.

What Basecamp lacks in reporting and customization can easily be supplemented with its integration with tools like Gantiffy and Easy Insight. Small businesses and businesses that don’t find themselves needing to produce detailed reports for stakeholders will find Basecamp’s reporting is robust enough on its own. Should this need change, the prevalence of supplements ensures there’s an option for everyone with a little extra work up front.

Which to choose for reporting?

Wrike. Here’s why: Wrike handles its reporting without the need for additional tools. It provides a breadth of clean, robust reports that are ready to present at the drop of a hat. Basecamp’s reporting is serviceable, but it will likely require the addition of a third-party integration and extra labor spent learning how to generate reports through another service.

Wrike vs. Basecamp: Which is right for your business?

Wrike and Basecamp are two of the most popular project management tools on the market. They both offer unique advantages, so it can be difficult to determine which one is the better option.

Basecamp advantages

Basecamp’s platform is divided into several tools every productive group needs: an organizational dashboard, messaging, to-do lists, file storage, and simple scheduling. The breadth of features that Basecamp covers makes this tool an excellent fit for most project management efforts. Basecamp’s simplicity also means that the learning barriers to entry are quite low, making onboarding easier than more complicated project management tools.

Basecamp’s design is beautifully straightforward, which makes it easy to learn, navigate, and use. Basecamp comes equipped with simple boards, clean design, and integrations to other services that allow users to simply integrate their preferred productivity services like Github, Zoom, and Slack.

Wrike advantages

Wrike’s platform focuses more on power than simplicity. Its design is slightly less streamlined but can accommodate a tremendous amount of customization. The ability to create workspaces dedicated to a project that can then be broken down from the broadest view to the smallest task is an excellent organizational tool to have access to.

Wrike’s workflows are customizable from team to team, and the platform offers built-in clean visual timelines. This combination gives project managers the ability to be as particular as they like in creating and adhering to workflow structures once a project is underway. Remote teams and projects with many dependencies will benefit from Wrike a great deal.

Basecamp disadvantages

Sometimes, simplicity is not enough to shoulder the burden of complicated task management. While Basecamp shines in its ability to get out of the way of project teams, it does so at the expense of handling complexity. Large software development teams, organizations that deal with iterative design, and enterprises with a large number of interconnected teams may find that the simplicity Basecamp offers becomes messy in the face of a winding project.

Wrike disadvantages

Customization is not always the solution to project management conundrums. The power and intricacy that Wrike offers may prove to be overwhelming if a team is looking for a simple answer to an organizational roadblock. It is possible to tweak Wrike into the perfect solution, but that time tinkering and onboarding could be better spent with a more simple solution like Basecamp.

How to choose the best project management solution

Wrike versus Basecamp is a classic example of simplicity versus customization. If your team needs bespoke solutions for workflow management, then Wrike will serve you well; however, Basecamp is better suited to a broader audience of project managers with more basic needs.

That said, Wrike and Basecamp aren’t the only two options worth considering. If neither of these vendors meets your needs, explore our Project Management Software Guide or browse trending solutions below.

The post Wrike vs. Basecamp: A Project Management Software Comparison appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

At its heart, project management is about mitigating risks and maintaining predictability. Regardless of what project management strategies are used, your primary task is to make sure the project goes as planned.

One way to ensure this is to avoid common project management mistakes. These mistakes can creep into even the most well-laid plans and impact your project’s success. Kanban boards, stakeholder management solutions, automated task prioritization, and other project management tools help keep teams on track, minimizing critical mistakes that may arise from human error.

1. Not Setting Clear Project Goals

Many projects fail because they did not have clear goals set upon kickoff. Stakeholders may have a desired outcome in mind, but often, that outcome has not been explicitly communicated. One of the best ways to pinpoint a nebulous goal is to hash out helpful key performance indicators (KPIs) or determine what a deliverable would look like at the end of the project before work begins.

Poor goal-setting also happens when there is no consensus among stakeholders about the project’s direction or project success criteria. Additionally, a change in requirements or an unplanned risk can cause projects to have unclear goals.

Tools that help establish clear project goals

Establishing clearly defined project goals is as simple as ensuring they meet the SMART criteria. Goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely usually come with easily identifiable KPIs.

With a KPI tracker like Domo, project managers can keep track of goals and point to concrete data points that measure success when managing projects. This will also help establish a consensus among stakeholders on the project’s direction once kickoff has occurred.

Tracking project portfolios can also help align project goals. This is an excellent way to track team workloads and provide feedback to stakeholders. KeyedIn provides a suite of portfolio management, reporting, and prioritization features that can act as historical records and aid in goal calibration.

With the ease of project portfolio access KeyedIn provides, it becomes a simple matter to compare similar past projects to current projects, and it gives team members easily accessible data to point to when collaboratively creating project goals.

2. Not Focusing on Personalities During Team Selection

The seventh edition of the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) mentions that a team is more than a set of hands. Every member of your project team has two roles:

• A functional role based on their skills
• An emotional role based on how they fit into the team’s culture (Do they engender trust, empower teammates, etc.?)

The best teams don’t just have the right mix of skills; they also have the right mix of personalities. After all, if your team members can’t get along with each other, you can’t really expect them to guide a project to success or collaborate well, regardless of their skills.

“The dynamics of interpersonal relationships depend on individuals’ personalities, not on hard skills or expertise,” wrote Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Dave Winsborough in Harvard Business Review. “The only way to create a team that’s worth more than the sum of its individual contributors is to select members on the basis of personality, soft skills, and values.”

This isn’t exactly a new belief in project management. Experienced managers might already be familiar with personality-focused team models such as Belbin’s 9 Team Roles. These models divide team members into different roles based on their personalities, values, and energy levels.

Thus, team members might have different roles, such as:

• Managing stakeholder relationships
• Evaluating results, following best practices, and keeping the project on track
• Motivating the team and challenging them to perform better

Selecting for personality and skill ensures your people perform well not just as individuals but also as a team.

Tools that help choose the right team

Trello’s kanban boards give teammates the ability to organize themselves in terms of capacity, skills, and ability to work together. By putting work up for grabs in accordance with the capacity of the team, and allowing members to assign themselves to tasks, work will more easily fall into the hands of members that are best suited to the project tasks at hand.

3. Not Reporting Necessary Data

Successful project management will usually rely on effective and meaningful reporting. Managers sometimes see creating project reports as a mundane task and fail to include all of the necessary information in them. Routinely failing to dig into project reports will come back to haunt project managers sooner or later in the form of tasks that have fallen through the cracks or unaddressed roadblocks cropping up down the line.

For example, if a task is delayed because a distributor could not provide raw materials in time, and that delay has not been reported, stakeholders will be left in the dark, further delaying projects that have already run into a bumpy road.

Tools that create effective reports

Kissflow generates stakeholder-friendly reports without any need for additional coding. The software helps project managers create simple-to-understand, narrative reports like project health and status updates. These data views come with clean visualizations of KPIs and data organized according to different priorities, so team members can see granular KPIs, and executives can focus on big-picture progress.

Kissflow also allows teams to create status reports with stakeholders in mind. Short, data-rich reports give stakeholders the information they need without bogging meetings down with useless data points that clutter presentations and slow down meetings.

4. Prioritizing ‘Urgent’ Tasks Over ‘Important’ Tasks

The Eisenhower Matrix is taught by the Project Management Institute to this day because being mired in urgent tasks has been the bane of project managers for decades. An Eisenhower Matrix is an excellent tool when creating a to-do list at the beginning of the day, but it can be difficult to prioritize tasks correctly as time goes on.

Project managers need to be able to separate the urgent from the important to avoid spinning their wheels in “urgent” muck. Sticking to a project plan and effectively delegating small fires to team members will keep a project on schedule and within budget.

Tools that manage task prioritization

Project management tools that have built-in task prioritization will take the mental load off of project managers and their teams, allowing them to efficiently meet project needs in order.

For example, Planview has portfolio analysis tools that keep track of project portfolios by allowing project managers to rank and interconnect projects. The portfolio-wide views and analysis Planview offers keep the big picture at the forefront of the project management process, ensuring teams don’t get lost in the daily minutiae.

5. Not Managing Scope Creep Proactively

Scope creep is the addition of features, functions, or tasks to the development process that were not previously included in the initial scope of a project. When the scope of a project grows out of control, teams will find themselves over budget and over schedule, and the morale hit can fray in-office relationships in the long run.

Scope creep usually happens when there is no consensus on the project’s scope. If stakeholders and managers have different expectations, one party is liable to over-ask or over-charge the other.

Preventing scope creep demands proactive change management. You need to keep a close eye on every change request and keep stakeholders alerted to the same. When a project team is able to offer data-backed explanations for a rejection, most clients will understand.

This approach also gives teams the opportunity to discuss realistic alternatives that will head off the threat of creeping scope altogether while maintaining the flexibility project management often requires.

Tools that manage scope creep

Project management software is designed to manage the organization and implementation of a project, but these tools also come packaged with tools that will assist project managers in avoiding scope creep.

With monday work management’s sprint planning tools, for example, teams are able to take an open and honest look at the workload they have been presented with ahead of time and allow wiggle room for creep appropriately. Sometimes this means there is no room for creep, sometimes the opposite is true. Regardless, this can be set in stone early in the planning process, and it should be adhered to should any changes in scope crop up that push the boundaries of an already-established workload.

The Right Software Can Help Keep Your Projects Afloat

Project management is a difficult science. It requires careful planning, proactive client management, and judicious use of resources. However, kanban boards and Gantt charts alone are not enough to flawlessly execute a project plan.

Outfitting an attentive team with an arsenal of flexible, user-friendly tools will make it easier to sidestep many roadblocks with ease. Finding the perfect solution for a project can be daunting, but our Project Management Software Guide is a simple starting point for you and your team.

The post 5 Critical Project Management Mistakes & How to Avoid Them appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Property management software streamlines many management processes and reduces the stress placed on landlords and their property managers. From promoting available properties to maintaining tenant relationships, this software can add efficiency and value to many property management responsibilities.

However, choosing the right software often involves identifying the biggest pain points of existing property management processes. Some property managers may want a tool that makes it easy to cross-list properties on as many of the top sites as possible. Others may need help managing an overwhelming number of applicants and tenants. Thankfully, the right software offers both of these time-saving features in addition to many others.

If you’re looking for the best property management software to meet your rental property’s unique needs, check out our Real Estate Software Guide to browse our comprehensive list of solutions.

Automated Rental Listings

Rental sites like Apartments.com and Zillow are invaluable to the property management endeavor. They are the primary destination for prospective tenants who want to browse available rentals, so managing listings effectively can make a difference in how quickly a vacancy is filled.

Property management software helps reduce the time and effort it takes to maintain open listings across all of the top rental sites. The right platform will ensure all listings have consistent information and up-to-date availability. Avail is one such property management solution that makes the process of cross-listing properties on as many outlets as possible becomes a simple, streamlined process.

With Avail, property owners and managers only need to enter rent and lease details, upload photos, and list applicable amenities once for each property. Then, Avail automatically syndicates the listing information to top sites like Realtor.com, Trulia, HotPads, Zillow, and Apartments.com.

Streamlined Applicant Management

Property management software solutions help manage the deluge of housing applicants that landlords often face when a property is finally on the market. The right software will make it easy to organize and sift through applications and find the best tenants.

For example, DoorLoop digitally collates applications and stores their contents in a simple and clean display. It sorts applicants by property and keeps all of their data neatly organized by name. Because DoorLoop keeps all of the information sorted in such a convenient view, it is easy to make a decision when a prospective tenant has submitted all of the necessary information.

In some cases, property management software can even take the next step of helping landlords screen potential tenants automatically. Avail’s application management features provide each tenant’s 5-year rental history, verified employment and income details, and automated reference checks. For tenants that make it past the initial screening, Avail also offers deeper reports like background checks and credit histories as add-ons.

Efficient Lease Agreements

One of the most time-consuming, labor-intensive aspects of property management is preparing lease agreements with the right details. Therefore, lease agreement management is one of the most important features a rental solution can provide.

Products like Avail help property managers create digital lease agreements with a range of customization options, including lease terms, property- and state-specific clauses, accepted payment methods, and other important policies. The ability to duplicate these customized agreements is also a massive timesaver any property management company needs in order to operate at peak efficiency. 

Maintaining compliance with lease agreements can also be a difficult affair when laws related to rental properties differ from state to state. For this reason, many rental management solutions typically work with legal experts to make meeting compliance requirements less complicated.

With TurboTenant, for instance, property managers gain access to lawyer-reviewed, state-specific lease agreement templates. These leases are simple to generate, and the fact that they have been reviewed by lawyers ensures the agreements will be in compliance with relevant laws.

Convenient Rent Collection and Accounting

Many property management solutions support digital rent collection, and property accounting can be easily managed within the software for a relatively low price per unit.

Some platforms like Yardi Breeze offer native payment processing capabilities. Tenants can choose to pay rent via credit, debit, or ACH (Automated Clearing House) transfers, and they can set up automated payments to avoid late fees. This flexibility has become a standard in the rental property market, so not offering online payment methods could deter prospective tenants from signing a lease.

From a landlord’s perspective, online payments make it easy to identify tenants who haven’t paid their rent, so the missed payment can be addressed as quickly as possible. In fact, with Avail’s convenient FastPay feature, rent collection funds are available as soon as the next business day.

Property management software also simplifies accounting processes. Tasks like budgeting overhead costs, managing payables and receivables, and preparing tax documents are easier when all of the financial information exists in a centralized platform. For large management companies that prefer to use a dedicated accounting suite, platforms like Propertyware integrate with QuickBooks for synchronized bookkeeping.

Do You Need Property Management Software?

Property management software is designed to support property managers in every aspect of their jobs, from posting rental listings to optimizing a property’s financial future. The features that the software offers are often easily scalable, so property managers and investors can rely on a single solution as their portfolio of rental properties grows. With the right property management solution, the prospect of managing dozens of properties becomes a more realistic and strategic endeavor.

To find the best rental property management solution for your needs, check out our Real Estate Software Guide.

The post Top Property Management Software Features That Save Time appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Business intelligence (BI) software systems help businesses create meaning from their data by analyzing it in large batches and presenting it in bite-sized chunks. There are many BI vendors that can help make data usable in this way, but two of the most popular options are Qlik and Tableau.

Both solutions source data from multiple data connectors to provide businesses with meaningful and actionable insights. However, each system is best for different kinds of businesses.

Qlik is best for quickly growing large enterprises that handle a significant volume of data on a regular basis. Its AI-backed data presentation services and multiple node deployments make it an excellent fit for sprawling workplaces. Tableau, however, is better suited to smaller businesses with local operations and agile processing needs.

If neither of these BI solutions seems like the best fit for your organization, you can explore more solutions on our comprehensive list of BI software.

What Features Does Qlik Offer?

Qlik strives to make data literacy more accessible to everyone in an organization. The software does this by leveraging many different options for visualizing data, which users can build using drag-and-drop features.

These visualizations allow a surprising amount of granularity, considering how well they summarize large groups of data. Users are able to request data views as specific as “quarterly sales in a given region” in plain conversational, requests.

Qlik also uses an associative engine to help reveal insights that can be easily lost to human error. This focus on showing associative data tends to surface insights a human would not have on their own. While this is good for viewing the same data sources in different ways, some users might find the experience overwhelming.

What Features Does Tableau Offer?

Tableau helps users tell stories with data by making it easier to find and share insights. Customizable, user-friendly dashboard tools let analysts generate graphs and reports for forecasting, spotting trends, and more.

Tableau’s query-based approach gives users a more hands-on experience and allows for exacting deployment of only the data points a user has personally sought out. Although this empowers individual users to find answers for themselves, it may do so at the cost of unexpected insights.

Tableau also lets users present data analysis as a story, using slideshow tools like Microsoft PowerPoint to help analysts create narratives. This simplifies the process of parsing data and translating it for broader business audiences.

Qlik vs. Tableau: Deployment

Depending on your organization’s needs, Qlik and Tableau offer different deployment options. For Qlik, businesses can choose from a selection of software as a service (SaaS), on-premises, or private cloud for deployment. Similarly, Tableau comes as an on-premises or cloud-based solution.

Qlik prioritizes scalability with its multi-node deployment options, allowing massive enterprises to locally house and access their own instance of Qlik. For smaller operations, though, this may be excessive.

Tableau deployment is usually faster and simpler compared to Qlik. However, large businesses may experience bottlenecks when bloated servers are forced to manage more requests than they are equipped to handle.

Qlik vs. Tableau: HR Analytics

Both Qlik and Tableau handle the less obvious number-crunching that human resource (HR) analytics requires.

Qlik aids talent acquisition initiatives by monitoring data at large businesses that would otherwise be a time-consuming process for an individual. The data Qlik provides can be anything from departmental headcounts to the precise spending areas for hiring budgets. By utilizing its AI to display data like employee development and training costs, Qlik becomes a useful and responsive HR companion.

Tableau carefully monitors turnover rates, retention headcounts, and intracompany movements. Crucial data points like slowly increasing turnover rates or steady intracompany movement are revealed with very little coaxing from Tableau’s HR tracking capabilities. This data is also easily collated by Tableau for stakeholder presentations, keeping everyone in the loop no matter their proximity to the hiring process or stake in HR budgets.

Qlik vs. Tableau: Security

Both Qlik and Tableau support multiple users with role-based permissions, so companies don’t have to worry about the wrong people viewing data they shouldn’t be able to access.

Additionally, system administrators can also enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) as an extra safeguard against weaker passwords. For Qlik, an enterprise can set up MFA using Okta, and Tableau users can use Duo.

For maximum security, both solutions offer single sign-on (SSO) capabilities. This is ideal for organizations looking to minimize the threat compromised user passwords pose for companies’ most valuable data.

Qlik vs. Tableau: How to Choose the Right BI Solution

Qlik and Tableau are powerful BI software solutions that offer numerous advantages, but one may meet your organization’s unique needs better than the other.

Qlik comes equipped with robust, AI-backed data parsing capabilities. The automatic report visualization and intelligent query features make it an invaluable tool for large enterprises working with large volumes of raw information.

Tableau, on the other hand, is an excellent fit for single-office enterprises and small businesses. From its deployment to its data management, Tableau is agile and powerful enough to handle complex workloads without being overwhelming for small teams.

Qlik and Tableau are some of the most popular business intelligence systems on the market, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your search should end here. If you want to save hours on the search for the right business intelligence solution, explore our complete list of business intelligence software. Our advisors can help you narrow down the top options for your business’s unique needs.

The post Qlik vs Tableau: BI Software Comparison appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Agile grew out of a number of studies in the 1990s and early 2000s that showcased significant flaws with how large IT and software development projects were being managed. These studies showed that traditionally managed IT or software projects:

• Usually went over budget
• Usually ran over schedule
• Had trouble adapting to changing requirements

Unlike traditional project management, Agile uses an iterative process that allows teams to test each version of a program, and make changes accordingly. This allows for greater flexibility and more efficient use of resources.

While Agile was designed for software development, organizations such as digital content firms and media can benefit from implementing elements of this methodology.

6 Essential Agile Project Management Software Features

If a team is looking to get started with Agile, they will need the right project management tools. Certain software does lend itself to this methodology, but Agile by nature isn’t rigid, so features from a number of project management products could be used for Agile teams.

What are six of the most essential features of agile project management software?

1. Progress visualization

Overlapping with the Kanban methodology, representing progress visually makes it much easier to see where each member of the team is with their individual tasks. Visual progress tools are common in many project management products, and make it easier to preemptively identify bottlenecks.

Be sure to vet this feature carefully. Locking a team into a Kanban chart when they have linar projects and limited resources will be a frustrating way to realize that a Gantt chart would have been the better visualization tool a few months after committing to a project management tool.

2. Issue tracking

Working in combination with progress visualization, issue tracking allows the team to easily tell which parts of the project require immediate attention, and which parts have been completed. Issue tracking will be used more often by software development and IT teams than by non-technical teams, but can be helpful for managing any type of revision-related work.

3. Collaboration

Depending on the nature of the team and project, they will want to look for different types of collaborative tools. For example, team wikis serve as a great tool for centralizing any documents attached to specific projects on the board. This eliminates the redundancy of email chains and makes it easier to find relevant information quickly.

Strong collaboration tools should be a hallmark of any Agile-specific software. One of the main values of the Agile manifesto is putting “individuals and interactions over processes and tools.”

In order to stay agile (pun absolutely intended), a team will need to eliminate barriers to the information they need. Employee collaboration is often used in other project management methodologies but is particularly vital in Agile.

4. Estimation

In order to set accurate requirements and control scope creep, agile project managers need to use estimation tools to calculate how long each iteration (or sprint if utilizing Scrum) will take. Gathering accurate estimations helps project managers create a base of historical data from which to forecast future agile projects.

Estimation tools also help in an immediate sense, too. Reacting to change is a central tenet of Agile, so by updating estimates after every release or sprint, PMs can stay on top of deadlines and adjust accordingly.

5. Customer portal

How can development teams receive feedback on their development if customers can’t access the software?

Having a customer development portal allows agile project managers to conduct software walkthroughs. They also help customers provide more detailed feedback that can translate directly into actionable tasks.

Instead of waiting to receive feedback after weeks of development, teams can ask for feedback with each new release or patch. While Agile is flexible enough to accommodate last-minute requirements changes, it’s always better to adjust priorities as soon as possible.

6. Project portfolio management

Agile’s focus on team collaboration and individual contribution means it can be difficult to scale. It can become cumbersome to respond to change quickly as the amount of moving parts and interdependent skill sets grows. It can also be hard to prioritize individuals over tools, as the very nature of scaling requires organizations to adopt tools that replace individual interactions.

The solve for scaling Agile is to break down large teams into smaller groups that focus on specific tasks. Those teams can thus be centrally managed via project portfolio tools.

By having quick access to a team’s entire portfolio of projects, they will be better able to jump between projects and ensure estimates are still accurate. A good agile project management software will track concurrent projects down to the most minute user story, enabling simple and intuitive inter-portfolio response.

How to Choose the Right Agile Solution for the Features You Need

Agile seeks to eliminate many of the redundant processes that too often imbed themselves in project workflows. It’s not the right solution for every team or industry, but it can result in higher ROI and faster time-to-market when implemented correctly.

Finding the perfect agile software can be a headache if you don’t know where to start. Check out our Project Management Product Selection Tool to see what suits your needs.

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