Productive

We haven't had a single issue with Productive and have yet to hit a limitation or thing to improve. It has been such a breath of fresh air to come across an out-of-the-box solution that fits our team and way of working. It's clear that Productive listens to user feedback and quickly implements features and fixes. Their support is also outstanding - going above and beyond to provide excellent customer service.

Having tried 6 other project management and team collaboration software, I am pleased to say that Prodocutive has surpassed my expectations and there isn't anything that we don't like.

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

There are SERIOUS bugs that totally defeat the purpose of using this product. All of these I've brought to their attention but they have dragged their heels on fixing. Here are some of the top bugs:

#1: When you/your team logs time and goes to create an invoice from it, the date for every single time entry is off by one day as it appears on the invoice, vs. the date you actually logged that time. You can get the accurate dates with time logs from the reporting module and when you compare, you'll see every date on the invoice is incorrect and your customers will start questioning why you logged time on the weekend...

#2: When you go to download a custom report made in the report module, e.g. the hours report mentioned in #1, you get a blank PDF. Try CSV format? Also blank file, with only the header row filled in, 0 rows of data.

#3: Invoice formatting - if you use Productive with Quickbooks Online, when your invoice syncs over you will end up with some random HTML code as part of the descriptions e.g. <ul><li>Notes about this time entry</li></ul> on each line of the invoice. Have fun manually cleaning these up!

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

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

The product is robust yet streamlined at the same time. They simplify the UI to enhance the UX and make it easy for team members to jump right in. The flexibility with budgets has been the best feature for us, as we are able to put all shapes of budgets into the system and track them correctly and effectively across all of our projects.

I wish there was some way to create a production schedule within the projects so they could easily be visible at all times. Everything is tracked within this system EXCEPT for production schedules, so I feel most strongly about that element missing.