Accelo Reviews

Pros

I like that Accelo combines almost all facets of my business in one application. Not only do I get CRM & sales capability, I also get job/task tracking, project management, support ticketing, and billing! There is integration with key third party apps so I rarely have to go anywhere else to run the business.
I also like the user community engagement and level of communication to keep informed on product development.

Cons

It is hard to dislike anything given all the recent improvements, but next I'd like to see a payroll feature, so either I can export timesheet data to a third party application or run a payroll process within Accelo.

Pros

I loved the analytics of this product. I was demoing several products for a client that was looking for a PM software that handled a lot of their issues. This software fit the bill. They let me demo it for over 2 months, as I also had a full time job at the time that interfered with my daily testing/playing time with it.

Cons

I pick up new software fairly easy. I did have a major learning curve with this software. But once I got over that it was smooth sailing from there on out.

Alternatives Considered

Kantata and Wrike

Reasons for Switching to Accelo

I researched over 20 and demoed 4 products and brought all 4 to the table with pros and cons that I found with each of them. Mavenlink I thought was overpriced compared to the others. I also felt they weren't as helpful or agreeable to help while I was demoing. Wrike was okay, but they started to shy on giving me time to work with the product. A big factor in my decision making was who was the most customer/user firendly. Who wanted me to really like their product. I wasn't buy for me, I was researching for someone else. I gave that information up front. and the 2 I ended up taking to the client was Liquid Planner and Accelo. We set up online demos for the client to see and ask their own questions. That day, Accelo performed the better demo and the client went with them.

Pros

Accelo is alright to us, visually good, and easy to follow. Has advanced features that will help users manage tickets/projects accordingly.

Cons

Does not integrate with other newly built systems: due to its popularity, I guess. Issues with Merging tickets, as can't revert once done. Does not fully integrate with Outlook, especially forwarded invites or replies from Outlook directly.

Pros

Accelo provides a CRM, sales funnel, statements of work (quoting), active work (projects and ongoing), time tracking and invoicing -- all in one fully integrated platform. The tool is quite user-friendly if set up properly for your business.

Cons

The integration with QuickBooks Online needs some additional features.

Pros

I love how easy it is to understand. Completely customizable and very organized on a whole. Tracking transactions with previous customers is super easy.

Cons

The ease for booking leaves is actually not so easy. It seems to be very complicated. Also I have having to do so many tasks manually.

Pros

It's the perfect app for teamwork, log your time, make a report and to let you know where the project is heading.
Easy tracking of the project and who is working on it.

Cons

It's not that easy to set at first.
You need to be careful when you tracking you.
The reports are not very easy to read and you cannot have them in pdf.
You have to report the exact time that you were working on each task.
Unfortunately, as sometimes I am doing many tasks at the same time its not really realistic for me to track the exact time.

Alternatives Considered

Everhour

Reasons for Switching to Accelo

The setting and the report are more visual. You can have them in pdf. Easiest to see how many time each team member logged. You can track minutes or hour.

Pros

I love working with Accelo because it is a very accessible service for my company, its high performance allows us to manage projects with high performance and my team loves it because of how convenient it is, the tool is available to access from Windows and Android. One factor that makes this software ideal for anyone even without technical knowledge is that it has excellent training available for inexperienced people, its high customization and its wide interface make an excellent experience that motivates people to want to work with this software every day at all times.

Cons

The software has constant updates which is an advantage and disadvantage at the same time to work, the main advantage is that it keeps all your system updated to the most innovative technology and the disadvantage is that for people to adapt to the software makes this very challenging because of the constant changes that are seen.

Pros

- we loved the idea of a fully integrated professional service system. TImesheeting, project management, and business development (prospecting) follow-up, and project cost tracking were essential for us.
- we use everything in Accelo except 'ticketing'.
- we were initially attracted as well by the invoicing and the project profitability features.
- time sheeting, project cost tracking, business development (opportunity funnel) and basic project management work very well for us. The team - including external contractors - use the system externally, and it greatly streamlines our weekly All Hands review meetings.

- We have consultants with extensie experience with Salesforce and Work, and they comment this is much better suited to our 'professional services' application.

Cons

- the proposal/ quoting functionality has been a disappointment. We wish there was better functionality to impot text, 'view' andedit and modigy layout, due to the nature of professional services work. The quoting/ prosposal module is probably fine if you are quoting 'canned' services like web design packaging, or system configuration / maintenance, but not for much else.

Pros

It kind of changed a whole lot of my teams work ethic, and system. Helper us immensely with unique set of features, especially, syncing schedules, result tracking.

Cons

Nothing much really. Just that the pricing is on the higher side. Not a deal breaker though.

Pros

Excellent platform with advanced features and easy to use. Accelo is part of the facilitation of operations within the company.
Excellent quality ratio of the different functionalities and price of the monthly subscription.

Cons

Accelo can take enough time to master all the services offered.

Pros

We are able to fully process our business with the detailed project plans, scheduling and capacity tracking which gives us very detailed and accurate forecasting for capacities.

The whole business now trusts the reliability of the system and the data in it so much that we report daily on the state of play with task management and capacities to move resources around which helps us deliver work quicker for our clients.

We are forecasting for hiring new resources based on the system data, conducting price reviews and making lots and lots of continuous process tweaks with the confidence that Accelo is our living process documentation via the templates.

Also, with the detail in the project plans is something we are able to leverage in the sales process to show prospects we have robust processes that will ensure the best quality content creation.

Cons

There are still some more features we would love to see in the future which would help us automate more and reduce admin but the revamp on the community ideas page gives great confidence to everyone at Digital 22 that if it will benefit enough people then there is a good chance we will see these and more great updates in the near future.

Pros

The stream tracks past info so nothing is lost- I can always go back and see where we were and who said what - awesome! We have substantially cut down on our quoting process/time and it is much more consistent for us now. Instead of using Project Templates I'm using milestone templates and it has been fantastic. I build a quote and then customize it perfectly. And the release of POs was a game changer for us. We don't use them in the traditional sense-we send them to our consultants to verify what they will be paid as subcontractor, but it is working well for the most part.

Cons

1)- Please bring Rich Texting into the body of the quotes FAST and to the emails when we are sending the quotes out to the clients. 2)- Navigation in the "configuration" backend is not user friendly - feels like it needs a "do-over". I find it overwhelming and frustrating. Whenever I have to update or fix something I'm spending WAY TOO much time in my day back there. Time I should be using making more money with clients.... mostly trying to find where I should be. 3)- My Executive Director is finding the reporting function to be challenging when it is time to pull info for the board of directors as well...... OH! and...4)- when using the POs 1 out 10 times the PDF does not populate.... it's like there is a glitch in the system?? I have to delete the entire thing and start over.... ??

Pros

Accelo is a truly effective platform for planning, executing and delivering jobs on time, as it takes care of undoing all those manual tools that hinder overall growth, boasting extremely robust features for project planning, team scheduling, task management and client registration, among other things, it is a platform that boasts excellent customer service and an impressive price-performance ratio

Cons

Within the main features that I dislike about Accelo is that it has few integrations with common tools, just as it needs to improve customization options to achieve adjust the needs that any company needs

Pros

Accelo does a good job helping our marketing agency setup and manage retainers for clients and manage the budget of time they have available. In addition, Accelo allows us to manage website design and development projects down to the minute and helps us ensure projects are on-time and on-budget.
If needed, we can produce an audit trail of work performed for a client in a moment's notice. Our website management team also uses Accelo to manage the hundreds of tickets that are received from clients needing changes to their websites.

Cons

Although Accelo includes a CRM component, this is perhaps the weakest part of their platform at this time.

Pros

The platform has a number of serviceable solutions that integrate well with each other, and with Google Apps / Gmail. The onboarding options are helpful and support staff are very friendly.
The Retainer tool does a decent job of managing recurring tasks and commitments once you figure out how to use it.

Cons

Unorthodox vocabulary, modules operate differently from class leaders, so the learning curve is significant and that can impair adoption across a team.
None of the modules can reasonably be called best-of-breed - but most are still useful.
- The Ticket system is a far cry from Zendesk, but still good enough.
- The quote feature doesn't stack up to Quote Roller, so we still use QR for sales proposals. Accelo used to support integration with Quote Roller, but no longer does.
- We tried to get by with their Project Management tool, but everyone gave up. Now we use JIRA for major projects.
- We have multiple businesses operating in different currencies, so we reply on Xero for accounting, and Freshbooks for invoicing.

Pros

Accelo has encoded the work flows for my business. I was unaware of some of those flows, so the software has educated me. It solved problems I didn't know that I had.

Cons

What I like least really has nothing to do with Accelo. It can be complex, but, for me, that was because I didn't understand some of the complexities in my business.

For example, the Retainers section has you trying to understand the options that they give you. Your first question will be, "Why does this have to be so complex?", or "Who would do it that way?". When you realize the reasons that they structured Retainers, you understand the power of it.

Pros

The idea of a fully integrated professional service system is attractive. Yet there is no delivery on the promises.

Cons

- Does not do what it says on the box
- The offering is convoluted and they offer no training
- Staff are rude when you ask for support
- Consistent bugs erode what little value that remains

Pros

The tool is very powerful. It has a lot of features that allow you to do time tracking, project management, client communication, invoicing and much more. I think because it is trying to be so many things, it is lacking in most all of those areas and the user experience and overall feature set is quite cumbersome and falls below expectations for the money.

Cons

The tool is overly complicated and lacks what you would consider basic features in so many ways. Our team of 8 people spent over 200 hours learning the tool and we are still learning and still frustrated weekly. They try to say that you can make the tool do about anything you want, but doing even the basics requires a tremendous amount of time. Things that should take 30 seconds often take multiple minutes. The system loads pages so slowly that it's not uncommon to watch the wheel spin for 30+ seconds which seems like an eternity when you are trying to work. I would not purchase the tool again and I would not recommend it to others unless you have a full time staff of IT or super users who will do nothing but manage the tool.

Pros

I like the affordability. We are a new MSP and this was a great entry level service desk tool for our company.

Cons

There are some moments that feel unfinished. The email system for alerts and tickets is clunky and has been my least favorite piece of this offering. I was able to make it work, but I don't love the workflow and there are a lot of extra steps that seem unneeded in general. I understand that the idea is to leave it open and able to be customized, but I for one would have much preferred a solid base build that required much less configuration. It leaves the end user feeling like I did the job of an architect instead of a more complete out of box experience. I think people want a more plug and play experience from a service desk tool. It took weeks of configurations to get it to the point of being usable in a real world way. Sandboxing wasn't an option as we needed a production ready tool now, not 3 weeks from now.

Pros

It has the Signoff feature : I really like this , you can send an approval to any people added in the project , also a client ( guest licences), and them can approve the request ( like a changes or new feature )

Proyect Type Function: You can customize the flow of the Project Like at this moment it is the stage 1 - next is Stage 2 , you can add them as you need , related also with a specific custom fields to the type of project.

End user portal: I really like it it shows all the projects related to this client, the gant chart, signofs, and also it allow you to send request ,

Cons

*Filters and reports:
*Filters you cannot search information for the new custon fields
in the main view you cannot add the custom fields, nether the progress in the project overview .
the report sections : totally deficient only has 2 types , and you cannot add the custom fields.
*If we need to create reports or executive reports, it is very difficult because it does not allow to export all that is needed.

Pros

I wanted a great PSA, one that I could stand up quickly and get to work without hours and hours of churn. This fit the bill great. It integrates well with QuickBooks, my RMM, and email platforms. And it is reasonably priced.

Cons

It still feels young in its product lifecycle. The integrations, while solid, have the opportunity for greater and greater automation. Looking forward to the progression of the product.

Pros

Accelo has a really robust ticket system which automatically emails those involved with the ticket when a change is made. It is excellent for managing projects that involve multiple people. Accelo can also send out reminder emails that a task is waiting for more information.

Cons

There are some buttons and functions that don't have clear explanations. When it comes to filtering tickets there are so many options it it really easy to include so few that you don't get useful results, or you can include so many there are no results at all. Some drop down menus are also very quick to snap shut if your cursor wanders a bit.

Pros

The customer service is responsive. That is the only good thing about Accelo.

Cons

They're constantly making updates but don't tell the users about all of them. Then when new features are rolled out, they're buggy and not tested frequently. The pricing is very expensive compared to other project management solutions that work better and don't have frequent issues.

Pros

fully fledged CRM to manage leads effectively through the quotation process. Good way to monitor time and activity at work to understand and prioritize product time. Very well integrates with email, voip and salesforce to allow for good handle on information flow across system and give a consolidated view.

Cons

nothing much that i can think of which needs to change.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot CRM

Reasons for Switching to Accelo

more focused on enterprise servops