Float Reviews

Pros

It is a very visual tool, I love the timeline graph where you can easily filter down the resources on both person and project tags.

Cons

It is rather simple and I would like some more options for tailoring the product to our specific needs, like setting monthly cost limits and including more visual options on each project.

Pros

The ease of use as a one stop shop, browser based to allow all the development team (and subsiduary but linked teams) to see important dates like dev complete, bug fix windows, cert windows and release dates.

The ability to quickly block out time for features and projects.
The ability to add notes and details to tasks.
Fully fleshed out holiday and time off structure.
Robust financial reports possible with very high degree of accuracy for budget per project, per quarter, per annum.

We used to get by with using Excel, we invested in Float and it has taken the companies' project planning to the next step. I would recommend Float for small to mid sized companies definitely, it is a great product boost and good way of reporting and seeing issues early.

Cons

it does not allow you to easily move a bunch of small tasks along in the timeline, that's my only main gripe, you can't band box select you have to shift select. Everything else is intuitive and easy.

Alternatives Considered

monday.com

Reasons for Choosing Float

Excel was clunky and out schedule was increasing in ambition and scope.

Switched From

Microsoft Excel

Reasons for Switching to Float

the website and videos showing features were clear and clean and one of my peers had previous experience and good reviews of the product and we were given a gratis time period to try things out, this helped us alot in making sure Float was the product for us.

Pros

I like the fact you can filter and search by people and/or project

Cons

I don't like that you cannot see 3months in advance on 1 screen. It's still laggy when scrolling, we have 70 people timesheeted and we have project managers filling this in, they find it cumbersome. The repeating tasks are not well formed, as in if you set a repeating weekly task then want to edit one week to be say 3 days, it won't let you do it.
We have other awkward things around adding contractors or people leaving jobs, it would be nice if Float had more sample data as I think sometimes we uncover usecases they haven't tested for - atleast tested the UX for.
I'd love it to improve, as the last speed improvement they did was a step in the right direction, but more customisation is needed.

Pros

I used float at my previous workplace and the ability to integrate with other apps such as Teamwork was brilliant and its easy to use and amend.

Cons

There wasn't anything that stood out for me

Pros

The simplicity of Float was what sold it for us. As a company with around 90 very busy engineers and designers, entering workload data needed to take less than 5 minutes. With Float we can do this. Once all the data is in Float, managers can easily see who needs more work and who is overloaded. Support is also fantastic. The instant message service on the website always gets a fast response.

Cons

No major issues. If I had to nitpick, I had to create a workaround to allow all employees to be able to automatically see every project in the system sithout assigning it to them. To do this I had to make every user an admin. But this works fine.

Alternatives Considered

Resource Management

Reasons for Choosing Float

Excel was very manual, cumbersome and time consuming.

Switched From

Microsoft Excel

Reasons for Switching to Float

The ease of use was critical to us. Float did everything we needed it to.

Pros

Float is a powerful tool that can help the managers to make sure the team is not overloaded (or underloaded :) ).At the same time we have a clear vision if we, as a team, we can take more projects to work on or we have to raise our hand because we are in difficult

Cons

Visually could be more appealing. User interface is easy but it could be more eye-catching for the creative team

Alternatives Considered

Resource Guru

Reasons for Switching to Float

The opportunity to have a mobile app and a time tracker

Pros

It is easy to see what myself and my colleagues have got scheduled to help make sure that resources are managed effectively.

Cons

There is not much integration with other applications that we use which means at the moment it is a stand alone product that we use in our business. If there was more integration then we would be able to utilise the functionality more effectively.

Pros

It's a good software for scheduling people's time on projects, seeing at a glance who is available and when, and who is working on each project. We can easily categorise people into teams, roles etc and then do quick searches. It's also really easy for every employee to log their time spent on projects so that we know what to invoice to clients.

Cons

It's not great for managing the budget of a project: the reports are really limited so you have to do a csv export if you want to do in depth analysis.

Pros

I like that you can split bookings and set different hours on different dates, rather than blanket booking a full resource.

Cons

I dislike that you must click more than 2 times to add a new project. It's an extra step that I find a bit more cumbersome than other project tools.

Pros

The presentation of all the features makes use of the software easy for technical and non-technical users alike. That reduces time spent in training users.

Cons

I guess the need to log in is a very mild pain point, but a necessary one.

Pros

* Provides an overview of scheduled work and staff availability for forecasting and scheduling
* Ability to assign consultants to specific projects, while also assigning individual tasks.
* Minimal duplication of work as the system maintains the lifetime of the projects
* Ability to link to Jira tasks
* Easy to schedule timeframes
* Can view based on teams or individuals

Cons

Not a lot we didn't like, but it would be great to have;
* Task breakdowns
* Two way Jira linking (Currently only from Jira)
* Pull more data from Jira (Timeframes etc)

Alternatives Considered

Todoist and Trello

Reasons for Choosing Float

It didn't provide an overview of staff availability for forecasting purposes

Reasons for Switching to Float

It covered some of the basic features of Asana but providing an overview of staff available and scheduled work, which was a higher priority for us.

Pros

It gives a good overview over the planned projects, even if there are many employees in different teams. The planning, time tracking and reporting features seem to work in a stable manner. Sorting and filtering is done really well.

Cons

There are some UX problems which are just plain weird. Scheduling time for an employee is tedious because the planned time affects the duration and vice-versa. We do our planning on a weekly basis instead of day-to-day, so we're often entering time planned like 0.4h/day which is more complicated than we would like it to be. There are some weird issues with the API as well, where some fields are not being applied correctly, or behavior changes with updates.

Pros

We were previously working on a competitive solution. Compared to other solutions on the market, Float is affordable and allows you to use the tool to its full potential. You're not drowning in a ton of functionality and that's what I liked about it. The ease of use for users and the ease of management for administrators is very satisfying.

Cons

Perhaps the most annoying thing about Float is the ability to export a schedule for customers that is easy to understand. The statistics section could also be improved so that we can compare the time spent (and internal costs) against what has been sold (with the costs sold).

Pros

The software is easy to use and has many features that support resource planning in flexible ways.

Cons

There could be some work on the global settings where we can convert from a local currency (i.e. Euros, Pounds, Aussie dollars) into a default currency to see how projects compare with each other when normalised.

Alternatives Considered

Planview Portfolios, Trello and monday.com

Reasons for Choosing Float

More flexible, more features and somehow cheaper

Reasons for Switching to Float

They solved the issue I was struggling with which is a team view and resource capacity planning. The other products were either to complex or did not have the features I desired.

Pros

It is a great tool to be integrated with jira - it works well for our team, it's a seamless, smooth integration that helps us estimate time & choose the right resource for any jira tasks. It is also easy to follow by the users who are marking tasks "complete", adding comments, mark bookings as tentative. All very clear and transparent.

Cons

The integration with google calendar doesn't work that well. Some of the bookings are wrong / outdated / are not being updated / duplicated / not being displayed in a correct project or are missing. Luckily, the support team is open to help with this kind of issues. Also, the annoying feature is that the "View in jira" link doesn't work for duplicated bookings. It doesn't work well for our team as more people use the same tasks on jira in different time. It's impossible to search using the jira ticket number (you have to know the ticket name). Also, ticket numbers are not displayed in the “Task” field- that causes some confusion because we work with tasks with similar names.

Pros

Intuitive and easy to use, focus on work schedule not project budget.

Cons

Updates are not always realtime forced page reloads required which can be troublesome for the team.

Alternatives Considered

LiquidPlanner, monday.com and Evernote Teams

Reasons for Switching to Float

Price, easy of use, data compliance.

Pros

Float's user interface and logic are inspirational. They have made the activity of coordinating multiple resources on multiple projects about as easy as it can be. They have paid a lot of attention to usability, efficient use of screen real estate and simple navigation. However the killer feature is the intuitive yet clever way that searching and data navigation work. All searching and filtering is done using a single search field, which offers indexed word search on pretty much everything including tags. There is also a well-worked out protocol for handling union and intersect searches.

Cons

The only real bugbear is that any user that can enter data into the system can define new values for any field. It isn't possible to centrally control lists such as task names, clients, job descriptions etc. This means that if you have more than one person using the system, very quickly you get different versions of the same thing being defined (e.g. job roles being slightly different) which makes it difficult to analyse across records. Not a dealbreaker, but I do think it should be possible to lock down lists of values. Also it would be good if you could zoom out the view a little more - if you're dealing with more than a dozen resources/projects.

Pros

The tool has a simple overview, visually similar to already known calendars. This means that you don't need any time to familiarize yourself with it. Just click and add entries.If you work with many different customers, you can create them once and then easily add individual projects within these customer folders.I especially like the fact that I can tell my clients apart right at first glance using the Color Coding feature. But when I need more information, I can also click on the entries and have access to the job number, the available budget, and any other information that might be available.Thanks Float - you make my daily work so much easier :-)

Cons

What could be improved:Currently, when I enter vacation, my projects in the same time frame just disappear from the schedule. This is quite inconvenient and should be fixed. It would be more practical to at least be warned and transfer the projects individually to someone else from the team, or be able to specify vacation substitutions so that the projects are automatically transferred.Also, it would be great if you could duplicate blockers via copy & paste. The split tool is often a bit impractical to use.

Pros

Easy to see forward into weeks ahead for project planning and resource planning. Can easily see when my team hit the limits on hours per day to see when a project is going to need additional resource called in.

Cons

I don't think there is anything I don't like about Float.

Alternatives Considered

Teamwork.com

Reasons for Switching to Float

Visually much better and better UI.

Pros

I like that I (as a project manager) can manage time easily for our team of two, but can easily add contract workers, and that visually it works for my designer as well -- he struggled with really seeing how his week needed to flow when just using tasklists, like Basecamp.

Cons

Anything I haven't liked has been added (e.g. ability to do recurring tasks, reordering tasks). It's a small thing, but we also spend way too much time trying to figure out colors for all of our projects after using the default ones. I would love to be able to add a project from the schedule interface -- like when I go to schedule time and I type in a project, it tries to find it; if it's not there, it would be nice to just have "add this project" without having to exit out of the scheduling box and go into Project.

Pros

Integration with our business was very straightforward, and there are very few problems that arise when using float on the daily. The schedule updates immediately and its very easy to keep track of an entire teams workload at a glance.

Cons

Sometimes I have issues adding in new tasks to the system, but this is quite rare.

Pros

Float excellent resources management features helps us to bring together everyone and everything in the organization under one central point and this allows us to plan our projects effectively and allocate duties based on ones capabilities. It has useful dashboards which keeps us updated on the project time and budget expenditure in real time.

Cons

Working with Float has always been simple for me and i have no dislikes.

Pros

One of the things I like best about Float resource management tool is that it allows you to centralize your people and project data. This means that you can easily see the availability, workload, and skills of your team members, as well as the status, budget, and timeline of your projects

Cons

A few points on which float needs to work:- It has few API integrations that work- It has limited reporting and forecasting features or maybe I need to look into it myself.

Alternatives Considered

Jira

Pros

Float is incredibly easy to use and integrate into smaller teams. Visually straightforward, it gives you quick and simple answers to essential resource-based questions and allows team members to see what work they should be progressing and when in a tidy calendar view. In addition, there is an easy link between time in the calendar to projects that can be managed quickly.

Cons

I do find that compared to some other systems, a level of detail when it comes to finances and budgets vs resource is missing. Whilst you can get some very top-level detail, the ability to link actual time spent versus project budgets is a little simplistic and could be expanded upon to really drill down into more detail to provide better overall reports.

Pros

Scheduling is easy for both myself and others. My office operates of a flexible hybrid schedule so its great that I can also indicate what days I will be in the office.

Cons

With the introduction of hybrid work after covid, I use float to indicate what days I am in the office using the status feature that already exists. For tax purposes, It would be very useful if I as an individual employee could export the days and hours each day that I worked from home for the past year.