5 Best Mavenlink (Kantata OX) Alternatives

What is Mavenlink OX?

Mavenlink, now known as Kantata OX, is a cloud-based software platform designed for professional services organizations. It provides tools for resource management, project management, financial management, team collaboration, and business intelligence to help businesses streamline operations and improve profitability.

Why do users consider an alternative?

We’ve spent hours speaking with Kantata OX’s existing and former clients. Here are some reasons they’re considering switching to another PSA platform.

Not great for building estimates: Several former Kantata users have found the platform’s functionality lacking when it comes to building project estimates. They prefer external tools like Google Sheets and Excel spreadsheets, citing ease of use as a key reason.
Limited integration with accounting systems: Integrations with popular accounting tools like Xero, QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct, and Expensify are not deep enough to streamline the billing process, leading to manual work and potential errors.
Lack of live, up-to-date data: Kantata OX’s lack of real-time data and reporting limitations force users to rely on manual workarounds, such as exporting data to spreadsheets and manually collecting information, leading to inefficiencies and potential errors.
Difficulty customizing reports: While Kantata offers a variety of pre-built reports, users have reported that the platform lacks sufficient customization options. This limitation often forces them to export data and create manual reports, which can be time-consuming and delay access to real-time information.
Scheduling issues: While Kantata offers high-level resource allocation capabilities, many customers have found its day-to-day resource scheduling features lacking agility and flexibility. This makes it difficult to adapt to frequent changes in project delivery, leading to outdated schedules and reactive adjustments.
Lack of visibility into non-billable time: Kantata OX’s time tracking capabilities are primarily geared towards billable projects, making tracking and monitoring time spent on internal, non-billable initiatives difficult. This lack of visibility hinders resource allocation and project management for internal projects.

Best Kantata OX alternatives

Here are our picks for the five best Kantata alternatives out there.

1.Scoro

Scoro is an all-in-one project management software built for agencies, consultancies, and other professional services businesses.

It provides complete visibility across projects, finances, and resources, allowing you to standardize processes, improve team collaboration, and optimize resource allocation.

You can explore five default dashboards, including ones based on your role.

For example, the CEO/COO dashboard lets you easily track essential company metrics like revenue, profitability, sales pipeline performance, and resource utilization.

Other dashboards include:

Account manager/PM helps track project status and track KPIs like projects over deadline, team revenue, and team availability
Specialist gives team members an overview of their hours, tasks over deadline, upcoming meetings and events, and active projects
Profitability shares key financial metrics like revenue per period, projected profit, outstanding invoices, and individual project profitability
Utilization helps project and operations managers understand team capacity and track metrics like time spent by project, billable vs non-billable time, and utilization per period

Whichever dashboard you choose, you can always track productivity metrics like billable vs non-billable time, financial metrics like budgeted income and project profitability, or project management metrics like team hours.

Or create your own custom data points, such as expenses by team or income per project. Best of all, all the information you see on your Scoro dashboard is live, so there’s no need to export and manipulate the data to get real-time updates.

Core use cases of Scoro

Here are three use cases Scoro is perfect for:

Project quoting & budgeting

With Scoro, you can build client proposals, estimate costs, and track profitability all in one place. So you can ensure projects are delivered on time and budget.

To help simplify project quoting and budgeting, you can add standardized products and services to Scoro.

Set their default costs, selling price, and role. Then, quickly generate quotes for standard offerings with pre-made templates.

This way, you can agree on the scope with the client, estimate the delivery cost, and set clear expectations for the internal team.

As your work goes on, you can track key budget metrics, helping you avoid scope creep.

For example, the “Quoted vs Actual” table lets you compare your estimates with actual results in real time, ensuring you’re not going over budget or underutilizing resources.

Project management

Scoro lets you create projects, plan resources based on team member availability, and track project progress within a single system.

After creating a project from a quote, Scoro helps you break it down into phases and tasks and visualize the process more clearly with various views, including a task list, Gantt chart, task board, and calendar views.

Here, you can also plan the project delivery timeline and delegate responsibilities to team members.

Each team member’s avatar even has a circular progress bar showing availability. Ensuring you allocate work only to those who can take it on.

Once your people have started working on their tasks, you can visualize project delivery timelines and track progress in the Gantt chart.

Plus, you can ensure the projects are profitable by comparing actual time and budget to estimates in the “Budget” tab.

Time tracking

Scoro’s time tracking features make it easy to see where your team’s time goes. This allows you to spot workflow inefficiencies, identify bandwidth issues, and track expenses accurately.

Your people can track time as they work using Scoro’s stopwatch feature, schedule time in advance for recurring tasks, or manually log time under each task.

They can even log their hours retrospectively in their timesheets.

All logged hours get automatically recorded in each person’s timesheets.

As you and your team track time, you’ll notice a progress bar at the top of each day. This gives you complete visibility into how much work each person has on their plate.

Once your team’s weekly tasks are recorded, you can approve (or decline) timesheets and get them ready for invoicing.

What you’ll love about Scoro

Scoro’s detailed reporting capabilities are perfect for operations managers who need complete visibility over processes and finances.

For example, Scoro’s “Revenue report” tracks yearly revenue based on quotes and projects, helping you analyze past performance and trends and carefully plan for the future.

To access it, open the “Reports” tab and click “Revenue” report. This data helps you answer questions like:

How much revenue have we generated in a certain period?
Which projects are the most profitable?
How much revenue are we guaranteed over the coming months?
How much potential revenue do we have in the pipeline?

The “Pipeline” report lets you and your sales team hone in on your pipeline more closely.

Based on factors like closing probability rates and estimated closing dates for each deal, the report shows you an average of costs, profit margins, and sums for each funnel stage.

This helps you improve forecasting and optimize capacity planning.

Finally, Scoro’s “Utilization” report lets you track utilization across entire teams and identify availability or bandwidth issues.

The summary column on the left gives a quick overview of each team member’s capacity, making it easy to see who can handle new tasks.

The heatmap helps you identify when team members are available by day, week, or month.

Hover over a cell to see which projects someone spent time on. And how planned hours compare with actual time spent on projects or events.

Core features of Scoro

Visual work planning features like Gantt charts and availability heat maps allows you to assign work and keep track of progress easily
Cost management dashboard gives you a 360 view of your finances, helping you keep track of costs and compare estimates to actual revenue
Comprehensive reporting including utilization, finance, availability, margin, and custom reports
Time tracking and timesheets to see where your people’s time goes and how to best optimize it
Invoicing automates client billing and helps you get paid faster
Sales and CRM lets you easily quote customers and manage your pipeline
Integrations with tools you might already use like Asana, Jira, QuickBooks, Salesforce, and Zendesk

Pricing

Scoro offers four paid plans:

Essential: $26 per user per month
Standard: $37 per user per month
Pro: $63 per user per month
Ultimate: Contact sales for pricing

You can also start with a 14-day free trial to test Scoro.

2. BQE Core

BQE Core is a firm management tool designed for architecture, engineering, and professional services firms.

With this Kantata alternative, your reporting dashboard serves as your homepage.

When you log in, you’ll see an overview of your most important metrics, like income or expenses, as configurable widgets. And since all dashboards are entirely customizable, you can add or remove widgets only to visualize the data you need.

You can also create specific dashboards for different projects, clients, or employees.

Some metrics you can track include:

Cash flow
Income vs. expenses
Hours
Staff workload
Employee allocation and staff utilization
Employee performance
Gross margin by client
Due projects
Sales funnel

Core use cases of BQE Core

Here are three use cases BQE Core can help you with:

Project Management

BQE Core is a project-based tool, as opposed to a client-based one. So all functionalities—like tracking time, expenses, resources, and progress—are centered on specific projects.

The platform offers a dedicated project dashboard where you can track the status of your projects and even monitor key financial metrics.

Like amounts ready to bill, work-in-progress values, and overdue invoices.

This helps you monitor your company’s financial health without having to dig deep into a project page.

You can view individual project details, such as timelines, budgets, and invoices, by selecting a project from the row.

You can even add multiple phases and subphases to your projects, each with their own fee structures. This helps you better organize projects, forecast costs, and manage budgets.

Time and expense tracking

BQE Core offers a time and expense dashboard to simplify tracking for operations managers.

Like Scoro, users can track time as they go or enter it manually on their “Time Card”. They can also add details like whether it’s billable vs. non-billable, overtime, extra time, or comp time.

Employees and contractors can also track their expenses from the “Expense Entries” screen.

As an operations manager, you can also review submitted expenses by project, employee, or vendor from the “Expense Entries” screen.

After time entries and expenses are approved, it’s on to invoicing.

Billing and invoicing

BQE Core lets you automate the entire billing process from importing time and expense data to generating and sending invoices.

Select from one of the tool’s 20 standard templates to schedule automatic invoices, which adjust based on billable time and expenses.

You can even set up a schedule for invoices based on fixed fees.

If you’re sending invoices manually, you can email them to a client or an internal team member, like a project manager, directly from within the tool.

You can even add ePayment options to your invoice so clients can pay you more easily, from anywhere in the world.

What you’ll love about BQE Core

One of BQE Core’s standout features is its easy-to-use time and expense tracking. Its straightforward user interface (UI) encourages quick adoption.

Additionally, having expense and time tracking on the same dashboard simplifies tracking information like employee hours, budget updates, and project costs.

Core features of BQE Core

Project-wide dashboard lets you track the status of all projects and monitor key KPIs on one page for better oversight
Project phases and subphases simplify project management and help you keep tasks within budget
Interactive Gantt charts help visualize project phases across a 14-month period and even track budget spent
Real-time insights that help analyze project profitability, employee allocation, and performance quickly
Customizable reports and dashboards so you only see the data that’s useful to you
Time and expense tracker to expedite payroll and invoicing
Automated invoicing to ensure clients receive timely, error-free invoices
Customizable APIs which let you integrate BQE Core with any third-party tool

Pricing

BQE Core offers module-based pricing. For an exact quote, reach out to sales.

3. Avaza

Avaza is a project and work management software for business consulting and professional services. This Kantata competitor lets you manage your operations at every step, from resource scheduling and time tracking to invoicing and team communications.

Avaza offers comprehensive visibility into business processes with more than 50 real-time reports you can customize to your needs.

It also lets you automatically send these reports to stakeholders, saving you the hassle of doing it yourself.

Avaza reports are split into four categories:

“Project Management” includes reports like project profitability, project summary, and schedule vs timesheets
“Finance” includes reports like customer dashboard, revenue by month, and transactions by month
“Expense” includes reports like expense details, expenses by customer, and expenses by employees
“Exports” let you download key data like timesheet entries, expenses, and transactions

For example, the “Project Profitability Report” draws from your project data and shows you both an overview and detailed analysis of key project metrics, such as budget vs. actual costs or project margin.

Core use cases of Avaza

Here are three ways users like to use Avaza:

Visual Project Resource Scheduling

On Avaza’s “Team Scheduling” dashboard, you can view your team’s schedule and days off, create and assign new tasks, and reassign or reschedule assignments on one interactive page.

Each person’s availability bar, shown at the top of each day, shows who’s booked and who can take on more work.

Once you know who’s available, click “+ Add Assignment” to create a new task, set start and end dates, and assign it to the free team member.

The “Team Scheduling” view also helps you understand if your company can take on new projects. Or whether you need to hire more people to help you tackle the work you already have.

Quoting and estimates

With Avaza, you can go from sending client estimates to creating projects and sending invoices. There is no need to manually re-enter data at each stage or manipulate it, reducing the risk of errors.

Create and keep track of estimates from your “Quotes/Estimates” dashboard.

You can even send the document in different currencies and languages, which is great for companies that work with international clients regularly.

Once a client receives your estimate, they can reject or approve it.

After your client approves an estimate, you can convert it to a project to set the estimated amount as your project budget. And keep track of billable amounts for tasks.

Similarly, you can convert approved estimates into invoices to get paid more quickly.

Project and Task Management

On Avaza, you can view all your projects, along with key information like “End Date”, under your “Projects” view.

Hone in on individual projects by selecting one from the list.

The tool automatically takes you to the “Tasks” tab. Here, projects are divided into sections (or phases), tasks, and subtasks.

You can create and track tasks, log hours, assign work, and add subtasks to break things down into smaller steps.

The “Tasks” page defaults to the “Vertical Task List” view. But you can also view your work using Kanban boards, Gantt charts, or a calendar layout.

Finally, the “Summary” tab within each project shows you various high-level details like project expenses (both billable and non-billable), task progress, and project timesheets.

What you’ll love about Avaza

In addition to project management, quoting, and resource scheduling, Avaza offers user-friendly time-tracking and timesheet software.

The interface is clean and easy to navigate.

The tool also lets users track time however they’re most comfortable. For example:

By using a timer icon at the top of your screen or directly from your task list
Manually logging hours into your daily or weekly timesheets
Recording start and end times under your tasks

Once you’ve logged your hours, Avaza uses the data to automatically calculate project costs, update project progress, and generate timesheet reports.

The user-friendly time-tracking capabilities and seamless connection between the “Timesheets” module and other features (like project management) make it easy to standardize processes, save time, and reduce manual errors.

Core features of Avaza

In-task comments allow you to communicate with your team in context
Kanban, Gantt, and list views let you structure tasks and project phases in a way that suits you and your team
Customer collaboration gives your customers insight into project progress and even lets them collaborate on tasks
Visual resource scheduling simplifies assigning work based on skills, availability, and utilization rates
Time and expense tracking helps you monitor your people’s time and project-related expenses in one place
Quoting and invoicing allows you to set up estimates and invoices automatically and get paid more quickly
Team Chat lets you have direct conversations with a coworker, create task or project-related group chats, and even share files all within Avaza

Integrations with over 500 tools like Stripe, QuickBooks, Xero, Zendesk, and Salesforce

Pricing

Avaza offers a free plan with limited features and three paid plans:

Startup: $11.95 per month
Basic: $23.95 per month
Business: $47.95 per month

Productive

Productive is an agency management platform that aims to streamline your operations by integrating project management, resource allocation, and financial management into a single platform.

This Kantata alternative consolidates data from different sources like service rates, tracked time, and budgets to give you access to over 50 premade report templates.

For example, the “Profitability by client” report tracks invoiced revenue minus staff costs and expenses. So you can understand which clients bring your company the most profit. And which ones may be costing you money.

Want insights into team performance? The “Scheduled vs. Worked per person, per project” report shows how much the actual hours differ from what you originally planned.

This helps you spot which projects or tasks take longer than expected, so you can shift resources or tweak schedules as needed.

You can also create tailored reports that meet your specific needs by combining different data sets and metrics. This flexibility allows you to focus on the aspects of your business that are most important to you.

Core use cases of Productive

Here are three main use cases for Productive:

Resource planning

Productive combines resource planning, time tracking, and time off management to help you forecast capacity, balance workloads, and make informed hiring decisions. All while promoting a healthy work-life balance.

In the “Resourcing” tab, you’ll see a visual breakdown of each team member’s availability and utilization per project for the next three, six, or twelve months. You’ll also see if someone’s taking sick leave, vacation days, or time-off.

So you can allocate work accordingly.

Want a bird’s-eye view of all ongoing and upcoming projects before allocating resources? Select “Projects” from the “Resourcing” drop-down menu. This layout groups your data by project, rather than people.

Here, you can quickly understand which projects are underway, who’s assigned to them, and how long they’re expected to run.

This helps you ensure enough resources are allocated to projects so they can be delivered on time and within budget.

Time tracking

Productive offers five main ways to track time:

Manually logging hours in weekly or daily timesheets
Using Productive’s desktop timer
Creating entries directly from your Google or Outlook calendar
Starting the timer from directly inside a task
Pre-scheduling time bookings as you assign tasks to team members

As your people log their billable and non-billable hours, Productive updates your profitability and costs in real time.

How?

To start tracking time, team members first need to set their cost rates. This can be structured in ways like monthly or hourly, depending on their roles or the specifics of the project.

Want to see where your people’s time is going? You can access your company timesheets under the “Time” tab.

If a team member has tracked fewer hours than they were scheduled for on a specific day, their time will appear in red.

You can easily follow up with them to ask about the discrepancy and ensure all time is accounted for accurately.

Once employees submit their timesheets, you can review and approve (or decline) them from the “Approvals” page. Ensuring accurate records for billing, invoicing, and payroll.