Podio

Amazing platform for managing anything

Pros:

Podio is a fully featured platform that allows you to manage any process. We use it as our ERP and we manage all our company processes there. We are a corporate training organization and we sell workshops. In podio we create and keep track from the beginning of the process, the delivery of the courses and the follow up. We have developed with time a quite complex and at the same time simple custom platform for our needs.

Cons:

Reporting is quite limited and not very customizable. Also views could be more sophisticated and customizable.

Serves it's purpose

Comments: The big boss also loves this program, because it can generate many different reports for him, from bid activity, pending logs, securement logs, win percentages with different customers or geographic areas. allows him to see many different metrics with just a few clicks.

Pros:

The website is incredibly customizable, which allows you make this program perform many tasks that vary greatly. Our main purpose was to use this as a bid center for our company, allowing all of our branches to see who was bidding which jobs. After setting that up, we were able to have podio send out reminders after certain amounts of time to follow up on the bid results. If we were awarded the job, it will then send out notices to our purchasing department, project managers, and super intendents with the relevant information (start end dates, contract prices, labor hours estimated, location, contact info, etc). It is very helpful to make sure our branches do not double up estimating the same projects.

Cons:

Being very customizable also means it can be quite tedious to set up initially. There are, however, many premade modules you can either use as is, or customize to fit you needs.

10 Year Client

Comments: We loved it and did almost everything with it. Unfortunately they made a dramatic change that is unacceptable. They restricted our guest user functions in where subcontractors, collaborators, clients, and countless others we have worked with over the years can no longer perform functions like editing app items or create an app item which was a basic user function needed in all of our workspaces. We have been with them since 2013 have built hundreds of colabritives with clients, built entire security education curriculums and managed large government proposals using the platform. Now those free features that we became reliant on over the past 10 years were switched to employee only paid features. In order to restore those former functions. I would have to pay for a user account for each guest in the system. That would change my annual bill from $2400 a year to over $33K a year. That is like buying a new car every year so 130 guest could work with us. I would preach to others on how good the platform was but now after 10 years of customization of apps workspaces client and employee integration they want me to pay a factor of 13.4 x what we have been paying in order to do what we have been doing for the past 10 years. Absolutely criminal ! This is going to be painful and costly.

Pros:

Until Oct 11, 2023 I would argue they are the most powerful intuitive user friendly cloud based tool ever designed. The platform was ideal for project, client, and employee management with powerful tutorials and clean interface with a wide range of customization .

Cons:

They changed their business model effective Oct 11. It has completely disrupted our entire business. I was a huge advocate but no longer. The move is a financial fleecing of small business.

The Scheduling Manager you need

Comments: I have had a good experience with Podio. It has helped me manage my database for several years.

Pros:

I mainly use Podio to enter my customers in to a database and add or subtract information as needed. I am able to customize Podio to exactly what I need for each customer. I can schedule the customers.

Cons:

It took me a few hours to learn how to use Podio, but other than that, there are few things that I dislike about Podio.

a good collaboration tool for begginners of companies that can spend a lot of time in it

Comments: it is quite good, the best for us was to share information about leads

Pros:

we can have in one place all the leads we have and all the workers can upload information about that lead, so we check there all we have from them.

Cons:

the support it is not very good, the price it is quite high and at the end we were moving to MNprogram but we still could not do the change