Mavenlink Review

COMPLETE REVIEW

Mavenlink is an online project management solution developed by the company with the same name. The company was founded in 2008 and it is based in California, but today it also has offices in San Francisco, Boston and some other areas in the US and in Europe.

Mavenlink now has over 2,000 customers in 100 countries worldwide. Coca Cola Credit Union, Genpact, Salesforce, BuzzFeed and Cornerstone are just some of them.

This SaaS solution focuses more on task management and collaboration.

There are four paid plans available: Teams, Professional, Premier and Enterprise.

The Team package only includes 5 users and it is more a task management and collaboration tool. It comes with 10 GB of storage and includes the basic features, but lacks the ones that let you manage portfolios, accounting or resource planning.

Professional includes collaboration, project management and time tracking features. It comes with 50 GB of storage and adds accounting tools and change request management ones.

The Premier plan also adds resource planning and financial tools. You get 100 GB storage and some additional features: budgets and margin tracking, invoicing, rate cards, resource planning, analytics and others. Mavenlink claims this is the most popular plan out of all four.

The Enterprise package includes everything from project management to business intelligence and other advanced services: custom reporting, real-time analytics and more. It comes with 1 TB of storage.

Overall, we think that aside from the free and the basic Teams plan, Mavenlink is quite expensive and you can find similar or better services for less money. Another annoying thing is the fact that a lot of the features are not available with their cheaper plans. For example, access to all report options, which requires you to sign for their Enterprise plan (the most expensive plan). With the Team plan you have no reports at all, you can only export your project data to an Excel file or CSV.

Mavenlink is not the easiest to use software we tested so far. When you’re first getting started, you might feel you’re fumbling around and being overwhelmed by all the functions and features and the ways in which you can get to them. However, as you spend some time on it, it becomes clearer and clearer.  

Based on its features, Mavenlink gives the impression that it is best suited for larger companies, because it allows users to have different roles that come with specific permissions: admin, project creator, project lead and collaborator. Usually, smaller organizations don’t require these kinds of permission levels.

There is no built in chat app available and no dedicated mobile apps. All you have is the mobile-friendly version of the website.

On the bright side, there are some useful features we can mention.

• There is Smart Snips, which allows users to make highlighted comments on the files they upload and attach to the project, right in the browser.
• The task tracker is another worth mentioning tool, when it comes to creating tasks and subtasks. It lets you designate tasks as simply “tasks”, “deliverable”, “milestones” and “issues”.
• The “master planning” helps you ensure that all your employees are being used effectively. This tool lets you see how many hours an employee has worked or he is scheduled to work.
• The timer, which is placed on the upper right side and when it is activated, allows you to track the amount of time you dedicated to a certain task or project. When you completed your job, you can submit your timesheet to your manager for approval.
• There are many other features available: Gantt charts, file sharing, invoicing, task dependencies, project summaries, custom branding and more.  

Mavenlink lets you integrate with all major services like Google Apps, PayPal, Quick Books, Dropbox, Apple Calendar, Outlook and so on. It is also supported by Zapier and you can use their API, if you want to build your own custom apps and integrations.