A quick tour of construction management tools

Setting up:

Formstack offers a 14-day trial period and the starting price is $50 per month per one user. Although the copy on the landing page suggests that the tool is easy to implement, it took longer than expected to customize. The confusion over the new platform is natural, but we would like the support team to respond faster than Flash Slothmore in Zootopia.

Our score: 6/10

The simplicity of use:

Things felt much better once installation was over. Their product team made the platform understandable and logical. Every click you made leads to exactly the place you wanted to be in.

Our score: 8/10

Public complains:

“Some of the features are still obtuse after many years and not always perfectly”. Keeping customers waiting by giving obscure promises is not fair.

Our score: 6/10

Supported platforms:

In banner terms, “Download on the App Store” or “Get it on Google play”, Formstack is available on iOS and Android.

Our score:10/10

Ability to work offline

If you pair offline forms with the Formstack app, you or your team members could be able to complete tasks no matter where they are.

Our score: 10/10

Roles and permissions management

Formstack allows you to add multiple users to assign roles and permissions. That means you can manage users and permissions for your forms, folders, themes, and integrations.

Our score: 10/10

Both PDF and task based workflows

Within your workspace, you can view and execute any assigned workflow tasks. Shortly, the principle is that a list of workflow steps assigned to you is displayed in the sidebar on the left and you can select a workflow step from the list to complete within application. When you complete an assigned task, the next task will automatically loop around in seconds.

Our score: 10/10

Integrations:

The software integrates to a great number of web applications such as MailChimp, Salesforce, PayPal, Slack, Dropbox, and others. The total number of possible integrations exceeds 100.

Our score: 10/10

Forms and checklists templates:

There is a wide range of different types of forms, from business operations to education, finance and healthcare. Conditional logic in forms allows you to customize the datasets that are required based on the initial choices made by company employees. However, one thing is missing — checklists.

Our score: 8/10

Setting up:

Once you log in, you see a tunnel journey supported by helpers, messages that appear in the lower-left corner so that you understand what steps to take next. It took just four steps to create the first workflows. It's just as simple as the word “simple” itself.

Our score: 9/10

Customer support:

It’s a bit scary to say it out loud but the support team fully cares about your understanding of the product, they offer a demo and training to be sure you put software to its intended use. This is so charming and inspires greater confidence in the product.

Our score: 10/10

The simplicity of use:

Giving an honest word, without a support team it would be harder to create a workflow. The workflow builder is a bit confusing for the first time yet with every getting step of setting up it’s getting clearer and clearer what to do.

Our score: 7/10

Public complains:

“Customer service is Fluix’s greatest asset. When I go to Fluix for help, I know the response I get is genuine. They go out of their way to get the answers I need”

Our score: 10/10

Supported platforms:

Fluix is supported on iOS devices and web browsers.

Our score:10/10

Ability to work offline

Sometimes the saying “Impossible is nothing” could be applied to some product capabilities. The thing is, Fluix allows the field team to work in sync even in the middle of nowhere by syncing automatically offline changes with the whole project once connectivity is healthy. There is another interesting point about it: you can set the number of days during which your team will be allowed to work offline without leaving the app.

Our score: 10/10

Roles and permissions management

This isn't about the police or Orwell's ‘Big Brother Watching You”, but as an admin you can control the rights to access the Fluix administration portal and control the flow of documents. In other words, you either allow your team to do more or to do less. It’s interesting that for each type of workflow, you can grant different rights to the same people.

Our score: 10/10

Both PDF and task based workflows

Fluix allows you to create tasks and link them with any action according to your business rules, and schedule reminders for field teams. Use smart filters to find the specific processes and projects by name, status and due date. This functionality may downplay the number of productivity blockers you run into.

Our score: 10/10

Integrations:

Here’s the moment of slight “heh!” The number of possible integration isn’t big. What they can suggest is a possibility to make a match with Tableau, Trello, Zapier, cloud storage, Google sheets via Zapier, and some of your CRM systems.

Our score: 6/10

Forms and checklists templates:

Fluix is generous in sharing templates, out of which, you can choose checklists or forms of different types. They are logically built, customizable and made to help, not overwhelm you.

Our score: 9/10

Easy to implement:

This is where the tricky moment is: if you're well-versed in setting up tools, software, or apps, you’ll get down to brass tacks. In either case, the process of installation is going to be difficult since there is no team to assist you.

Our score: 6/10

Customer support:

The stream of questions was only partially noticed. This could probably be due to a large number of requests or the message "please help!" got lost somewhere in the black hole of the Internet space, but the support team did not respond as well as expected.

Our score: 5/10

The simplicity of use:

Their interface is browser-based, allowing you to open a new tab for each new task and keep tabs open and accessible. This is both good and bad at the same time: nothing will close by mistake, but dozens of open tabs still don't look pretty.

Our score: 7/10

Public complains:

“I find workflows tempramental. Also, there are, to my mind, too much functionality/too many reports. For me it is difficult to customize the submission process and information flow”

Our score: 5/10

Supported platforms:

Like it said above, Viewpoint is absolutely web-based.

Our score: 6/10

Ability to work offline

If the question is yes or no, then the answer is yes. You can turn on the offline mode and view documents. The only thing, again, this is only available in your browser.

Our score: 8/10

Roles and permissions management

Security and permission settings control access and limit actions.

Our score: 10/10

Both PDF and task based workflows

There is currently no way to build task-based workflows.

Integrations:

Everything is ok here with it. Viewpoint is fully integrated wTimeClock Plus, ExacTime, The EDGE, Rhumbix, TopBuilder, and more.

Our score: 10/10

Forms and checklists templates:

Hardly ever you will find ready-made downloadable checklists or forms on their site in the resources section. But they passed into the public domain something else, which is just as valuable, maybe more. You will find webinars and podcasts with a focus on project management.

Our score: 6/10

Easy to implement:

The installation process has even a kind of roadmap. The first thing is an account set up, then the launch step goes, just after that their customer success team comes to the scene and helps you in the rollout of Procore's construction management platform across your entire company.

Our score: 10/10

Customer support:

If that story was a song, it would have been a sad one. The support team chose the easiest way to deal with important requests, all they did in responding to requests for help was to send links to tutorials, articles or YouTube links. Not that it was bad, it would be more appreciated if there was more humanity.

Our score: 6/10

Simple to use/understand - Clean and robust interface:

Sometimes good intentions cause problems. The thing is, the desire to cover everything and even more than everything made Procore’s interface complicated for intuitive understanding. There are many sections, which are hard to understand and too many steps to go through to get work done. It’s almost impossible to put the puzzle together without How-to articles, support, and harrowing FAQ.

Our score: 6/10

Public complains:

“When we experienced a big hurdle with the accounting features, it took months to speak to a support representative who could talk through the issues”

Our score: 5/10

Supported platforms:

There are two directions for you to choose: “Download on the App Store” or “Get it on on Google Play”.

Our score:10/10

Ability to work offline

Procore works perfectly well offline and automatically syncs your updates when you are back online. So there are no worries if you find yourself on a remote job site without access to an Internet connection.

Our score: 10/10

Roles and permissions management

There is an option to manage user access to different tools within Procore itself. By default, you can find some role-based permissions templates. If they won’t work for you, you can create new ones up to your needs.

Our score: 10/10

Both PDF and task based workflows

Procore has a Tasks tool, which allows you to manage events within a project. With it, you can add comments to the task or edit it. The thing that seems to be more likable is the ability to close the task without completing it in case you suddenly feel that the work on the task is no longer required.

Our score: 10/10

Integrations:

And here they are just great. They have over 300 apps, which can be connected to Procore. Tools like Zoom, Bluebeam, and Primavera, for example, have been spotted on this list.

Our score: 10/10

Forms and checklists templates:

Logs, checklists, and forms can be accessed from a mobile device so you can audit, review, and document the day-to-day events you need to make.

Our score: 10/10

Easy to implement:

You literally should do nothing but download iAuditor. The implementation requires only a few clicks, and it is so easy itself you don’t need to look at the Help section or read extra articles taken from their page.

Our score: 10/10

Customer support:

If the implementation was easy and ended happily, the situation around communication with the support team turned out to be quite the opposite. Not that they didn’t respond, it’s just they responded on a matter of their choice. A quite big number of requests left unanswered. At the same time, those ones, which were not ignored, came back with detailed information and were really helpful.

Our score: 7/10

Simple to use/understand - Clean and robust interface:

At the start, everything looked simple and understandable. Seemed so, at first, then there was a little situation with exporting a CSV file. It just got logged up.

Our score: 6/10

Public complains:

“We have decreased accidents and incidents by 35% using this software it allows us to better track and implement safer practices and solutions”

Our score: 10/10

Supported platforms:

With all five mentioned above, this category is going to be most cited “Download on the App Store” or “Get it on on Google Play”.

Our score:10/10

Ability to work offline

If the conditions will turn out the way you have stored inspections on your device, then the team can have access to them even when they are offline. The key point here is “if you have stored inspection on your device”, so the answer to the question of whether it will be possible to work offline is yes, partially yes.

Our score: 6/10

Roles and permissions management

There is a tool, which is a capability iAuditor has, it’s called Permission management and it allows you to control feature access. So no one except the ones you give permissions to will be able to make unwanted changes to the organization, such as adding or removing users and creating new templates.

Our score: 10/10

Both PDF and task based workflows

There is currently no way to build task-based workflows.

Integrations:

There is even a separate landing page for the integration section. However, there are not that many tools from which you can choose, or it would be better to say they have a good basics, which includes Google Docs or Google Sheets PowerBI, Tableau.

Our score: 7/10

Forms and checklists templates:

Trouble found us at that moment. Building templates was very cumbersome. Then it took a fair bit of effort to download created templates to a PDF version. It might have just been an unlucky day, but things could have been much better with their form builder.

Our score: 6/10