Float Reviews

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

Float is an excellent scheduling tool that I have been using for months now. It is user-friendly, intuitive and the customer service is top-notch. I love the flexibility of the platform, which enables me to easily move and adjust my schedule when needed. It's a great way to keep organized and on top of my tasks.

Cons

Only negativity I've experienced with Float is the fact that it doesn't have an integrated time tracking feature. This means I have to manually keep track of the time I spend on each task, making it a bit cumbersome.

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

That once you get the hang of it is great tool for my team (about 40 team members). The big board gives great overview and the filters work like charm! As long as you have set them up correctly. This took a bit to click through all the team members but once done it make traffic management SO much easier!

Cons

Lack of multiple currencies, very cumbersome managment of retainer projects (those that need to be repeated month by month). Phases don't really work for me as it's too much maintenance and it's not the easiest to do

Alternatives Considered

Resource Guru, monday.com and Microsoft Excel

Reasons for Switching to Float

Interface, price, personal preferance that's difficult to pinpoint at the moment.

Pros

Easy to use. We can view the schedule of the entire team in one screen and make instant changes if necessary.

Cons

When creating tasks, the difference between creating projects and clients can be annoying. Also: provide more colours! ;-)

Alternatives Considered

Teamleader

Reasons for Choosing Float

Google Sheets was becoming to complicated to follow up billable hours, tasks and schedules. Float brought all of those together for our team.

Reasons for Switching to Float

Google Sheets was not efficient anymore. Teamleader had too many features for our current needs and would have created more overhead costs.

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

How easy it is to use. It's easy to jump in and also complicated enough that you can really use some advanced features.

Cons

There are of course small issues here and there but none worth mentioning at all. It's truly a great product and really helpful.

Pros

Float has made managing my team's workload a breeze. The drag-and-drop interface is intuitive and the real-time updates keep everyone on the same page. Highly recommend!

Cons

While Float has a lot of great features, the mobile app could use some improvement. It's not very user-friendly and often crashes.

Pros

One dashboard, one overview of all resources and it integrates with our job creation tool which makes it super easy for timesheets. Moving jobs to other days is just a drag and drop away.

Cons

It would be awesome, if a job doesn't exist in our job management tool, if float could create it via push.

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

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 ease of use for bandwidth calculation. Before Float, it would be very difficult for us to understand Trainer occupancy, and it was also a challenge to schedule trainings far in advance over several regions. With Float, I can see what's coming up at a glance and provide accurate reports to stakeholders so that they know how busy we are and will be. At the end of the quarter, I can easily calculate and show how much time we spent, and on what.

Cons

For my specific use, access can be a challenge. I need something between "Project Manager" and "Member." For me, it would be ideal if there are a "Department Manager" role where people who had this level of access could modify the schedule for anyone in their department, but not see or edit the schedule of other departments.

Pros

Easy to setup and use without any training required. Clean interface that makes it easy to view and update resources assigned to projects. Love the ability to easily drag to extend duration of tasks assigned.

Cons

Would be great if there was a better integration with our timesheet tool (Xero) to populate timesheets automatically based on plan in Float.

Pros

We love the ease of use of Float to visualize our team's schedule. It allows us to quickly see how our people are resourced and make adjustments on the fly with the draggable task blocks. It was extremely easy to set-up and implement with our team and projects–no tutorial or laborious how-to required!

Cons

We use the basic features for an easy workflow overview so it covers all the features we would need.

Alternatives Considered

Asana

Reasons for Switching to Float

Price, ease of use and set-up, simplicity and visually-focused interface

Pros

Simple colour blocking makes workflow easy to take in at a glance (perfect for visual thinkers like me!).

Cons

Sometimes when you scroll left it takes you back to the log-in screen.

Pros

Float is an incredibly intuitive piece of software to use, with a simple calendar-like interface that everyone can understand. I have found that this aspect of the software is helpful in promoting its adoption within our teams. The experience is consistent across the product, which has allowed me to discover more and more features in and enrich the experience of using the product.

Cons

The performance of the software is occasionally a bit lacklustre. For example, I often find myself accidentally clicking somewhere on the screen which prompts a dialogue box to open to enter a new task. This problem is especially pronounced when using a trackpad, and isn’t something that I experience elsewhere. Additionally, the interface seems to have a strange way of ‘splitting’ tasks that occur across multiple days. I have found that it often leaves blank gaps that give the illusion that a team member is working more hours per day than they actually are.

There are a few features that I would like to see when going forward. Firstly, I think it would be good if there were different options when ‘resizing’ a task. Currently, the task can be resized independently across both axes (i.e. how many hours per day, and across how many days). I think it would be good if there were an option for these to affect each other – i.e. the total number of hours allocated to the project remains the same and could be allocated fewer hours across more days, or more hours across fewer days.

Pros

Easy to use and it's simple to scroll backwards to check your historical or upcoming bookings. As a user it does all I need it to do.

Cons

I've previously used Synergist which was great for production resources as all the bookings automatically pre-populated timesheets ready to add hours and submit. I'm not sure if Float has this functionality but our organisation uses separate systems for both, and I find it does add a little more effort to time logging.

Pros

I find that the features already present are exactly what I need for my start up: the possibility to call each other via Chrome browser is a plus.
The mobile application is really very useful and makes Float easier to use. Not only does it allow me to continue to follow the threads of conversation wherever I am (in a meeting, on the road, anywhere), but also to send attachments (images, records, etc.).

The integration with other applications is very ergonomic: I use Jira and Confluence a lot and the widgets in Float are very responsible as soon as I import a link for my collaborators.

Cons

I'm a fan of it, I find that it is not lacking in functionality, but if I ever change my mind, I know that the customer service department will welcome my remarks and suggestions with kindness and professionalism.
However, I do find that the possibility of not having to change browsers and make or receive calls from Mozilla would be great.

Pros

In a blink of an eye, I can see who's busy on what, and for how long. It let me give a clear idea of planning for upcoming projects, see who's available for it and who's on holiday. Also, it let me check if we take too long to finish a project or not (by setting up a budget forecast).

Cons

It would be good to integrate other tools like Yadera or Monday.com. Also, I'd like to have an easier view on days split into different tasks (one per day is really clear, but as soon as you have 2-4 tasks a day, it's harder to read).

Pros

Float is the most straightforward product in our software stack. Every new start knows how to use it within a few minutes of creating an account, and we are able to allocate our resource quickly without the software getting in the way of the work which I wish we could say about all of the products that we use.

Cons

Not really a criticism of float but I will be looking to find an agency management solution that has a float integration if possible and if not another method of sync as we would hate to leave float behind.

Pros

Can easily see the whole stream of work. We were using excel, not ideal, especially when it came to needing to change it and others had it open. We'd done this for years, not great. This tool means we can react faster to the needs of our busy studio. Adding milestones has been invaluable because we can easily see where pinch points will happen. Handling employee leave and work hours is now super seamless as float deals with it for you using the 'time off' feature.

Cons

It can be fiddly to arrange work in the correct order if you're doing less than half a day block at a time. Fortunately, this doesn't typically affect us, as we deal almost exclusively with long term, large projects.

Pros

It's really really REALLY easy to use with a very intuitive interface. Float is continuously tweaking features for the better to further improve upon the UI/UX. My project management team did a lot of research on resource management tools and Float was the only one that allowed for such a granular view (i.e., instead of planning sprints in 2 weeks, it's day by day). We needed that for our business as we are run day-to-day with sometimes very small tasks (0.5-1hr) and Float was the only one allowing us to get that granular. Further, whenever we've had an issue the Support team is very quick and responsive to helping us!

Cons

The Reporting tools aren't as great and well-organized as our Finance/Billing team would like. But the front-end is superior to the other tools my team considered so we are still using on that front.

Pros

It's simple, clean, loads pretty fast and gives the best statistics and insights that come in handy. The administration of our company also prefers it over other online planning tools, for its convenience. The different colors feature that separates users is really a cherry on top of the whole set-up.

Cons

Logging in hours as a user could be more visible than it is right now. Users may find it quite knotty considering other features of Float; many coworkers have asked about where it's located.

Pros

Float has a user-friendly, "card"-based, grid interface where you can schedule your tasks for the day and see what you are scheduled to work on days (or weeks) in advance. My job is project-focused where we have a large team who are all working on different projects and Float keeps everything running smooth by showing who is on which project and tracking all the utilization all the while. Also it's very easy to update your Float Card and log your time each day.

Cons

Sometimes Float can be dense especially when you first start using it, there's a lot of different options and bells and whistles, but once you get the hang of it, it is very easy to update your calendar and tasks.

Pros

I find that Float is best in its class for resource management. My managers use Float to manage our pipeline. Float allows us to see the data in many different ways and that does make a difference in the user experience of the product.

Cons

The only thing I can think of is that it could have more integrations with other products.