Mavenlink Review

Mavenlink Features

Mavenlink offers all the basics for project management, including tasks, task dependencies, and a timeline for task completion. Another cornerstone of Mavenlink is the use of Gantt charts – a type of bar chart that lets you see the progress of a project at a glance. There's also a Gantt Baseline, which lets you compare a project's current progress against its initial plan or an expected performance benchmark.

Dashboard and Hub

The starting point for all Mavenlink users is the Dashboard, which is organized in a tile format. It offers a basic summary of all the issues that a user is involved in, including a tile representing each project, a list of colleagues, a list of tasks the user is responsible for, and a social media-like activity feed that displays active project conversations.

Similarly, each project has its own activity hub that includes actions taken with a project, the project team list, and any posts from team members. You can also add files to this activity tracker via direct upload or Google Drive, and each project comes with its own automatically created email address for receiving activity posts and files.

Tasks

The key feature of any project management software is its tasks view. On Mavenlink, you can add tasks, set start and due dates, assign responsible parties, and set its status, such as “Not Started,” “Started,” “Needs Info,” and “Completed.” Mavenlink tasks also have additional fields, such as a description, tags, subtags, and checklists.

Gantt Charts

Tasks can be viewed in a simple list or as a Gantt bar chart, where you can link task dependencies and view the project at-a-glance. There are also a few filters you can apply to the chart, such as a Critical Path view that shows how a project needs to progress based on task dependencies.

Templates

Mavenlink doesn't offer any of its own templates, but it does have a template feature to create your own for certain projects. This is a key feature for businesses that want to develop marketing plans or human resource events according to specific milestones.

M-Bridge

The company doesn't offer an app store the way some of its competitors do, but it does offer customized integrations for popular products, including Slack, Hubspot, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, and Google's G Suite. Mavenlink integrates with these services via its own application programming interfaces, called M-Bridge. While customization is a nice buzzword, in this case, it means you need developers to help make it work.

Mavenlink Pricing

Mavenlink offers four different pricing tiers: Teams, Professional, Premier, and Enterprise.  However, it only makes public the pricing for two of them, saving its upper two tiers for customized quotes.

The lowest tier offering, Teams, charges $19 per month flat. Teams caps its user base at five, but you can add additional members for $4 per user, per month. Teams features collaboration tools (activity feed, file sharing, messaging, etc.) and task management.

Companies with larger needs can upgrade to Professional for $39 per user, per month, enjoying the same features found in Teams plus a time tracking feature. Next, Premier adds financial and resource planning features, but offers no public pricing. Finally, the Enterprise tier takes all the features mentioned thus far, and adds business intelligence features and more powerful services in nearly all categories.

A key thing to note is that task dependencies and other critical features are not locked away in the upper pricing tiers; however, Mavenlink's base prices are much higher than competitors’ such as Asana and Jira.

Mavenlink Review Verdict

Mavenlink is a clean-looking project management tool with a lot to recommend, including the ability to use key features such as task dependencies and the Gantt chart overview in the lower pricing tiers. The interface isn't quite as clean and easy to understand as something like Asana.

Nevertheless, it's a solid choice for project management, especially if all you need are tasks and other fundamentals. Once you require items such as financials or resource management, the price escalates quite significantly, and a healthy comparison with other options is well advised.