Slack vs Monograph: Which is a better fit?

Speaker 1: I'm Cam, senior director in our company, anywhere between 20 and 25 employees across the world at any given time. I couldn't go a day without Slack. That's five stars for me. Before Slack, we actually had to use two different software options. We used Sococo for our virtual meeting offices, and that served a purpose. It was good for a little bit, but then as we got bigger, we also had to use Skype. And so a natural progression was moving on from both of those into one that offered the same exact offerings, if not even more, and that was Slack. So previous to Slack, Sococo, Skype, and a couple other different instant messaging systems, all provided by Slack going forward. Everything from the pricing to the ease of deployment to how quickly we could get up and running, and just how generally available Slack is, whether it's desktop or the app, and from a mobile phone, you could have a web browser, anything you wanted to. You're never away from Slack, technically. And so, while that might not be a good thing for the work-life balance, it definitely made it much easier to deploy than anything else we researched, and we got forward. And now, it's just part of everyday life. The reason we chose Slack, one of them at least the biggest one was how quickly we could move everything from previous options or previous programs we used to deploy the day of. So I think that was on a scale of one to five, five being the easiest. It was a five. If not, even higher than that. It was as easy as possible to deploy Slack, get everything set up from our exec team, and then trickling it down. It took maybe a matter of a half hour to get everybody on board and inside of Slack, and it's still even faster now. So that was probably the biggest factor to getting us over to Slack in the initial phase. Recommending Slack, or if you're choosing between Slack and something else, just try the free version of Slack and understand that that is good enough to probably get you in the door and keep you in the door as well. The paid version and the other offerings from Slack make it even more integral to your business, so I would highly recommend giving it a shot. Just in general, the ease in which you could get started and the ease in which you could continue going forward without skipping a beat in your business needs, whatever your business needs might be, it's Slack and Slack going forward.

Kimber M.: My name is Kimber. My job title is office manager. Our company is called Architects Collective. We're a relatively small architect firm with less than 15 employees, but everything is in-house. We do keep track of our time, our personal time and then also our time on projects so that we can help stay within budget or create future budgets. We are still in the early stages of using Monograph, but so far I would say probably four stars. Just a couple of glitches here and there, but it's done well for us. We used a QuickBooks-type system and also a different timekeeping system. And we also had to keep track of all of our prints and everything in order to implement all of those into the same reports to generate our monthly invoices to each of the clients. Quite a few different programs. I would say price drove us more than anything else. But once we got it established, it was much more user-friendly than the previous programs we were using. We were able to onboard or integrate anything. So we had to input all of our data into the system by hand, and it was horrible. It was not a good part of the process. But once everything was in the system, we were able to see how much better than the previous program it was. I would definitely say if your data is able to be imported so that you don't have to do it, that was one of our biggest hurdles. But just make sure that the program is what you're needing, because there's been different things that we've had to manipulate it and work to what we needed. But all in all, I think it's worked out pretty well.