Striven Review [2024]: Is It Good for Project Management?

Fully Featured ERP Software with Great Project Management Tools

Specializing in enterprise resource planning (ERP), Striven helps businesses manage their core operations, including finances, human resources, manufacturing, supply chain, and more. Striven also offers project management tools for planning and tracking projects and tasks and collaborating with team members.

Despite being only a subset of Striven’s tools, its project management features are surprisingly comprehensive. You can create detailed task descriptions, track time, set project budgets and milestones, upload and share files, and much more. Striven works best for larger companies, but features like billing and invoicing make it a great fit for any client-oriented business.

Even with Striven’s abundance of features, this English language-only software is easy to use. It offers an effective mix of basic and advanced tools, so it’s a good option for both beginners and experienced users.

Considering the quality of its features and the functionality you get, Striven is reasonably priced. However, Striven doesn’t have a free plan – only a 7-day free trial – and its paid plans include an extra fee for hosting. While Striven has good project management tools, they’re only a small part of its offering, so if project management is your main focus, you may end up paying for features that you don’t need.

Is Striven the right choice for your business? Let’s find out!

Striven’s Features Work Together Really Well

Striven may not have the most advanced project management tools out there, but you’ll get all the essentials you need to stay on top of your projects and tasks and communicate easily with your team members.

The great thing about Striven is that it makes all its features accessible on every plan. The difference between plans is volume – the higher-tiered plans allow you to add more users and clients and use more project templates, custom fields, and columns per report. Striven also gives you the freedom to organize your work in the way that suits you best, but let’s dive into specifics to see if its features are right for your business.

Flexible Task Management

Striven has extensive tools for creating and tracking tasks. Every task includes an overview of its key elements, such as assignees, status, budget hours, and any projects and milestones they are related to. You can also add a checklist of steps to be completed before a task is marked done, as well as add comments and file attachments.

You can view your tasks in a list or in your task dashboard, and configure your task dashboard to display widgets with the most important information. For instance, you can see all open or completed tasks and track your team’s efficiency week by week. You can also search for specific tasks based on filters such as task type and assignee.

Set Up a Project in Minutes With Templates

Depending on the plan you choose, Striven offers up to 500 templates (a.k.a. project types) to help you speed up the process of setting up a project. They’re divided across departments, such as accounting, marketing, and HR. You can view your projects in milestone (Kanban), list, and Gantt chart view.

Just like with tasks, you can add due dates, update a project’s status, and add labels and priorities to keep your projects organized. Also, you can get an overview of all your tasks, milestones, and reports in your project dashboard.

Stay Organized With Time Tracking and an Event Calendar

Striven’s built-in time-tracking function allows you to track time spent on individual tasks. You can mark a time entry as billable, add notes, and even specify the pay type. Also, you can easily manage timesheets and see the total number of hours logged.

Another feature to help you manage time and stay organized is Striven’s Calendar. It allows you to manage your schedule by adding events such as appointments, orders, invoices, and time off. You can also create separate calendars for employees and integrate your personal Google or Microsoft 365 calendars to sync your data.

Automate Processes With Workflows (Currently in Beta)

The Workflows feature in Striven isn’t fully developed yet, but it indicates where the company is headed. Workflows include multiple triggers and actions and they help you automate processes, such as creating tasks, sending emails, creating Discussions, and sending text notifications.

You can also set user permissions to determine how team members can manage workflows in Striven. For instance, users can view and manage all workflows, or they can view all workflows but only manage their own.

Striven Manages To Stay User Friendly Despite Being Feature-Rich

Striven strikes a good balance between being user friendly while still offering an array of tools for managing employees, projects, orders, finances, and all other essential business operations. The interface is intuitive and easy to navigate, and there’s a guided tour to show you around.

That said, some features – such as the Calendar and Happiness Ratings (more on this in the Collaboration Tools section) – aren’t so easy to spot because you’ll need to click on various submenus to find them. Still, you can always turn to Striven’s knowledge base for help. The support articles are organized in a clear and logical way, so you won’t have trouble finding the information you need.

Getting Started With Striven

You only need an email address to create a Striven account, and then you’ll immediately be directed to Striven’s interface. This may seem abrupt, but your guided tour will show you where to find and how to use the most important features such as projects, tasks, and reports. Aside from popup tutorials, there are also video guides you can access from the support documentation and the app itself.

Customizable Layout at All Levels

Striven has a solid set of customization options to personalize your interface. You can add your company’s logo and favicon and change fonts. Another neat feature is the ability to relabel entities to make them more suitable to your business terminology. For instance, Customers can become Partners, Clients, or Guests, while Tasks can become Issues or Requests.

In addition to project and task dashboards, Striven also lets you configure your company dashboard. Compared to project dashboards, the company dashboard has a more diverse selection of widgets at your disposal, such as Upcoming Appointments and Recent Contacts.

Time-Saving Task Groups

Striven excels when it comes to organizing tasks, and its task groups feature is a standout. Task groups are collections of tasks that you can assign at the same time, save to use later, and reuse. This can be particularly helpful during the onboarding of a new team member. Because they’re likely to complete various forms (e.g., employment agreements or tax deposits), you can add these forms as tasks to a group and assign them in just a few clicks.

All tasks belonging to a specific task group are stored in a task library, which makes it easy to add them to multiple task groups when needed.

Easy Reporting

Striven’s report builder allows you to monitor and share important information. You can easily create a report by specifying the data set you wish to include. You can run sales, service, and financial reports, just to name a few.

You can add columns and filters to narrow down the results of your report. Also, you can share your reports with individual users or entire teams.

Multiple Ways for Teams to Connect, but No Chat App

Striven doesn’t have a live chat function, and it doesn’t allow you to integrate a third-party app. Still, the lack of a chat app doesn’t hinder communication, as Striven offers several ways for team members to collaborate on tasks and projects.

Features like Buzz and Happiness Ratings not only make the communication easy, but also enjoyable. Additionally, Striven includes document storage, which makes sharing files quite easy and convenient.

Team Dashboard and Communication

Striven doesn’t give you the option to set up a team dashboard, but it lets you communicate across tasks and projects through comments. These are called Discussions, and you can use them to @mention people or simply leave notes on tasks.

You can also create company-wide Discussions in the form of threads and communicate with individual users or entire teams. You can view the history of each conversation in Striven, but Discussions you create will also be forwarded to your email inbox.

Another way for your team to communicate company-wide is through Buzz. This feature allows you to create posts to share news and announcements. Like with most social media platforms, you can leave comments on posts as well as like, follow, and share them on social media.

If you want to assess how satisfied your employees or customers are with your work, you can do so with the help of Happiness Ratings. This tool can be enabled for tasks, projects, and orders, and you can see the satisfaction results as a widget on your dashboard.

File Sharing

Striven’s Hub tool acts as a digital filing cabinet that allows you to store all your company’s content, including documents, links, posts, and folders. You can group documents and folders into content groups to easily organize them, and use the Search Content feature to find content in each group.

With unlimited storage, you can upload new content to the Hub on an ongoing basis. Also, you can restrict access to documentation to certain users or teams.

Mobile App

Striven doesn’t have a mobile app, but you can access your account from your phone browser to manage projects on the go. Still, the lack of a mobile app is a bit disappointing, given that most other project management software include it as a standard feature.

Customer Support is Responsive

Striven offers live chat support Monday through Friday, 8:00 am to 8:00 pm EST. You can also submit a ticket or schedule a brief meeting/screenshare with a Striven Support Specialist. I tested live chat with a question about a mobile app and got a reply within minutes.

The customer support agent was friendly, although she didn’t give the most elaborate answer. I also sent a support ticket to ask about the project import function. I got an answer after a couple of hours, which isn’t bad.

Again, the answer wasn’t particularly elaborate, but I got the information I needed. Also, the customer support agent offered a one-on-one consultation with Striven’s business analyst for a more personalized approach.

While Striven’s customer support is responsive and helpful, chances are you won’t even need it, thanks to Striven’s exceptional knowledge base. You’ll find detailed support articles on all Striven’s services.

A Comprehensive Service, but Still Pricey

Striven’s pricing isn’t exactly straightforward – you’ll need to contact their sales team for a full range of services offered as its website doesn’t provide detailed information about what each tier offers.

What’s clear is that Striven has a 7-day free trial and two plans: Standard and Enterprise. They both include the same features, the main difference being in the number of users you can add. The more users you have, the less you have to pay for your subscription. Bigger teams may find the Standard plan appealing, as it starts at $10.00per user/month.

However, in addition to the price of your plan, you’ll have to pay a monthly hosting fee to use Striven’s cloud-based ERP software. Because Striven’s monthly hosting fee rises with the number of users (and it can get quite costly), you may not be able to save much money even if you have a larger team.

As far as project management goes, Standard and Enterprise plans differ in the number of project templates available, as well as the number of custom fields and columns you can add. Striven’s Standard plans offer good value, as you can add unlimited employees and customers and create unlimited tasks, projects, and dashboards.

Overall, Striven provides a comprehensive Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) service, and you’ll benefit most if you have a large company intent on using all its offerings. If you only need project management features, you may be better off with a straightforward project management software like monday.com – you’ll get more advanced features for less money.