Hive Software: Pros & Cons

What Is Hive?

Hive is a productivity platform for businesses of all sizes operating across various industries. Hive’s main features include:

• Project management
• Time management
• Team collaboration
• Automation
• More than 1,000 integrations
• Robust search functionality

Hive serves the needs of different types of organizations — agencies, educational institutions, startups — and various verticals like marketing, operations, project management, and more. 

How Is Hive Used?

Hive is used for a variety of project management functions, including communication, transparency, visualization, organization, monitoring, file sharing, and automated task management.

Communication

Project management teams need to use a variety of communication tools. Among the most common ones are Slack, Skype, Google Chat, and email. The problem with this is that users will need to switch from one tool to another — which is time-consuming. With its suite of communication tools, Hive is a hub for centralized communication. Users can communicate seamlessly through its native chat and email integrations.

Transparency

Transparency about the moving parts of a project is a major challenge for teams. By using Hive, users have flexible project views and tagging features to keep everyone in the loop. Users are then able to receive alerts about processes, milestones, and updates for upcoming projects.

Organization

Complex projects are divided into many tasks, making them often difficult to manage. Teams facing organizational challenges should take advantage of Hive software capabilities. This tool enables managers to easily arrange tasks and provide attributes to each, such as files, dates, assignees, and budget. And because of Hive’s different views, users can visualize their different projects easily.

Visualization

Hive makes project visualization easier through its various project layouts. Users can choose the Gantt chart, calendar, table, and kanban board views and easily switch between them. Additionally, the whole team is informed about all updates, as these are seen across all project views.

Monitoring

Hive has dashboards that show actionable insights regarding the productivity of a team. It makes use of existing data, matching it with machine learning to allow users to spot inefficiencies in the way they do things. It not only sends real-time notifications on team performance anomalies, but also makes suggestions to improve productivity.

Hive Cons

When considering whether to adopt Hive for your project management needs, take the following factors into account.

Limited Mobile Functionality

According to users, the Hive mobile app is not as responsive as the desktop version. Users say the app is also not very easy to navigate, so they prefer to use the desktop version more.

User Navigation

Numerous users report that using Hive is challenging and needs quite some time to adapt to. There are functions that are difficult to understand and learn, including configuring and personalizing the software.

Task Dependencies

Users have reported being unable to create dependent tasks. Despite Hive saying that it allows automated workflows, users are not able to create dependent tasks that recur within projects. Though it has a sub-action feature, these don’t recur; this may be annoying for project managers to always have to create tasks manually.

Notifications

Unlike similar software, where notifications go to an inbox, Hive’s notifications come as a pop-up. Appearing on the top right corner of the UI, these notifications don’t allow users to mark them as read. Hive’s focus mode, however, allows users to mute notifications.

Hive Pros

Despite the drawbacks, Hive also has a host of advantages.

Comprehensive Features

Many users compliment Hive’s capabilities, which combine the features of other management solutions. Users don’t have to switch from one tool to another to complete their tasks, thanks to Hive’s tools for both collaboration and communication. Plus, users can use different views like the table view, Gantt chart, status view, and calendar to extend project visibility.

Versatility

Project managers love Hive’s customizability and versatility, which makes it easy for them to track their projects and tasks. The most impressive feature of Hive that relates to this is allowing users to convert a project to a calendar view from a kanban-style board.

Customer Support

Any time a customer reaches out for support, Hive’s customer support team is quick to respond, listens well, and continuously makes improvements based on customer feedback. 

Value

Many users vouch for Hive’s affordability compared to other project management software. It has three pricing plans — Hive Solo, Hive Teams, and Hive Enterprise — making it suitable for even small businesses.

Integrations

Hive has numerous integrations — more than 1,000, in fact. Hive integrates with many of the most commonly used business applications: Slack, Google Drive, Dropbox, Google Calendar, iCal, and more.

Flexibility

Hive is suitable for teams with complex projects, helping them divide the work into actionable tasks. It lets users work by project, or filter tasks to only those specifically assigned to them. Tasks cards are similarly easy to use.

For many users, Hive is like putting together Slack and Trello. After overcoming an initial learning curve (see the navigation issues mentioned above), it’s easy to navigate the task cards and assign tasks.

Workspace Trash Bin

Users who want to retrieve deleted cards or files may access them up to 30 days after deletion in Hive’s workspace trash bin.

Hive’s features and affordable price make it a great choice for project management teams who need a comprehensive solution that’s easy to incorporate into, or even replace, existing tools.

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