airfocus Reviews

Pros

The first thing my team and I liked most about this software is that it covers all the bases for project management: Gantt roadmap, Kanban board and the Priority Chart. The second thing we liked most was how easy it was to use and how it effortlessly integrated into Trello. The customization was the icing on the cake; it allows you to create custom weights for your items and then graphs those items in the Priority Chart which gives a nice high-level overview of your activities in terms of priority. My team was very impressed with this functionality. Finally, the customer service has been outstanding. Representative, their head of marketing & sales has promptly responded to every question and even took a call on short notice to help us address a couple of hiccups which their dev team quickly resolved.

Cons

At the moment Airfocus does not have a dependency feature, which would be great for the Gantt roadmap. Having a visual dependency link between items would make Airfocus and one-stop-shop for all things project management. However, representative has told me that this functionality should be available very soon. One other potential con is, depending on the size of your business, the cost of the editor license. It´s not cheap but for the scale and duration of my team´s projects, it certainly has been worth it so far.

Pros

The design is really user-friendly. Even if there are lots of features and information, we can easily find what we're looking for.

I also really appreciated the chart view (which is my preferred feature) and the priority poker.

Cons

I cannot manage to find a notification system, as we have the ability to comment and interact with people.

Moreover, it would be great to have more dependencies options between tasks. Currently we just have the choice between "This item blocks..." and "This item is blocked by...". Could be cool to have dependencies like "Duplicates...", "Caused by...", "Fixes..." etc.

Finally, I think that the scoring set-up is a little bit complex, because too complete. According to me, there are too many options. And the ability to set up the importance and weight of every notation would only be a powerful point if properly configured (which can be complicated at a first glance).

Pros

It is easy and straight forward to use. It will allow you to quickly create a board or roadmap without too many clicks.

Cons

When is time to jump into details or dependencies, splitting task and follow all the details in the same board/roadmap it gets complicated.

Pros

The timeline view. It is easy and quick to update and share with stakeholders.

We don't use any other functionality of Airfocus.

Cons

Pricing, currently we share a single user with all product owners.

Pros

can be used as a power-up for Trello,
good seamless integration with Trello,
synchronization works well between the two,
motivates users of our software products to contribute and clarify their requests for features,
high learning curve for editors (Team internal) and contributers (external),
clear message with regard to the commitment point (which features will be implemented by the Team)

Cons

adding a criteria leads to losing scoring for all items,
value axis of a criteria cannot be scaled after its definition

Pros

A the kids say, It is intuitive asf. It required almost little to no time to familiarize myself with the feature set and how to make use of them which is rare in a new piece of software.

Cons

Well I understand the reasons why, it is not all that easy to share/collaborate with teams outside of your product group.

Pros

Airfocus is magic, because it allowed my growth team to not work on the latest, shiniest idea. It allowed me to get my team to think more objectively about what projects will actually make the most impact.

Cons

I think onboarding could be a lot easier so I don't have to spend much time walking folks through how to use it.

Pros

Very easy to setup the roadmapping tool, and in particular, I like the ability to create dependencies with the drag and drop functionality

Cons

I wish that you could manually enter in the dates for items on the timeline, it can be difficult and time consuming to have to next arrow to many years down the line

Pros

The prioritization element and the ability to integrate with Trello.

Cons

It's a bit pricey to have multiple editors - would be great if the package levels increased the number of editors not just contributors.

Pros

Single input view which is easy to use, multiple views to analyze and make decisions. The easy to read views make it ready to keep stakeholders informed.

Cons

The webpages can be power consuming from time to time.

Pros

The items and chart sections are my most frequently visited sections. I use the items view to see the prioritized list of projects and their scores and the chart view has been helpful to visualize and highlight the quick win projects.

Your integration with Asana (and other project management platforms) is brilliant. It helped us get our data in quickly which helps our adoption rate of your product, and it helps us be efficient because we don't have to update information in multiple spots

Cons

I think educating your customers could be improved. You may have a lot of helpful content, but it wasn't at the forefront of my onboarding experience. For our business we use ActiveCampaign for our email automations and we setup an "onboarding sequence" that gives our users a nugget of help each day for the first 7 days (during their trial) to educate them on how to setup their websites with us. Those emails have a video tutorial for each feature which seems to really help. We've learned that the more information the user inputs into our system, the more likely they are to continue using it, which reduces our churn greatly. It seems you have a great product but I would really like to understand it more so I get the value out of it.

Pros

It's easy to use, which makes it great for when you need to onboard new team members - the other tools were too complicated to use for what we needed at the moment
The Board view is exactly what we needed for our roadmap
The timeline feature is also very useful for our Hardware teams
Aesthetics was also a very big reason why we decided to use this tool
I also like that we can customize the value indicators

Cons

The one major thing I noticed, is that it's hard to close / archive a full month (column) in the Board view. You are only allowed to delete it, and then you have to archive all the cards.

I think there are some key features missing:
* I wish we could see links for all the previous share views set up, not just the API key, this doesn't help
* I wish we could edit the settings we had for all previous share views
* I wish we could link workspaces so that I could make smaller workspaces but still see an overview of all workspaces
* I wish there was a way to save the custom colors and assign color to JIRA integrations so that I don't have to re-color everything everytime I have new items coming in

Pros

On boarding of an existing list of items is very easy, the custom tags allow you to group features/items so that when deciding on next set of improvements and functions, you can achieve economies of scale. The swim lane style structure really helps us visualise where we are, what we have prioritised, and what we have completed allowing easy to create presentations for stakeholders when communicating roadmaps and progress.

Cons

I'm not sure the feature voting function is something we will use, and it would be great to have a MoSCoW feature. The user roles and permissions also need evolving, change history would be extremely handy and a function to allow you to create unique ticket ID's would be fantastic, but these are improvements more then dislikes.

Pros

The Timeline and Scoring features make prioritization, which most companies/teams can struggle with, easy to do. It's also nice to have bi-direction sync to everyday third-party products (trello/jira).

Cons

I'd like to see the pricing model change to allow for unlimited contributors. The value of this product is inclusion. That said, I'm looking forward to the public portal feature (Q3).

Pros

I like that it gives option to create customized boards, ability to create customized tags for each board and also to create different ratings on each card per user value, financial benefit and also time for delivery. This helps me a lot when it comes to creating a priorities for next features to be delivered. I very much so like and use the preview of items that represent small wins and those that are to be dropped for now.

Cons

I did not like that I experienced kind of distability. Occasionally it is not working or it stops work and I am changing browsers to make it work.

Pros

The software attachs well with Trello and gives the needed outputs that Trello does not provide alone, turning one data input into many useful visuals for use in managing tasks and projects while briefing at many levels.

Cons

Takes a while to get to grips with set ups for functionality, not as intuitive as I would like but then as I learn to adapt in my inputs this will be less of an issue.

Pros

- Has jira integration!
- Has the bubble charts for drivers (rating system)
- not expensive

Cons

- doesn't have open voting for team/customers.

Pros

Easy to define features and link them to teams and epics
Able to define the values and put a score on it. Even able to change them later on without much effort.
Visualisation of the features on the chart gives you a great overview and information
Timeline is easy to manage without to much needed information

Cons

still need to find cons.
Sometimes you have to finetune or rethink some things, but it's not that you have to start from scratch.

Pros

How easy it was to integrate to Jira and Trello and other existing tools.
The priority poker feature to simplify scoring and prioritization.
And the timeline management section.

Cons

Can't have an item with two integrations (i.e. a Jira ticket and a Trello card)
JQL queries don't work exactly as JIRA's.
Most templates change in the values used for scoring, but not in suggesting structures or organizations.
Can't filter or search by colors.

Pros

I really love the visualized priority charts. Haven't seen something like this before. airfocus is easy to use and makes our planning simple.

Cons

I have nothing bad to say. It could be a bit less time consuming to copy manually added items to another workspace. But I guess that is an edge case.

Pros

airfocus is by far one of the most sophisticated prioritization solutions I've tried that is still easy to use. I also really like that you can share and discuss the projects with a remote team.

Cons

It'd be nice to have an undo button. So far I've not felt the need to use it, but I think it can be a useful feature to have.

Pros

As the person who runs product and engineering at our organization, there are requests coming in from every department for features, updates, and new products/pages. Being able to build a prioritization framework that the entire org is bought into that I can share with everyone has been invaluable. The entire team can now see our roadmap and why we're working on certain things. We built a google form to ingest requests, which creates an asana and airfocus task. We then enter their scores for impact, and our scores for effort and other teams can clearly see where their projects fall on the prioritization list. It's made conversations about bandwidth so much easier and made our teams work more transparent.

Cons

Currently, there is no way to have multiple frameworks inside a single project. It's also a bit expensive on a per-user basis.

Pros

I like how this software is simple to use for Product Roadmapping - my main use case as Chief Product Officer. One feature that really stands out for me with AirFocus is the ability to define a weighting scale and weight your features. The view that shows you most important to least important features is very helpful in making decisions on what to prioritize on your roadmap.

Cons

I'd like to see more fine grained user controls (along with more user tracking of who makes what changes on the roadmap). There have been a few instances where other users changed my roadmap (we also use it for business/tech roadmapping) and it wasn't easy to tell what was changed.

Pros

Easy set up, you're good to go within minutes. Also love the Jira and Trello sync!
Very helpful is the set of provided templates to get started.
Visualization alternatives (chart, board and timeline view) are great.
Great overall user experience and easy to use.

Cons

I don't totally agree with the differentiation between user groups in terms of features: why shouldn't a single user need Jira and Trello integration?

Pros

The Trello integration and timeline features are most useful to me.

Cons

The board portion isn't something we use much, since we have Trello.