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This is a live review of Kintone, a potential digital workplace platform for your organization. It’s part of a series where we review products which can function as a new digital HQ for your organization.
Reviewers:
- Vonda Page of Radical Change LLC
- Vijay Anand of The Startup Centre
- Neil Miller of The Digital Workplace
What is Kintone?
Kintone is a platform that lets you create no-code apps for projects, processes, and a bit of collaboration. It is a Japanese-based company that boasts nearly 20,000 customers, and first launched in 2011.
What’s our take?
Here are some summaries of our views after doing a Kintone review.
Vonda
As a change management leader, I’m presupposing that people are asking themselves the core questions: What are you using now? How is it working?What’s not working that you are trying to change?
Kintone is something that people will evaluate if they want something more customizable they can structure themselves.
It’s hard to imagine switching to Kintone if you already are using speciality apps for a lot of your core processes. Kintone won’t compete with those. I tried to convert a Google sheet to a Kintone app, and it was a big struggle.
The workflows are there, but they put a lot of burden on me as the creator to figure it out every step of the way.
Vijay
Everything in Kintone is based on databases, and it does a good job of syncing all those databases. But I don’t think it’s been designed to be a central work hub.
It’s hard to see an oganization sticking with Kintone throughout multiple stages. It’s not a tool for very early stage startups, but it also seems like it’s not set up for fast scaling organizations either.
It’s hard to know where their place of strength comes from. I thought it was workflow, but their workflow features are actually not very intuitive.
Who is the owner of a platform like Kintone? Is it IT? Operations? Department heads? That’s not clear.
Neil
Kintone is not something you just buy and throw out to your team and say, “have fun”. It requires someone to do a lot of thinking and planning and a lot of other people who are willing to follow all those rules.
One advantage of using Kintone is that it allows you to connect all your processes together in a very robust way. Their preconnected app packs are nice. But again, it requires a lot of thinking and planning and compliance.
The collaboration features like comments inside of project management are great. Other collaboration is threaded based discussions, which keeps things organized and less crazy. But if you are already addicted to Slack-style messaging, it’s going to be hard to get used to this.
Having a unique “space” that is a homepage for your team is nice so that you can see all your apps, conversations, and announcements is very nice.
Kintone makes me want to get in, do my work, and get out–which may actually be it’s advantage.
Kintone pricing
Check their pricing page for the latest details, but as of this recording, Kintone is $24/user/month.
LIVE Kintone Review
Other reviews
Clickup Review
Friday.app review
Qatalog Review
Swit Review
Twist review
This is a live review of Kintone, a potential digital workplace platform for your organization. It’s part of a series where we review products which can function as a new digital HQ for your organization.
Reviewers:
- Vonda Page of Radical Change LLC
- Vijay Anand of The Startup Centre
- Neil Miller of The Digital Workplace
What is Kintone?
Kintone is a platform that lets you create no-code apps for projects, processes, and a bit of collaboration. It is a Japanese-based company that boasts nearly 20,000 customers, and first launched in 2011.
What’s our take?
Here are some summaries of our views after doing a Kintone review.
Vonda
As a change management leader, I’m presupposing that people are asking themselves the core questions: What are you using now? How is it working?What’s not working that you are trying to change?
Kintone is something that people will evaluate if they want something more customizable they can structure themselves.
It’s hard to imagine switching to Kintone if you already are using speciality apps for a lot of your core processes. Kintone won’t compete with those. I tried to convert a Google sheet to a Kintone app, and it was a big struggle.
The workflows are there, but they put a lot of burden on me as the creator to figure it out every step of the way.
Vijay
Everything in Kintone is based on databases, and it does a good job of syncing all those databases. But I don’t think it’s been designed to be a central work hub.
It’s hard to see an oganization sticking with Kintone throughout multiple stages. It’s not a tool for very early stage startups, but it also seems like it’s not set up for fast scaling organizations either.
It’s hard to know where their place of strength comes from. I thought it was workflow, but their workflow features are actually not very intuitive.
Who is the owner of a platform like Kintone? Is it IT? Operations? Department heads? That’s not clear.
Neil
Kintone is not something you just buy and throw out to your team and say, “have fun”. It requires someone to do a lot of thinking and planning and a lot of other people who are willing to follow all those rules.
One advantage of using Kintone is that it allows you to connect all your processes together in a very robust way. Their preconnected app packs are nice. But again, it requires a lot of thinking and planning and compliance.
The collaboration features like comments inside of project management are great. Other collaboration is threaded based discussions, which keeps things organized and less crazy. But if you are already addicted to Slack-style messaging, it’s going to be hard to get used to this.
Having a unique “space” that is a homepage for your team is nice so that you can see all your apps, conversations, and announcements is very nice.
Kintone makes me want to get in, do my work, and get out–which may actually be it’s advantage.
Kintone pricing
Check their pricing page for the latest details, but as of this recording, Kintone is $24/user/month.
LIVE Kintone Review
Other reviews
Clickup Review
Friday.app review
Qatalog Review
Swit Review
Twist review
