BQE CORE vs. Merlin Project Comparison


BQE CORE BQE Software	Merlin Project ProjectWizards GmbH	+	+
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		Related Products Kantata Kantata helps professional services organizations of 50 to 5,000+ employees ensure consistent excellence and profitability across every project. By connecting scoping, resourcing, and forecasting in one platform, you can always deliver amazing. Most PS organizations struggle with unpredictable projects that erode margins, strain resources, and weaken client trust. Kantata PSA puts an end to unpredictable projects by enabling you to: • Instantly assemble the ideal team based on skills, availability, and scope • Easily amplify institutional knowledge by turning past experience into real-time intelligence • Confidently forecast every outcome with an accurate view of everything from revenue and margins to capacity and sentiment 2,341 Ratings Visit Website Project Insight Project Insight is strategic project, program, and portfolio management (PPM) software that gives organizations a complete picture of work across their business. By connecting projects, resources, capacity, schedules, budgets, and strategic priorities in one central command center, Project Insight creates the connected project data backbone needed for reliable reporting, forecasting, executive decision making, and AI analysis. Manage work at the project, program, or portfolio level while integrating with tools your teams already use, including Jira, Azure DevOps, Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and HubSpot. Eliminate manual data reconciliation and gain visibility across departments without forcing everyone into the same system. From interactive Gantt charts and Kanban boards to resource capacity planning, financial tracking, project intake, and portfolio reporting, Project Insight connects the information leaders need to understand what's underway, who has capacity, what projects cost, and how investments support business goals. AI-powered capabilities help teams generate project templates, capture meeting action items, suggest resources, forecast capacity, and evaluate tradeoffs through what-if simulations. Whether you're moving beyond spreadsheets or managing a sophisticated PMO, Project Insight offers configurable workflows, customizable processes, dedicated onboarding support, and free view-only seats for clients and stakeholders. 122 Ratings Visit Website Sage Intacct Sage Intacct is a premier cloud-based financial management software designed for growing businesses. It offers comprehensive features including core financials, accounts payable and receivable, cash management, and multi-entity consolidations. Sage Intacct's advanced modules cater to complex financial needs, ensuring scalability as your business grows. The software integrates seamlessly with other business applications, providing real-time financial and operational insights. Its user-friendly interface and customizable dashboards empower your team to adapt quickly and make data-driven decisions. Sage Intacct's robust reporting capabilities and automation of key financial processes help improve accuracy, efficiency, and compliance. Trusted by thousands of organizations, Sage Intacct streamlines financial operations, enhances visibility, and drives business growth. With award-winning customer support and continuous innovation, Sage Intacct is your partner. 8,791 Ratings Visit Website Xero Save 80% for 4 months on Xero's award-winning accounting and online bookkeeping platform for businesses of all sizes and stages of growth. Beautifully simple, Xero covers a wide range of features that help businesses manage their finances effortlessly, including invoicing, inventory, bank connections, payroll, reporting and more. Xero also offers users free online support 24/7. Xero offers a robust ecosystem of connected apps and integrations with banks and financial institutions, enabling small businesses to access a wide range of solutions within Xero's open platform to streamline operations and manage finances. Additionally, accounting and bookkeeping firms benefit from efficient compliance tools, advanced practice management software, and a cloud-based unified accounting ledger for all clients, centralized in one place. 6,132 Ratings Visit Website Striven Striven is the all-in-one business management software that lowers your costs, improves your operations, and makes work easier. Make your company’s data coherent, connected, and relevant. With over two decades of expertise in Software Services, we’ve collaborated to help over 8,600 organizations in dozens of industries make their operations more secure, efficient, and valuable to their customers. Helping people accomplish more has always been our mission. Now, it’s the heart of our software. We offer simple, straightforward pricing plans and an unbeatable guarantee. You can even get started right now at absolutely no cost. There’s no trial, expiration date, or contractual obligation on any of our plans. 234 Ratings Visit Website Runn Runn is a real-time resource management platform with integrated time tracking and powerful forecasting capabilities. Intuitively plan projects and schedule resources with allocations, project phases, milestones, and time off. Flick between monthly, quarterly and half-yearly views to plan for the short and long term. Get a dynamic bird’s-eye view of your entire organization to manage capacity, workload and availability changes as you create your plans. Track project budgets, view forecasts, and get relevant metrics with in-depth reports, charts and dashboards. Use Runn’s time tracker and timesheets to monitor project progress. Direct integrations with Harvest, WorkflowMax, and Clockify. Use the API to connect your favorite tools with Runn. 37 Ratings Visit Website Epicor Financials Epicor Financials is a cloud-native financial management solution that helps organizations streamline accounting processes, automate workflows, improve compliance, and gain real-time visibility into financial performance. Built on a modern cloud architecture, the platform combines core accounting, financial reporting, planning, analytics, governance, and AI capabilities within a unified ecosystem. Organizations can extend the core accounting solution through Epicor's broad ecosystem of business applications and ISV solutions. Designed exclusively for the cloud, Epicor Financials benefits from continuous innovation through regular upgrades and a modern CI/CD deployment approach, helping customers stay current without disruptive upgrades. The solution scales globally with support for multiple books, companies, sites, currencies, languages, and legal entities while maintaining centralized financial control. Visit Website Premier Construction Software Premier Construction Software is a global, AI-powered construction ERP that helps growing general contractors control job costs, cash flow, and risk across every project in one easy-to-use cloud platform. Replace disconnected accounting, project management, and field tools with a single source of truth for WIP, change orders, and forecasting, so your team can shorten billing cycles and keep margins on track. How we're different: • Built for general contractors, owners, and land developers managing multi-project, multi-entity portfolios. • Advanced construction accounting with detailed job costing, real-time WIP reporting, and cash-flow forecasting to spot issues before they hit the P&L. • Project and field management with RFIs, subcontracts, drawings, and change orders tied directly to the budget and schedule. • Automated billing, approvals, and payroll to reduce manual entry and speed up collections. • Unlimited entities, consolidated reporting, and role-based dashboards. 408 Ratings Visit Website Hubstaff Hubstaff is a time tracking software that helps teams log hours, monitor productivity, and automate payments — whether remote, hybrid, in-office, or field-based. Available on desktop, web, and mobile, Hubstaff enables employees to track time against specific tasks and projects from anywhere. Managers get built-in visibility through app and URL usage data, activity rates, and optional screenshots — all configurable by user role. Designed for global, growing and distributed teams, Hubstaff includes built-in productivity monitoring and workforce analytics to help businesses analyze how time is spent, identify inefficiencies, and improve performance — without micromanagement. 3,996 Ratings Visit Website Zoho Projects Project management, as effective as it gets. Zoho Projects is a cloud-based project management tool that helps you plan your work, track it efficiently, and collaborate with your team wherever they are. Plan your project activities, assign work, manage resources and collaborate with your team better to get things done on time. Use Gantt charts to build your project plan and track your task schedule. Zoho Projects keeps you aware of your critical tasks and their dependencies, and immediately shows any deviations between your planned and actual progress. Save time on routine tasks. Whether you have a simple process or a complex workflow, our project management software has a drag-and-drop interface that makes new automations easier to visualize and deploy. Log billable and non-billable hours with the Projects timesheet module. Record every minute of your hard work, either manually or with timers, and our built-in integration with Zoho Invoice will generate invoices. 1,901 Ratings Visit Website
About Effortlessly provide principals, project managers, and entire staff with the information they need. Monitor KPIs like project performance, time and expense, and profitability on BQE CORE's powerful dashboard. Watch real-time status of tasks by phase, track progress, and compare budgeted hours and costs vs. actual so nothing falls through the cracks. Efficiently allocate resources with interactive Gantt charts and accurately forecast every time. Manage your new sales opportunities, activities, and performance through Core CRM, specifically built to address the needs of professional services. Discover how BQE CORE helps you focus on the essential parts of your practice while effectively managing client projects. Book your own personalized demo today!	About Merlin Project is the standard for project management in industries such as Architecture & Construction, Media & Agencies, Research & Development, Education and others. For more than 18 years customers in over 160 countries have been using our flexible app to plan, manage & control their small and large projects – no matter whether you're on a Mac or an iPad! Merlin Project is project management with a bit of magic!
Platforms Supported Windows Not Supported Mac Not Supported Linux Not Supported Cloud Supported On-Premises Not Supported iPhone Supported iPad Supported Android Supported Chromebook Not Supported	Platforms Supported Windows Not Supported Mac Supported Linux Not Supported Cloud Not Supported On-Premises Not Supported iPhone Supported iPad Supported Android Not Supported Chromebook Not Supported
Audience Professional Services Firms including Architects, Engineers, Consultants, and more.	Audience Project managers in companies of all sizes, in the office, at home and on the road. Architects and engineers working with projects.
Support Phone Support Supported 24/7 Live Support Supported Online Supported	Support Phone Support Not Supported 24/7 Live Support Supported Online Supported
API Offers API Not Supported	API Offers API Supported
Screenshots and Videos View more images or videos	Screenshots and Videos View more images or videos
Pricing No information available. Free Version Supported Free Trial Supported	Pricing $19.99 per month & user for macOS. Other durations and iPad app available. Free Version Not Supported Free Trial Supported
Reviews/Ratings Overall 4.8 / 5 ease 4.7 / 5 features 4.8 / 5 design 4.8 / 5 support 4.9 / 5 Read all reviews	Reviews/Ratings Overall 0.0 / 5 ease 0.0 / 5 features 0.0 / 5 design 0.0 / 5 support 0.0 / 5 This software hasn't been reviewed yet. Be the first to provide a review: Review this Software
Pros & Cons from Real Users Pros Robust Software with lots of capabilities. One stop shop for billing payments and project management. We are a little over four months in Core and the ease of use of Core has helped us understand the software quickly. We are really benefitting from invoicing and CRM features in Core. The customer service team is great and has helped us get acquainted with the product tremendously. Integrated systems, CRM - Project Management - Billing to Financials. No need to transfer information from various systems to produce financial statements. Good, what I like is that the product continues to improve, especially on the accounting end. Adding the contract balance to time entry screen would be most beneficial to us. Importing data to CRM is another feature that would make things more efficient. We were among the first few BQ customers who upgraded to Core, and we like the flexibility of data entry from anywhere using the browser and mobile phone. With Core, we also started using the built-in accounting, and it has helped us tremendously see the connection between project management, billing, and accounts payable. In addition to resources available in the Core help center, we do take full advantage of a quick and always available support team. After upgrading from BillQuick to Core our billing department has been extremely happy with the move. We like the easy workflows in Core and this has helped us reduce the billing time greatly. Reporting in Core is easy too and with report scheduler we can now deliver reports through automation to our managers and clients. Cons Slow sluggish performance, downtime, slow support fixes, not user friendly, time consuming to use. It is too early to say as we are still trying to learn the software. It would be nice to see amount spent in time card to have a greater visibility in amount spent versus contract amount. After our switch to Core accounting, we had some issues with bank reconciliation, and as always, BQE's helpful support team listened and solved the problem. So far so good. Anything we experience that is not desirable is submitted to support staff. Monthly updates from Core have been very helpful.
Training Documentation Supported Webinars Supported Live Online Supported In Person Supported	Training Documentation Supported Webinars Supported Live Online Supported In Person Supported
Company Information BQE Software Founded: 1995 United States go.bqe.com/sourceforge-bqe-core/	Company Information ProjectWizards GmbH Founded: 2001 Germany www.projectwizards.net
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Categories Architecture Supported Billing and Invoicing Supported Job Costing Supported Professional Services Automation Supported Project Accounting Supported Project Management Supported Time and Expense Supported	Categories Architecture Supported Business Management Supported Kanban Supported Mind Mapping Supported Professional Services Automation Supported Project Management Supported Risk Management Supported Scheduling Supported Subcontractor Supported Task Management Supported
Professional Services Automation Features Billing & Invoicing Supported Client Portal Not Supported Collaboration Tools Not Supported CRM Supported Document Management Supported Portfolio Management Not Supported Project Management Supported Proposal Generation Supported Quote Management Not Supported Resource Management Supported Time & Expense Tracking Supported Project Management Features Agile Methodologies Not Supported Budget Management Supported Client Portal Not Supported Collaboration Tools Not Supported Cost-to-Completion Tracking Not Supported Customizable Templates Supported Gantt Charts Supported Idea Management Not Supported Kanban Board Not Supported Milestone Tracking Supported Portfolio Management Not Supported Resource Management Supported Time & Expense Tracking Supported Traditional Methodologies Not Supported Show More Features Billing and Invoicing Features Billing Portal Not Supported Contact Database Not Supported Contingency Billing Not Supported Customer Portal Supported Customizable Invoices Not Supported Dunning Management Not Supported Hourly Billing Not Supported Invoice History Not Supported Mobile Payments Not Supported Multi-Currency Not Supported Online Invoicing Not Supported Online Payments Supported Payment Processing Not Supported Project Billing Supported Recurring/Subscription Billing Not Supported Service Ticket Billing Not Supported Tax Calculator Not Supported Job Costing Features Bills of Material Not Supported Budgeting & Forecasting Supported Change Orders Not Supported Cost-to-Completion Tracking Supported Invoice Management Supported Overrun Reporting Supported Percent-Complete Tracking Supported Production Cost Tracking Not Supported Purchase Order Management Supported Quotes / Estimates Supported Time Tracking Supported Work Order Management Not Supported Time and Expense Features Activity Tracking Not Supported Billable Hours Tracking Not Supported Billing Rate Management Supported Expense Tracking Not Supported Invoice Processing Supported Multiple Billing Rates Supported Project Tracking Not Supported Reimbursement Management Supported Time Tracking by Client Not Supported Time Tracking by Project Not Supported	Architecture Features 2D Drawing Not Supported 3D Modeling Not Supported Bills of material Not Supported BIM Modeling Not Supported Building Information Modeling Not Supported Client Management Supported Contact Management Not Supported Contract Management Not Supported Document Management Supported Drafting Not Supported Manufacturing Design Data Not Supported Presentation Tools Not Supported Project Management Supported Proposal Management Not Supported Quotes/Proposals Not Supported Visualization / Presentation Not Supported Professional Services Automation Features Billing & Invoicing Not Supported Client Portal Not Supported Collaboration Tools Supported CRM Supported Document Management Supported Portfolio Management Supported Project Management Supported Proposal Generation Not Supported Quote Management Supported Resource Management Supported Time & Expense Tracking Supported Project Management Features Agile Methodologies Supported Budget Management Supported Client Portal Supported Collaboration Tools Supported Cost-to-Completion Tracking Supported Customizable Templates Supported Gantt Charts Supported Idea Management Supported Kanban Board Supported Milestone Tracking Supported Portfolio Management Supported Resource Management Supported Time & Expense Tracking Supported Traditional Methodologies Supported Show More Features Business Management Features Billing & Invoicing Not Supported CRM Supported Employee Management Supported Financial Management Supported Inventory Management Supported Marketing Management Supported Order Management Not Supported Point of Sale (POS) Not Supported Project Management Supported Purchasing Not Supported Scheduling Supported Time & Expense Tracking Supported Training Management Supported Vendor Management Not Supported Kanban Features Collaboration Tools Supported Dependency Tracking Supported KPI Monitoring Not Supported Milestone Tracking Supported Multi-Board Supported Prioritization Supported Project Planning Supported Roadmapping Supported Supports Scrum Not Supported Task Management Supported Time Tracking Not Supported Mind Mapping Features Brainstorming Supported Flowchart Supported Presentation Tools Supported Project Planning Supported Publishing / Sharing Supported Templates Supported Risk Management Features Alerts/Notifications Not Supported Auditing Not Supported Business Process Control Supported Compliance Management Supported Corrective Actions (CAPA) Not Supported Dashboard Supported Exceptions Management Supported Internal Controls Management Supported IT Risk Management Supported Legal Risk Management Supported Mobile Access Supported Operational Risk Management Supported Predictive Analytics Not Supported Reputation Risk Management Supported Response Management Not Supported Risk Assessment Supported Scheduling Features Alerts/Notifications Supported Appointment Scheduling Not Supported Automated Scheduling Supported Calendar Management Supported Class Scheduling Not Supported Employee Scheduling Supported Facility Scheduling Not Supported Group Scheduling Not Supported Interview Scheduling Not Supported Meeting Room Booking Supported Multi-Location Supported Online Scheduling Supported Payment Processing Not Supported Real-time Scheduling Supported Reservations Not Supported Resource Scheduling Supported Room Booking Management Supported Task Management Features Collaboration Supported Create Subtasks Supported Gamification Supported Gantt Charts Supported Mobile Access Supported Percent-Complete Tracking Supported Progress Tracking Supported Recurring Tasks Supported Reporting/Analytics Supported Spreadsheet View Supported Task Board View Supported Task Planning Supported Task Scheduling Supported Task Tracking Supported Time Tracking Supported To-Do List View Supported
Integrations Dropbox Supported 8am CPACharge Supported 8am ClientPay Supported Apple Mail Not Supported ArchiSnapper Supported Box Supported Daylite for Mac Not Supported Google Drive Supported MYOB Supported Microsoft Project Not Supported MindManager Not Supported NotePlan Not Supported QuickBooks Online Supported QuickBooks Online Advanced Supported Stripe Supported TaskPaper Not Supported Tax1099 Supported Vergo Supported Xero Supported iCloud Not Supported Show More Integrations View All 13 Integrations	Integrations Dropbox Supported 8am CPACharge Not Supported 8am ClientPay Not Supported Apple Mail Supported ArchiSnapper Not Supported Box Not Supported Daylite for Mac Supported Google Drive Not Supported MYOB Not Supported Microsoft Project Supported MindManager Supported NotePlan Supported QuickBooks Online Not Supported QuickBooks Online Advanced Not Supported Stripe Not Supported TaskPaper Supported Tax1099 Not Supported Vergo Not Supported Xero Not Supported iCloud Supported Show More Integrations View All 9 Integrations
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