What is Kantree? Read on to discover how Kantree works—what problems it can help you solve and who uses it, along with a tour of its features, pricing, and integrations. I’ll also explain how Kantree compares to similar tools.
Looking for a Kantree review? Check out the Kantree review in Ben Aston’s Agile Tools review.
What Is Kantree?
Kantree is a combination of a database and works management software. It replaces spreadsheets and emails with an easy to use, collaborative, and extremely flexible platform to improve your team’s communication and efficiency.
The startup behind Kantree, Digicoop, is a worker co-op founded in 2015 in Paris by former colleagues who wanted to work together on projects they cared about. Frustrated with existing work solutions, they set out to create products that would give power to individuals, not just managers, and have a positive effect on the workplace. We believe in the power of collective intelligence to improve business performance. These co-op values: transparency, collaboration, and collective decision-making are reflected in Kantree features.
Who is Kantree for?
Kantree is designed for any team in any type of company. It can be used across departments as a cost-reducing, single tool for project management. It doesn’t require extensive IT knowledge to set up and run, so training is easier compared to some other tools.
Kantree is best for teams of up to 50 people. Here are some of the most popular uses:
- Perfect for product teams: use it to setup SCRUM or Kanban and to build roadmaps;
- Perfect for HR teams: set up workflows and use forms to collect requests (CVs etc.);
- Perfect for agencies and service companies: collaborate with clients easily – you can communicate directly from Kantree and provide access to a chosen subset of tasks;
- Perfect for remote teams across time zones: Kantree has real-time updates and offline support – any changes made in offline mode will by synced once you connect;
- Perfect to share structured information across the company: objectives, partner database, competitors database, etc. – an example of the transparency we talked about.
- Perfect for small companies and startups: Kantree is an all-in-one tool for business.
For real-life examples of how teams benefit from Kantree, check out stories from our users on product management, growing new business, cross-team collaboration, and HR management.
What challenges does Kantree help solve?
Here’s a breakdown of common workplace challenges and how to use Kantree to solve them.
- Difficulty finding a tool to match my way of working: Kantree lets you customize everything and will remind you of Excel, except that it’s for managing things and not calculating numbers. But the familiar functionality is there.
- For smaller companies, paying too much for many tools that do similar things: You can use Kantree as a single tool across the company, saving you big bucks in the process and making it easier to see the big picture.
- For companies who want to digitalize: Kantree helps people to digitalize their own workflows without the help of IT, which saves time and money.
- Remote teams: Kantree makes it easy for distributed teams to work together. Tasks are updated in real-time, there’s offline support, and you can use Kantree on mobile devices.
What’s On The Kantree Roadmap?
Since Kantree was launched in 2015, the product has continued to evolve. In 2019, Kantree rolled out several new features, such as a refreshed interface, global search, shared views, and a new template library. And the product roadmap for the coming year includes some exciting updates, namely:
- Improved global views;
- Improved reporting;
- Discussion center.
Kantree Features Overview
To get an idea of how Kantree works, here’s a tour of the main features and how they can help you manage projects on your own terms.
1. Cards with the most flexible custom field system
- You can add or remove any field within cards: there are no built-in or mandatory fields, everything’s completely customized and flexible.
- Move fields around on the card to customize the layout.
- There are many types of fields, including voting, formulas, relationships, etc.
2. Powerful views
Kantree comes with multiple view modes (kanban, table calendar, timeline) and saved views that can be private or shared, giving you instant filtering in projects.
3. Reporting
Kantree makes it easy to create detailed reports in a few clicks. Many charts are available for common agile practices, such as cumulative flow diagrams, burndown charts, cycle times, and velocity tracking.
4. Forms
With this time-saving feature, you can collect and manage various requests (e.g. job candidates, sales prospects, IT tickets) by creating shareable forms that will create cards directly in your Kantree project. Request tracking is also available.
5. Tracking
In Kantree, you can track everything. Besides our detailed activity journal, track any kind of data using our logging system: expenses, time spent on a task or in meetings, phone calls with clients, and more.
Kantree vs Airtable
Kantree’s main focus is the kanban, which has resulted in a much better kanban system. In Airtable, fields are only customizable in the table view, whereas our card system allows for a custom layout for cards. We also have a much more powerful view system: there are more options to hide some fields, colors, etc. and we have a built-in timeline view. With Kantree’s powerful role and permissions system, you can assign different roles to different team members, as well as share a single view with limited data (great for working with external partners). Finally, there is no expensive pricing to get access to some features like Airtable blocks.
Kantree Integrations
Projects can be imported to Kantree directly from Trello, Asana, and Github. The other Kantree integrations include Slack, Dropbox, G Suite, Google Drive, and many other tools via Zapier (beta stage).
The Kantree app is available from the Apple Store and Google Play. Kantree is also optimized for mobile browsers and comes with offline support. It saves projects locally, meaning you can make changes to projects offline and they will be synchronized once you’re connected again.
Kantree Pricing
Our simple Kantree pricing starts at approximately $7/user/month (we offer a 30-day Kantree free trial). With this option, you get unlimited projects and online support. We host and manage Kantree for you, there’s no contract.
The other Kantree price option is Kantree Enterprise, which allows you to keep full control over your data with on-premise and private cloud hosting. Here the Kantree cost is based on the number of users, and licenses are issued for one year. A license can be upgraded at any time.