Motismo Review - Time Tracking Software

Posted by Ryan

February 2, 2008

http://www.motismo.com/

I stumbled upon Motismo when I noticed their ad on another blog and since I’m still looking for a time tracking program I figured I would give it a try to see how well it works. At first glance it looks promising with it’s clean look but it has a pretty basic website, and by basic I mean basic. The Motismo website consists of three primary pages, a homepage, a plan select page and a sign up page, that’s it. There is not much in the way of informational pages which was kind of a disappointment because it pretty much forces you to sign up to see what features it contains. I guess it’s a bonus for them but it might turn some people off. Motismo offers three plans, a basic(free), a standard($6.00) and a premium($12) and as far as I can tell the only difference is in the number of projects, clients, and users you can have much like many other time tracking programs.

The interface itself is pretty nice; it’s very clean and the colors work well together. The Dashboard looks very similar to other time tracking programs, it has a begin new task and recent project history along with a little hint section in the right sidebar. Once you have clients and projects setup in the system you can start a new task right from the dashboard. Once you start a new task it appears in your Currently working on section on the dashboard but there is no way to interact with the task other than clicking on the complete button. Tasks are treated different in Motismo than in other time tracking applications; you basically create a task which starts it and then when you’re done you finish it. You can’t pause a task which is odd; I can’t remember the last time I completed a task in one sitting but that just might be my style. Once you’ve completed a task you can go in and edit it and something I found odd is you can change the time manually after you’ve completed it yet you can’t start it back up. I found this cumbersome and not very practical.

The comments section is nice, you can enter a new comment for each task but again I think this would be more useful if you could start and stop the tasks. I would use this feature to leave myself notes so when I have to stop a task to do something else I know where to pick the task back up…but since you can’t start a task back up I’m not sure what I would use this for. I would rather see these comments moved to the project page where I think it would prove more useful.
The projects and clients sections are pretty basic but they really don’t need to be complicated so I like this. Navigation is pretty easy with the clear visible tabs and for the time I’ve spent on the site it was pretty quick.

I want to jump back to the timing process for a minute because it’s not like any other program I’ve used. In the other time tracking programs I’ve reviewed there was always some type of stop watch feature that you either downloaded or used on the web to keep track of time; Motismo does not have this. When you start a task it starts in the background and it just runs until you stop it. Because of this there is no visual way to see how much time you’ve spent on a task unless you want to do some math and subtract the current time from the time you started it. The total time for the task does appear once you’ve closed a task though. The fact that you don’t have a widget or something showing you you’re currently tracking a task I found it rather easy to forget you have the task running which will can only cause problems later.

Overall Motismo is a pretty decent time tracking application. It’s very clean, it’s quick and it does what it should. I’m not too fond of the way the time tracking actually works which will probably stop me from using this time tracking application but I can see how some people would actually like this method. Because it’s different I encourage everyone to give it a try. I would also suggest they add something in so you can continue a task where you left off, all though not a deal breaker it’s hard to get used to it when all the other applications out there offer this.

Cube Rating (82/100)