FunctionFox Review

We’ve seen a few project management platforms that make things fun, but FunctionFox could be the first one we’ve seen that makes things, dare we say, cool. Maybe that’s going too far, but it does have personality and a sense of humor.

In this FunctionFox review, we’ll take a closer look at its interesting features and see whether its approach gives it any advantages over competitors.

It takes a different approach than most of the tools we’ve looked at by focusing more on time tracking than task management. If you’re looking for a platform to organize your clients, personnel and projects, as well as track your time and costs, it’s a good choice.

For those who want more standard project management features, such as detailed control over tasks, we suggest looking through our monday.com review.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Alternatives for FunctionFox

Features

Most project management software we look at is centered around tasks, but FunctionFox is more about keeping client and project information in one place and streamlining your workflows.

Task management is included on the higher tier plans, but it’s more a case of categorizing what you spend your time on than organizing the details of every item.

If you want a platform that gives you control over task details and allows you to add subtasks and manage dependencies, take a look at our Wrike review.

FunctionFox has a navigation panel on the left that gives you access to its various sections.

The calendar view lets you see what’s coming up. In addition to monthly and weekly views, you can click any day to get an hour-by-hour breakdown of what’s planned. There’s also a separate group calendar, which keeps shared activities distinct from your personal schedule.

FunctionFox’s CEO desktop gives you a high-level overview of everything and lets you see things such as hours spent on each client, costs and the statuses of projects. Being able to see if you’re over or under budget will appeal to bosses everywhere.

Hard-nosed business types looking for good software could do worse than looking at our Mavenlink review, too.

FunctionFox has a comprehensive report generator. There are multiple types, including expense reports, estimates, task breakdowns and several others. That’ll make your accountant happy, if it doesn’t put them out of a job. If that happens, our best accounting software guide might help cheer them up again.

If you want to keep track of your personnel, FunctionFox gives you a comprehensive tool for managing them. You can sort people by departments, give them different access levels and select whether they have access to certain features. For example, you could designate them as managers or allow them to enter time.

FunctionFox Client Management

Similarly, you can track and manage clients and store various types of information about them. There’s also a detailed client tracking system that allows you to store lots of data.

You can generate invoices automatically based on your data and edit their fields before sending them to your clients.

There isn’t much in the way of integrations, but you can save things such as reports as Excel files. If you’re looking for a tool that you can use with data stored on other platforms, read our Podio review to see an example of one.

As for customization options, there are two themes: “light” and “dark.” All they seem to change is the buttons at the top, though, which doesn’t make much difference to the look.

You can upload your logo to give your workspace a sense of identity. If you’re looking for ways to build your team’s online presence, take a look at our best virtual software team tools for ideas.

There are more choices when it comes to customizing the way the platform works, with options covering custom fields, naming formats and timesheet details.

If you want to change how things look, check out our Taskworld review for a platform that lets you use your own photos as a background if you don’t like its many built-in offerings.

As for communication within your team, FunctionFox has a company blog on the higher tier plans to keep everyone informed.

You can decide who gets a copy of the company newsletter, too, but we couldn’t figure out how to send it or if doing so is possible within the platform. If communication is important to you, read our Basecamp review to see a tool that makes it easy.

FunctionFox offers plenty of ways to stay organized and keep track of work. It lacks several things that are standard elsewhere, though, so we recommend taking a try-before-you-buy approach to see if it’s a good fit for your team.

FunctionFox Features Overview

User-Friendliness

Signing up for FunctionFox is clunky, but you’re quickly sent to its slick-looking top page. The design is modern and smart, leaning toward tablet-friendly chunkiness but still managing to get plenty on screen.

There isn’t a tutorial when you first sign in, but there’s a populated sample project to explore. If you want guidance when getting started, you can find a quick start .pdf on its support page. There are also several videos. We recommend watching the overview for whichever tier you’re on.

FunctionFox has a quirky sense of humor, which we enjoyed. The sample project wasn’t the usual run-of-the-mill business placeholder but a Shelf Danglers project for the MuuMuu Dairy, headed by Johnny Fox himself.

Above that, boxes showing our project costs and hours logged on the timesheet demonstrate that the fox has claws, too.

FunctionFox Interface

The interface is fast and responsive, with a clearly-labeled menu on the left giving you plenty of categorized navigation options. You can select a few options to use as larger customizable buttons that appear at the top of the screen, so you don’t have to keep hunting to find the areas you use most.

Working out what to do seems easy because the interface looks well-designed and intuitive. There’s a lot there, though, and figuring out how it all fits together is harder. We found individual areas easy to navigate, but then found while moving around that the changes we’d made didn’t seem to be reflected in other areas.

For example, we added a new client, then created a project. On moving to the timesheet, we could select the client, but our project didn’t seem to exist. We’ve seen others mention usability issues on the forums and in comments, too.

If you want to try a platform that keeps things nice and simple, read our Asana review. If you like what you see there, our Asana beginner’s guide has tips for getting started with it.

Estimates are easy to set up. When creating a project, you select from a range of tasks that you think will be needed. Tasks each have an associated hourly rate and can be customized to your needs. From there you enter how many hours you think will be needed for each one.

FunctionFox does the legwork for you and figures out a total estimated cost for your project.

Later, your figures can be compared to the hours that you actually logged so you can see how your estimates stack up. That can be useful for improving your accuracy over time.

To track time, you can enter it in manually or use FunctionFox’s built-in timer, which you can start and stop when you work on something. The only indication it is working, though, is that the timer icon turns blue, so it’s easy to forget. Some kind of always-visible counter might work better.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get timesheets working, so we weren’t able to take advantage of it.

We’ve given FunctionFox a good score for user-friendliness. Its interface is readable and responsive. Not everything works for us, though, and we’ve seen similar feedback from other users.

Though we ran into issues, the design is good, and if you can find what you need, you can figure out how to use it.

If you’d like to try a tool with an easy and intuitive interface that works more often than not, take a look at our TeamGantt review.

Cost

Classic $5 per extra user	$ 35.00/ month
Premier $10 per extra user	$ 50.00/ month
In-House $15 per extra user	$ 100.00/ month

FunctionFox takes an unusual approach to pricing, with a large fee for the first user, then a smaller charge for additional team members. That might sting small teams, but it’s a fair reflection of the way costs scale.

On the plus side, you can try it for free for two weeks without providing credit card information. Nonprofits and academic institutions can take advantage of discounts, but they’ll have to discuss the details with FunctionFox’s sales team. FunctionFox also offers a month free for every user you refer to it.

It’s also free for students, which takes the sting out of the price, and it gives free training and webinars to those still in education.

FunctionFox is more about time tracking than task management, and its Classic tier doesn’t offer much of the latter. If you’re focused on arranging and organizing tasks, we recommend avoiding its cheapest option.

Storage space is also limited, with 10GB available on its most expensive plan and additional space available for $10 per month per 10GB on all plans. If you need more than that, take a look at our best online storage for teams article.

You can pay for annual plans with a credit card, check or purchase order. If you’re not happy with FunctionFox, there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee.

If you’re watching the pennies and want to try something with a free tier and lower prices, check out our Freedcamp review.

FunctionFox gets a decent score in cost. You get several options to tailor it to your needs, as well as a free trial and a range of concessions. It isn’t the cheapest platform around, though.

Security & Privacy

FunctionFox has a page on its website addressing security and privacy concerns, which reassures us that it doesn’t mess with your data or information unless asked.

It fills in your city and country based on its estimate of your location, though. It also used our email address to determine our website. We aren’t keen on applications storing data about us that we haven’t explicitly provided.

If you want to know more about keeping your information safe, take a look at our how to protect your privacy article.

On the plus side, it offers continuous backup and stores your data in a high-security off-site facility. It uses SSL for data in transit, too, giving you some protection from cybercrime.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer two-factor authentication. To learn more about why that matters, read our what is two-factor authentication guide.

To see an alternative that does well in security and privacy, take a look at our Smartsheet review.

FunctionFox gets a good score in security and privacy. It doesn’t go into much detail, and you don’t have many options to manage things yourself, but the basics are in place, so you don’t need to worry too much.

Service & Support

If you click the “contact” button, you’re given a phone number, email address and contact form to choose from. Many platforms hide their direct contact information, if they even offer it, so it’s nice to see a platform give you multiple support options without having to hunt for them.

FunctionFox is committed to responding to calls and email requests immediately, but only during U.S. office hours. Outside of those, it promises to get back to you first thing on the next business day.

We put that to the test with an inquiry about our issue with newly-created projects not showing up on the timesheet screen. It was late evening in the U.S. when we asked, so we expected a response the next morning.

The response seemed to go missing, but the bug we reported was fixed the next time we logged in, though, so perhaps the support staff were waiting to hear back from the developers fixing the issue.

To learn about an alternative platform with fast support, check out our monday.com review. It’s our favorite tool in this category.

Clicking the help menu brings up a pop-up webpage with a detailed text description of the page you’re looking at in the interface. It’s a sparse approach and looks dated, but we found it effective. Some users might prefer video or images, but the text is detailed, so you get plenty of information.

It does have video guidance if you look for it, though, with several long, detailed YouTube videos showing you around the platform.

Searching for something specific is tougher, though, and we found ourselves trying to find things on several occasions to no avail. That was all the more serious because we found things not working that we suspected to be bugs.

FunctionFox gets a good score for its service and support. It has ways to get help, but they aren’t as thorough as they could be.

The Verdict

FunctionFox has excellent features for tracking costs throughout multiple projects and is a great high-level tool for managers and executives to keep an eye on things. Its task management is more limited, so you should probably look elsewhere if that’s your focus.

Our roundup of the best project management software is a great place to start if you want to compare what’s out there. Read our ClickUp review for a product that gets lots of things right when it comes to basic task management.

FunctionFox looks good. It’s generally attractive and well-designed, but we had trouble getting it to work how we wanted. When we got lost the support options didn’t offer enough to help get us back on track.

FunctionFox offers something different from most of the platforms we’ve looked at, but we recommend trying it before buying to make sure it matches your needs.

If you’ve tried FunctionFox, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks for reading.