Esticom - Avis

Esticom is very user friendly and easy to use.

There are not many icons for the fire protection industry I work in. This makes it difficult when creating mocked up drawings for the customer.

The ability to create and manage catalogs is a big deal for us. As a company, we have a large number of products across a wide range of technologies and have the ability to separate those into individual catalogs helps to make sense of what to quote. In addition, assigning a catalog item to a takeoff makes creating a bill of materials a cinch.

While I understand that making a profit is key to a business's survival I feel that the per-user cost is quite high. Also, a bulk selection for changing the creator of an estimate would be nice. I recently had to manually go through and change the creator of about 30 individual estimates. While this was due to us sharing a login between users and then purchasing more logins I could see this being an issue, later on, should you have to replace an employee and need a have someone take over their estimates.

The ease of learning it and using the system

Material needs to entered and labeled better

It is highly functional!! If I could spend more time on customizing it, I would use it as my only tool for estimating from beginning to end.

Pricey. $99 per month is a lot considering there are critical things like Office and Adobe that cost so much less.

The software is simple. It is a great set-up for a small business. The customer service is very hands on. You get a real person every time and they do a good job of helping explain things. There is not a charge for training. If there is something you are struggling with they seem genuinely concerned on making the software the best it can be for you.

It would be nice if we could customize some of the costs and if there were a couple more options with the quote set-up when it goes to the customer. It is time consuming for us (we are electrical contractors) to try to find "specific costs" for wire and other things. They have a lot of templates, but a lot of them are based on nationwide pricing.

Cloud based - I can estimate and track projects on any computer wherever I have a good internet connection
Economical - Low monthly or annual costs allow a great ROI
Intuitive - Assemblies are easy to customize/create
Evolving - New features added monthly using real input from actual users
Personal - Customer support staff have field experience as well as excellent product knowledge which translates to excellent on-boarding sessions and quick answers to questions.

The design build section could use some updating/expanding. I realize that this is not one of the main features of Esticom, but it would be nice to see a few more items in its database as it is not yet possible to add my own.

The team and I appreciated the ease of use. It has significant power to perform all the required work of the larger more expensive packages, but still gives you the flexibility to make it a custom fit for you.

Only cloud based at this moment. I hope in future releases they will issue a server based stand alone platform for our secure projects.

The software is easy to use. As features are added, it becomes more and more useful. The fact that your customer and existing catalog data base can be uploaded to give it a tremendous value.

There are still some issues with the way it rounds and displays some of the cost information, but customer support has been working with me on that.

I like that the software is easy to use.

I don't like that it has glitches at times. I did request for some changes.

It's very similar to other DAS design software programs I've used, where it scales and measures a link budget as a design is being worked on. Very simple to use and makes going from Microsoft Visio a very easy decision.

It would be great if our products were incorporated into the software, similar to .vex files in iBwave, so that a proper Bill Of Materials could then be created based on the design. Otherwise, a great product.

Design function
Ability to easily jump between work stations and use at home
Reports that can be issued are very professional looking

The database for devices in the design function is limited
Limited database for parts that have been pre-entered

It is very nice to be able to scale a map with ease either utilizing the common scale option or drawing a line as a measurement. Additionally, Esticom's team is fantastic about working directly with you to make the software suitable for your project type. It makes estimation and design easy when you have one centralized platform to work with.

I have no current complaints to speak of.

Ease of use-the software is very user friendly

I would like to be able to add shipping as extra at the bottom similar to sales tax-we order a lot of fixtures that require shipping and customer likes t see it broken out

This software is easy to use. We have the ability to add items and organize them. We are able to integrate the information entered into this software into our project management software which reduces the need for time consuming processes of moving information between softwares.

We would like this software to include the ability to show reports of the information from proposals entered based on date entered etc... We would like to be able to delete default items from the software for trades not related to ours. We are otherwise totally satisfied with this software.

The software is very easy to use and accessible anywhere with internet.

Electrical components prices are off making it difficult to in smaller projects.

Auto Search is amazing. You can select exactly what to search for and it actually works. You can turn off and on your takeoffs. After marking up your blueprints you can save the takeoff and print it for use in the field without having to hunt for everything all over again.

Can't merge pages of a floor yet to see the big picture.
They don't have a takeoff template or a way of reusing what you have created already for new projects.

It saves you a tremendous amount of time by building your estimate as you are doing your takeoff.

Sometimes there are slight quirks that need to be fixed, but this is mainly because they are adding new features and they always get fixed.

Ease of use. Feature friendly. Estimating tool is great.

Wish there were more options in takeoffs to add numbers for drops.

What I liked the most about Esticom is how easy it is to measure blueprints and download them with legends. It works very well with the mouse, and it is web based so I could access it anywhere.

What I liked the least about Esticom is that it is missing important features and they are charging way too much for the platform. Please add templates, stages and Excel options!

This software is easy to set up and is user friendly. I also like that this software is cloud based and I can do takeoffs anywhere.

You have to go to the estimating page to add another part to the estimate. It would be nice to be able to add it on the takeoffs page. It would also be great to have the ability to price out alternates and have those totals separated from the base bid total on the proposal. We use our own proposal to have this ability.

Ease of use and the knowledge and helpfulness of the support staff that has been helping us get Esticom setup and running.

Difficulty in working with margins and profit categories. This may be user error more than a software issue.

Some of the options are not easily converted from the US to Canadian.
Measurements. Material costs, tax etc.

We have to be careful before we send an estimate out to insure all the calculations are correct. Measurements are in metric. Pricing etc.

The software is easy to use and has a whole stock list of the product we sell in the fire alarm and security industry.

The only thing I found least about the software, can the tool be able to float of the screen to allow all the items on the page to be seen.

Ease of use. The navigation is simple, but effective!

Lacking a bit on the materials, but getting better with updates!

Easy to use software was able to learn the basics with little instructions

don't like that you cant edit parts from the assembly screen