[Dale Wiley]

Originally posted by sdinenno


In other words, you could buy these two programs for about $200 and you'd have more useful features and information than PROLandscapes. About the only thing you'll lack is an estimating function which could be helpful but I doubt that it is worth the $1100 difference that you'd pay for it.


Stuart [/b]

I am going to disagree here and this is my personal opinion and based upon what I want in design software and software in general. To say that 2 programs for $ 200 will do more than a professional design image program is bad advice in MY OPINION. Using 2 stand alone programs to do something 1 will do, even a a greater cost is poor use of a designers/salesperson/owners TIME.

ProLandscape will produce working drawings from the design. Very important feature because I can convert that design into crew plans immediately. No second step involved in an additional drawing or engineering process.

ProLandscape will allow me to generate a complete estimate for labor and materials, import that to Excel or use their module. I could set a macro to drop the numbers right into my custom designed estimating program in seconds. I have not bought the program yet, but it is scheduled for purchase in March.

To me an additional $ 1100 is a small price to pay for eliminating at least 2 very time consuming steps in the sales process. From the material list I can assign labor values, I want cut and fill capabilties, and I want a solid plant library. I want mulch calculations, I want it all, and $ 1100 is nothing over the course of 1 year as compared to my time and efficency.

I went to both the links in the post and I found them both to be inferior to ProLandscape. Any time a graphics program has a time management and finance module in it, they lost my interest right away. Realtime is a variation of Punch or Serria or one of the low end non profesional user's.

Don't go cheap here folks, I have made that mistake dozens of times, and this process figures to thave the greatest impact on our business this year of everything we are doing and I am not going to cut a corner in the name of economy, when doing that could impact it more in a negative way. If you want the best, you need to pay for the best.