ESPIRIDION  I think it's important to update my rating for Daylite, since I gave it 5-stars back in 2006.

On a positive note, when I launched Daylite a few minutes ago I got a message regarding the new version. Auto-update had stopped working for me for years. Unfortunately, the download was for daylitesuite38, so I had to manually download daylite38. No big deal, though.

Regarding Daylite itself, I experienced a lot of unexpected behavior, especially when I upgraded to Leopard. Customer support was good, but it was often non-existent. In the end, they were unable to solve my problem and stopped all communication. I got Daylite to work again by doing an "Erase and Install" of Leopard, and reinstalling Daylite.

MarketCircle also seems to be a bit unresponsive regarding bug fixes or adding features to their software. Once bug fixes and added features are available, they come in the form of a paid upgrade or additional expense (e.g., modules, connectors.)

Billings 3 is another example of a paid upgrade that should have been a free update. I'm not giving MarketCircle $25 for that upgrade, which is interesting since this week I'm buying 2 applications which sell for $269 and $299. They simply do not deserve my money.

I actually stopped using Daylite a while ago and now use Contactizer Pro. Both have their positive aspects as well as their limitations and room for improvement, but by now I prefer to support other developers.

I also use Entourage quite a bit.

Other options:

Chandler looked promising but it still has a long way to go.

NightHawk's evolution is painfully slow.

I sometimes miss using Consultant or Now Up To Date and Contact under OS 9.  
(Version 3.8)

NESSUNO  After I wrote the comment below, I found out that Daylite had messed up my Address Book AGAIN. I had trashed it 2 years ago because of this bug that Marketcircle was unable to fix. I thought they would have fixed it after 2 years. Nope. Every A.B. entry is duplicated or tripled! Thanks God I had an intact copy on my MacBook...

Fare thee well, Daylite, forever! I won't give you another chance.  
(Version 3.9.2)

JEFF NAILEN  Thanks A.J. and team for listening to your users! Integration with an accounting package is something I and many others have been asking for. This will put Daylite way ahead of alternatives. As usual, MarketCircle seems to have chosen it's partners wisely. MoneyWorks has the best reputation among the major commercial accounting packages for the Mac platform. It has the highest user ratings on MacUpdate as well. Well done. The new integration with LightSpeed seems to do the same thing - integration with best-of-class point of sale on the Mac.

Daylite is turning into the indispensable hub of my business, integrating with all the apps I need to run my business from a central location. There's nothing else like it.

Jeff Nailen

BioFit Solutions  
(Version 3.7)

EIGHT  Since two month the technical support is not able to slove a problem with Daylite log-in. The log-in process takes about 8 minutes, which is quite inacceptable.

Finally Daylite admitted that they don't know how to solve the problem. That's what the call customer support.

New clients should be very careful in choosing Daylite. It is full of bugs obviously and a decision of purchasing a CRM software should be considered carefully. Out of my experience, I wouldn't recommend Daylite any longer.

It has great features, but they are worthless if they are not working, aren't they?  
(Version 3.7.6)

DEIBEL  I am a daily user of Daylite since about a year. All in all I am very pleased with the software. Of course, in the recent months two major hurdles, in integration of synchronisation as well as the Leopard upgrade had to be overcome. After the appearance of the 3.6 betas, and now the final version, I must say that Marketcircle did rather well. Also, the support appears to be pretty responsive and helpful.

Some features could be improved though. The report generator is a good start, but not easy to get used to. I personally prefer to alter the report templates by hand, and am pretty happy with the outcome (e.g., sorting tasks by status: open tasks first, cancelled tasks last). A certain project hierarchy (project with subprojects) would be nice. Drag and drop of Daylite notes should IMO result in an export of the notes title+contents, not the title only. And so on. However, I can live with these issues. I assume that the Daylite developers will have more time now to focus on ease-of-use etc, and am looking forward to future versions of this very useful and well-performing product.  
(Version 3.6)

AKROBAT  Till now this is in my opinion the best PIM out there. I used to use Palm Desktop, but the lack of updates for 2 years led me to look further.

The mail integration, Task/Project management and automatic syncing when in a network is a real winner for me. Everything is in one window and I don't need to use a seperate IGTD program which means the integration is not an issue. PLUS the fact that I can make changes on my laptop, come home plug in the ethernet cable and have those changes immediately reflected on my eMac is probably for me the biggest 'feature'.

Falls short on simple things like copying an appointment or event and being able to drag it to wherever you want (such as in Palm Desktop). Why they refuse to implement week numbers I don't know. In Contactizer (a gloryfied but potentially good PIM) there's a Day Preview window that you can toggle when in the Month View... really handy to quickly check what's going on in a particular day.

Hopefully this app will get better, but for now I'm satisfied.  
(Version 3.2.3)

ESPIRIDION  I’ve been using DayLite for years. I did have some issues with the earlier betas, but they were betas. As a DayLite user I provided feedback to the MarketCircle people, and their program has vastly improved.

I find it hard to believe that CAUSTICT has even tried the software. It does have a learning curve, but there’s a manual, a forum, support, FAQ’s, and videos. Most people will not need all of this resources to create a Task or a Note, which are two features that seem to be giving a problem to CAUSTICT. It takes just a few seconds to add tasks or notes, by the way.

I’ve used other alternatives, and for years used Now Up to Date and Contact. I’m very happy to be using DayLite now. I will be happier if they would include Billings as well, once it’s out of beta, for free :-) I would rate it a 5 if it included email integration and Billings. For the price, I have to rate it a 4 in terms of features and value. Ease of use also gets a 4. It’s easy, but it pays to read the manual and watch some videos.

There are other reviews on the web that go into more detail.  
(Version 3.2.1)

DONOVAN RODDY  I've been running a small 5 man team with each person in a different part of th US and other areas internationally. I will say Daylite had very few bugs when I used it as an individual project with billings (billings works great but lacks on features) but as MarketCircle pushed out Daylite server to allow teams to collaborate easier I've only had headache after headache with the the program. For instance, the way they handle licensing is awful, at times if you don't log out prior to closing daylite it will tell you that all your licensing are in use so the person who has access to the Daylite Server has to log in and wipe any local databases in order to get it to work properly. Another thing you may experience is Daylite will continuously crash if the system crashes once and you try to reconnect to the database. The only work around I've found for that is to create a temp database, connect to it and then delete it and then attempt to reconnect to the database that was crashing. The newest bug I've found since the latest build release 3.9.3 (As of July 10, 2009); I have daylite set up as an automatic start up program as with mail, if Daylite has not started completed I receive an error with my mail application saying I can only connect with one database at a time. If I don't use daylite as the start up program Mac Mail starts perfectly each time. Some may say it's a Mac Mail issue (I believe this is a Daylite Mail Integration Issue), being that its an OS native application I think Daylite needs to look into it and give their subscribers on possible issues and keep their customers in the loop which they fail to do (being on twitter and trying to cut bad buzz about their products doesn't count). Another thing potential buyers should be aware of is if you're purchasing this platform to work for teams Daylite currently has it priced at $189.00 but it's $449.99 with support 'Which You Will Need' because for MOST USERS who just expect software bought to 'just work' out of the box you won't find it with this product and if you didn't purchase the support Daylite expects you to wait 3 days for them to respond to any issues you have and if you're like me I can't wait 3 days or more to have data that is critical to my business working. I questioned Daylite Staff on that issue and their reasoning was because they released a new product (Daylite Touch for the iphone) they couldnt answer support questions as fast as they used to because they were busy with the new product, so in other wards what they are saying is we're going to be concentrating on the potential new wave of customers (more revenue) and put the customers that have already purchased on the backburner... temporarily... Ask yourself this question, when Microsoft or Apple pushes out a new product do they do stuff like this to their existing customers...?

The bottom line, I'm really upset because Daylites possible capabilities is the best in this realm for Mac users, I've seen the rest and I was really looking forward to using this with my team and being that I've purchased multiple licenses, plugins, hosting & computers It's been a very bad experience. And I will continue to point out all the issues I run into in the hopes that people will not make the same mistake as I did or until Daylite corrects these issues and pays attention to the people that have already paid and not just potential new revenue.

Donovan Roddy

1.702.448.3435  
(Version 3.9.3)

TEKSESTRO  I have evaluated every minor revision of Daylite that comes out, since version 3.0. I keep coming back, and trying it again, because from a design perspective, this software has some much potential! Unfortunately, every time I try it, I must give up on it, as there are always 1 or 2 features that are deal-breakers, and whose implementation falls short.

The user-management is fantastic. Features such as 'opportunities', and projects with pipelines show a great deal of thought for business processes, and could quickly become indispensable. And the fantastically flexible and customisable reporting capabilites are amazing - and getting better with every revision.

Where the package falls apart for me is in the CALENDARING, which in my business, is the MAIN component, and where I spend most of my day. Daylite's calendar interface is, in my opinion, archaic, and buggy. Simple operations, like being able to option-drag an appointment to make a copy of it at a different time (a feature of just about every other calendaring application) does not work. Making an appointment by dragging a contact into the calendar, ignores appointment preferences (I need all my appointments to be 15 minutes long, but dragging a contact into the calendar ALWAYS creates an appointment that is 1-hour long, regardless of how I've set my preferences). Changing the status of an appointment (to, let's say, 'completed') gives you NO visual indication in the calendar - neither is there an indication for when an appointment has alarms, or is being repeated (another standard in just about every other calendaring program).

I need to make tens of appointments everyday, which often extend beyond a year, and I need to keep track of which appointments have been kept, which have been missed, and print appointment reports. So, calendaring is a pretty intensive part of my business, and although I'd truly LOVE to adopt Daylite - it would perfectly fit into all my other business processes - the calendar module still keeps letting me down.

I hope that the Daylite programmer(s) will eventually put some time aside, and update the calendaring module, to make it as feature-full and up-to-date as the rest of the program.  
(Version 3.2.3)

TONGZIE  complex, but nice product made useless by a licensing scheme that doesn't let you use the product, and support which reacts in weeks, not days, and is unable to resolve the issue for you.

OK for a single user - if you never plan to upgrade. I've had a terrible experience with them, which is a shame, because it otherwise could have been a good product.

I'm now an ex-user, looking for something else with a licensing system that actually works, so I can use the product I paid money for. I feel totally ripped off. I've sales for my money back, but like support, they don't answer. For telephone 'support' I need to pay them more money.  
(Version 3.2.1)