PastPerfect

PastPerfect

4.5 / 5 7 reviews


Average Ratings

7 Reviews
  • 4.5 / 5
    Overall
  • 4 / 5
    Ease of Use
  • 5 / 5
    Customer Service

Product Details

  • Starting Price
    $696.00
  • Deployment
    Installed - Windows

Vendor Details

  • PastPerfect
  • www.museumsoftware.com/

About PastPerfect

Provides the tools to automate accessions, exhibits, condition reports, repatriation, and incoming and outgoing loans.


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PastPerfect Features

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PastPerfect Reviews Recently Reviewed!


For the cost, this is a robust program that can let you do a lot.

Dec 08, 2017
4/5
Overall
4 / 5
Ease of Use
4 / 5
Features & Functionality
5 / 5
Customer Support
5 / 5
Value for Money
Likelihood to Recommend: 7.0/10 Not
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Pros: It's relatively intuitive to use, and training materials are free available online. The program has plenty of flexibility for small- to medium-size organizations with a wide variety of collections. There are features that allow you to make your collections accessible online. If you have problems, the customer service is outstanding.

Cons: Because the program was originally developed by a museum curator, the library and archives modules are lacking, but have greatly improved with each version. If you don't thoroughly clean up your existing data before importing it, or develop a comprehensive plan for entering data anew to ensure consistency, you will end up with a lot of records that look sloppy and unprofessional, and there are few functions for making mass changes. PLAN and think through all scenarios before you process. When operating this program on a network, be sure to have enough space and speed on your network to handle the program, otherwise the program will run so slow to render it practically useless, or at least *significantly* lower your productivity. This will impact your real cost of implementing and maintaining this program. As far as cost, also keep in mind that every additional module which allows you to publish to the web and improve your workflow will cost extra money, so be sure to know your current and future needs in advance.

useful and user-friendly product

Oct 07, 2016
5/5
Overall
5 / 5
Ease of Use
4 / 5
Features & Functionality
5 / 5
Customer Support
5 / 5
Value for Money

Pros: -easy to learn and use on a daily basis
-combines modules for tracking objects, loans, donations, and people associated with it all

Cons: -it could allow for some more customization in terms of object types
-better object search options would make this more user-friendly

Overall: This database is great for small to medium sized museums. It's fairly easy to get the basics down if you're just starting out (i.e. volunteers and interns), and if you have some experience working in museum databases and want to become more organized, especially with collections management and everything related including loans and donations. It's convenient to have all the modules in one program.

It seems to be geared mainly toward historical collections-- choosing an object type can be difficult when you aren't allowed to create your own, so art and archaeology, etc. objects can be a bit tricky to input. You may have to be creative with some categorizations.

Overall, phone support is great and the training manual is helpful for reference. I haven't had any huge issues with the product and would recommend it, as it's a well-known software and an affordable option for many small organizations.

I have been working with PP software for more than 12 years and I am always learning something new

Apr 04, 2018
5/5
Overall
5 / 5
Ease of Use
5 / 5
Features & Functionality
5 / 5
Customer Support
5 / 5
Value for Money
Likelihood to Recommend: 10.0/10 Not
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Pros: Affordable. The advanced searching and ability to create a variety of reports to suit needs. Also option of online presence.

Cons: We have a high turn of office administrator staff and they have always found it difficult to learn how to use the membership contacts lists. Probably because they don't use the software very often (1-2 times a years) that they would spend a lot of time trying to work out what to do. In the end they have elected to just use a spreadsheet to track member info.

Overall: Great one stop shop for our collection management needs. In the past we had so many different spreadsheet lists for indexes. Now we are able to have everything in one place to look. Because of the variety of people who have catalogued in the past (with a variety of inconsistencies) the advanced search options really helps narrow down search criteria.

Excellent name recognition, and comprehensive curation resources.

Jul 09, 2018
5/5
Overall
4 / 5
Ease of Use
4 / 5
Features & Functionality
5 / 5
Customer Support
5 / 5
Value for Money

Pros: Extensive and robust, as well as well-trusted and well-known, museum software that, once learned, provides excellent transferable skills to other institutions and museum software platforms -- PastPerfect is a name most museum folks recognize, for good reason.

Cons: Such a strong and comprehensive platform for museums, especially for curation departments -- while also marketed as of use to libraries and archives, those tools and resources (while present) are much less extensive. It can also be a challenge to integrate PastPerfect-generated artifact/collection-donor reports and acknowledgements to a museum's main CRM platform used by the resource development team for fund-based donor reports and acknowledgements.

Thesaurus Database

Sep 16, 2016
3/5
Overall
2 / 5
Ease of Use
4 / 5
Features & Functionality
5 / 5
Value for Money
Likelihood to Recommend: 3.0/10 Not
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Pros: One stop shop museum management. Looks good. Training Videos & Customer Support.

Cons: No free field for Object Name. Not suitable for volunteer run organisations.

Overall: Whilst it is a sophisticated all in one museum management software it is more suitable for medium to large size museums with paid staff. This software is vulnerable to a lack of successional training & knowledge of database management software. The main bugbear we find with the program is that it doesn't come with a free field for 'object name' just a thesaurus for the type of object which is very odd.

Recommendations to other buyers: Manual is not user friendly - too verbose, more diagrams etc

Capterra-loader

I have enjoyed using PastPerfect in several museum settings

Apr 24, 2018
5/5
Overall
3 / 5
Ease of Use
3 / 5
Features & Functionality
4 / 5
Customer Support
4 / 5
Value for Money
Likelihood to Recommend: 7.0/10 Not
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Pros: I like the ease of use, it's very self-explanatory, that you can use accession cards alongside the software that way you can have a physical as well as digital copy, and that every pieces location can be tracked using the software.

Cons: It is not as modern and streamlined as other programs, but even in saying that it's such a simple software that I feel like a more modern version might be harder to use.

Overall: Ease of use!

PastPerfect museum management software

Dec 29, 2015
5/5
Overall
5 / 5
Ease of Use
5 / 5
Customer Support

Comments: A great product for managing all museum membership and other contacts plus management of artifacts and collections.
Easy to learn and use and I understand that they are making lots of improvements to an already great program
Great support service
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