Devon Ashby
Computational Chemist · 1-10
1 review written · 4.0 average
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Reviews by Devon Ashby
★★★★★
First week with Cresset, I kept bracing for the wall. You know the one: dense documentation, a support ticket that takes three days to bounce back, a UI that assumes you already know every acronym in the manual. None of that happened. Their onboarding was genuinely attentive. A scientist from their team walked me through the Flare interface on day two, answered my stupidly basic questions without making me feel stupid, and by Friday I had a real protein-ligand system loaded and was actually making sense of the electrostatic potentials. For a small group like mine, where nobody has time to babysit a new tool for a month, that pace mattered enormously.
A year in, the features have held up. The multi-parameter optimization view is where I spend most of my time now, balancing potency estimates against ADMET flags across a compound series. The shape and electrostatics matching for ligand-based searches is sharp, and the 3D visualization quality is well above what I expected coming from older, cheaper tools. My one real gripe: the learning curve on the scripting API is steeper than the rest of the product suggests it should be. Documentation exists, but it assumes a comfort level with Python workflows that not everyone on a tiny team has. I hit a wall there around month three and had to rely on support again rather than figuring it out myself.
Support did come through, so it's not a dealbreaker. Still, if you're evaluating this for a small group with mixed computational backgrounds, budget some time for that piece. Everything else, especially those first critical days when you're deciding whether the tool earns its keep, Cresset handled better than I expected.
