ActiveCollab Reviews

Pros

Before I decided to go with ActiveCollab a few years ago, I researched and tried all the project management softwares I could find. I ended up going with ActiveCollab for a number of reasons.

One, their interface is simple, practical, and easy on the eye. I found other project management softwares trying to hard and it essentially complicated simple things. Also, I loved how my projects can be displayed and searched. I know this sounds trivial, but when you manage hundreds of projects (websites), I need an interface that works for me. Their interface works perfectly for someone with my needs. I constantly have to go back and forth on so many notes for projects and ActiveCollab has made it user-friendly for me to do this.

Second, ActiveCollab had awesome customer service when I had any issues or questions. This was a big plus because I then knew I was in good hands.

Third, they had some add-ons other softwares didn't have so it was nice to have features I wanted to use all in one place, like time tracking and invoicing.

Fourth, it was reasonably priced.

Cons

While I went with ActiveCollab, I am still frustrated with some of their features:

One, I use notes A LOT. Their notes interface design looks like something from the 90's.

Two, while they have the invoicing option available, it's sub-par. There are a lot of things they can improve with their invoicing. I wish I could use it, but it's just very limited. An example of a limitation is that you can't even enter or send an invoice without "inviting" the client to join ActiveCollab. I tried testing an invoice by putting an email manually because they claimed you could, but nothing gets sent, unless I "invite" someone into my account. This is silly. Another issue I have with the invoicing is that it shows "Active Collab" as the sender and you do NOT have the option to change this. Kinda stupid.

Three, you only have a measly 3 ways to categorize or filter projects: Client, Category, and Label. This can be very limiting depending on what you're doing.

Pros

Web used Active Collab during several years in our servers. The database structure is very simple and allow us to create dashboards with user data.

Cons

Lack of features like kanban and of user interface improvements during updates

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing ActiveCollab

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to ActiveCollab

Pros

Onboarding is easy, interface is easy to use and understanding. It's also one of the cheapest option in the market. For features that are not available, the ActiveCollab team is keen to consider adding that feature though during our usage, we didn't really see the feature being rolled out.

Cons

I used to use Basecamp and when compared, there are a lot of features that are lacking in ActiveCollab such as being able to create a Gantt timeline, quite messy grouping of projects on the main home page, not able to add vendors (only can add clients, yet we do not use ActiveCollab to collaborate with clients). As a project management tool, we also would like to see how we can gauge the workload of each team mate and if each team mate might be overload within the day or week, this function at the moment is not available. Completed tasked are being archived and under archived, the completed tasks are not organised according to task list. Some features such as invoicing and budget management cannot be adopted by finance team as they uses a more advanced thou legacy system which includes a whole lot of other functions on top of merely invoicing.

Pros

It is simple to organize and manage work and projects with activeCollab.I can easily track time used on projects and tasks with this tool.It is simple to plan work and projects with ActiveCollab.

Cons

I lack anything that is detestable with ActiveCollab as it meets all my requirements and needs.

Pros

Being able to:
- upload images and files into task discussion threads to facilitate easy review of work
- easily add and archive users
- run reports at the task, project, client, and user levels

Cons

- No integration with Microsoft Teams.
- Limited ability to manage user groups or fine-tune user permissions.
Most needed feature:
- The ability to mark notifications "unread" or "priority".

Pros

The native features are very adapted to our uses, and we were able to add the missing features.Especially, time and budget tracking are good to have and

Cons

Not us directly, but our customers are sometimes disturbed by the UX, despite huge leap forward recently.We sometimes find it a bit slow in terms of performance - we host it so we may be to blame - and access to data (because we have a lot of projects and customers).

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to ActiveCollab

Pros

Ease of use and implementation. Simple staff on-boarding and intuitive interface.

Cons

Poor search function and lack of ability to enter a date on estimates... crazy that such a well rounded and useful software lacks a full feature search function and doesn't allow (nor even auto generate) a date field on the estimate form.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to ActiveCollab

Pros

I have tried multiple task management software for our company, But anyhow I was not satisfied with other product because of no option to manage workload or time and invoice calculation or somehow workflow is difficult for non technical user to use.
Activ Collab has the most simple UI and Design. Only 1 or 2 days training will be sufficient for any users to understand it.
Workload segment is really simple and most important functionality it have.
And the support team is really great.

Most importantly - it have self hosted options which is utmost priority for us for data security and privacy and also we can reduce cost for our users.

Cons

Android app needs improvement. It doesn't comes anywhere near to desktop web version.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to ActiveCollab

Pros

Solid options for organization and streamlining processes that even clients can be taught to use. As a creative agency selling our time it's important to communicate quickly and efficiently with our clients. A big part of that happens at the beginning of every project when they fill out a creative brief. We've used ActiveCollab to set up standard brief templates so AC asks all the questions and they go down the list and fill it out. The time tracker works great and is a painless way to keep track of time. Email notifications are great, especially being able to respond to comments VIA email really speeds things up. Support staff is great. Always available and helpful.

Cons

The invoicing functionality is great but is missing major sorting and display capabilities. For example, if I wanted to show each time entry with its note about what that entry was for organized by project, I cannot do that. My wife has also complained about the App not having a lot of functionality, but I have not used it much personally. I also think the 'Notes' 'Files' and 'Discussions' tabs are kind of random. Haven't found a good place for those in our workflows and they're confusing for clients. I realize it's a big thing to ask, but I'd also like to see some way of incorporating something like Slack into Active Collab, so we can move away from Skype completely.

Pros

It's amazing how flexible AC can be depending on a project's needs. It can serve as a simple reminder list with great speed and simplicity but also get fully blown up for projects involving production teams and clients at once. Compared to its competition it never feels like its dictating you to use it in a certain way, it just hands you a great bunch of options and lets you use them without interference. I use other products like dropbox and dropbox paper too and it all goes together really nicely.
One thing to note is a personal and genuinely helpful customer service, there have been issues and bugs here and there (not many) and in 90% of the cases they were solved within short time.

I think AC is great for freelancers and small project groups working remotely I switched from Basecamp and it was one of a relief.

Cons

I personally don't like the free limitations of users. I know there's a business model behind it but I hate to delete other clients/team members just to make room for someone else.

Pros

I own and operate a company that specializes in creative strategy and marketing/PR services and this is a good fit for us. I spent many months and went through quite a few trials researching a software that had as many features combined that we were looking for. We settled on ActiveCollab and we're very happy with them. It's a great option without the price tag and disorganization the later versions that Basecamp brings. I like the customization features as well as the billable categories for tracking and reports. We work with contractors in our business and we like the ability to assign tasks and hide back office items from the client. Their customer service has been very responsive and helpful throughout our set up and we're overall very happy with the product and functionality for our needs. Overall good UX / UI.

Cons

We're finding the reports options are a little bit limited, however it hasn't been a huge issue. We're getting most of the data we need. We really wish we could assign tasks to multiple people, but that seems to be a common theme among these software options. I don't understand why as we have many tasks that are worked on by multiple people. This carries over into the time tracking app. If you aren't assigned a task, it won't show up in the time tracking app for you to track against. However the work around is you can add a time report in the desktop version after the fact to any task regardless of who it assigned to. The budget feature per project is nice, however, we wish we could break it down further by task list. Their great customer service has passed this along to the management and dev team for consideration so fingers crossed it will be coming in an update at some point.

Pros

For all intents and purposes, ActiveCollab is awesome at doing what it advertises it's doing - project and task management, with easy-to-use, uncomplicated and effective tools. And really, especially on the task level, it is great and will save you a lot of time and brain power.

Cons

On the other hand, if you're the one to experiment with your software, look for ways to improve it in new and unexpected way, I hope you're not expecting a lot of success with ActiveCollab. It is a good piece of software, as long as you stay within its area of expertise. Otherwise, you're just stopped in tracks for the most of time, with little or no ways to go forward.

Alternatives Considered

Pros

Lots of detailed helpful features which don't complicate the interface but are great when you start using them. Customer support has pointed some out when I put in what we thought was a feature request... but it already existed and I'd missed it.

Actively developed and continually updated without annoyingly changing things unnecessarily or 'fixing' anything that isn't broken.

Cons

Using Elastic Search as the only available search feature is limiting, as it's difficult to host and especially so in a shared hosting environment. Without Elastic Search, there's not even a simple text search available for project/task/comment description.

There's a couple glitches that pop up from time to time but customer support has been responsive about them and some of our suggestions have been included as feature requests.

Pros

ActiveCollab is very easy to use. With just a few clicks, you can have a new project created right away. Time tracking, invoicing, payment processing and many other features add an already large depth of features.

Cons

Support is quite bad, at least for the self-hosted release of the application. There is no ticketing support system, and instead you have to chat with staff through the activecollab.com site to be able to get issues logged. You never get professional assistance through chat. They copy and paste your chat into their internal support system. You're then at their mercy to reply back via email. If and when they do write you back to your email address, be prepared for long followups to your replies.

When features are broken in ActiveCollab, if a fix is not on their roadmap to get the problem resolved, it will take a long time, if ever, to get the problem fixed.

Elastic Search is not a great feature for self-hosted AC builds. However, search has always been horrible with AC since it's early days.

Pros

While I will say I don't like much about this software, the budget and description location/transparency works well for the task workflow. It is fairly easy to include all necessary information in an individual task, but detail tracking and dependencies are where this ease of use falls off.

Cons

The relationship between tasks and subtasks is a pain point and lacks clarity/definition. Sometimes there would be dropoff when trying to upload attachments, and they would not actually post to the task. ActiveCollab doesn't have a great reporting structure (compared to Jira) for our specific needs, and that ended up being a hindrance to workflow. For as complicated as the reporting section looked, I felt it was lacking. While it isn't a functionality issue, I also dislike the visual design of the software - it feels antiquated and can be draining for such a frequently used tool. Time logging was difficult compared to the software we moved to later.

Pros

Very smooth operation in a team. It really helps to share information and make quick and concerted decisions.

Cons

The invoicing module is far too limited. Integration into QBO or other is not really a factor to be taken into account.

Alternatives Considered

Pros

I can easily track time on each project. It also generates reports for time and budget. It's easy to see where we are on budget or if we're over budget. The tasks are all tracked and I can see who worked on which task. We have a 'status' of each project so we can see where it is in our process. Even after a project is completed, all the information is in there for future reference.

Cons

Some of our clients have difficulty using it or just refuse to communicate through this system. Sometimes there are so many people on the thread that it's difficult to determine who should be responding to the request.

Pros

It's been more than 10 years using ActiveCollab since the day they had this 90s looking masterpiece of project scheduling platform. Today ActiveCollab grew sooo much and we love the minimalist style, the fact that they keep integrating and updating new features and functionalities making it every next day better and better.

Cons

I've tried so many other Project planning and Teamwork platforms but this one is the best I've ever seen for what we need - combining teamwork, with project planing, milestones progress, resource scheduling and time tracking.

Pros

Creating tasks is easy. I can create subtasks, assign executors and deadlines.

Cons

I would like it if the subtasks also had a deadline.

Pros

This tool is intuitive to use and had a pretty easy ramp-up period. Projects can be organized easily and tasks are easy to create and assign out. The comment function works well for tracking task updates and notes.

Cons

Does not have a task workflow built into it, and is not great if you have more advanced project tracking needs. The time tracking also needs improvement.

Pros

The ability to view information a variety of ways enables each project to be completed according to need.
The flexibility of reports
The fantastic customer service you can tell they put the customer first and genuinley care about you getting the most from the software
The best thing about ActiveCollab however, is the ability to handle general admin tasks along side projects, something very few project managers allow for

Cons

The UI the software really needs a little colour, I know this is a little thing but I also know it is important to some people.
Although the android app works well, I have a personal preference for seeing my task lists on a homescreen widget not having to access through an icon

Pros

MOST: The desktop version. Structurally and organizationally sound. Streamlines workflow and allows multiple leads to see the workload and run reports on their various departments. Really helps with tracking estimated time for the individual and their part in the project. Communication is up and the stress of the communication is way way down. Creatives have more freedom and administrators and managers feel like they have the control they need. Love the Command+K shortcut we found today. We're still learning how to customize it to our team. It has made dealing with 60 national brands much easier and has put an end to the grade school feeling of walking up to the gigantic whiteboard to move color blocks around.

Cons

Notifications - We believe if a Project is set up and has multiple tasks that run linearly, we should be able to connect them and have a notification sent to the next person when the person before them has completed their task - An automated "passing of the baton" type of thing.

Pros

Easy to use, affordable, logical, logical, really helps. The latest version has greate GUI and I have been using this tool for last 4 years. I first used it at Xivic, then took it with me to Get My Auto, Everything Online, Digital Advertier, and now my own consulting firm.

Cons

I wish it would connect to other project management tools such as basecamp, asana, etc. I work with many contractors and vendors and if I could do everything in active collab, then it would create a ticket in their platforms, it would be awsome.

Pros

Active Collab is a very easy tool to use that allows for the safe and secure sharing of materials between remote stakeholders. The tool provides a great forum for online discussions and file sharing, enabling our company to work seamlessly with clients all around the world.

Cons

Recently I have come across some bugs with the uploading of files which has been frustrating when trying to share deadline senstive files with remote clients.

Pros

I like the fact that everything is contextually linked, you can dive into a task from a calendar, report, email - anything really.
As a manager it's great for checking workload and distributing tasks efficiently. I've been using ActiveCollab for a while now in different organisations, so much so I recommended we get the self-hosted version.

Cons

The inability to email direct to other modules like conversations and files unlike Basecamp which does allow it. That and not being able to add tasks from the calendar. That would be awesome.