User Reviews Overview
About ActiveCollab
ActiveCollab is a project management solution for creative professionals. It offers cloud-based subscription plans or a self-hosting license. Projects are split into tasks and subtasks. Tasks can be filtered by the due date,...
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- Industry: Internet
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Great, but a lot of improvements can be made.
Overall, I like ActiveCollab, but I want to so bad love it more. There is a lot of potential with AC and room for improvement, and I really hope they listen to people's suggestions and needs! Either way, I do highly recommend ActiveCollab, especially if you're a web designer like me who manages hundreds of sites.
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.
- Industry: Information Technology & Services
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Simple and extensive
It was very good to us during 6 years.
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
Reasons for Choosing ActiveCollab
Jira was so complicated and hard do mantain. I'm talking about 2009Reasons for Switching to ActiveCollab
Price and simples maintenance- Industry: Marketing & Advertising
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Good choice for a basic project management tool but lacking when compared to Basecamp
ActivaCollab is still at the initial stage in terms of features even though they have been in the market for a couple of years. It serves our initial purpose of tasking team mates and tracking task conversation and progress but not more than that. Based on that, our usage is limited to basic tasking and we are considering and exploring migrating to a different system.
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.
Response from Active Collab
Appreciate the detailed feedback shared! We would recommend you to reach to our support teams to schedule a Calendly meet as we might have some workaround options to share with you that might help organising your work.
Top ActiveCollab Alternatives
- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Flexible, easy to use system
We have been using AC for five years to manage projects in an in-house marketing and communications team. Overall, we've been able to adapt the system to our needs. AC makes it easy to stay out of email for day-to-day tasks like assigning work, reviewing work, checking on project status, etc.
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".
- Industry: Graphic Design
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Comprehensive Project management
Despite the above mentioned short comings (search functionality and date entry on estimates), overall Active Collab is a great asset to our team and our companie's ability to track all projects and billings in one place. We find it indispensable.
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.
Reasons for Switching to ActiveCollab
Cost was major consideration, but it also provides all features we needed.- Industry: Information Technology & Services
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 1-5 months
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Review Source
Best Project and task management software for SMEs
Simple UI, even a stupid person may understand after simple guidance
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
ProofHubReasons for Switching to ActiveCollab
Selfhosted options not available in Proofhub, Data security and privacy is a big concern for us. Design of Activ Collab is much more simple.- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Great Project Management Software
It organizes my life every day.
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.
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
A sleek yet powerful project management software way above its competition
It helps me organize a great number of projects as one-man business without losing more time than necessary.
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.
- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 10,000+ Employees
- Used Daily for 1+ year
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Review Source
A Fantazgreat and Exceptional Project and Work Management Platform.
It is very useful as it allows me to communicate and collaborate with my team on work schedules.
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.
- Industry: Railroad Manufacture
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
ActiveCollab is Basecamp, but better and cheaper
Overall, this is a major tool for the day-to-day operation of my business. Support is at least average, functionality is fairly complete and mature, and it is a pleasure to use.
Pros
I started using ActiveCollab back when it was open source and contributed to the code. Since then it has matured a lot. It is a great over-all solution for project management, communication, time management, and even invoicing. The interface is well-thought-out and has few glitches.
Cons
The reporting functionality leaves a bit to be desired, but gets the job done. As others have mentioned, the search functionality is not great and setting up Elastic Search for the self-hosted version is a bit involved. Also, the mobile apps are not great.
- Industry: Marketing & Advertising
- Company size: Self Employed
- Used Daily for 6-12 months
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Review Source
Great Option for my Creative Business
ActiveCollab keeps us organized and on task. It's a great snapshot of our client work at any given point. We have many moving parts, and ActiveCollab allows us to really stay on target with our goals and on task with our clients.
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.
- Industry: Information Technology & Services
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Collaboration on the project and task level - ActiveCollab is the middle-of-the-road solution
Using ActiveCollab daily for over two years felt easy, but also like a chore sometimes. Doing things manually falls within one's job, and it offers good control over how things happen, but sometimes you just want to automate things exactly to your liking. The former describes using ActiveCollab better, but as mentioned, that is sometimes a good thing.
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.
- Used Daily for 1+ year
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Review Source
Surprisingly helpful and pleasantly quick to implement. Continuing to find more useful...
Increased project efficiency, improved client satisfaction through better scheduling, better communication, and giving clients open access to interact with us on project tasks (while easily limiting them from internal discussions they don't need to see).
Saved time on recording project data and improvements/lessons learned, saved time invoicing thanks to time tracking and integration with accounting software, and have a centralised document store for internal use (apart from client projects) without needing to manage a duplicate access permission system.
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.
- Company size: 501–1,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Great Product, Bad Support
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.
- Industry: Marketing & Advertising
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 6-12 months
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Review Source
Convoluted structure is a hindrance to workflow
We ended up transferring from ActiveCollab to Teamwork fairly quickly because it caused some business problems for us. Issues were missed (especially subtasks), and we lacked the reporting structure we needed to keep a good grasp of resourcing and individual task progress. The time logging structure was also a pain point compared to alternate software options we've since pursued.
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.
- Industry: Law Practice
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Fantastic software for project management
We have loved activeCollab since version 4. It is a valuable software, which really helps its users on a daily basis and is very flexible in its operation. We greatly appreciate his progress and are reassured about his future. Keep up the good work!
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
Basecamp- Industry: Computer Software
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
ActiveCollab Review
It's beneficial to have all the information, (i.e.tasks, back-log, etc) stored for future quotes. It helps the retrospect meetings to be able to see what took longer than anticipated or was not completed.
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.
- Industry: Marketing & Advertising
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
We wake up with ActiveCollab and close the work day with it :)
10000% happy camper
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.
- Industry: Marketing & Advertising
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Helpful tool for organizing
I use this tool daily to assign tasks to the team. It is a good helper and in general I am satisfied with how the application works.
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.
- Industry: Computer Software
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
OK for task & project management
It is an average tool that will get the job done for anyone that needs basic task and project management.
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.
Response from Active Collab
Appreciate you sharing the feedback with us! We would love to hear more about the suggestions for improving the time tracking and workflow on tasks, you can reach out to our support at [email protected] or share your suggestions on this page: https://activecollab.com/help/suggest-a-feature
- Industry: Nonprofit Organization Management
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used Daily for 1+ year
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Review Source
The flexibility of ActiveCollab makes this an all round fantastic business tool
ActiveCollab has increased my productivity, my organisation and decreased the sheer volume of clutter that used to be on my desk
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
- Industry: Marketing & Advertising
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Great features when they work.
ActiveCollab has a lot of potential because it offers great features, but it's very buggy and doesn't work properly quite often.
Pros
ActiveCollab has a ton of great features - tasks, messages, time tracking, etc. I like that you can have both internal and external teams and choose what the clients can and cannot see.
Cons
Different features break all the time. Time that you've tracked will be deleted with no warning, tasks will show up with the wrong due date, you won't be able to upload files to the message, etc. Customer Service is quick to *respond* to a support ticket but actually getting the problems fixed usually takes days or weeks.
- Industry: Marketing & Advertising
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Flexible project management tool with many features
Pros
The project management tool has many advantages and features. We've been using it for many years. A big advantage is the link with Slack and Google Drive. This gives us an optimal overview of every customer. In addition, our customers can create tasks independently and communicate with our entire team. Since the new version it is clearer and more intuitive. We can only recommend it and will continue to use it intensively.
Cons
The app itself is expandable and also the software for time recording is relatively unreliable.
The recurring tasks should include more options.
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
One of the best project management software
Pros
+ faaast
+ intuitive, easy to use
+ almost everything that small company need in one place (projects, tasks, time tracking, expenses)
+ invoicing
+ 3rd party integrations (stripe, xero) <3
+ did I mention that is fast ;)
Highly recommended, not only for software development.
It's highly configurable and as most of the things that you have to work on is "like a project" - you can use it everywhere.
Cons
After over two years, I see that lack of simple crm is probably only missing feature. You can use internal notes, but I don't feel it now.
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Packs a lot for the pricing. We are super satisfied with the product and excellent customer...
Pros
The software is easy to use and easy for others to figure out. We have a campus like environment and are able to work on projects for various departments without having to have so many meetings. All skill levels have been able to easily figure out how to utilize the product. It's been a real life-saver for our department.
Cons
I would love to see the completed projects being able to sort and view better. It gets hard to go back to a job and see what we've done before or re-open. Also, copying the entire job itself would be great.