ActiveCollab Software

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.

Active Collab for In-house Marketing

It's been a lifesaver in keeping our department running efficiently and everyone on campus can access us without leaving their building.

Pros

Ease of use, very similar in concept to Facebook. The price is super reasonable. I know there are more elaborate platforms out there, but for our small, in-house marketing and communications team it works really well. They keep improving it based on customer feedback.

Cons

Sometimes there are issues uploading files, you can really only upload one at a time.

Jet another PM tool

Pros

Well written PM software. Everything I tried was simple and fast: employes, contacts, tasks, projects. I like dashboards and calendars. But most important was use Gantt - amazing how was it simple! I can adjust tasks here - good for me! Kanban with todo - great! I recommend it to all PM's!

Cons

User interface is created as wireframe white design - maybe there are users who like it, but after several hours with look on it my eyes refused to cooperate :)

Colourful and easy

Pros

Adding new tasks, editing them and setting alerts are easy things to do. If you explore more the app, you will find other useful features.

Cons

Sometimes it's difficult to find old (accomplished) tasks.

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.

Love it!

Pros

Really simple and easy to use, you can use it anyway you want, I find that using labels to set ticket status are great.

Cons

Sometime slow servers really kill the feeling.

Decent project manager

Pros

I like having the ability to add multiple tasks and projects under one main project.

Cons

It took a little while to understand this software. Some things are hidden and require deep searching through the tool. I'm personally not the biggest fan of this software.

Project management software tool for your everyday business

We used this software tool on just a few of my projects, so my experience is limited. However I quite enjoyed working with it, but for the future I would probably prefer some alternatives in the universe of project management tools.

Pros

Time tracking was really usefull feature
Callendar, Invoice Manegement, File storage and many great features, necessary for business usage
Good integration with other tools

Cons

Can be little bit difficult tu use for novice
Not so easy to use

Perfect tool to not miss deadlines

This has been keeping my team on track!

Pros

It is an awesome tool. It has an effective way of notifying me of the tasks I need to do. It helped me set my priorities!

Cons

The only thing I bet they can improve at is having a feature that would allow users to send direct messages.

seems rigid but it has all that you really need

Helps you organize your projects, clients and teams well.

Pros

As the title says ActiveCollab seems too rigid but it has all that you really need. Very rich in features and super helpful for medium size agencies and SaaS. I enjoyed using it.

Cons

UI seems to be outdated and it somehow gives you the impression that you are having less control compared to other PM software out there but it's quite the opposite.

One of the best Work Management tools for small agencies

Their customer service team is phenomenal. Answers back immediately.

Pros

Interface is easy to use. Plus, depending on your needs and requirements, it touches a lot of them: time tracking, simplistic resource management, scheduling, task management, project conversations.

Cons

The schedule could use some love. Ideally would like to assign multiple people to tasks, as well as have tasks be dependent on one another so timing can be adjusted.

ActiveCollab is worth it for us.

It does what we need for the most part, at a reasonable price.

Pros

ActiveCollab is pretty straight forward for our needs of project management.

Cons

We like being able to create templates for projects, however, there is no ability to copy a template and adjust it to be a different template. Every template needs to be made from scratch, and there's not an easy way to even copy and paste things from other templates. A lot of our templates are similar but have variations. We've contacted support multiple times and they like our idea, but they haven't done anything about it in about two years of asking.

Excellent for managing web projects

I settled on using ActiveCollab to manage website development projects after testing numerous. On the rare occasions that I've had questions, customer support is very quick to respond.

Pros

ActiveCollab is very easy to use and helps me manage projects, project documents and project communications all in one place. Best of all it reduces emails and the issues that arise when trying to find the latest version of a document that has been emailed multiple times. It's easy to keep selected team members updated about particular tasks and they can each determine how often they want to receive updates.

Cons

I can't really think of any cons about ActiveCollab.

I have never been so organized!

Keeps me organized and helps me prioritize my to-do list!

Pros

I love this software because it allows my supervisor to add tasks to my to-do list when I am not around for her to tell me in person. It organizes everything and I can add tasks myself as well. Active Collab is always open on my computer!

Cons

The one thing I don't like is that my recurring tasks that happen every day​, excluding weekends, still shows up on the weekends and I have to go in a delete them or mark them as done.

Great collaboration tool

Overall the experience was pretty good, just that the volume of users are abit too small my team which is growing. We have about 12 members initially and the 15 members plan fitted nicely but when I had my team increased more than 15, the next plan was 30members which was too many for my team and the cost also doubled for me. Maybe can reconsider to enable users to add min of 5 users - 10max to their plans and a lower cost.

Pros

The ui/ux is simple and easy to use and the learning curve is really easy.

Cons

Unable to set timeframe on sub tasks and assign multiple people to tasks/sub tasks

Great product - needs more mobile support

Pros

Spectacular design - very nicely thought about

Cons

The mobile app does not work very well. Specifically, updating dates and priorities of existing tasks is unreliable.

Review

Pros

The accessibility, and the add-on especially the timer.

Cons

I'm having problems with the desktop​ app. It's not opening up.

User-friendly and practical

i am generally quite satisfied with the sofware and would highly recommend it to my coworkers and friends

Pros

it is pretty simple for usage enabling you to easily organize your team and have a clear insight into status of all projects.

Cons

user interface - design has been a little bit grayish. it would be nice if you could just highlight some parts with the other more vivid colour.

Could of been great

It's run's our agency and we want scheduling integrated but, it's not being supported.

Pros

New version is clean and nice, posting old data from hosted versions is simple. Almost hit's it out of the park fopr use in any ad agency.

Cons

It's no longer supported. We looked to invest a bit of $ to move from a self-hosted to their cloud for AC3 and the support response was crickets. They have a scheduler but, it is not for hourly limits, jsut due dates. If you are trying to schedule against hour constraints you'll need to look elsewhere.

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.