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.

This system is the very bedrock of client collaboration in our company. We simply need it.

Pros

Diversity of features. It covers calendar integration, task management, expense and time tracking, client estimates and invoicing is integrated, discussions with clients are threaded and neatly organized at all times, file uploads that act as a mini-Dropbox for yourself and your clients, notes, facebook-style timeline of the activity within each project... And I haven't even touched on the level of customization, multitude of extensions (Zapier included), scalability (with self-hosted options!), and the iOS app that works with either cloud or self-hosted versions (our clients LOVE the app).

We love ActiveCollab because of it's diversity. That's the one reason that in our opinion, it's simply irreplaceable. Having to replace it would be like adding tripling the administrative work on our plates. It replaces the need for multiple separate services that do each of those things separately. Who wants that when you can have one single login to one single system that can rule them all? ;)

SIMPLY. IRREPLACEABLE.

Cons

The iOS and Android apps needs some work. They don't do as much as the desktop version, so they feel limited. They don't really take advantage of features like gestures or multi-touch, which every smartphone has.

We'd really like to be able to upload more than just pictures from the camera roll; some kind of file picking, or option to upload to ActiveCollab from another app (share sheets) would go a LONG way. Optimization for tablet-size screens would be sweet too, along with the simple ability to make text in the app bigger or smaller, so it's easier to read.

The calendar allows for syndication via subscription links, but stopping there feels premature. It would help a lot to be able to integrate to Calendar apps (via CalDAV), since the calendar isn't available on the mobile app either. It would be really nice so that we can add or edit events from our native calendar apps of choice.

Support is fantastic, and extremely knowledgeable. We run a self-hosted installation, which is more economical for us, but we don't have pros running our server environment. That task falls on us, teaching ourselves as we go, and it feels like support will drop clues about what an issue is, instead of going the distance and going in themselves to help fix the problem. Granted, that's more of a problem with /us/, since we're business administrators and not experts in server management. But support will not abandon you. They've always got your back, no matter how tough the problem!

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.

A/C has been a game changer for us. We are using it a bit outside of its intended scope but it works

Highly focussed team members. Remote work flexibility. Collaboration. Time Management. Quality Management. Data Management. Targeted and SMART Goals. Internal Motivation. Trust.

Pros

The platform makes communicating with team members a breeze. We have a multitude of projects and tasks within the three departments - A/C helps keep everything organized and on track. LOVE the landing screen "My Work". The calendar view is awesome for our morning meetings. It is great that we can filter by person or project on the calendar. It's a robust feature that other platforms did not have. Really enjoy the notifications when I mention a team member. The robust area within a project including Tasks List, Discussions, Files, notes, Time, Expenses, Activity is great. Not only does it encourage collaboration it fully supports remote work. On the task list, we can drag/drop tasks. Filter by assignees, tasks lists, due dates, or completed tasks. You can also review the overall project progress. A/C has some great reporting features. I like how we can star projects. Simple features like that are NOT overlooked in the A/C platform.

Time tracking, invoicing, and estimates functions look great. We haven't used them yet but we will eventually. I appreciate the pricing. The customer support is quick and responsive. Our team has embraced the platform and I feel we will continue to use it for years to come. I would recommend the platform to others.

Cons

Disclaimer: We use it a bit outside of its intended purpose. Our group is Marketing, Web Development, and IT. Although there are a ton of project-based objectives within the departments there are some marketing functions that are not project based. This is the biggest thing I've got it's not a deal breaker. Maybe extend the software to include flexible user accounts or setup different types of project areas. That isn't necessarily project oriented.

Minors:
Recurring tasks are a bit of a pain to setup the first time
Multiple different calendars confuse people sometimes and they end up creating a calendar for themselves.
Maybe we could setup tasks requiring a sign-off? Maybe this is already a feature and I don't know how to do it yet?

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.

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.

Constantly Improving and Helpful Support

The team is immediate to help, and pleasant to deal with. Also, truly they release updates like monthly, the product is always getting better which is AWESOME.

Pros

This software includes all of the features of the leading brands and more in most cases. I compared ActiveCollab to every system out there and tried demos and trials of each as well. It combines robust options with ease of use, and is more affordable than most other options. We can use kan-ban, calendar or list views, and can organize almost everything to our own preference. They also are continuously upgrading the system and adding features. I also like that they have a roadmap on their website so you know what they will be working on next. Top quality product and service.

Cons

We used to be able to change the colors and design options but now we are limited to one set of colors and 4 or 5 different background images. I know it is probably only the designers who care, but as a design company, it drives me crazy. It's not ugly, per se, and it is definitely not hard to read or use, but it is not how I would like it to look, so, it's my least favorite thing about it.

Surprisingly helpful and pleasantly quick to implement. Continuing to find more useful features!

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.

Manage and accompany to innovate

Control of project operations

Pros

In such a complex world, where the time and control factor in operations makes a difference, it is vital to have a platform that allows access to many tasks that, otherwise, would involve and coordinate many people, this type of tools allows us to save costs and reduce involuntary human errors, in everything that refers to the necessary coordination between all the members of the project. The calendar allows to have all the tasks, meetings, and filter the tasks by projects, and if that were not enough, all this can be complemented with the participation of the members remotely, so that it is possible to follow the general state of the proyects. In case of any problem, the support team is attentive to clarify your doubts, there are still elements that we have not had the opportunity to explore, but that, surely, according to our needs we will be using them to solve the growing demands of our organizations.

Cons

As with many platforms, the versions that are used in tables or smart devices show some limitations, in relation to those that are handled by PC, it would be very important to preserve and maximize the benefits when you have other devices and not limit the functions that, After all, knowledge or traditional devices for solving problems are not always available.