Act! Pricing

There is absolutely nothing I like about this software.

Zero functionality. It can't pull any reports that are meaningful. When I think I can pull a report that is meaningful, I realize the data isn't even correct. It has almost no dynamic features; for instance, it can't update data by pulling it from another source; it has to be manually changed, which leads to errors. Also, Act! web premium only works if you have a really high quality internet connection. For example, we have 100MBPS internet; however, the speed is very inconsistent, which causes the Premium web version of Act! to constantly crash every time the internet slows down, while any normal web app would continue to load, or try to load, or just slow down. But Act! doesn't have that functionality; it just crashes, becomes unresponsive, and doesn't save any of the data you just input. When you restart your browser, it makes you sign in again. Also, almost no functionality is available on the web app; you can't delete contacts on the web version; you cannot import anything into the web version, and you can't manipulate any data. You can only input completely new data. It's literally awful. Contacts don't link well with groups or 'companies.' If you have seven people working for the same company and that company moves offices. If you change the address to that company, you have to individually change those seven people who work there. But the worst feature is the importing tool. You can't import in any 'advanced' way at all unless you pay for an importer tool, which you can't be sure will work for you. When talking with our third party Act! customer service person, I asked if I could try the import tool to make sure it did what I want before I bought it, or if I could have him try it for me to make sure it worked, and he said "No. There is no way to provide that service." When asking a simple question like, "So your input tool didn't find the duplicate contacts and just imported 700 duplicates. Is there a way to delete the duplicates all at once? Because all I see is an option to delete the duplicates one by one?" they told me there was no way to do it but that they would charge me to have them delete them for me. And I was quoted at an over 50 hour project quote, for something that took me one minute to do. So I just restored my backup file and started over. Also, I purchased a duplicate removal tool that was developed by a third party software company, and I thought it would work great, but it turns out that half of the contacts in the system had been uploaded with their full name as one fiedl and the other half with their first middle and last name as different fields. There is now way to differentiate this in ACT because it displays them the same way, so it merged all of the John's into one John contact. So again, I had to restore to a backed up database. The Swiftpage integration is awful. The only way I am able to use Swiftpage to any success is to export every single email, name, and address in Act! into an Excel spreadsheet, remove any duplicates, sort by region or the way I want to set up groups to email blast in Swiftpage, go to the actual swiftpage6.com website and upload the spreadsheets into Swiftpage manually. The Swiftpage email marketing HTML editor is also pretty bad. You can write beautiful HTML to display a great email, but Swiftpage mutilates the code in ways no one could ever understand. I am a professional coder - javascript, html, css - and it takes me hours, sometimes days, to design a marketing email that displays correctly in any sort of email client. In fact, it doesn't even ever look great when it's done, even after all the hard work. I would highly recommend any other email marketing company other than Swiftpage. I was on hold with a Swiftpage rep once for over three hours to find out why my email blast which was supposed to be sent by 10AM was still in the queue by 7pm. It actually didn't go out till almost midnight, and we had a 3% open rate, when we normally have a 15% open rate with other email marketing software. Please, please please do not buy this. With a database as important and large as mine, it's going to be extremely hard to switch to another software without major delays in service. The company has used it since 2002, and there is a lot of important data that needs to be imported into to a new system. It's going to cost a lot of money to do, and we will do it, but I just pray and beg that no one else ever has to be in the same situation that I am in if they don't have to be.

Perfect fit for mid-sized businesses. Great price point. Only truly hybrid solution that allows you to use Act both on your desktop and in a hosted environment.

No cons were added to this review

I like that they created a cloud version for people on the go.

The over design or look of the desktop version is old and kind of dated. It can be updated if I choose to. But that will take time. A larger selection of templates would be excellent.

Thank you for your feedback, Jake. We are excited about our upcoming releases and updates with new UX/UI improvements we know you'll love. We really appreciate you taking the time to let us know how Act! is working for you.

it was inexpensive. but you get what you pay for.

No tech support. ACT is always putting out a new version. each new version trips off problems and requires new integrations and updates that they do not tell you about and cause integration issues with all of your other software expecially microsof.

ACT has been around for a long time, as has Swiftpage who aquired them. The software itself has continued to evolve and improve, but hasn't lost the overall feel it has always had. What I like the most is that they have cloud AND desktop platforms for those that might not need cloud services. They also have a large number of plans available, are affordable, and there are a good number of independent technicians out there that can help you with your data, and design third party add-ons too.

The recent change that does not let owners of much older versions of the software activate what they already own has me concerned.

Act is a great program when it works. I have been using it for well over 25 years.

After purchasing ACT from Costco 25 or more years ago the software ownership has changed multiple times. Each time the customer service has gotten worse and the program updates have gotten more expensive. Subcontractor customer service people have been really poor and unable to solve problems when contacted and in some cases made the problems worse. For example having to restart the program 11 times in one eight hour period of time because it crashed.... among many other problems

James, we appreciate you taking the time to leave this review and are sorry to hear that you had issues with your older version of Act!. We are here to help and are standing by to provide assistance, should you need it, with your upgrade. Please don't hesitate to contact us at 866-873-2006 if you experience any issues so we can ensure you're up and running smoothly.

I like that I can still use a PC-based product that I control and provide security necessary to product our client and internal information. I like that my customized version fits my basic needs to manage contacts and periodically send email messages and letters.

I need ACT support to fix problems with email merge too often. The time required to send routine communications annually has increased at least 10 fold due to time needed to fix problems. Most of the problems seem to be keeping up with Microsoft.

We value our long-time users and love hearing from you! We are happy to hear that you like the benefits of Act! Premium Desktop, but are sorry to learn that you are experiencing issues with the email merge. We want to help as best we can. Please visit https://www.act.com/resources/contact/ or give us a call at 866-873-2006 to see how we can provide some assistance.

Having the ability to scale requirements has helped the business grow without huge outlay. Has the capability to use high end hardware and now has a Cloud based solution so removing the need for costly onsite equipment if required

As usual costs, the license model has change from perpetual to the per user per year, the Cloud based variant is expensive but comparable to others. The need for a 3rd party module to fully use the software for our needs has increased usability but at a cost, would of been nice to include in subscription

Hi David, thank you for taking the time to share how your business is using Act! -especially the cloud-based solution. We love hearing from our customers, so thanks again for sharing!

The Act! for Advisors software has been modified to meet the requirements of a financial advisor which includes being able to input information regarding insurance contracts. The new Marketing Automation is an great way to send out Newsletters, etc.

They have lots of online resources/video's to learn the Marketing Automation. You can also speak to customer service but they recently cut their remote access where you can have customer service work on your computer to help answer/show you how to do things with the marketing automation.

There are multiple benefits to using Act as reported by our users. The Act database allows for a large quantity of information to be stored, meaning we were able to decommission several other systems holding various bits of customer data by merging it into Act. We have found pricing to be competitive on a per-licence basis which suits us as a small team working within a non-profit organisation. Act makes it easy for users to update already stored customer/company information, so we always have up-to-date data for contacting, addresses, etc. Communications to customers/companies are tracked in Act so other members of the department can see who has communicated with who, and what the correspondence was – this is useful if a member of staff is off and another needs to pick up some workload. On the technical side, updates and hotfixes are provided regularly and it is relatively easy to install these during periods of downtime. The UI is easy to navigate, with clearly labelled menus and an in-built help area.

We have found it somewhat difficult to integrate Act with our current systems and have resorted to manually exporting CSVs with information to import into our systems. This is a legacy process and may have been improved upon however, we haven’t looked into this. We have also had to purchase add-ins to enable certain features such as opportunities tracking, but Act plays well with these add-ons, so this is not too much of an issue for us. From an admin’s perspective, it has proven difficult to set up an automatic installation that works with our MDT deployments, but we roll out images with Act on rarely, so this isn’t too much of an issue. Perhaps in future, updates could be made to the UI to make it look a little less dated and bring it up to clean, modern, standards.

Started using Act about 25 years ago. Have added contacts since and used most of the features. Over time the use of certain features such as mass mailings to customer lists have faded, and now occasionally by e-mail. Over time I have come to value how I can locate someone that was a customer years ago, and have a complete record of a transaction, conversation or specific subject we were involved in. You have to learn to use for nearly every phone conversation or piece of correspondence. If you do, you will always be able to revert back to a contact, and who said what when. What correspondence was involved etc. To say nothing about scheduling appointments, and being reminded of birthdays and other important events. Act is the backbone of my business and personal contact information. Invaluable and used every day. I have used over may revisions and Company changes. Sometimes the customer service is better than others. Presently the Customer Service is Excellent. If you are a first time user or considering starting to use it I would recommend you take a course on using it as many of the features are not apparent unless someone shows them to you. A great tool to keep track of what everyone on your team is doing and as they move on a record of what they did and who was involved. A great tool that I rely on daily. Happy to spread the word.

Many features that I never use, but see how others would. Don't like having to use MS Outlook for e-mail. Would like to access completely by phone, but my database is too big.

At this moment, I am struggling to think of anything positive to say about my Act! experience. Both my boss and I have had problems since we bought it. I have lost entire days' worth of sales time on the phone with their tech support trying to fix issue after issue. And to make matters worse, they keep telling me to give them more money if I want better, faster, more competent customer service. All I want is for the program to work correctly and do what they promised it would do!

This program is seriously glitchy, and the customer service experience has been bad. I have spent countless hours on the phone trying to get issues resolved. And to add insult to injury, they keep telling me that if I want better customer service and faster, more professional support I need to give them more money. If you believe in your product then, stand behind it and fix it. My boss and I have spent enough time (and money via lost sales revenue) dealing with Act's technical issues already, so I wish they would stop telling me we need to shell out more. After two days on the phone with them, having been escalated to their Level 3 support guy, my Outlook started to have problems immediately after hanging up with him. I have never had a single problem with Outlook since I started using it. Over the last two days, three different tiers of tech support have remotely accessed my laptop, gone into my Outlook as administrators, and messed around with it. Though they managed to fix the mail merge issues I was initially having with Act!, they clearly messed up my Outlook along the way. Now they claim it is a complete coincidence that Outlook started sending me error messages the moment I hung up with their top tier tech guy. They keep telling me the problems are not related, it is solely the problem of Outlook, they are not experts in Outlook, and I should call Outlook's tech support for help. Clearly, it is not a coincidence or unrelated. And clearly, they are confident enough in their Outlook expertise to go into my program and mess with it. And as tech support for a software program that works with Outlook, they should be trained and qualified to work with Outlook in the first place. I have asked repeatedly to have their top tier guy call me back. He knows what he did, so he should be able to track down his mistake and fix it. But they keep saying they can't do that without me shelling out more money. As if all of that wasn't enough, during my last conversation with their support, I had to force the rep to stop trying to get me off the phone and to fix the new problem that had cropped up with Act! just today: the loss of my email history. It took her close to an hour, and she finally discovered that my email history was now gone from Act! because one of the three techs who has remotely accessed my computer over the last two days accidentally replaced my database with a demo database. And even in light of that, she still tried to say that the issue with Outlook had nothing to do with anything their tech staff did. She continued to insist it was all just a coincidence. I told her I felt the time had come to talk to a supervisor, and I asked her to put one on the phone. After placing me on hold once again, she finally came back and said a supervisor was unavailable, and one would have to call me back in 10 minutes. It ended up taking close to an hour to hear from him. He did finally fix the Outlook problem, but when I asked him what I should do if the error messages come back in an hour or two, he said I had to start all over again from the bottom. The whole routine: wait on hold, start with a low-level tech, slowly work up the ladder, all of it. That or pay the fee. The next day, the Outlook error message came back! And I had to lose that day as well trying to get them to fix it. I spoke to my boss, and he said the same thing happened to him a while back, where they tried to blame Outlook. So my boss said he started a conference call with the Act! tech guy and the Microsoft tech guy on the phone at the same time, and lo and behold, the problem turned out to be with ACT, not Microsoft.

I used ACT! for nearly 20 years in my previous role and when I went freelance I really missed it but thought it was not affordable. I am now so busy I really needed to get organised and I was pleasantly surprised at how affordable it actually is. It only really needs to save me one hour a month to give me more than return on investment - and it did that on day 1!

I made a silly error uploading and couldn't figure out how to undo so I shall be calling on the onboarding team for help.

We are so happy to have you back, Claire, and thrilled to hear that Act! is already saving you time and helping you organize your business. We wish you the very best with your freelance business! How exciting!

The CRM is easy to use and one can learn how to use it very quickly. Act keeps up with the changing times and provides the tools that a sales person needs to optimize his/her performance. Introduction of Marketing Automation was an added bonus that provides a sales person with more power to find leads

The pricing has risen over the years to the point that I feel it is now on the high end of the spectrum. I probably utilize only 20 - 25% of all the ACT features; but I'm paying for a software program that can accomplish more than what I need. I started with the original ACT when it first came out (forgot how many years ago) and it had a very attractive price at that time.

Thank you, Ken, for your feedback. We are happy to hear that Act! is helping your business and that the Calendar and Notes features are especially useful to you. We are excited that you have begun using Act! Marketing Automation and wanted to share these resources to help you leverage its powerful capabilities to create landing pages, capture leads, and nurture prospects and customers. Please check them out at https://www.act.com/resources/act-marketing-automation/.

This product allows you to integrate the basic and most complicated processes within your business. I love the email link feature, any time I send an email to a client (who has their email in their account profile), the system automatically saves that email in the client profile. You don't have to search for it in your inbox, or click an extra button to push the details over to the profile, it all happens automatically. The icing on the cake, is now that it is in the client profile, other members of my team can see what emails I have communicated to client, and when they were sent. It helps to keep my team all on the same page. This is by far the best Client Database system I have ever used. AMAZING!

The biggest downside to ACT is there is not a built in funnel email system. You have to select the group or type of clients that you want to email, export that to another database and then send the communications from there. The system will still tag your emails as long as they are sent from your domain, but having to export the list an use an additional software or service to send the mass email notifications is a little frustrating. If they can fix this option, it would make my life a lot easier.

I understand the interface because I have used ACT daily for over 30 years.

ACT does almost everything poorly. It does not sync with multi-user unless you call support. You cannot move your data out of ACT onto a competitive product. They keep raising the price of support. I have tried all three different mass email programs they have offered over the years, but none of the mass email systems worked. The email system required support from ACT to make them work, and still a major problem. I have used ACT for over 30 years, have 10K contacts, and I cannot leave ACT. If you have not bought ACT, do not. If you are going to work on this everyday, pay the money and go with SalesForce.

Kris, Thank you for letting us know about your issues with marketing automation- this is not the experience we strive to provide our customers. We hope you'll give our Support team another try. Please reach out to https://www.act.com/resources/contact/ or call 866-873-2006 so we can get a few more details, and provide some possible solutions.

I was probably one of the first purchasers of Act. It is a great program that needs a company to put some serious thought behind making it work better. After shopping several other CRM software's I still think it is above the rest in both user friendly and functionality. You price for the product is more than fair (in fact, I think low) but the software runs like it is somebody's part time job.

Customer service is the worst. The guys in India are great and I have nothing bad to say about them but is there some reason I need to sit on a phone 45 minutes waiting to speak to the representative? Again I think Act could be the CRM leader but I don't see much improvement over the past few years. The principles of this company have sat back and let opportunities walk by not focusing on the customers needs. With all the apps and technologies available Act should have more to offer.When I purchase a product I do not expect to have to spend hours chasing down my answers through videos.

Act has a lot of the features more expensive CRM’s offer without sacrificing usability or features. It is feature rich and simple to use.

Act hasn’t had many changes in the last two years. I would like to see more growth for this product.

We love hearing from customers Alissa! Thanks for letting us know why you selected Act! and how it is helping your business. We look forward to more years delivering value to you!

Act is vert easy to use and customize to the users needs. Very little training is required for new users

None it is a very good CRM for marketing purposes

Thank you, Mark! We love hearing from our customers and enjoy learning how Act! is helping their businesses around the world. And, we'd love to learn more about your business if you'd like to share your Act! Success Story. It's easy - just paste this link into your browser to get started. https://www.act.com/success-stories/ Thanks again for sharing and we wish continued success to you!

Ease of use, flexibility of design, reports, ability to track relationships across multiple contacts, and mass mailing abilities

Seems a little unstable at times for some features, and tech support is a game of Russian Roulette with perhaps one person in 10 who can troubleshoot a problem and fix it. The rest seem to be untrained, seem to have no analytical skills or trouble shooting abilities, seem to be reading off knowledge base scripts, and often make or recommend changes that end up making matters even worse. The product is WONDERFUL when it works properly, which is most of the time. But lookout for 2-7 days of downtime if you hit that problem that is too much for the low level tech support people.

No pros were added to this review

No cons were added to this review

Elegant solution that works across a range of devices with possibilities for a range of integrations much more cost effective than the competition for small businesses

Not always well integrated with other platforms eg leadpages etc - needs an intermediary or requires support of an ACT consultant to implement many integrations.

The only reason I use this software is that I have used it for 25+ years, too embedded to change

The Company, the Pricing and mostly the Customer Service. How crazy is I have to pay extra to speak to someone in the US that speaks English. Appalling. The response time is poor. I requested a password change via email as it is set up to do because it would not take mine; never got the reset password email. I called the sales number thinking they would at least ANSWER the phone. He told me there was an issue with the reset email and customer service (which I pay an extra $480.00 a year for) can help... on hold too long, left a message for a call back.... waiting..... Years ago ACT was amazing, since the transitions it has become progressively worse. The Product itself is good, the sales people are nice. That is it. I do wish I had the time to research options and change, perhaps in 2021.

Initially I wanted to use the program because I had used it a decade ago and found it easy to use and customize. It has changed and I ended up having to hire a consultant for everything.

As mentioned, I have worked with ACT off and on for two decades. Their most recent "upgrade" has been filled with bugs and a lack desire to fix them. My consultants have been inundated with complaints they have passed on to ACT with no response. Plus, they lack basic integration with excel or outlook. What!? Contact management programs are a competitive software. ACT is both more expensive than most, not user friendly and lacking in function and basic customer service.