ActiveCollab Reviews

Great dashboard, different types of reports, milestone preview, calendars, time tracking tool are just a few of the features that make this software irreplaceable tool when it comes to project management.

Lack of integration with Git or another version of control system.

We tried many alternatives, but the simplicity and the ability to self host won us over. Task lists, Kanban Style boards, Time tracking, Notifying and Assigning all work well.

I feel the file sharing (or at least referencing a file you have already uploaded) could be simpler. Apart from that we're really happy.

It is beautifully designed so initially it seemed easier to use and navigate. It had a client portal and I could track my jobs and invoice/do estimates all from one place.

It has hidden fees. Everywhere it advertises itself as only 7.50 a month. - But using the MAIN FEATURES OF WHY I WANTED THIS APP is extra, like invoicing, time tracking and using the client portal. This was not made clear initially. The client service is terrible. I would ask questions but there response was really terrible english language - not what I would expect from an international app that everyone should be able to understand. Especially a client service person called Darla. Terrible and rude manners and unhelpful.!

We appreciate your honest feedback, and we are sorry to hear you had this experience with ActiveCollab. As for the pricing, additional features such as Invoicing, Time Estimates, Workload, Availability, etc., are listed in the GePaid bundle section, which is charged additionally and is not a part of the basic paid plan. You can check out our pricing on the official site here: https://activecollab.com/pricing

Time tracking. It's wonderful. We are able to track our time down to the specific task within projects. We can also label each project by client and bill clients based on the time we've specifically tracked for each task and project. All of this tracking also allows for reporting to our clients - down to being able to let them know how much time was spent on each task. Customer service is also amazing. One of our team members has made suggestions for new/alternate features/revised functionality, and things were updated fairly quickly! So good. Thank you!

I'd love to see the organization of the projects in a different way. Organized instead by client on the main page. The main page is otherwise less organized than I need it to be.

Great tool for managing complex projects with multiple stakeholders Pretty robust feature set Simple to access and easy to invite collaborators in & out of my company

Upgrades have been a bit buggy and while the team are responsive, they don't always believe that they've broken something

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.

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

I really appreciate the simplicity and the power behind the features it delivers. On the surface, it offers just a list of tasks me and my team manage throughout our design and development process, but under the hood it offers task dependencies, estimates, time tracking and many other cool things that make it deceptively powerful.

Probably the speed of the app on some larger projects. It's lightning fast for everything small to medium, but on larger projects it can take a while to load everything.

ActiveCollab is quite feature rich. We were able to consolidate multiple pieces of software into one.

Some of the menus are hard to find and I'd really like to see a comprehensive calendar approach to tasks, vs just per project.

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.

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

I love that you can create projects and upload content & give explanation of the project as well as tag different contacts for responsibilities. This helps us keep so organized!

I have no issues with anything using Active Collab.

My team and I do really like the simplicity of the software. It helps us focus on doing the tasks rather than figuring out how to use the software correctly to assign tasks.

- Unmaintained mobile apps, both iOS and Android versions. - No function to duplicate tasks list. - Zipping attachments from a task to be downloaded, takes forever. - Bulk actions on tasks seem to need an improvement on UX so that it's more user friendly to use. Currently, we need to scroll up and down to choose the actions. - On the Reports page for Tasks, every time we choose a Custom Report, the columns and "sort by" are always reset. - As admin, I can't see the full list of other user's Activities. I can only see the last 5 or something. I might be able to give some more feedback. Do let me know if it helps improve your product :)

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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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....

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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?

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.

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.

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

- 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".

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....

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Active collab is intuitive, easy to use and easy to navigate. There are MANY other project management tools out there and I've used a number of them. Active Collab is the best in my opinion in light of the integrations and ease of use.

There are a number of more in-depth features that are sometimes hard to find in ActiveCollab. Nothing a simple support ticket can't solve though.

Active Collab is efficient, friendly, and structured just right for our team's work. The reporting, activity stream, project, task, and subtask organization are all well-calibrated for daily use to organize work and to report on projects.

I wish AC integrated with Jira. Our development unit uses Jira, but the complexity means it's a no-go for our unit's daily use. The lack of integration means that sometimes members of our team have to ping-pong between both products, or fail to understand what's happening there. A preview of a Jira ticket in AC would be totally sufficient.

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...

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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.

There are actually two PM tools that I absolutely love - Nifty and Ora, however, as much as I love them, they're a bit too "technical" for the layman to use. If you're not heavily invested in software development, they can be overwhelming, but ActiveCollab offers a really clean UI and superb UX that make onboarding new, casual users a breeze. The features offered in ActiveCollab are on par with the industry and mean that you can grow into the product as a team without worrying about boundaries for the most part. I only say "the most part" because I'm on a lower tier plan that doesn't include things like Invoicing (something I use a different product for anyway).

While I guess it can be seen as a "smart" business decision, I think gating things like Invoicing behind a pay wall doesn't feel great as an end user. It's just the psychological aspect of it all, right? If you said I had to pay $7.50/month for a plan and then an additional $3/month for Invoicing, I would be less inclined versus just being asked to pay $10/month for everything. I think the pigeon-holing of Invoicing being behind a plan that is also a price per member can also be a crux because the functionality doesn't really change between a 2 person operation and a 200 person operation, but the two would pay a crazy amount of difference ($6 vs. $600) just for Invoicing.

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.

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...

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