ActiveCollab Reviews

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.

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.

The native features are very adapted to our uses, and we were able to add the missing features.Especially, time and budget tracking are good to have and

Not us directly, but our customers are sometimes disturbed by the UX, despite huge leap forward recently.We sometimes find it a bit slow in terms of performance - we host it so we may be to blame - and access to data (because we have a lot of projects and customers).

It's a great Project Management System. We moved from a legacy system and had prerequisites for our agency: project & task management, people/roll management and time management. It does these with ease. Then it layered great collaborative working.

The recently launched "workload" feature is an add-on additional cost. As a SaaS the competition is fierce for features and benefits. I personally think this should have been part of their bundle, not additional.

We've been using ActiveCollab since version 1. We needed more features and flexibility than other project management systems provided and we also were looking for an invoicing system. ActiveCollab provided all of that in one package and we could buy a license to run on our own server instead of paying monthly fees. This pricing model was very attractive for us along with the extra features to make the system fit our project management workflow, made ActiveCollab an easy choice.

The mobile app isn't the best. For those who heavily rely on using their project management system on mobile, this might be something to consider. I'm not a fan of the themes in the theme option, but if using the self hosted version, then you could potentially adjust styling to fit your business better.

ActiveCollab ensures that I meet my deadlines and deliver quality work always. I can manage my work and collaborate with my team effectively and hassle-free. Its interface and design offers simplicity and helps me manage everything on one platform from tracking tasks, file sharing to planning on my calendar. I am really impressed with it and it is really helpful in terms of communication. I can recommend it to anyone.

I found it difficult to integrate it my calendar when I first started using but so far I'm pleased with it.

While some project management systems try to force their own project management paradigms, ActiveCollab allows you the freedom to decide how you will manage your projects. Kanban? Click a button. Gannt? Click a button.

You can easily manage milestones, tasks, files, discussions, time-tracking et al. however needed and have every feature you'll need or want available.

Their support and development has been amazing. Quick replies, quick changes to the core product for quality-of-life requests.

Rich text could use some work as adding formatted content will sometimes yield awful results.

Needs a better way to sort/view items in "My Work" based on tags and deadlines e.g., view all tasks due that week or all view all time based on job types.

A responsive design and more fluid UI would also be a welcome change.

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

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.

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.

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!

Active Collaboration is super intuitive and affordable. Before switching to Active Collaboration a few years ago we used WorkFront and it was an absolute nightmare. After 10 months of getting templates set up and trying to learn how to use them our team was so frustrated that I knew that I wouldn't be renewing that tool for another year. Active Collaboration is so easy to use, it literally takes 10 minutes for me to walk a new team member through the tool when coming onboard. I've learned over the years of project managing that if someone doesn't understand how to use something or its too complicated to input a simple request or comment in, they aren't going use so it, they will default to email or drive-byes. I just don't have that problem with Active Collaboration. I highly recommend it.

I wish there was a feature that if you change a task date there's an option to move out all the dates at one time.

I love how easy it was to implement across our IT team. We started using this for our project management and it has drastically increased our efficiency and communication.

The only thing I have found that I dislike about ActiveCollab is there is no due date for overall projects. You can create due dates for individual tasks, but it would be nice to set it for the project itself. In no way has this impacted our performance, it would just be a nice feature to add.

Timelines.

Not reactive interface. Terrible iOS app.

Working at an agency with 50+ people, where there are many moving parts and everyone wears a lot of hats, Active Collab allows us to stay organized and hold conversations in tasks, with or without clients. Tasks are easy to schedule, reschedule and conversate in.

Overall, these are the issues we experienced with ActiveCollab on a regular basis:

- The ActiveCollab timer erased logged time regularly
- Documents were unable to be uploaded to tasks from time to time, which halted communication on certain topics
- The customer service is very slow. If you're having an issue with the software, it takes weeks to resolve the issue
- Sometimes the software is so slow or won't open for an unreasonable amount of time, ultimately wasting time

- Simple, clean UI
- Easy to learn
- Clear structure (teams, projects, categorized task lists) that works well for us
- Ability to sort things in the My Work list, so I can arrange my priorities for the week and then easily reorder things as tasks are completed.
- Integrates well with Dropbox
- Powerful customizable reports (ex. can easily see what got done in the past week on project A, or can get a clear portrait of what employee B did for the last month)

Also, when you're in the middle of writing something (ex. a comment or a note) and get interrupted, it *retains* what you wrote (even if you didn't submit it and no one else can see it). This has saved me so much effort, since it's hard to juggle doing things with documenting them.

- The Asana importer didn't work for me. This resulted in a huge amount of effort migrating projects and tasks by hand.
- AC emails you every time you're added to a project, and you need to be part of a project to see what's going on in it - we use this for workplace transparency, so there are a lot of projects and the notifications are irritating
- Can't easily transform a task into a project
- The My Work interface doesn't automatically refresh when there's an update on one of my projects, so I can be in AC all day and still miss some notifications (unless I enable email notifications, which I dislike).

I love the fact that it's linked to my email account, so if there is a new post I know about it quickly! It's also great that I can reply to threads directly from my email, that feature is so helpful.

I like that the threads within ActiveCollab are easy to keep track of, so no more wading through emails trying to find a reference to something!

The interface is quick and easy to use, and it's great being able to tag co-workers in threads to grab their attention.

There isn't much to be honest, but I suppose I would like it if the software took me directly to recent activity, as when there are a lot of projects sometimes I find it hard to navigate my way to the thread I'm looking for. But that's a minor quibble!

Other than that, I really enjoy using the software.

The robust features that are at our disposal should we scale up or change the way we work. Discussions, notes, tasks, lists. Third-party app integration if needed. I like that we have room to grow. I also very much like the reports. As the business owner, it's key to see how efficiently my team is performing, and how to keep our workflow profitable.

Day-to-day, the timer app is buggy. It's frustrating when I can't scroll through our long list of active jobs, or when the status doesn't appear in my toolbar for easy reference. We've also had issues with days going by with time records not being logged, having to take screencaps and re-enter by hand (if we're lucky enough to no re-start the app). A better timer app would be very welcomed.

Enables us to work efficiently on multiple tasks, with multiple users across multiple projects and multiple geographies. It's not too complicated for non-technical users and not too simple when dealing with technical issues with developers. Also can be used many different types of projects.

We would like more elaborate options for "operational analytics". The reports are ok, but we still have to do too much manual manipulation of data to get what we want. We would also welcome SMS/Text alerts and integration with services such Ghost inspector (e.g. automatic ticket generation).

It allows you to make different projects and within the projects itself you have tons of options. Also, you can make tasks and subtasks and assign them to someone, which I find very usefull, certainly when working with a lot of people. The billing-tool is also very easy. I've been working with ActiveCollab for a while now, and it's by far one of the best project management tools I have used.

It's powerful enough without being overly complex. It has the potential to be the best product for creative/tech teams on the market, and I'm trying to stick around long enough to see the improvements on the roadmap.

The lack of task dependencies. What I view as a completely broken time management system allowing employees to decide if a time entry is billable or not when that should only be left to management to decide. It's been buggy lately and the issue with images not uploading has been awful. Design is outdated.