Act! Reviews

I'm able to integrate with MS Outlook, and sync within my Ipad and Google phone. Your costumer support is awesome with it's followup and addressing and any issues I may have. Deserves more than 5 stars!

Software pricing is becoming an issue as less expensive models are out there that competes with Act. Need to consider reduction pricing for those loyal customers like myself since 2006. Needs to come up with a better less tedious way of merging contact duplicates.

I like the fact that a team of 5 can share effectively in real time, I like the ease of changing layouts and adding fields, and with Seamless the ablity to easily prdcue high quality documenation. It's link to outlook and ODBC is good and it is a stable, which being at the core of our business is a good thing

There are many things I think we could do to be more productive but can't, and we do see fields being changed or lost "by themselves". The web version was a poor version of the Pro, and we haven't been able to make it available when offline, which is a frustration.

Our office has been using this product since before I started. It is a solid database program and if that is all you want to do is have a large database of contacts, then this performs well.

I dislike how this is still only available for windows computers which makes communicating information in an office with both Mac and PC impossible. Also, the outlook plug in that allows emails to be synced with a contact in ACT will only link emails to the PRIMARY contact. So that means you have to manually sync that. If you are emailing over 100 emails a day, you end up either spending most of your time manually syncing contacts or just foregoing this feature. Also, you can only add 4 contacts to a company. Often times, we need to have upwards of 6-10 contacts for a company so the inability to add more is a huge issue. And since ACT isn't online, any changes made on any employee computers while not connected to the server means no one else has access to that info until they make it back to the office to sync. Which means our data is never fully up to date. There are so many problems with this software that we often don't try to take advantage of any of the other functions.

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

I loved ACT when I used to use it. It was by far the best CRM at the time.

Last time I used ACT and granted it was many years ago, it wasn't cloud based. At one point my computer crashed and I lost my entire ACT database that hadn't been backed up in the last few weeks. I was devastated and decided I had to switch to something that was in the cloud.

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

When the software works it is good but the support from ACT is the worst we have ever experienced.

Act Marketing Automation does not work. We have battled with trying to get this working for over two years with appalling customer support and still no resolution.

There isn't much I like about using Act. It is clunky and there are a lot better CRM tools out there that are much more sophisticated and are better for integrating multiple programs. It is a relatively easy tool to use although it does not do a lot of what we would like it to be able to use.

Act seems to be patched together from add-ons over the year and has not had a comprehensive UX refresh. It also is not simple to integrate with our other software like a lot of other software tools are

I enjoy having the ability to adjust my searches based on the category of the database. It's simple to create groups.

It's true that Act! can be slow, especially when working with large amounts of data. This can be frustrating for users who need to quickly access information or perform tasks just like me. However, It's important to note that slow performance with large data sets is a common issue with many software solutions.

It has the capability to personalize the database, fields, and reports. Additionally, it records all interactions such as phone calls, emails, and documents.

There is nothing in particular to mention. The product satisfies or surpasses all my anticipations.

I have pioneered the purchase of ACT! in my company. Back then, It offers a perpetual license per user which is great as you don't subject yourself to a monthly or annual subscription. I love the fact that ACT! marketing can be customised and very rare that it falls under the promotions tab of the email recipient.

ACT! can only be linked to a certain version of Outlook which i find not helpful. Not all the licenses we purchased were maximise as they find ACT! a work duplicate particularly on the finance side since only selected accounting software can be integrated in the ACT! system.

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.

I have been using ACT for over 25 years and have seen lots of versions. I like its flexibility and that I can put users into multiple groups, It would be impossible to design a program that did everything everybody wanted it to but ACT comes close. I use it for sales, marketing, personal groups I coordinate, keeping track of some of my customers' customers.

It can interact with Outlook and Google's calendar if you use either of those programs. I am a Premium member. The bad side to that is it is a little pricey - about $0 a month. The good side is that I always have the most up to date version. The customer support is wonderful if you are a premium member. Whenever Microsoft Windows has an update a lot of my programs need some adjusting. ACT requires the SQL to restart but that is a simple fix. If/when I have had issues I couldn't fix I just made a call and their support team was terrific in helping me.

I like the fact that it is cloud based so I can access it on my tablet or cell phone or any computer anywhere. At my office I use the offline version and simply update the sync to the cloud. I have it set to update overnight also. One of the features I like best is the history. It is great to be able to look back to meetings, calls etc to see what I said, did etc. The library of forms is very useful also - create a form, letter - whatever - and you have a pre printed template you can utilize for multiple clients or for just one.

It holds tons of contacts also.

I wish it had more options for the ID/Status cells. The group function sort of does that but not like I need it to. Having 3, 4, 5 or more ID/Status cells would be very useful. Most of my clients fall into more than one category.

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.

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.

Now it is on the cloud rather than desktop version we don't need to synchronise as this never worked properly anyway

they are removing useful features every year to the point it becomes a glorified database, it always has technical issues of some description. they fix one thing and break another.
It is very limited in what it can do, looks ok on the outside but when you come to use it you find that it is so limited it is difficult to make it work effectively.

Consistent interface through the years, reliable functionality and easy to resolve simple issues. Even in a small business, hosting the database on a consumer grade PC and operating system still provides a functional and fast connection. The ability to create an offline database that can then be synced with the master database is very useful for laptop users.

Finally in ACT 2018/2019, the interface between Outlook 365 (aka Outlook 2016) and ACT! is finally more reliable.

The time it takes to create a large offline database seems way to slow. Some troubleshooting issues require support from ACT!. I strongly recommend a support plan with ACT!

Familiar as I have been using ACT since 1991, starting with v2.0 and now have v22.1.

ACT worked 'great' up to and including v21. Since the release of v22, I get ACT "NOT RESPONDING" messages 6-8x per day and need to completely reboot my laptop. Also with v22, I have randomly and periodically had (2x) my template for Contacts changed/rearranged. This combined with the elimination of service contracts, makes using ACT and potentially upgrading to the next version of ACT "unattractive".

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.

When we first bought ACT! around 17 years ago we loved it. We were all happy with what it could do to automate the office and with client/lead management.

Email marketing and email functionality - or lack of - with Outlook.
Only being able to attach one document file to a history note has also caused much frustration.

Easy to use

Some of the features I will never use and some of the features take some time to learn how to use.

Highly customizable fields. At each upgrade, all my changes are carried forward without me needing to do anything. Solid follow-up system.

My only complaint is the size of the application on the screen. The settings that I use on the screen work for all my other programs. This displays just a bit smaller than I would like. Haven't found a way to correct.

seems very simple and we had a long standing relationship with ACT with the in house CRM. So we had a lot of our contacts already on board and it does keep track of contacts.

When I came on board about 3 months ago I suggested going to the cloud the idea was well recieved and I contacted act. We intially had some issues uploading the information some of which I will admit was my own fault. when I did the software lagged extremely bad. I contacted the company spent almost 4 hours o the phone (mostly on hold) the first time and then didnt get a call back untill about 9:30 that night. Then the trial was running out with out the issue being resolved I asked them to extend it while we tried to fix the issue they told me I had to buy it and then they would be able to fix it....

We loved Act's flexibility and ease of use as each of our team members were able to use Act with their mobile devices and phones. Our team members reported that Act's updating process is quick, painless,
and automated. In addition , their user interface was quite intuitive and made for generation of highly
configurable reports in a timely manner .

We have found Act to be a solid and multi faceted CRM. However , we would love more tutorials on importing contacts for business use and referral. By importing we would value some kind of scan
utility feature for use with cell phones and tablets. That said , once a client enters contact information ,
Act will make a connection and provide information regarding parent companies or further supplemental data. This feature proves extremely useful.

Nothing - this program and all it's components is sold from the sales level as the answer to all of your business needs... but you have to run your business very specifically in order to make sure it works the way they want it to. No macs, you must have dedicated workers to spend their entire days creating ad campaigns and updating the information - because if my sales team tried to do it - we would never get any sales work done.

Lag time is HORRIBLE. Customer service is lacking. Updates - haven't seen any improvement in the 8 years i've been using it. the 'solution" for not being Mac compatible (which is laughable in 2018) - is to use the Cloud version on their server - it's seriously the most horrible thing and biggest waste of time. I would much rather create my own manual spreadsheets in google docs to organize my client database.