Act! Reviews

Pros

It is very simple to use and yet very powerful. It provides me with Notes and Histories and as many fields as I need to put in data about my customers and vendors. It is linked to my phone as well as my admins data. I really cannot see running my business without ACT.

Cons

really nothing to complain about. they do updates and patches to fix any issues I have ever encountered

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Reasons for Choosing Act!

Salesforce was cost prohibitive.

Switched From

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Switching to Act!

Cost while not sacrificing the overall features.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

I have been using Act! for decades via its various owners and takeovers. It served me well in sales and marketing, and now I use it to track my legal clients and court hearings, trials, etc.

Cons

It does not work in Windows 11, which came with my new computer. Your Tech Support was no help, telling me simply that Microsoft knows about it and "someday" will have a fix. Meanwhile, with a local technician, I had to roll back to Windows 10 (hundreds of dollars paid), then I had to pay a remote Act! specialist (not your employee) to help to get it to "work" even in Windows 10. It barely works now, freezing up constantly and repeatedly throughout my workday. It is practically useless, but I bear with it until I can find another product that works for me.

Pros

Easy to setup and have customized fields. They have an option to run on your own server to avoid monthly fees of other CRM options.

Cons

Once you have over 10,000 contacts. It is harder and slower to organize CRM. Works much better for smaller contact lists.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Switching to Act!

Cost of alternatives were much higher for similar features.

Pros

The way it’s supposed to work is ok. Not great. But getting it to work is a very heavy lift. And with inadequate support, it’s totally up to the user to figure it out.

Cons

Where do I start? Bottom line is that setup for marketing automation is nearly impossible. I’ve used successfully ACT! for more than 20 years. But marketing automation is a disaster. The documentation is unhelpful, and in some places, downright incorrect. It has lots of broken links. And their support staff, all offshore, knows nothing about how to help with the marketing automation feature. I had to hire someone who finally figured it out, by trial and error, after several weeks of work.

Pros

You can input any information and update it and the information can be seen by anyone in the organization. Makes communication between teams very simple and quick.

Cons

I am not a fan of the way they use multiple contacts past two for a business. If there are a list of people to communicate with each profile has up to two contacts, with more than two a new profile for the company has to be created, creating multiple profiles for each company which can cause confusion for other sections of the company, including processing payments and sending to the wrong contact at the other end or returning a product to the wrong section of said business.

Pros

We used this software mainly for contact management. We received the emails through Act! and replied back to customers through this system. Also used for scheduling/receiving viewing requests.
What I really liked in this software was that is was very easy to see what was happening during the day, how many emails and viewings we had. You could see the attachments, previous contacts from the customer.
The viewing handling feature was pretty easy to use, you can leave notes, edit the contact details easily.

Cons

I personally did not find this software very user friendly. It was a bit difficult to handle the attachments and we did not always had the proper connection with between Act! and Outlock, therefore we stopped using the Act! after a certain time. But this might be good for smaller businesses.

Pros

Potential Customer interactions have been a very effective tool for gaining customers, satisfying and retaining customers. It has versatile marketing automations.

Cons

Customer service was not very professional. Their late return suspended the business process, I was not satisfied with it.

Pros

This used to be my favourite software, I had it originally of 5 1/4 floppy disks, I think it was version 2, I used it daily, Version 6 was really good, and the changes started, they kept adding features, and then more features.

Cons

I live on an Island, normally internet reception is good, power, on the other hand, can be quite spasmodic, I had another problem when everything went online, the would go and my router stops. no CRM, It was then that I began to consider what to do. keep it or change (or go into competition with them).

Pros

This is a robust software program. We have added many custom fields that allows us to track a lot of data really dig into for trends and statistics. We love how history is captured a for all the activity we do for and with a client. We rely on the relationship tab heavily as multiple people are involved in a transaction. We are really enjoying the new Marketing Automation. It has a lot of robust features that we are just beginning to tap into. We also like the groups feature. We have hundreds of groups that we can run reports and create statistics from. We can see how many groups a contact is part of which helpful as well. I like the statistics ACT generates from drip marketing. Knowing what emails bounced back or who opted out helps us improve our data.

Cons

When searching for a person, it doesn't give you the option of having similar names - the spelling must be exact. It crashes when we are in the social updates tab. Customer Service: Often the techs are hard to understand. The time we spend on the phone with customer service on average lasts about 1/2 to an hour depending on the issue. That is a big interruption to our workflow in the office.

One thing I wish ACT would do is send to 2 emails at once. When sending out an eblast, it pulls from the email field. If there is more than one email address followed by a semicolon, it won't send to both. It bounces back.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

Without ACT I could not compete as well as I do in the sales world for it is changing every day. I need ACT to help track my customers my orders my RFQ's and so many other things without it I wouldn't have a job today. I see so many salespeople who won't invest in ACT who sales numbers could be so much better I tell them about ACT but they don't seem to want to invest in their future and their future sales that could be so much better.

Cons

I cannot find one thing wrong with ACT I have been using it approximately 20 years and never had a problem I cannot say this about other database programs I have had to use when I worked for other companies. Some of them were super complicated took hours of work just to get your data in whereas using ACT it was a breeze putting data in and saving data of all kinds.

Pros

Act itself is as a good database software. Compering to previous version synchronized with Swift Page it has a better platform to create a template. There are other things you improve but for our small company we do not use them (like several times of sending same e-mail to one customer)

Cons

In Marketing Automation:
- you can not add and SAVE our data base fields in the template
- you can not send an e-mail from the template to one person (only to the group)
- you can not sent an e-mail to lookup (every time you must create the group from lookup)
- may e-mails is getting lost (in our 2 campaigns about 20% e-mails were not delivered)
In e-marketing
- you can not add and SAVE our data base fields in the template
******
In your previous version of ACT I was able to add fields from my database SAVE them in the template and send them to lookup without a need to create the group.
******
And your customer service ??? I believe you can do better work.
For example - I wrote an e-mail to you about month ago - with totally no answers from you.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

I liked this software to run my credit repair business. Keep track of letter management and clients. It was easy at first.

Cons

After you purchase your license, in a year or 2 they discontinue the version and you have to pay for the license all over again. I had purchase 3 licenses and wanted to purchase a 4th one and they said I couldn't that I would have to upgrade to the monthly fee version where you pay monthly per license including for the licenses I already had. Now this year they discontinued the licenses I already purchased, they want me to upgrade and pay 550 per license all over again because they have a new version and will not give support nor fixes to the older versions. This is insane. I pay them for a license so they discontinue the product and expect me to purchase all licenses again. ON top of that, it is glitchy, it continue disconnects from Outlook. You call customer support and someone in India answers and they are clue less. Every time Outlook does an update or act updates it completely looses all integration. OH, and they give you 0 customer service, you have to pay for that separately.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Pros

we inherited this software and while it has some good basic functions, apart from knowing how to use it I have nothing positive to say about it

Cons

Customer service is the WORST. I'm currently waiting for my rep to get back to me about an unresolved issue (it's been over 4 weeks since we were able to access our task lists). In the 4 weeks i have left numerouse messages and followed up with emails. As a total I received 1 email correspondence.
We have 3 new staff members that started within the last month and although trying to reach out numerous times regarding setting up profiles for these staff, we haven't been able to get a response.

ACT for web speed
we have a database of about 28000 contacts and are unable to use ACT for web as it is that slow that it has become unusable.

INTEGRATION
Everytime there is a server update all integrations stop working. We have tried to set up email syncing since early this year. All that "support" has to say that it has to be our PC set ups. Yet they can't tell us which settings need to be changed.

Pros

It is in bad taste that you will not allow this box to be left blank and are trying to force users to say something nice about your software. Every time I come in contact with your software it is because it is broken.(N/A)

Cons

The Act! / Microsoft Office integration needs some work. It keeps breaking and we have to troubleshoot this issue with our customer on a weekly bases.

Pros

I have been a user of the ACT! program since I became a Realtor in 1990. It is one of the most versatile programs around. I am only using parts of the program necessary to run my business. It allows a comprehensive amount of information on each individual on record or family history. All activity is recorded in the history file for future reference. All Emails, letters and correspondence is attached to the individual for future reference. The groups that can be set-up

Cons

There is nothing that I dislike about this program. It has all of the features that are needed to run a business. There are also features included that are helpful in record keeping and developing schedules for a smoother day to day operation.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

I can track my customers and their email addresses.

Cons

The confusion with accessing customers.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.