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

The ability to connect with Outlook and keep the history of communication. Create groups for all types of needs with ease

Cons

It is slow - regularly get message that is not reacting". No interface with my Iphone

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

There is nothing good or helpful about this software.

Cons

The trial is not really a trial because you cannot see how their marketing automation works.

Alternatives Considered

Agile CRM

Reasons for Switching to Act!

I chose ACT! because I had previously used this software. However, I used this software when it was own by Sage Software.

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

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

Cons

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.

Pros

Easy to use - feels familiar even on first use and isn't hard to get started.

Cons

Cumbersome and slow. Once you start getting thousands of contacts in the system get use to watching the hourglass. Server needs to be restarted weekly. Their cloud based solution is lacking in features and not as mobile friendly as other options.

Pros

I like the simplicity of the platform, training users was simple and adoption relatively painless. Also the data was able to be stored locally which was nice.

Cons

What i don't like is what happened when we decided to move on from ACT to a different solution. Exporting notes was nearly impossible and we had to pay for a 3rd party tool to accomplish this.

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

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

I began using Act! 20+ years ago the draw for me was the ability to customize the product for my companies needs. I have run my company's database with this software from start up and I have made it work through the years. In the earlier days I was able to automate functionality to stay ahead of trends and have robust productivity far a head of my competitors. As the years have gone on and the product was sold and resold they have updated and brought general users more but have left lifelong users in the dust for profit.

Cons

Subscription services that cripple my ability to utilize the fully purchased/owned product. I feel that the company sold out for recurring subscriptions. I don't care that they want to go to subscription but I do care that I have my feet held to the fire because of it. Users like myself enabled their progress and continued success.

Pros

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!

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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".

Pros

We have been using Act for 18 years. It's a nice product with as many bells and whistles thats needed for a CRM. Its easy to implement and set up databases. It has the necessary features for analytics and reporting for clients.We plan to upgrade to an Act cloud version soon.

Cons

The only feature I would like to see added would be an internal voip so that you could hit the call button and Act would dial automatically.

Pros

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

Cons

None it is a very good CRM for marketing purposes

Pros

What's not to love? It keeps my contacts names, numbers, addresses, emails, etc... sorted. I can mark/tag them for different groups, find them, note them, write them, sort them... I can schedule me calls, meetings, to-do's with alarms to remind me. I LOVE MY ACT!

Cons

The only reason for the 4 stars is because this software will do so much and I being age 60 and not growing up with computers all thru school... I am probably not doing one tenth of what I could be doing with ACT and yet it is still a LIFESAVER! Without ACT, I would NEVER be able to keep my "ACT" together... lol.
It makes me feel a little incompetent knowing there is SO MUCH MORE it could do for me if I knew how to do it.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Reasons for Switching to Act!

Cost

Pros

Organization and logic

Cons

Syncing with Outlook and Gmail can be difficult.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

Flexibility to set ACT to support different operations in my business.

I heavily customise the fields.

One version is my HR system. It beats Sage 50 HR for me

Cons

Difficult question. It does what U require.

If I am being critical, it could do with faster search routines. Also reporting is a bit dated.

Alternatives Considered

Sage HRMS

Reasons for Switching to Act!

Flexibility /customisation