ActiveCollab

Pros

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 and searched. I know this sounds trivial, but when you manage hundreds of projects (websites), I need an interface that works for me. Their interface works perfectly for someone with my needs. I constantly have to go back and forth on so many notes for projects and ActiveCollab has made it user-friendly for me to do this.

Second, ActiveCollab had awesome customer service when I had any issues or questions. This was a big plus because I then knew I was in good hands.

Third, they had some add-ons other softwares didn't have so it was nice to have features I wanted to use all in one place, like time tracking and invoicing.

Fourth, it was reasonably priced.

Cons

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 even enter or send an invoice without "inviting" the client to join ActiveCollab. I tried testing an invoice by putting an email manually because they claimed you could, but nothing gets sent, unless I "invite" someone into my account. This is silly. Another issue I have with the invoicing is that it shows "Active Collab" as the sender and you do NOT have the option to change this. Kinda stupid.

Three, you only have a measly 3 ways to categorize or filter projects: Client, Category, and Label. This can be very limiting depending on what you're doing.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to ActiveCollab

Pros

Onboarding is easy, interface is easy to use and understanding. It's also one of the cheapest option in the market. For features that are not available, the ActiveCollab team is keen to consider adding that feature though during our usage, we didn't really see the feature being rolled out.

Cons

I used to use Basecamp and when compared, there are a lot of features that are lacking in ActiveCollab such as being able to create a Gantt timeline, quite messy grouping of projects on the main home page, not able to add vendors (only can add clients, yet we do not use ActiveCollab to collaborate with clients). As a project management tool, we also would like to see how we can gauge the workload of each team mate and if each team mate might be overload within the day or week, this function at the moment is not available. Completed tasked are being archived and under archived, the completed tasks are not organised according to task list. Some features such as invoicing and budget management cannot be adopted by finance team as they uses a more advanced thou legacy system which includes a whole lot of other functions on top of merely invoicing.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing ActiveCollab

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to ActiveCollab

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to ActiveCollab