ActiveCollab

4.5 (402)
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Automated project management tool

About ActiveCollab

ActiveCollab is a project management software created for automating busy work and focusing on Real Work.

ActiveCollab allows you to organize your work into tasks and subtasks, set priorities, collaborate with your team and clients in real-time. Plenty of features reduce the noise and enable you to make Real Work happen: time tracking, budgeting and invoicing, reporting, in-app chat, task dependencies with automatic rescheduling. There are also third-party integrations available, so nothing stands in the way of ActiveCollab becoming your centralized workspace!


Key benefits of ActiveCollab

Deliver projects on time and plan accordingly
Use Task dependencies with automatic rescheduling so you can always know how your projects are coming along at any given moment. Whatever happens.

Centralized communication
This is your workspace, and this is where all communication happens. Within your team and with your clients!
This is where ideas and files are shared, feedbacks are given, discussions are held.
Everything is seen in real-time, so you're always in the loop!

Get paid!
Create estimates, track time, track your budgets.
Send invoices straight from the projects and create extensive reports.

Centralized workspace
All your work is here. All your tasks, files, communication, team members, clients.
There are even third-party integrations so your work stays within a single app.

Intuitive UX
You don't need additional resources to start using ActiveCollab.


Images

ActiveCollab Software - ActiveCollab Workload is a visual resource management tool built for agencies and creative professionals.
ActiveCollab Software - Everyone’s availability at a glance
ActiveCollab Software - Multiple task views currently showing a Kanban view of the tasklists and tasks
ActiveCollab Software - My work with tasklists and tasks with high priority options, assignees, due dates and task dependencies
ActiveCollab Software - Calendar view with task dependencies
View 8 more
ActiveCollab video
ActiveCollab video
ActiveCollab video
ActiveCollab Software - ActiveCollab Workload is a visual resource management tool built for agencies and creative professionals.
ActiveCollab Software - Everyone’s availability at a glance
ActiveCollab Software - Multiple task views currently showing a Kanban view of the tasklists and tasks
ActiveCollab Software - My work with tasklists and tasks with high priority options, assignees, due dates and task dependencies
ActiveCollab Software - Calendar view with task dependencies

Not sure about ActiveCollab? Compare with a popular alternative

ActiveCollab

4.5 (402)
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US$9.00
month
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Ease of Use

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Value for Money

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Reviews

Overall rating

4.5 /5
(402)
Value for Money
4.5/5
Features
4.2/5
Ease of Use
4.5/5
Customer Support Software
4.4/5

Already have ActiveCollab?

Software buyers need your help! Product reviews help the rest of us make great decisions.

Showing 5 reviews of 402
Sinoun
Sinoun
Overall rating
  • Industry: Internet
  • Company size: 2–10 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support Software
  • Likelihood to recommend 8.0 /10

Great, but a lot of improvements can be made.

Reviewed on 2018-12-12

Overall, I like ActiveCollab, but I want to so bad love it more. There is a lot of potential with...

Overall, I like ActiveCollab, but I want to so bad love it more. There is a lot of potential with AC and room for improvement, and I really hope they listen to people's suggestions and needs! Either way, I do highly recommend ActiveCollab, especially if you're a web designer like me who manages hundreds of sites.

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.

Ross
Ross
Overall rating
  • Company size: 11–50 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support Software
  • Likelihood to recommend 9.0 /10

Great Project Management Software

Reviewed on 2018-02-09

It organizes my life every day.

It organizes my life every day.

Pros

Solid options for organization and streamlining processes that even clients can be taught to use. As a creative agency selling our time it's important to communicate quickly and efficiently with our clients. A big part of that happens at the beginning of every project when they fill out a creative brief. We've used ActiveCollab to set up standard brief templates so AC asks all the questions and they go down the list and fill it out. The time tracker works great and is a painless way to keep track of time. Email notifications are great, especially being able to respond to comments VIA email really speeds things up. Support staff is great. Always available and helpful.

Cons

The invoicing functionality is great but is missing major sorting and display capabilities. For example, if I wanted to show each time entry with its note about what that entry was for organized by project, I cannot do that. My wife has also complained about the App not having a lot of functionality, but I have not used it much personally. I also think the 'Notes' 'Files' and 'Discussions' tabs are kind of random. Haven't found a good place for those in our workflows and they're confusing for clients. I realize it's a big thing to ask, but I'd also like to see some way of incorporating something like Slack into Active Collab, so we can move away from Skype completely.

Verified Reviewer
Overall rating
  • Industry: Marketing & Advertising
  • Company size: 2–10 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support Software
  • Likelihood to recommend 2.0 /10

Good choice for a basic project management tool but lacking when compared to Basecamp

Reviewed on 2021-04-15

ActivaCollab is still at the initial stage in terms of features even though they have been in the...

ActivaCollab is still at the initial stage in terms of features even though they have been in the market for a couple of years. It serves our initial purpose of tasking team mates and tracking task conversation and progress but not more than that. Based on that, our usage is limited to basic tasking and we are considering and exploring migrating to a different system.

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.

Response from Active Collab

Appreciate the detailed feedback shared! We would recommend you to reach to our support teams to schedule a Calendly meet as we might have some workaround options to share with you that might help organising your work.

Matthew
Matthew
Overall rating
  • Industry: Marketing & Advertising
  • Company size: Self Employed
  • Used Daily for 1-5 months
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10

ActiveCollab is one of the easiest PM tools to migrate to

Reviewed on 2021-06-17

Overall, I really like the product and I think for any team that has been plagued with trying to...

Overall, I really like the product and I think for any team that has been plagued with trying to find the "right solution" to their PM needs, either overwhelmed by more technical PM tools or underwhelmed by lightweights, then ActiveCollab slots in nicely as being a very viable, competitive solution. You just have to ask yourself if the pricing is worth it.

Pros

There are actually two PM tools that I absolutely love - Nifty and Ora, however, as much as I love them, they're a bit too "technical" for the layman to use. If you're not heavily invested in software development, they can be overwhelming, but ActiveCollab offers a really clean UI and superb UX that make onboarding new, casual users a breeze.

The features offered in ActiveCollab are on par with the industry and mean that you can grow into the product as a team without worrying about boundaries for the most part. I only say "the most part" because I'm on a lower tier plan that doesn't include things like Invoicing (something I use a different product for anyway).

Cons

While I guess it can be seen as a "smart" business decision, I think gating things like Invoicing behind a pay wall doesn't feel great as an end user. It's just the psychological aspect of it all, right?
If you said I had to pay $7.50/month for a plan and then an additional $3/month for Invoicing, I would be less inclined versus just being asked to pay $10/month for everything.

I think the pigeon-holing of Invoicing being behind a plan that is also a price per member can also be a crux because the functionality doesn't really change between a 2 person operation and a 200 person operation, but the two would pay a crazy amount of difference ($6 vs. $600) just for Invoicing.

Matthias
Matthias
Overall rating
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support Software
  • Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10

A sleek yet powerful project management software way above its competition

Reviewed on 2018-02-09

It helps me organize a great number of projects as one-man business without losing more time than...

It helps me organize a great number of projects as one-man business without losing more time than necessary.

Pros

It's amazing how flexible AC can be depending on a project's needs. It can serve as a simple reminder list with great speed and simplicity but also get fully blown up for projects involving production teams and clients at once. Compared to its competition it never feels like its dictating you to use it in a certain way, it just hands you a great bunch of options and lets you use them without interference. I use other products like dropbox and dropbox paper too and it all goes together really nicely.
One thing to note is a personal and genuinely helpful customer service, there have been issues and bugs here and there (not many) and in 90% of the cases they were solved within short time.

I think AC is great for freelancers and small project groups working remotely I switched from Basecamp and it was one of a relief.

Cons

I personally don't like the free limitations of users. I know there's a business model behind it but I hate to delete other clients/team members just to make room for someone else.

Showing 5 reviews of 402 Read all reviews

ActiveCollab FAQs

Below are some frequently asked questions for ActiveCollab.

ActiveCollab offers the following pricing plans:

  • Starting from: US$9.00/month
  • Pricing model: Subscription
  • Free Trial: Available

Plus: For smaller teams that need a platform for collaboration and managing projects. Annual Billing: $3.17 for 3 members / per month Monthly Billing: $3.67 for 3 members / per month Pro: For teams and companies that need to overview the entire workflow in one place. Billed per member. Annual Billing: $8.00 per member / per month Monthly Billing: $9.00 per member / per month Pro+Get Paid: For teams that need to track time, organize, and invoice their projects. Billed per member. Annual Billing: $11.75 per member / per month Monthly Billing: $14.00 per member / per month

ActiveCollab has the following typical customers:

Self Employed, 2–10, 11–50, 51–200, 201–500, 501–1,000, 1,001–5,000

ActiveCollab supports the following languages:

Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish

ActiveCollab supports the following devices:

Android (Mobile), iPhone (Mobile), iPad (Mobile)

ActiveCollab integrates with the following applications:

Asana, Basecamp, Braintree, Dropbox Business, Google Drive, Hubstaff, PayPal, QuickBooks Online Advanced, Slack, Stripe, TestLodge, TimeCamp, Trello, Wrike, Xero, Zapier, authorize.net

ActiveCollab offers the following support options:

Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base Software, Phone Support, Chat

Related categories

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