ActiveCollab Erfahrungen

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.

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.

Being able to:
- upload images and files into task discussion threads to facilitate easy review of work
- easily add and archive users
- run reports at the task, project, client, and user levels

- No integration with Microsoft Teams.
- Limited ability to manage user groups or fine-tune user permissions.
Most needed feature:
- The ability to mark notifications "unread" or "priority".

While I will say I don't like much about this software, the budget and description location/transparency works well for the task workflow. It is fairly easy to include all necessary information in an individual task, but detail tracking and dependencies are where this ease of use falls off.

The relationship between tasks and subtasks is a pain point and lacks clarity/definition. Sometimes there would be dropoff when trying to upload attachments, and they would not actually post to the task. ActiveCollab doesn't have a great reporting structure (compared to Jira) for our specific needs, and that ended up being a hindrance to workflow. For as complicated as the reporting section looked, I felt it was lacking. While it isn't a functionality issue, I also dislike the visual design of the software - it feels antiquated and can be draining for such a frequently used tool. Time logging was difficult compared to the software we moved to later.

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.

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.

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).

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.

In such a complex world, where the time and control factor in operations makes a difference, it is vital to have a platform that allows access to many tasks that, otherwise, would involve and coordinate many people, this type of tools allows us to save costs and reduce involuntary human errors, in everything that refers to the necessary coordination between all the members of the project. The calendar allows to have all the tasks, meetings, and filter the tasks by projects, and if that were not enough, all this can be complemented with the participation of the members remotely, so that it is possible to follow the general state of the proyects. In case of any problem, the support team is attentive to clarify your doubts, there are still elements that we have not had the opportunity to explore, but that, surely, according to our needs we will be using them to solve the growing demands of our organizations.

As with many platforms, the versions that are used in tables or smart devices show some limitations, in relation to those that are handled by PC, it would be very important to preserve and maximize the benefits when you have other devices and not limit the functions that, After all, knowledge or traditional devices for solving problems are not always available.

It's a great Project Management System. We moved from a legacy system and had prerequisites for our agency: project & task management, people/roll management and time management. It does these with ease. Then it layered great collaborative working.

The recently launched "workload" feature is an add-on additional cost. As a SaaS the competition is fierce for features and benefits. I personally think this should have been part of their bundle, not additional.

We've been using ActiveCollab since version 1. We needed more features and flexibility than other project management systems provided and we also were looking for an invoicing system. ActiveCollab provided all of that in one package and we could buy a license to run on our own server instead of paying monthly fees. This pricing model was very attractive for us along with the extra features to make the system fit our project management workflow, made ActiveCollab an easy choice.

The mobile app isn't the best. For those who heavily rely on using their project management system on mobile, this might be something to consider. I'm not a fan of the themes in the theme option, but if using the self hosted version, then you could potentially adjust styling to fit your business better.

While some project management systems try to force their own project management paradigms, ActiveCollab allows you the freedom to decide how you will manage your projects. Kanban? Click a button. Gannt? Click a button.

You can easily manage milestones, tasks, files, discussions, time-tracking et al. however needed and have every feature you'll need or want available.

Their support and development has been amazing. Quick replies, quick changes to the core product for quality-of-life requests.

Rich text could use some work as adding formatted content will sometimes yield awful results.

Needs a better way to sort/view items in "My Work" based on tags and deadlines e.g., view all tasks due that week or all view all time based on job types.

A responsive design and more fluid UI would also be a welcome change.

This is reasonably priced with several features that are very simple to learn.

The user interface is not particularly appealing.

My team and I do really like the simplicity of the software. It helps us focus on doing the tasks rather than figuring out how to use the software correctly to assign tasks.

- Unmaintained mobile apps, both iOS and Android versions.
- No function to duplicate tasks list.
- Zipping attachments from a task to be downloaded, takes forever.
- Bulk actions on tasks seem to need an improvement on UX so that it's more user friendly to use. Currently, we need to scroll up and down to choose the actions.
- On the Reports page for Tasks, every time we choose a Custom Report, the columns and "sort by" are always reset.
- As admin, I can't see the full list of other user's Activities. I can only see the last 5 or something.

I might be able to give some more feedback. Do let me know if it helps improve your product :)

Active collab is intuitive, easy to use and easy to navigate. There are MANY other project management tools out there and I've used a number of them. Active Collab is the best in my opinion in light of the integrations and ease of use.

There are a number of more in-depth features that are sometimes hard to find in ActiveCollab. Nothing a simple support ticket can't solve though.

ActiveCollab is very easy to use. With just a few clicks, you can have a new project created right away. Time tracking, invoicing, payment processing and many other features add an already large depth of features.

Support is quite bad, at least for the self-hosted release of the application. There is no ticketing support system, and instead you have to chat with staff through the activecollab.com site to be able to get issues logged. You never get professional assistance through chat. They copy and paste your chat into their internal support system. You're then at their mercy to reply back via email. If and when they do write you back to your email address, be prepared for long followups to your replies.

When features are broken in ActiveCollab, if a fix is not on their roadmap to get the problem resolved, it will take a long time, if ever, to get the problem fixed.

Elastic Search is not a great feature for self-hosted AC builds. However, search has always been horrible with AC since it's early days.

I love how easy it was to implement across our IT team. We started using this for our project management and it has drastically increased our efficiency and communication.

The only thing I have found that I dislike about ActiveCollab is there is no due date for overall projects. You can create due dates for individual tasks, but it would be nice to set it for the project itself. In no way has this impacted our performance, it would just be a nice feature to add.

Covers almost everything you need for team workflow and managing (digital) project, nice UX, rich features, moderate price

Lacks a dashboard/cockpit, reports should be more flexible and easier to use, design of estimates and documents should be more flexible, billing options should be more flexible

It's been more than 10 years using ActiveCollab since the day they had this 90s looking masterpiece of project scheduling platform. Today ActiveCollab grew sooo much and we love the minimalist style, the fact that they keep integrating and updating new features and functionalities making it every next day better and better.

I've tried so many other Project planning and Teamwork platforms but this one is the best I've ever seen for what we need - combining teamwork, with project planing, milestones progress, resource scheduling and time tracking.

This tool is intuitive to use and had a pretty easy ramp-up period. Projects can be organized easily and tasks are easy to create and assign out. The comment function works well for tracking task updates and notes.

Does not have a task workflow built into it, and is not great if you have more advanced project tracking needs. The time tracking also needs improvement.

I love the fact that it's linked to my email account, so if there is a new post I know about it quickly! It's also great that I can reply to threads directly from my email, that feature is so helpful.

I like that the threads within ActiveCollab are easy to keep track of, so no more wading through emails trying to find a reference to something!

The interface is quick and easy to use, and it's great being able to tag co-workers in threads to grab their attention.

There isn't much to be honest, but I suppose I would like it if the software took me directly to recent activity, as when there are a lot of projects sometimes I find it hard to navigate my way to the thread I'm looking for. But that's a minor quibble!

Other than that, I really enjoy using the software.

I started using ActiveCollab back when it was open source and contributed to the code. Since then it has matured a lot. It is a great over-all solution for project management, communication, time management, and even invoicing. The interface is well-thought-out and has few glitches.

The reporting functionality leaves a bit to be desired, but gets the job done. As others have mentioned, the search functionality is not great and setting up Elastic Search for the self-hosted version is a bit involved. Also, the mobile apps are not great.

ActiveCollab is far less expensive than BaseCamp and more visually appealing than the likes of Zoho or Trello. This makes it ideal for freelancers (myself included), but it could work for larger teams just as well.

It's available everywhere I need it: the web, my Mac, and my phone.

The overall workflow is insanely simple, yet powerful, allowing you to create new clients, projects, tasks and sub-tasks with ease.

Every time you find yourself thinking "hmm...I wonder if ActiveCollab does this..." whatever you try works just as you expected it to. That's a sign of really good UI/UX thinking.

Their customer support is fantastic, as well. All the people I've talked to have been real, friendly humans never bots or clueless outsourced drones.

The Mac app is still being worked on, and it has a few startup bugs, but works fantastically, otherwise.

Enables us to work efficiently on multiple tasks, with multiple users across multiple projects and multiple geographies. It's not too complicated for non-technical users and not too simple when dealing with technical issues with developers. Also can be used many different types of projects.

We would like more elaborate options for "operational analytics". The reports are ok, but we still have to do too much manual manipulation of data to get what we want. We would also welcome SMS/Text alerts and integration with services such Ghost inspector (e.g. automatic ticket generation).

ActiveCollab is pretty straight forward for our needs of project management.

We like being able to create templates for projects, however, there is no ability to copy a template and adjust it to be a different template. Every template needs to be made from scratch, and there's not an easy way to even copy and paste things from other templates. A lot of our templates are similar but have variations. We've contacted support multiple times and they like our idea, but they haven't done anything about it in about two years of asking.

It allows you to make different projects and within the projects itself you have tons of options. Also, you can make tasks and subtasks and assign them to someone, which I find very usefull, certainly when working with a lot of people. The billing-tool is also very easy. I've been working with ActiveCollab for a while now, and it's by far one of the best project management tools I have used.

It allows my team to collaborate easy and get work done with.

I would like to control some of the notification features more. For example, I'd like to disable/modify when the Daily report is sent out and it would be great if there's an option where members of a project that are subscribers can get a notification of an update and not all the details.

New version is clean and nice, posting old data from hosted versions is simple. Almost hit's it out of the park fopr use in any ad agency.

It's no longer supported. We looked to invest a bit of $ to move from a self-hosted to their cloud for AC3 and the support response was crickets. They have a scheduler but, it is not for hourly limits, jsut due dates. If you are trying to schedule against hour constraints you'll need to look elsewhere.