ActiveCollab

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

- 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 :)

Avantages

I truly do not really like anything about ActiveCollab, but the feature that allows you to hide things from clients is nice.

Inconvénients

The title says all of it - ActiveCollab is the single worst project management system I have ever used. Their customer service is the worst part, because it makes solving all of the other issues that go on almost impossible. The timer never works and deletes people's work, the server is often down for days at a time, clients will lose access for no reason at all and not be able to login, we'll stop receiving ActiveCollab email notifications and tasks will show either for the wrong day or not at all. When we reach out to ActiveCollab, they more often than not have absolutely no solution and just say "they are working on it".