Active Collab is a project management solution built around features such as task management, collaboration, time tracking, and invoicing.
$8
per member/per month
ClickUp
Score 8.3 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
ClickUp is an all-in-one productivity platform. It’s a hub where teams can come together to plan, organize, and collaborate on work using tasks, Docs, Chat, Goals, and Whiteboard. Customized with just a few clicks, ClickUp helps teams of all types and sizes deliver work more effectively, to boost productivity to new heights. ClickUp aims to make the world more productive by removing friction caused by using many different applications. The platform boasts millions…
Active Collab is great for small teams who want a web-based project management platform to help them on their day-to-day workflow tasks, billing, estimations, vendor assignments and even client communications. It is also great for agencies with users who are sometimes remotely working. Active Collab starts to show shortcomings when you have an immense amount of projects in the system (1000+), and, being a web-based platform, can sometimes experience downtime.
Great for project management, reoccurring task management, building trackers and keeping track of what everyone is up to. Like all software that has great functionality, having solid governance and control over access is essential. I recommend ensuring that your admins/owners have a close eye on what is going on across the space or it can turn into an unmanageable nightmare.
It isn't possible to set members of staff as part time, so if someone is unavailable on certain days you must manually enter them as OOO every single day that they are not in, that other teammates work. Hours also can't be edited individually - everyone is treated as working the same hours in a day, rendering capacity planner useless for flexi working teams
Subtasks cannot be assigned their own hours and deadlines, meaning the To Do list view can't be seen in actual date order and capacity planner does not reflect all time allocated to an individual's schedule unless every task is set up as a separate task rather than subtask
There is no way to see all tasks of a certain type across multiple campaigns (e.g all copywriting tasks vs all technical tasks) - support team suggested exporting data and making spreadsheets
Kanban view isn't available for people's own task lists ('board' view here shows a list)
Not possible to have one task be assigned to more than one person
Notifications are not sent when tasks are updated, so you have to leave comments and tag people each time
We're very pleased with how the system works in general. For over a year we've barely ever had any problems with ClickUp and there might have only been one or two times when it wasn't operational for us due to a global emergency. Moreover, when we had a problem once with renewing our licenses we've been contacted directly by our account manager and taken care of in a very professional way (with a due refund as well). The exceptional customer service makes us firmly believe that ClickUp is just the right tool for us.
Far easier to use than any other PM tool. ClickUp is incredibly intuitive and had us saving time and energy within the first week of implementation. In my opinion, PM software should make it easier to focus on the deliverables - it shouldn't take all your time and energy to learn how to use the tool in the first place. ClickUp is a user-friendly tool that actually helps us focus on what's important.
For over a year ClickUp was unavailable to us just twice for a couple of hours. I would say for a system this big and working globally that was a minor issue. They managed to fix all the issues within a couple hours and then it was back up and running perfectly fine.
The speed of ClickUp is average to be honest. This is one of the biggest flaws of the system, sometimes it's also lagging a little bit but we also have a lot of documents, lists etc. on our workspace. However, with the next version of ClickUp I've seen they are planning to increase the speed by almost 500%, probably by changing the technology, so I am more than looking forward to it.
The support team is responsive to requests and their annual support fees are reasonable. Honestly, we don't have to contact them much. Updates happen automatically and the platform is very solid and does not require a lot of support. Documentation is good and the platform is easy to learn.
Support are genuinely helpful and really nice to deal with. I had a bug on my workspace that I’d been experiencing for a while. They looked into it for me and asked some questions. Once they found the issue and resolved it, they even filmed a video detailing how they’d fixed it. That level of support is fantastic.
There are multiple guides on literally all of the functions you can find within the system, therefore it's easy to learn anything you'd really like to use, starting from project and people management, down to Gantts, mind maps, time tracking, inviting Clients as guests to work with you on the projects and so much more.
Start small. Don’t try to build the most elaborate plans first. Resist the urge to get into Gantt charts if no one is used to them. Just get work written, add dates and assignees, and start getting used to it. If you did not use a work management tool before, you need to be gracious with yourself about the fact that you likely do not have the muscle memory for working this way yet. But you will get there.
And leverage people who know it if possible. Look for ClickUp experts and vendors. They can really supercharge your effectiveness at building the tool out and speed up the process.
Since we moved from fixed capacity project to T&M we need some tool who support our billing & invoicing. HP ALM did not provide good support for invoicing so we moved out from HP ALM to ActiveCollab. The features like Timer, reminders are not available in other project management tools like JIRA, Rally & ALM making AC the first choice since we have strict SLA's & AC helps in meeting that.
Every other tool I have used has been for organizing tasks and work only. There were some of the other features, but none of them had the ability to do everything we need to manage a project from start to finish
Scaling with ClickUp is superb. If you create a workflow best suited for your organization then it's all about creating new accounts and teaching the new employees the workflow you're using. It's that simple. There is no black magic when it comes to Clickup.
A central communication portal is used to keep all members of the team informed as to the status of specific projects. All staff have access to read past discussions to enable contribution to the current discussion.
We have found it difficult to get our clients to adopt usage of ActiveCollab for communication on a reliable basis.
The cost per person is high when using it as a communication center.
