ActiveCollab vs. Invoice Ninja

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
ActiveCollab
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
Active Collab is a project management solution built around features such as task management, collaboration, time tracking, and invoicing.
$8
per member/per month
Invoice Ninja
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Invoice Ninja is a source-code available suite of apps focusing on SMB invoicing & payments, from the small company of the same name. The service boasts users among 200,000+ businesses, who use Invoice Ninja to invoice clients, track payments, expenses, and time billable tasks.
$0
Invoicing, Quotes, Expenses, Time-Tracking built with Laravel & Flutter
Pricing
ActiveCollabInvoice Ninja
Editions & Modules
ActiveCollab Project Management
$8
per member/per month
Self-Hosted Plan
$999.00
license
Invoice Ninja - Self-hosted
$0
Invoicing, Quotes, Expenses, Time-Tracking built with Laravel & Flutter
Forever Free
$0
Unlimited Invoices & Quotes for 20 clients
Ninja Pro Plan
$10
per month
Enterprise Plan
$14
per month 1-2 users
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ActiveCollabInvoice Ninja
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup Fee$6.25 per member, per month, annual billingNo setup fee
Additional DetailsDiscounts available for annual pricing. Higher volume plans available for an enterprise subscription.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
ActiveCollabInvoice Ninja
Features
ActiveCollabInvoice Ninja
Project Management
Comparison of Project Management features of Product A and Product B
ActiveCollab
3.6
Ratings
72% below category average
Invoice Ninja
-
Ratings
Task Management5.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Resource Management1.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Gantt Charts3.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Scheduling1.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow Automation7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Team Collaboration6.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Support for Agile Methodology7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Support for Waterfall Methodology7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Document Management3.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Email integration4.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile Access1.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Timesheet Tracking2.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Change request and Case Management1.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Budget and Expense Management2.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Professional Services Automation
Comparison of Professional Services Automation features of Product A and Product B
ActiveCollab
5.7
Ratings
28% below category average
Invoice Ninja
-
Ratings
Quotes/estimates6.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Invoicing6.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Project & financial reporting1.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with accounting software7.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
ActiveCollabInvoice Ninja
Small Businesses
Stackby
Stackby
Score 9.0 out of 10
Method:CRM
Method:CRM
Score 8.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
InEight
InEight
Score 8.3 out of 10
TimeCamp
TimeCamp
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprises
InEight
InEight
Score 8.3 out of 10
TimeCamp
TimeCamp
Score 8.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
ActiveCollabInvoice Ninja
Likelihood to Recommend
1.6
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
ActiveCollabInvoice Ninja
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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I think Invoice Ninja is well-suited for small businesses or freelancers with this software you can track your expenses bill and get paid using a friendly user interface, it is easy to set and configure. They have a paid version but with the open-source self-hosted version it's free and this is a great advantage over other similar softwares.
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Pros
  • Project Management - Makes it very efficient to manage projects using Gantt Charts, daily email reports and custom reports!
  • Collaboration - Allows to collaborate with team members, tag them in tasks, send files/attachments.
  • Task delegation - With just 2 clicks you can delegate tasks to other team members/users.
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  • Invoicing
  • Billing
  • Track expenses
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Cons
  • 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
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  • Should be able to produce a SAF-T file
  • Better reports
  • More invoice templates
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Support Rating
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.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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.
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I changed from Fresh Books to Invoice Ninja because Invoice Ninja while being free and open source still offers all the Fresh Books features. Also, we were able to change the estimate module to work exactly as we needed and now it allows us to do consignations to our clients that after we can convert to invoices.
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Return on Investment
  • 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.
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  • Save me 200 euros per year on a invoice system
  • Save me time by automatically send late payment reminder
  • Saves me time wend I have to do my tax declaration
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ScreenShots

ActiveCollab Screenshots

Screenshot of the dashboard with an overview of projects.Screenshot of multiple task views currently showing a Kanban view of the tasklists and tasks.Screenshot of Overview of all recent activity.Screenshot of Calendar view with task dependencies.Screenshot of Permission settings (owner, member, client, client+).Screenshot of List of available Add-ons.