ActiveCollab vs. InvoiceBerry

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.

Incentivized

InvoiceBerry helps in invoicing from individual resource billing to project and program level billing. Best fit for most billing and invoicing scenarios from small to enterprise businesses.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Invoicing
• Accounts Receivable
• Bookkeeping
• Credit Card Processing

Incentivized

• 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

• The support is often long to get.
• Reporting could be better and more sophisticated but the software is very cheap so it is probably normal.
• Some options could be added to the very basic design that we get.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I have not used support too often but when I did, it was a big long to get the support I needed. But this is probably related to the cost we pay in general for the tool, it is a way of maintaining a very low cost by having fewer people to provide support. But the tool is so simple that we don't really have much support anyway. For our business, the cost is the first criteria so it is ok if support is not excellent.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It is much cheaper and InvoiceBerry is for very very small businesses. QuickBooks is simple but they keep upgrading their software now it is nice but the features can be challenging to learn and use so again, once the business o the size of the company gets bigger, QuickBooks might definitely be a better fit but as a small firm, Invoice Berry is perfect. The cost is a huge component for us so we liked it better at the moment.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Positive impact on the business through easy and seamless accounting processes.
• Ensured my business financial reports are accurate and up to date.
• Ensures I can create invoices with ease.

Incentivized