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.
Wunderlist is a fantastic task management system, not the best project management system. For a long time, I tried to use Wunderlist to plan large events with multiple users and it wasn't as effective. But, once we simplified our desired outcome to accomplishing tasks that repeat or are unique to a given work-week, we had much more success. Now my assistant can manage her weekly tasks and give feedback through this app. I can also add tasks, assign them and see what is being accomplished
Smart due dates are the greatest thing about Wunderlist. I can tell it to "print past due reports on Monday" and then set that up as a repeating event.
It's clutter free. When I'm creating or assigning tasks I like to have a distraction free area to think, and the simplicity of Wunderlist gives me that.
The fact that I can look at it on my phone, on the web, and on my PC and it always looks the same is great. I can always tell what I'm doing b/c of their consistent design choices.
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
Sub-tasks should have their own separate due dates
The main list needs some more intuitive tools to sort the list in any way I choose
Hovering over links should show a description of how to use it. For example, it would have been nice to know right away that double-clicking on a task is the way to open the details list.
The actual user interface and the way to navigate around the app is very intuitive and easy to learn/use which would make me give it a high ranking, but the syncing issues drop down my rating because there are times where you add an item to the list and then it just disappears. Then when you add it again the sync will happen and now you have duplicates. The other negative with the usability is adding extra information to an item, such as files or comments or assignments. You can do it but it's difficult to tell which items have this information from the main screen. You have to click on them individually.
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.
I have not had an issue where I needed to reach out to Wunderlist, but I know their contact and online chat is easy to access and feel confident that they would be helpful. My only worry is Wunderlist is becoming Microsoft to-do in May 2020, and I believe the app will become worse after that.
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.
It's a small tool compared to bigger project management software, but we found that they work perfectly together. It helps you declutter the larger PM tools, keep your smaller tasks in-line and make sure they get completed. When you're working in a creative agency, ideas and tasks are flying around, so having a tool like this that keeps you accountable and reminds you of your tasks is a must!
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.
We reduced the number of meetings of teams and companies by 5 times because now all participants have access to comments and know at what stage the project is located.
Simple to use common to-do lists allow you to manage the projects of the group and give all its participants a clear idea of who is responsible for each task. There is no need to waste time explaining the business processes and responsibilities of team members
Wunderlist for business stores all group correspondence together with tasks.
This is convenient for all participants and for management because sometimes important moments are lost in other messengers or chats. Now you can do everything in one application. The number of problems with this
