ActiveCollab vs. Planview PPM Pro

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

PPMPro is well suited for tracking new product introduction projects, as well as process changes. It serves to reliably track ongoing action items, issues, resource allocations for projects. Areas where PPMPro is less appropriate for use: Project to project dependencies, automating action item notifications on multiple platforms, integrations of PPMPro into other platforms PMO typically uses (like MS Projects, Teams, ppt, etc)

• 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

• New request workflow/kanban board helps visualize where new requests are in the process of the quote to cash/request to completion
• The time tracking tool is tied directly to project tasks for seamless integration of time tracking, estimates, and actuals
• The reporting capabilities and ease of use has allowed us visibility to data that we never had before
• The tool is easily configurable by Administrators. We can add fields, change reports, add new dashboards within hours vs. days of trying to track things manually

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 base API is not a REST based interface and is difficult to use for integration with other systems in the enterprise.
• The UI for the maintenance of the task schedule for projects can be a bit cumbersome , although the spreadsheet style editor helps somewhat. The Gantt view is not interactive.
• The workflow engine is designed only for initial project intake, and does not allow for an integration of the work flow with the project from start to end, so it can't be used for routing artifacts like change requests, ancillary project approvals, etc.

Incentivized

As I previously stated I am no longer in the role where I acted as Innotas admin, but because our license has been twice renewed since initial deployment and since I am in the business and have used the IT request process I created and have not heard anything to the contrary

PPM Pro has very effective process capabilities around Project, Demand, and Resource Management as well as Reporting/Dashboards. Very stable platform, never any downtime. We now also have PPM Pro Sandbox which we have leveraged for any new major developments such as Request Management.

Incentivized

Never any availability issues or outages. The few process issues we have ever encountered were addressed and resolved quickly.

Incentivized

No issues with overall response time and performance. There have been some occasions where a Report could take few minutes to render but this is vary rare. No integration issues...

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

Their ability to assist and answer questions when needed is incredible. They create innovative ways to share information and help customers trouble shoot. I didn't give it a ten because I believe they could do a better job of personally reaching out to customers and providing improvement guidance based on where the customer is at and their needs at the time

Tim Srjezter was an excellent trainer.

It's been since 2009. A lot has changed. We have not grown as much as we could have because of executive backing.

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

Microsoft Project does not integrate the data or provide meaningful dashboards. We needed a tool that could manage a portfolio of projects versus just a single project view. In addition we needed a tool to track financials and internal effort all integrated into one product. Planview PPM Pro addressed all of our needs

We have always used PPM Pro across multiple Business Units and Business Functions and have never encountered any scalability issues. PPM Pro offers flexibility in how the various Entities are configured across the Enterprise

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

• Planview PPM directs all the resources in the right channel, hence, credible performance.
• Planview PPM initiates proper time, and resource tracking and hence is friendly for company functions.
• Planview PPM is competent in managing diverse projects, and this offers highly sustainable business continuity.

Incentivized