ActiveCollab vs. Rocketlane

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

There is project management tracking from the start till the end (onboarding till hypercare). The bifurcation of project stages and pre-built templates is good; you can assign client tasks. Less appropriate: Raising tickets for developers because there is no escalation management option. Let’s say the developer didn’t reply in 24 hours for a high-priority task; this should be automatically escalated to their senior.

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

• The project timelines and tasks feature is nice.
• Status updates can be published, which can be seen by external stakeholders/clients even though they are not on Rocketlane or they have not taken Rocketlane subscriptions.
• Timesheets can be easily tracked through which resource utilization can be planned.

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

• Project Opening time
• Automated time tracked should be there
• Every phase has a option to make a call and zoom so time tracked real time

Incentivized

It really helps to support us in supporting our customers.

Incentivized

Because of the impact, it has created in terms of saving resources and time by helping them with project-related timelines.

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

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

Ease of User, User Friendliness, Customer Onboarding, Task Management, Effective & Efficient communication, Project Management, E-mail reminders/notifications, Publishing status report, Overview of all projects, Templates, Resource management, Timesheet

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

• As an admin and end-user, Rocketlane has saved me at least four hours of work every week. Multiply that across the entire team, and we're saving two full days of work by removing all the manual tasks.

Incentivized