ActiveCollab vs. Todoist

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

[Todoist: To-Do List & Task Manager is] fantastic for small teams or for personal use. Really simple and easy to use so requires very little in the way of onboarding and gets people engaged quickly in the tasks they need to complete. May not be perfect where more complex usage is required but integrates with other tools so time tracking and other add ons are more than possible through other tools.

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

• Being able to manage tasks across multiple devices and platforms is absolutely critical to me. If I am out of the office, the tasks will be on my phone. But they are also readily accessible on the web, on my desktop, and on my iPad.
• There are several ways to organize your tasks... via Projects, Labels, Boards, Lists, etc. that allow users to use Todoist to fit their productivity workflow. I use them all and I have been delighted to see how Todoist has continued to improve and advance the Todoist application over the years.
• I rely extensively on recurring tasks which allow me to never forget a birthday, monthly submission, chore at home, etc. Todoist offers many ways to manage recurring tasks, such as, "every week", "every April 8", "every fourth Thursday in November", etc.

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

• Task Dependencies - Particularly for business projects, I'd love if we could make one team member's task dependent on another's where we could say "do this task 3 days after another one is complete"
• No Two Factor Authentication - For me personally, I like to keep all my passwords secure and backed up by two-factor authentication. Just wish this was something Todoist offered!
• Adding Start Date & End Date - Sometimes I set an end date farther in the future, but I'm not alerted that I need to be working on it before then to achieve that due date. If I look at the "Next 7 Days" section, I can see upcoming tasks, but ideally, I'd love to be able to set a start date and an end date so it could appear in today's tasks without needing to be completed today.

Incentivized

Excellent features and concept, simple implementation, but the software is not very clear in training new users and communicating features. The occasional unexplained crash or freeze is not handled gracefully by the desktop software, requiring either the user or tech support to manually restart.

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've been able to find answers to any questions I have in the support documents. You can explore key features and view ideas and best practices for getting organized with Todoist. You can also fill out a support form to submit a request for customized help if you run into anything not covered in the support documents.

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

Todoist is more focused on its goal than Google Keeps and is far more intuitive to use. For example, with just a click we see immediately that Todoist provides a way to distill tasks so that we only see what's immediately pertinent to us, via the Filters (which can be customized and set to various priority levels). Also, Todoist's project board is something Google Keep doesn't even offer, it really can't even compete with Todoist simply because Todoist does so much more and was obviously designed with the business professional in mind.

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

• A good project management tool for daily completing/recycling my customers' project line items--time to value.
• Incomplete items stay on the list where I can see them and reschedule easily if needed--time to value.
• Built-in completion metrics for reviewing project completion success--time to value, and indirectly, customer satisfaction.

Incentivized