ActiveCollab vs. Worklair

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

Worklair substituted for us several other tools and now we have task boards, chats, Gantt chart, etc - all in one place which is super convenient and you don't have to switch between different tabs or windows, feel less overwhelmed and stay more focused. The only thing they don't have, but I heard they're planning it, is the integration with the Calendar and emails. For now I still have to check my calendar and emails separately. If it happens that they integrate it in Worklair so literally everything will be in one place - would be awesome.

• 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

• Project Management
• Team Planing
• Dashboard
• Gannt Chart
• Workload
• Task Board
• Budget Management
• Invoicing

• 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

• Since this product is quite new on the market, they are improving it constantly and sometimes small bugs happen. Their ream reacts very fast to the clients feedback.

As I mentioned earlier, despite of some small bugs sometimes and given the fact that the platform is relatively new on the market, their team is very responsive and passionate about their product, so they quickly react to feedback and provide improvements to the system.

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 team is very responsive.

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

We selected Worklair because of its integrity and because you don't have to use multiple tools simultaneously (e.g. chat and project management separately in different tools).

• 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

• Worklair substituted for other multiple tools we used (like Asana, Slack, etc), so it was worth switching to it and it was beneficial for us from day 1.