ActiveCollab Reviews & Insights

Score7.5 out of 10

36 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for ActiveCollab are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Effective Billing and Invoice Feature: Many users have found ActiveCollab's billing and invoice feature to be highly effective for time and materials teams. They mentioned that the current version, ActiveCollab version 5, allows for direct time tracking to tasks using the Timer app, making it convenient to create invoices based on the time entries.

Useful File Sharing Capability: The file sharing feature of ActiveCollab was highlighted as very useful for distributed teams. Users can easily share files and screenshots, improving collaboration and communication.

Easy-to-Use Interface: ActiveCollab is often described as easy to use by many users. With just a few clicks required to create a new project, they appreciate the well-laid-out dashboard and options, which are easy to navigate.

Reviews

13 Reviews

A lot to be improved but better than nothing

Rating: 1 out of 10

June 29, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our team attempts to use ActiveCollab to keep track of tasks allocated/in progress/delivered across a number of project types and clients - as the workload/scheduling function, in my opinion, is impractical and has a number of issues preventing its usefulness, we primarily use ActiveCollab as a store of task briefs and a place to communicate about tasks and share related files that is simpler to relocate things in than email threads/slack threads.

Pros

Notifications when people comment on tasks
Ability to upload files to tasks
Can assign tags to tasks in order to filter
Can manually enter time off so that team recieves OOO updates

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have a very tight budget and cannot afford a better tool, I feel having this is better than nothing.

Verified User

Manager in Marketing (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Works great for our sprint/scrum tasks, just be aware of limitations and avoid the mobile app

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

August 1, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ActiveCollab allows us to manage each of our sprints (which last two weeks) and our tasks within those sprints. Tasks are assigned accordingly, and we can track our time as well as the progress of each task and any impediments if necessary. We can also see tasks that other people are working on and add time to those (or view the status) if needed. We can categorize tasks where appropriate and get an idea of how long future tasks in that type of category will take.

Pros

Track time for projects
See which tasks are easily assigned
Move tasks over from one project to another
Add notes for a particular project that carry over
Categorize tasks appropriately

Cons

Does not maintain default categories for tasks
Makes information difficult to share with others not on AC
Relies on other people to track their time correctly in categories for estimates
Mobile app is very hard to use and not user-friendly if you are working with multiple projects

Likelihood to Recommend

ActiveCollab is great for managing all scrum/sprint tasks. We organize our sprints into projects and name them with the week and the sprint the project will cover. It can get cumbersome to have all the sprints, but we generally only focus on the current or previous sprint, so we don't need to categorize the others. We also keep a backlog of tasks that are not in a sprint. ActiveCollab allows you to move tasks in and out, so this backlog has been useful. If you have a lot of projects you are juggling at once, this may be a more difficult interface to use, or you'd have to categorize things very well in order to find them. ActiveCollab works great on a desktop, which is how I primarily use it. However, I found the mobile app frustrating and not user-intuitive. I try to avoid using the mobile app whenever possible and just enter my time via the desktop.

Verified User

Employee (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Great option for small businesses

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

November 20, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ActiveCollab is used by the client services department for communication with clients regarding their projects. Having a centralized platform for reviews allows all parties to be included in discussions and questions about their services.

Pros

Easily add clients as guests and control the amount of access.
Clients can start discussions and respond to existing discussions via email.
Discussions have good formatting options to allow for improved readability.

Cons

Individual comments cannot be linked to. This makes it more difficult to reference a comment or question.
Unnecessary features cannot be turned off. Since we use it primarily for communication, it would be ideal to turn off tasks etc. that are not needed or be able to move discussions as the first screen.
There isn't an easy way to set up different projects under the same client.

Likelihood to Recommend

ActiveCollab is more suited for people looking for project management software since the tasks and project management tools are the primary focus. The time tracking and invoicing components are valuable for this. It is less useful as a communication portal as the project management features actually get in the way and hamper the usability.

Nancy Ross

Director in Marketing at ROMI Lab (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Strong project management tool that provides a great set of features

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

November 7, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ActiveCollab is being used in our company as a project management tool. We utilize it for our traditional and digital services. For our digital services, we use it to manage agile workflows along with timeline and task management. It's used by our entire organization and feeds our billing department as well.

Pros

Simple interface.
Flexible setup of tags and categories.
Handles agile and waterfall type workflows well.

Cons

Could use more flexibility in setting up categories.
It would be nice to have multiple Kanban boards inside a project.
The search functionality could be improved.

Likelihood to Recommend

ActiveCollab is well suited for small to medium-sized organizations that want strong project management tools at an affordable cost. It's nice that we can use the self-hosted version to help control costs and utilize the current hosting infrastructure. It's not as appropriate for very large organizations or organizations requiring many different task categories.

Mike Muller

Executive Vice President in Corporate at Stevens Advertising (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

ActiveCollab or Actively looking for another solution?

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

September 25, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our support team utilizes ActiveCollab to manage projects that are specific to their department. Overall, it's a fine enough system, but there are some quirks and challenges that need to be addressed before the system can be utilized fluently. We're still working through these challenges, but the system seems to be working as expected.

Pros

Simple project management
Organized task lists
Solid user management tools

Cons

Uninspired design
Very basic text editing features, minimal support for screenshots (you get 1 per task/message update)

Likelihood to Recommend

This is a system built by engineers for engineer-minded people. Nothing fancy, but it does do exactly what you expect it to.

Joshua VanMeter

Digital Marketing Director in Marketing at Max Effect Marketing (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

ActiveCollab has a simple interface and helps manage tasks easily, though design and some finctionality could be improved

Rating: 7 out of 10

April 20, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ActiveCollab is used across the whole organization to manage tasks of design, development, and marketing.

Pros

Activity log to see the general picture.
Ability to manage different projects.
Daily email report on things discussed the previous day.

Cons

Subtasks cannot be managed as full tasks, with comments.
No ability to make several assignees.

Likelihood to Recommend

When you manage a project or a task it is convenient to assign it to the appropriate colleague and track its status. ActiveCollab's user interface and design are a bit unusual after using Wrike for several years.

Julia Romanchenko

Digital Marketing in Marketing at Giveaway Club (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

ActiveCollab - Powerful, Simple & Reliable!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

December 5, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ActiveCollab is used at my company as the main ticketing system. We rely on ActiveCollab for:

Tracking internal tasks
Projecting progress
Client requests
Internal and external communications

It helps to keep on top of things and ensure nothing slips through the cracks.

Pros

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.

Cons

Search functionality - The search functionality is not so promising and I'm unable to find the tasks/items that I need even though I use the keywords that are in the ticket/comments -- Definitely something that needs to be improved.
No snooze functionality for tasks - If you work on multiple projects and deal with large number of tasks/tickets then things can get messy in your "workspace." An easy feature that can resolve this is to add snooze functionality. That way users can snooze tasks and optimize their workspace until when they really need to work on the task.
No ability to color code tasks - I'm a visual person and deal with a large number of tasks on ActiveCollab. Seeing my huge pile of tasks in the same color makes me lose track of things and slows me down. It would be very helpful for me if task color coding was added to Active Collab -- I'm sure there are others out there who benefit from this feature, too!

Likelihood to Recommend

Overall, ActiveCollab is a great project management tool. If you're looking for a platform for your team to track their tasks, communicate with one another, share files, etc., then ActiveCollab is the exact right choice. It even allows you to invite external users to collaborate with (such as clients) and lets you set up custom visibility for them.

Ali Zakeri

Data Analyst | SEO Specialist in Marketing at Xivic, Inc. (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

We tried everything and Active Collab is above all.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

November 18, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ActiveCollab helps us run the day to day operations for our company and our clients. Our whole team uses ActiveCollab in order to keep everything moving in the right direction. It helps us keep track of everything we do and where any project as at in its timeline.

Pros

They give you the source code to use on your own server.
It is easy to sort clients and campaigns.
The email notifications work perfectly when tagging and talking to people. They allow you to subscribe to tasks as well to keep in the loop on what is going on.

Cons

They don' do Gantt charts well
Integrations aren't awesome yet
They don't have task dependencies

Likelihood to Recommend

We have a marketing company. If you are an agency of any size and work with clients, it's easy to give your clients full access to whatever you want them to see. We allow our clients to see how their projects/tasks are going, but there is even a hidden from clients button on any task that allows you to give full visibility into any task for any and all clients.

Chris Lesner

Founder & CEO in Marketing at Project World Impact (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

Wonderful solution when managing projects and personnel. Recommendable.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

August 10, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ActiveCollab is used throughout the company to manage projects and manage company resources. Each idea, plan, execution, project, management, acquisition, new tool. They discuss, talk, repair ActiveCollab.

It is the ideal platform for the current IT industry, it gives us a great comfort to establish meetings, dictate tasks and supervise the activities delegated to the assigned team, according to the project.

Pros

Very nice interface for all user roles in the system.
Effective notification of pending tasks and optimal management of the equipment.
Organized work flow, productive tasks and correct execution.
Creation of filters to better locate artifacts for daily use.

Cons

It is confusing when a review is made, before buying the product.
It lacks animation and pleasant forms for the user.
Does not allow effective communication when activities are reported. Since it does not provide a direct message chat.
The reports that are generated are basic, they do not have personalization characteristics.

Likelihood to Recommend

Intuitive and flexible to use all kinds of extension components. Simple and pleasant, it has amazing features and is highly secure.
When they lack animation and explosiveness at the user level, it expires due to the rich user experiences offered by today's website.
ActiveCollab is a safe investment when talking about dynamics and production in projects, also in the management of the fair of the working group.

Daniel Pacheco

Consultor ADF in Information Technology at Innova4J (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

ActiveCollab a boon for T&M projects

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

March 16, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

For two teams Active Collab is being used in my organization as project management tool after our customer decided to move to agile scrum framework from waterfall. Earlier these teams were using HP ALM.

Since project moved from fixed capacity to T&M, Active Collab was very helpful since its billing & invoice features allows you generate the invoices easily.

Here cost can be easily assigned to each team member, Team members can start the timer after they start their work, then allows you to export the time records of team members making it easy to complete the billing.

It tells us precisely how much budget you've spent, who is working on what with how much capacity available and how deadlines and responsibilities overlap across multiple projects.

Thus AC served as excellent tool providing a great snapshot of team work at any given point to customer.

Pros

Its billing & invoice feature worked pretty well for T&M teams. ActiveCollab version 5, the current version, allows you to directly track time to tasks using the Timer app and later create invoices based on those time entries. Their statuses will change through phases, as you are pending payment, or after they are set as paid.
Here cost can be easily assigned to each team member, Team members can start the timer after they start their work, then allows you to export the time records of team members making it easy to complete the billing.
File sharing feature is very useful for distributed teams as we can we can easily share files, screenshots.
Also ActiveCollab ability to connect to Google docs, attach images and link to web pages make it unique from other project management tools.
AC easily allows you to track your daily tasks & serves reminder if miss on the targets defined by giving daily / weekly reminders regarding tasks and any that have gone over due dates.
ActiveCollab is quite easy to use. With just a few clicks, you can create a new project.
The dashboard and options are easy to see and it is well laid out.
Here user have an opportunity to select the number of emails they receive from ActiveCollab and for some email providers, such as Gmail grouping is enabled. So rather than getting multiple mails, it send you a summary of all the daily notifications in one mail.
It allows users to upload several files at once on task comments, and if you are set with the owner role, or have the member role but are a project leader, you have a Batch Edit option available on project level. This allows you to edit multiple tasks at once and change all the details on them, such as assignee, due dates, labels, importance, and more.

Cons

It does not provide support to scaled agile frameworks like SAfe which is there for Rally & Agilecraft.

Likelihood to Recommend

Scenarios where ActiveCollab works well
1) ActiveCollab works well for small teams specifically T&M teams.Its invoicing feature is unique & can make your life easy.
2) It is very easy to use & posses good range of filters like on the task list, we can drag/drop tasks, Filter by assignee's, tasks lists, due dates, or completed tasks.
3) It has some simple but awesome features like when you're in the middle of writing something i.e a comment on story and get interrupted, it retains what you wrote.
4) It allows you to tag team members in threads of comments to grab their attention, its really needed when teams are distributed. Thus helping team members to collaborate easily & stay on same page.
5) It integrates pretty well with other web apps like quickbooks , Slack, Trello, HubSpot, Zapier etc

Scenarios where ActiveCollab did not work well
1) Tasks can not have multiple assignee's here so if two members are working on same task it did not allow you to reflect that.
2) Sorting capability is not their under invoicing
3) It did not work well for larger teams
4) Search option is not very detailed & you may end up wasting lot of time searching one particular bug or issue.

Sourav Singla ,Safe Agilist, CSP, ICP-ACC, CSM, CSPO, SSM, LSSG

Enterprise Agile Coach in Information Technology at Tata Consultancy Services (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

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ActiveCollab a boon for T&M projects

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

March 16, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Since project moved from fixed capacity to T&M, Active Collab was very helpful since its billing & invoice features allows you generate the invoices easily.

It tells us precisely how much budget you've spent, who is working on what with how much capacity available and how deadlines and responsibilities overlap across multiple projects.

Thus AC served as excellent tool providing a great snapshot of team work at any given point to customer.

Pros

Its billing & invoice feature worked pretty well for T&M teams. ActiveCollab version 5, the current version, allows you to directly track time to tasks using the Timer app and later create invoices based on those time entries. Their statuses will change through phases, as you are pending payment, or after they are set as paid.
Here cost can be easily assigned to each team member, Team members can start the timer after they start their work, then allows you to export the time records of team members making it easy to complete the billing.
File sharing feature is very useful for distributed teams as we can we can easily share files, screenshots.
Also ActiveCollab ability to connect to Google docs, attach images and link to web pages make it unique from other project management tools.
AC easily allows you to track your daily tasks & serves reminder if miss on the targets defined by giving daily / weekly reminders regarding tasks and any that have gone over due dates.
ActiveCollab is quite easy to use. With just a few clicks, you can create a new project.
The dashboard and options are easy to see and it is well laid out.
Here user have an opportunity to select the number of emails they receive from ActiveCollab and for some email providers, such as Gmail grouping is enabled. So rather than getting multiple mails, it send you a summary of all the daily notifications in one mail.
It allows users to upload several files at once on task comments, and if you are set with the owner role, or have the member role but are a project leader, you have a Batch Edit option available on project level. This allows you to edit multiple tasks at once and change all the details on them, such as assignee, due dates, labels, importance, and more.

Cons

It does not provide support to scaled agile frameworks like SAfe which is there for Rally & Agilecraft.

Likelihood to Recommend

Sourav Singla ,Safe Agilist, CSP, ICP-ACC, CSM, CSPO, SSM, LSSG

Enterprise Agile Coach in Information Technology at Tata Consultancy Services (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile