ActiveCollab
Simple yet powerful productivity and collaboration workspace
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Nichole Elizabeth DeMerè (Eithiriel)

ActiveCollab - Project Management software for creative professionals

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Plan & organize your tasks and workflows, communicate & collaborate with your teams and clients, track progress & measure the output across all projects, and get paid for your work with the built-in invoicing system.

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Ilija Studen
Maker
Hi Hunters! First off, I’d like to thank @nikkielizdemere for hunting us! :) I’m @istdn, the co-founder (along with @godza) of ActiveCollab - a Project Management Software that gives you complete control over your work. For those of you that don’t know, it’s been over a decade since the first version of ActiveCollab came out. Since then, the app has gone through many iterations and gotten numerous new features and capabilities. New ActiveCollab has been a product of continuous improvement over the past years, and all of the new features and upgrades are the result of long-term iteration, careful planning, and constant communication with our customers. Now you can improve the way you work better than ever: 1. Plan & Organize - task lists, kanban board & timeline view with task dependencies and automatic rescheduling, recurring tasks, batch editing, and much more. 2. Communicate & Collaborate - real-time communication, improved feedback, file sharing, discussions and notes for every project. 3. Track & Measure - track time on all your tasks across all projects and use these time records to improve your estimates and don’t let your hours go to waste. 4. Get Paid - Take good care of your budgets and create invoices from time records directly in ActiveCollab. We wanted to take this opportunity and give all of you a chance to test the newest iteration of ActiveCollab. Our free 14-day trial will hopefully give you enough time to get familiar with the new design and features, and complete an actual project or two. We’d love to hear all about it, our team will be available for all your questions during the next couple of days. :) Enjoy! https://activecollab.com/product...
Joseph Krahn
@nikkielizdemere @istdn @godza Yet uploads still fails daily! Can’t even upload a file most days. Not to mention download them. This is great when clients are waiting on you.
Jovana Subić
Maker
@nikkielizdemere @istdn @godza @shilorune Hi Joseph! Working with files is a must and it has to go smoothly! Our warehouse did have a few downtimes back in the summer of 2018, but everything is green on our end since then. We haven't had any complaints about upload and download from your account, but I'll forward your feedback to our Customer Care Team so they can check the status.
Joseph Krahn
@mokyalletun I'm not sure what you consider a few, but we experienced downtime for weeks back in the Summer. This is much more than a few. Over the last week, I have confirmed team members who were unable to upload to AC, and clearly documented this noting, "had to upload on drive, ac uploads not working again..." Regarding my account and lack of communication with your Support - I stopped reaching out, because it's not worth my time. Your support continues to misunderstand us over and over. I have even gone as far as tracking bugs on your behalf, recording videos, and following up. All of these efforts I did on my own time have proven to be a complete waste of my time. Lastly, some guy from Ukraine called us "to make a deal." Yet he never followed up, and we emailed him directly with no resolutions many times.
Lee Fuhr
@mokyalletun @shilorune Yup, we had this too. My PM also resorted to uploading to Drive and attaching that way. And I agree about support… they're pretty nice and stuff, but they don't seem deeply informed about the product, there's a language barrier, and I feel like a burden to them (I too have tracked bugs, followed up, send screen recordings, etc.) The standard response is something like "Is that a feature request?" to which I'll say "Uh, I guess so?", and they'll respond with something like "Okay! I'll pass that on to the UI team to discuss."… and that's that. Other PM platforms track that kind of thing in a shareable, trackable, public-facing way so that I know I'll get updates on the issues that interest me.
Jovana Subić
Maker
@lee_fuhr Hi Lee! We'd be happy to investigate your upload&download options if you're still having issues with them. Indeed, there are different ways of communicating feature requests and roadmaps on the market. We defined ours and, for now, there are no plans for changing it. When it comes to our support, we completely reorganized the team and had numerous thumb-ups for troubleshooting, even in Russian and German. We strive for progress and further improvements are coming!
Radomir Basta

AC is on the project management market for a long time, and their team has tremendous experience in building and improving project management tool.

Pros:

Sleek new look, old good features.

Cons:

Now when aesthetics are improved, all is peachy :)

Bojan Rendulic
Maker
@gashomor Thank you! 🤘
Ivan Dima Dimitrijevic

AC keep project organized with clear focus on the end goal. Also it provides a clear picture of our work for a client at any point. Learning curve is less steep and non-technical personal can jump in to it with ease.

Pros:

Evolution in the right direction of already useful everyday tool

Cons:

Finding a fine balance between feature packed and seamless easy experience is not easy.

Bojan Rendulic
Maker
Thanks Ivan! 🙌
Ognjen Vukovic

Clean and functional tool, that is pretty mature, with a great team behind it. :)

Pros:

The interface is great, easy to use, enables you to spend more time working on stuff that really matters instead of roaming the tool.

Cons:

Haven't noticed any bigger issues with the tool.

Bojan Rendulic
Maker
@vforvukovic thanks! glad you're liking it! 👊
Nichole Elizabeth DeMerè (Eithiriel)
Hunter
ActiveCollab has been on the market for more than a decade, but this year’s update brings something completely new to the table. A complete visual makeover and loads of new features make it easier than ever to organize all your projects and workflows. Not only that, it’s now easier than ever to establish a process that works well for you and your team, so you always know where to start and what you and your team need to do next.
Bojan Rendulic
Maker
@nikkielizdemere thanks for hunting us!
Bryan Miller

Definitely a great product for marketing agencies. I'm only hoping they continue to move the product in the right direction!

Pros:

Loads of new features this past year Polished new interface with a great look & feel Very affordable compared to other PM apps

Cons:

Definitely looking forward to a versioning feature, but very happy overall.

Bojan Rendulic
Maker
Thanks, @bryan_miller2 Keep sending us your feedback 😃
Greg Stone
Looks sleek! But how does this compare to Asana? What would be your biggest selling point to someone like to migrate over? In the end, your pricing structure is steeper for small teams, and I'm not sure what new benefits I would actually get. Just curious...
Bojan Rendulic
Maker
@gregstone14 Those are great questions, thank you! The whole project management market is quite saturated, there are a lot of excellent tools out there. Asana is for sure one them. With ActiveCollab we are trying to be more than “just another project management tool”. We are solving problems like Project Budgeting and tracking, Time & Expense tracking and Invoicing. The pricing structure is a steeper, you are right. We are trying to be more cost effective for paid plans (we are cheaper 20-30% for paid plans), but currently, we don’t have a free plan. At this moment we are collecting feedback from the customer, what feature set would be best in free plans? One person plan? Limitation in number of Projects? Something else 🤔
Greg Stone
@bojan_rendulic thanks for your reply. I own a very successful freelancing biz, and so I work solo. But I work on extensive enough projects to bring my clients in to view progress on tasks, etc. Probably one of the biggest obstacles that freelancers like myself have with most project management tools, even Asana, is they are built for almost exclusively for teams with no options for team to client relationships. So kind of always left to jerry-rigging the system somehow.😆 All that being said, I'm not looking for something free. Just something that works for a freelancer biz structure. I'm willing to pay. A one person plan would be great without having to pay a steep price for a client with 10 extra people they want involved that I have to buy seats for. Just thoughts. Thanks!
Bojan Rendulic
Maker
@gregstone14 I feel your pain 😑 You have to keep your clients close, but not to let them run your projects. In ActiveCollab we take client work very seriously https://activecollab.com/client-... There are two roles: Clients and Clients+. What is important we do not charge for Client role (Only for Client+), you can invite as many clients as you need. In Client+ role, clients are even able to create and assign tasks, and you’ll be able to assign tasks to them.
Greg Stone
@bojan_rendulic wow, I missed this somehow. Thanks for sharing. I will be looking into this.
Rich Peterson
@bojan_rendulic @gregstone14 Nailing the team > client relationships will be key going forward as more people push for automated client servicing solutions. When I was doing research for Software For Projects I found some software that was easy enough for client relationships and also some portal solutions. DM me for details.
Svetozar Krunic

In short, ActiveCollab incorporates project management, time tracking, and invoicing into a comprehensive Project Management Software.

Pros:

Order tasks into lists, granulate them with subtasks and organize your flow with task dependencies.

Cons:

Didn't find any cons for now.

Mladen Lukić

Overall, a quality product with great support.

Pros:

New design is awesome, fixed up a lot of little issues that were sometimes driving me crazy. :) Task dependencies are a life saver!

Cons:

Reports do need a bit of love.

Bojan Rendulic
Maker
@mladen_lukic thanks for your feedback! We are polishing our report section right now, new stuff coming soon.
Rachel McPherson

Definitely a good investment and that hasn't changed for little under 2 years now.

Pros:

Love what they did in the visual department since it was already a well rounded app.

Cons:

Would love it if it was a bit more white-label-friendly, otherwise there are no major issues.

Captain Suleiman

I purchased the self-hosted version and have used it for the last year and a half.

Pros:

Almost everything I need in one place The new design looks nice Everything just works

Cons:

Self-hosted & upgrades expensive Only 1 year of service & upgrades with the self-hosted purchase The mobile app is terrible

Joko Frank Octo
Agreed with the Self Hosted is very expensive
Joseph Krahn

Avoid ActiveCollab as if your life depends on it.

Pros:

None

Cons:

- Performance is VERY unreliable - Search suck - Invoicing & estimates suck - Support is terrible - Complicated

Uroš Zorić

I've been using ActiveCollab for quite some time now, and it really helps me organize my work and projects. I love the fact that I don't need almost any other tool to run the daily stuff, since everything can be done through AC, from the beginning to the end of the project.

Pros:

Easy to use, great for working with others. Well-rounded for planning projects, delivering them and invoicing clients.

Cons:

Mobile app is very useful but needs some love

Nemanja Markicevic

I would like to give praise to their support team, they have been very use-full and quick to response in every situation.

Pros:

Great app, using it daily and loving it. It is easy to get used to, and easy to use, great design and great for creating/sending reports.

Cons:

MacOS timer app can be a bit buggy, as the active collab app but web app seems to work great.

Abhiroop CVK
Love the video, how did y'all go about making it!
Bojan Rendulic
Maker
@abhiroop_cvk Thank you, I'm glad you like it! :-) Everything in that video is designed from scratch by @thizizraz and our in-house design team
Sandro Meda

I use this software for 5 years. Every client employee/subcontractor I worked with was very excited and jobs are really fast done with it.

Pros:

Selfhosted Elegant and easy to use Everything for project management under one hub Perfect ACL - Client and subcontractors management

Cons:

Selfhosted version is a little bit expensive No whitelable on selfhostet version No external extensions

Marie Malikova
Easy to use and featured service. To be completely satisfied I recommend everyone to use it with TMetric time tracker. TMetric has a convenient integration with ActiveCollab (works just in browser as an extension), so you won't have problems with customization, just start track time inside ActiveCollab.
soylakate
@yulia_moskaliuk Agreed! Both apps are good investment.
Ali Usman
This is fantastic :)
Tim Doyle

Give it a whirl - it has changed the way we do business.

Pros:

Easiest PM software we've ever used.

Cons:

The new design makes up for the previous challenges.

owlookit.com

Very happy overall.

Pros:

- easy to use, well-suited for planning, track progress and invoicing - a couple of new features and polished interface updated this year

Cons:

- mobile app should be enhanced much - MacOS timer is buggy - integration with versioning systems (GitLab) will be great