In case you personal or handle a small enterprise, you need venture administration software program that doesn’t punish you for wanting the entire options you want. ActiveCollab retains your month-to-month invoice low, even should you’re a small workforce that wishes superior instruments like built-in time monitoring, consumer administration, and job dependencies. Let’s dive into how nicely their high options carry out and the place ActiveCollab might stand to enhance.
ActiveCollab In comparison with the Greatest Challenge Administration Software program
We’ve written rather a lot about venture administration right here on Loopy Egg, together with our full put up reviewing the top options for project management software. From that article, we’ve pulled our three favorites—our Golden Eggs—that are stable, versatile options to ActiveCollab and different PM platforms.
Monday.com provides a variety of venture administration options, together with belongings you received’t discover elsewhere, like a sturdy, built-in CRM. Get began by establishing your free Monday account.
ClickUp allows you to set targets, chat along with your workforce internally, plan like an professional, and far more for much less cash than you may suppose. You may even start using ClickUp today on its free-forever plan.
Smartsheet’s flexibility and energy are its strongest belongings, and we wager you’ll love its functionality to automate duties and generate customized experiences. Try Smartsheet out on its beneficiant 30-day trial.
ActiveCollab: The Good and the Dangerous
Shopping for software program is tough, which is why we use this put up to interrupt down the important thing virtues and flaws of ActiveCollab as a venture administration resolution. Our objective is that, by the tip of this put up, you’ll have all of the info and particulars you want so your buying choice is easy and stress-free.
What ActiveCollab Is Good At
ActiveCollab delivers 20 commonplace options on each plan, so there isn’t a scarcity of advantages to be gleaned from this software program. Beneath, we break down the perfect options you’ll get from the software program and what present customers really feel are the core parts that stand out.
Simplified administration: In case you handle each day scrum conferences or sprints, ActiveCollab does a superb job serving to you manage and handle occasions, duties, and different venture objects abruptly. With listing, column, Gantt, and calendar views, you may visualize all these parts in whichever approach you want greatest. You may simply use any PM methodology.
Plus, you may duplicate whole job lists, full all open duties with one click on (as a substitute of one after the other), and even copy duties to a totally totally different venture, all of which provide help to template frequent endeavors and streamline venture setup and completion at scale.
Constructed-in time monitoring: Customers love that you just don’t should safe totally different software program to calculate billable time for tasks and observe time spent. ActiveCollab’s stopwatch function allows you to observe time with ease—precisely. Particular person duties and whole tasks are monitored, then neatly summarized in easy-to-read experiences.
As soon as ActiveCollab has a really feel for a way a lot time your workforce members spend on tasks and duties, you may evaluate the estimated time to completion versus precise time spent. Even higher, time administration by ActiveCollab additionally folds in payroll calculation for all of your workforce members with billable hours. You may simply invoice by the hour and let ActiveCollab do the mathematics. Calculate time as a workforce or individually by private timesheets.
Profitability forecasting: Understanding how a lot a venture will impression your backside line is among the differentiators between respectable and nice venture administration. ActiveCollab has options that provide help to predict the end result and profitability of your tasks and show the price of recent alternatives to executives, shoppers, or different stakeholders.
This picks up the place the earlier function left off. With the power to forecast billable hours spent on the duties that make up a venture, ActiveCollab combines that info with venture bills to develop an preliminary profitability evaluation. Higher nonetheless, it retains updating that evaluation in real-time, so that you’re alerted if delays or new duties are consuming an excessive amount of into your revenue margin.
Shopper work: All ActiveCollab plans mean you can invite a vast variety of shoppers to your interface, permitting you to deliver them behind the scenes at key factors in your course of. Plus, their visitor accounts can obtain notifications from inside the platform, so you may talk with shoppers clearly whereas eliminating unwieldy e mail chains and confusion concerning venture particulars.
Past simply giving and receiving faster, clearer suggestions from shoppers, the built-in time monitoring and revenue forecasting you get from ActiveCollab additionally lets shoppers into your visibility on venture well being and expectations, should you so select. Moreover, by including the Get Paid options to your ActiveCollab plan (extra particulars on that in a bit), you may even invoice shoppers and get funds from them from proper inside this platform.
Crew collaboration: ActiveCollab provides a number of options to maintain your workforce working collectively like a dream. Actual-time notifications occur when duties get accomplished so the following individual within the chain is notified that it’s time to begin. In the meantime, feedback and discussions can occur inside duties permitting workforce members to add attachments like drafts, mockups, and proofs.
That’s not all, although, as ActiveCollab additionally has built-in workforce chat that may occur independently of duties and tasks. Create customized teams of workforce members so these concerned with specifics can brainstorm and clear up issues amongst themselves. Then, flip a easy brainstorming session into an actual actionable job with the clicking of a button.
Cost gateway integration: All venture administration software program could have some potential to combine with different key platforms you’re doubtless to make use of throughout venture work. However ActiveCollab continues its excellence concerning consumer work with its distinctive potential to sync with cost processors like PayPal and Stripe. This fashion, you may settle for simple consumer funds for invoices you create inside the ActiveCollab software program.
What ActiveCollab Is Missing
ActiveCollab is nice at delivering a big selection of helpful options on any plan, however we’ve observed a number of drawbacks throughout our analysis. Assess the next flaws and see in the event that they current an excessive amount of of an impediment to justify committing to ActiveCollab as your PM software program of selection.
Cell entry: ActiveCollab provides a cellular app model of its software program platform, however it’s sluggish and doesn’t carry out as much as the extent that many customers anticipate. There may be usually lag when switching between screens, inflicting some customers to simply abandon even making an attempt to make use of it. By most accounts, the desktop app is far more user-friendly and dependable.
Want for duplicate duties: A significant limitation we discovered is the shortcoming to assign multiple workforce member to a job. That’s simply unrealistic with regards to trendy venture work. In ActiveCollab, you probably have multiple workforce member that must be connected to a job, you’re caught making a number of copies of that job for every one that must work on it.
Having this limitation with ActiveCollab causes additional busy work for venture managers and might result in confusion and decreased visibility due to these redundant venture objects. That disproportionately impacts sure venture views, like Gantt charts and calendars, which change into extra cluttered the extra duplicate duties it is advisable to make.
Search: One other facet the place ActiveCollab breaks down at scale is the search perform within the software program tends to be glitchy, requiring you to manually seek for duties, attachments, or different objects. That may be ignored or suffered by for smaller endeavors, however if you’re juggling an entire portfolio of tasks or only one with upwards of fifty particular person duties, all with their very own necessities and workforce discussions, this could be a enormous nuisance or simply flat-out untenable.
ActiveCollab Choices and Pricing
ActiveCollab provides streamlined pricing that doesn’t lock a bunch of options away on high-cost plans. And the general value level for any possibility is kind of simple to swallow.
There are three major types of pricing for this software program. It begins with the Professional plan, priced at $8 per person per 30 days when paying yearly, and $9 per person with month-to-month billing.
The Professional package deal delivers each software program function for venture planning, job administration, collaboration, and time monitoring. You get every little thing ActiveCollab has to supply, in need of the options included within the Get Paid add-on (which we’ll cowl momentarily).
That’s a fairly stable value level for limitless customers, consumer accounts, and tasks, plus 100 GB of shared storage.
There are two different pricing tiers for smaller groups. ActiveCollab Plus is supposed for groups of three or fewer members and likewise delivers the overwhelming majority of options that the software program provides. All that’s lacking are integrations, expense monitoring, and superior reporting options. You’re additionally restricted to 10 GB of storage.
Plus will truly price you a bit greater than the Professional plan, because it begins at $9.50 per person per 30 days if you decide to a yr upfront. That value goes as much as $11 per person should you go for month-to-month billing as a substitute.
There’s additionally a free model of the ActiveCollab platform. It’s a restricted model of the software program, with just one GB of storage and no venture views outdoors of lists and Kanban boards. However you continue to can have as much as three workforce members utilizing it collectively, plus you even have entry to venture time monitoring, the Stopwatch function, private timesheets, begin and due dates, job dependencies, and extra.
ActiveCollab Get Paid
For groups that wish to lean arduous on ActiveCollab’s potential to simplify and help consumer work, it’s price contemplating including the Get Paid package deal onto the Professional plan. In a single bundle that prices simply $11.75 per person per 30 days on annual billing ($14 per person for month-to-month billing), you get every little thing this software program can do, plus instruments for invoicing, billing shoppers, and accepting funds.
It is a actually distinctive and useful package deal, because it additionally unlocks integration with QuickBooks, the profitability reporting options we talked about earlier on this put up, and a variety of budgeting and workload planning instruments. Get higher at each folks and consumer administration alongside your venture administration if you go for ActiveCollab’s Professional+Get Paid bundle.
ActiveCollab in Abstract
Challenge administration isn’t thrilling, often. However the options and advantages supplied by ActiveCollab are as understandably mesmerizing to some companies because the lights on the Vegas Strip. The advantages are considerable with this software program, however be aware of its limitations and the intricacies of its pricing construction.
With that in thoughts, ActiveCollab may not be the most suitable choice for you and we perceive that. Maintain your choices open if this software program’s shortcomings are an excessive amount of to bear, and contemplate our favored picks for all kinds of customers and use instances. Monday.com and ClickUp are moderately priced, highly effective, and widespread choices well-suited for a lot of groups, whereas Smartsheet delivers critical energy even on its most cost-effective plan.
And, if you wish to do extra analysis by yourself, dive into the big range of venture administration posts we have now written right here on Loopy Egg. We propose you begin with our top list of the best project management software options and preserve going till you’re armed with the data it is advisable to make a assured, right choice on your group.
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