ActiveCollab

Before I decided to go with ActiveCollab a few years ago, I researched and tried all the project management softwares I could find. I ended up going with ActiveCollab for a number of reasons.

One, their interface is simple, practical, and easy on the eye. I found other project management softwares trying to hard and it essentially complicated simple things. Also, I loved how my projects can be displayed and searched. I know this sounds trivial, but when you manage hundreds of projects (websites), I need an interface that works for me. Their interface works perfectly for someone with my needs. I constantly have to go back and forth on so many notes for projects and ActiveCollab has made it user-friendly for me to do this.

Second, ActiveCollab had awesome customer service when I had any issues or questions. This was a big plus because I then knew I was in good hands.

Third, they had some add-ons other softwares didn't have so it was nice to have features I wanted to use all in one place, like time tracking and invoicing.

Fourth, it was reasonably priced.

While I went with ActiveCollab, I am still frustrated with some of their features:

One, I use notes A LOT. Their notes interface design looks like something from the 90's.

Two, while they have the invoicing option available, it's sub-par. There are a lot of things they can improve with their invoicing. I wish I could use it, but it's just very limited. An example of a limitation is that you can't even enter or send an invoice without "inviting" the client to join ActiveCollab. I tried testing an invoice by putting an email manually because they claimed you could, but nothing gets sent, unless I "invite" someone into my account. This is silly. Another issue I have with the invoicing is that it shows "Active Collab" as the sender and you do NOT have the option to change this. Kinda stupid.

Three, you only have a measly 3 ways to categorize or filter projects: Client, Category, and Label. This can be very limiting depending on what you're doing.

Onboarding is easy, interface is easy to use and understanding. It's also one of the cheapest option in the market. For features that are not available, the ActiveCollab team is keen to consider adding that feature though during our usage, we didn't really see the feature being rolled out.

I used to use Basecamp and when compared, there are a lot of features that are lacking in ActiveCollab such as being able to create a Gantt timeline, quite messy grouping of projects on the main home page, not able to add vendors (only can add clients, yet we do not use ActiveCollab to collaborate with clients). As a project management tool, we also would like to see how we can gauge the workload of each team mate and if each team mate might be overload within the day or week, this function at the moment is not available. Completed tasked are being archived and under archived, the completed tasks are not organised according to task list. Some features such as invoicing and budget management cannot be adopted by finance team as they uses a more advanced thou legacy system which includes a whole lot of other functions on top of merely invoicing.

There are actually two PM tools that I absolutely love - Nifty and Ora, however, as much as I love them, they're a bit too "technical" for the layman to use. If you're not heavily invested in software development, they can be overwhelming, but ActiveCollab offers a really clean UI and superb UX that make onboarding new, casual users a breeze.

The features offered in ActiveCollab are on par with the industry and mean that you can grow into the product as a team without worrying about boundaries for the most part. I only say "the most part" because I'm on a lower tier plan that doesn't include things like Invoicing (something I use a different product for anyway).

While I guess it can be seen as a "smart" business decision, I think gating things like Invoicing behind a pay wall doesn't feel great as an end user. It's just the psychological aspect of it all, right?
If you said I had to pay $7.50/month for a plan and then an additional $3/month for Invoicing, I would be less inclined versus just being asked to pay $10/month for everything.

I think the pigeon-holing of Invoicing being behind a plan that is also a price per member can also be a crux because the functionality doesn't really change between a 2 person operation and a 200 person operation, but the two would pay a crazy amount of difference ($6 vs. $600) just for Invoicing.