Product Review: activeCollab

I remember trailing an open-source version of this ages ago. It looks like it’s come along way since then. I’m currently using Lighthouse, though it gets a bit expensive if I expand beyond my current limit of three projects. I’ve never had success though with getting clients to use these kinds of Project Management systems. They seem to work better with submitting dev tickets to developers. That sort of thing.

http://www.projectpier.org

Wrong link, please repair

Your activeCollab anchor links to http://freelanceswitch.com/general/product-review-activecollab/%E2%80%9Dhttp://www.activecollab.com/%E2%80%9D rather than http://www.activecollab.com

LOL, it’s kinda funny how I would be talking to some fellow designers of mine about how cool activeCollab is, and the next day there would be an article on it. Having more options for clients would be helpful though.

I think the link is broken to activeCollab.

Hi,

activeCollab has it’s own OSS fork, ProjectPier (www.projectpier.org) which picked up activeCollab at an early version than atm, when development has been stalled and owner wanted to close source.
I would def. recommend it as an alternative since you benefit of free software (e.g. installing on your own machines) and are able to customize however you want.
I would cherry pick one nice feature (of course inherited from the earlier versions) – be able to send emails from the application (message posted, task completed, milestone added) directly with gmail.
I would emphasize “getting things done” with projectPier with fellow developers / designers you work with, rather than clients, although since it’s your free setup you can add and track as many projects and clients you like.

I am completely satisfied with aC as a project management tool. For the first time I saw it on a Superawesome blog, and decided to give it a shot and never regreted. In the end, try it if you need quality PM tool and I strongly believe you will like it

AC is a very nice full featured PM tool, from what I have heard and can tell from the demo. I don’t use it but know some people who are quite passionate on how well it has worked for them, so there must be something to it. I was a big fan of the open source version and have used the new fork projectpier.org occasionally. Although I have great respect for the software, their move from open source to commercial created quite a stir. Not because they went commercial, but the way they did it. An entire community was left out in the rain after providing all of the interest in the product in the first place. There was no consideration for the large user base who made the activecollab name popular by recommending it or writing about it (as a result there are several old reviews for the open source ‘free’ version pointing to the commercial version…kinda like false advertising).

Anyway, I hope that they have more respect for their current clients than they had for their community in the past.

ok,

I have been using activecollab from last few months, in fact its about an year and I think its the best project management web application out there. Previously I tries Bacecamp and few others but they cannot compare the features offered with activecollab installed on my own server. Its not really cheap application but it worth every single $$. I am glad someone came up and posted a review. I learn few new things. lol

Thank you for a great review post.

Roshan
Freelance Developer
http://www.instantshift.com

Hi Travis,

Thanks for the review! We are glad to hear that you like activeCollab. Just a minor correction – activeCollab does offer RSS feeds for activities (global and pre project) and for status updates. It felt redundant to have RSS per section section because these changes are covered with activities feed so we skipped them.

We are aware how hard it is to convince clients to use project management software and we are working on couple of things that should address that issue. Goal is to have interaction as easy as possible and through tools that they are familiar with – mostly email. Stay tuned

Thanks again. If you have any questions regarding the application you are free to contact us at hi@a51dev.com.

Is that better and simpler than copperhub? http://www.copperproject.com/

I’ve been using a mod of their old free version that looks/feels like basecamp. I’m quite happy with it and wouldn’t pay a penny to change to the new version. I tried PP but development and community are not really there consistently.

Have to ditto here. Using AC with a partner and it really keeps us more organized than this gmail communication we had back and forth. Plus, we can open it up for selective client access in some cases so that we can share files and let them drop in support tickets with us. Was worth the expense. As a PHP dev, myself, I’m jealous with how well-made this thing was.

I’ve tried projectpier a year ago and it was horribly unstable and there are some concept mistakes. The development of pp is very slow. There are only a few improvments now.
What I’m am using at the moment with a lot of fun is Trac.
Once you have it installed and configured (this is not too easy because you have lots of possibilities)
you have a wiki, a ticket system, you can browse your svn repo, etc.

I know a tool that is being developed especially for freelancers – http://www.comindwork.com

One more vote for ActiveCollab. Have been using it since free version, and definitely worths the bucks.

Another alternative is Collabtive ( http://collabtive.o-dyn.de/?lang=en ) which is open source, and being constantly developed.

We use aC in work and I’m not really falling for it. I prefer basecamp and I’ve had a quick look at copper, that seems like a good pm.

What do people think of activeCollab vs. Basecamp?

Currently I use Basecamp, but would prefer something hosted on my server (I like control).

Has anyone switched between the two? Found better features in one or the other?

I’m all for installing, running, and tweaking open source apps, but does a freelancer really have the time or expertise to set up their own web-based project management? What happens when your server goes down? I think ActiveCollab is ideal for freelance web developers, but if I were a designer, illustrator, or writer, I’d stick to something hosted.

We’ve been having problems keeping track of projects at our studio.. This seems like the perfect solution.

Thanks for the review, wll be trying this out..

Owain

http://www.icomcreative.co.uk

@Nathan Barry:
old review: http://www.slackermanager.com/2006/07/basecamp-vs-activecollab.html, not going to reiterate things. I’m just outlining that things got better from 2006/07 and taking full control means using ProjectPier.

@MariusRugan: that article is a great example of the ‘false’ advertising that is a result of AC literally fooling their community into believing that they were an open source project with a future. Ironically you don’t read much more than paid reviews for the commercial version, most of the existing literature is about the old version.

I found localization very usefull because all my clients speak spanish, at the moment only Active Collab (AC) supports it.

One lack is that you can not reorder tasks, its planned for the future (1.2 release I think) You can only order tasks under 5 priority levels.

Generally speaking I think its a good app for people that prefer something hosted in your server or for the ones that dont like month payment.

Features, I think Basecamp have the best ones.

The past of AC I think that was a great abuse of the community, things clear from the beggining!!!

I switched from Basecamp to Projectpier to ActiveCollab. I liked basecamp, but work in a technical field where I can’t trust client data to a “cloud” service – I have to sign confidentiality agreements and if I opened up Basecamp for client collaboration I’d lose clients for violating control of their data to an untrusted third party.

So I found PP which allowed me to host my own, but I found the lack of a reliable calendar option to be a big problem. There are beta hacks that you can install to get a calendar, but they don’t cut the mustard.

I moved to AC which is expensive, but no moreso than a midrange basecamp subscription for a year or a copy of MS Project. I really like AC but there was one annoying problem in that people weren’t getting notified of activities based on their subscription to a task. I see that the AC development team pushed out a fix to this the other day.

I like that PP and AC allow you to project manage without needing to be a Project Management Mastermind. But the two most important things that make it worth it to me are version control of documents and threaded discussions instead of e-mail.

itd be nice to see a direct comparison between this and basecamp – i have 8 employees using basecamp and it costs a small fortune for the amount of projects we use through it – therefore a one off payment that can have a similar system would be great.

I don’t find Basecamp that useful. You can’t submit dev tickets, it’s really just a to-do list, which grinds to a halt if you have a massive list.

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If you are looking for something more than the simple pm tool and less complex than the hi-end ones, check out DeskAway .It is a great collaborative tool.

i second project pier with a basecampesque skin (zura blue steel) its amazing!

I have been using ActiveCollab for a long time, first as an open source app but when 1.0 came out it was such an improvement that I gladly paid the 400$ to get the corporate licence. As a french speaking webdesigner, my client need a french interface and aC can be localized while Basecamp doesn’t seem to care about non english speaking customers…

I am glad I went for aC, more than 3/4 of my clients use it which is a godd rate of adoption. Time tracking is invaluable and the UI and features constantly improve… Kudos to Ilija and his team on suppor too : fast and efficient !

@Nathan Barry : We have tried everything from GoPlan.org to Basecamphq.com including ActiveCollab but finally settled on TeamworkPM.net. Basecamp TBH was our first choice as it is the most popular when we started searching but the lack of due dates on tasks, lack of language support, poor response from 37signals led us to look for an alternative.

ActiveCollab beats GoPlan hands down, has some of the features lacking in Basecamp but ultimately didn’t offer the UI or feature set of TeamworkPM. The ability to run on your own servers is a massive plus though…

just my 2 cents,

John.

is link broken?

Works fine here.

We have been using AC for our visuals proof design outsourcing services (www.visualsdirect.com) for a few weeks now. So far so good, although we would like to have a few new features that AC does not accommodate at the moment.

-Wei

I came from PHPCollab, an open source PM system that was, in all honesty, overkill for my needs. It has stalled out in development. I moved to aC when it was still open source and followed it to where it is now. I’ve been a happy Corporate user for well over a year now and I cannot work without it. The payment structure won me over. Buy it once, own it forever. Granted you have to keep your support upgraded if you want new versions outside your branch, but that’s a small amount of money to pay compared with the monthly fees that Basecamp and others charge.

As far as web based versus self-hosted, any server can go down at any time so I don’t think that’s the best argument for or against either one. I like having control, however, so self-hosted is perfect for me.

I did an in-depth review of aC 2.0 beta last spring:
http://blog.pixelita.com/67/activecollab-20-beta-an-in-depth-review/

And in January 2009, I outlined several different choices for project management systems:
http://blog.pixelita.com/60/project-management-to-get-the-year-off-to-a-good-start/

I have a colleague who is in a perfect position to do a side by side comparison of Basecamp versus activeCollab. She is a hardcore and enthusiastic user of Basecamp who just happened to win a Small Biz license in aC’s recent giveaway. I will be very interested in her opinion of it, compared with Basecamp.

This is one of the better, and more recent, reviews of aC I’ve read that isn’t gritching about the license structure. As long as the ProjectPier fork exists, i don’t think anyone was cheated out of anything. I respect the aC devs and the business decision they made. They stand behind their product and in this day and age, that’s not something to sneeze at!

I am selling my copy of ActiveCollab if anyone is interested. I already contacted support and they said I could transfer my license. I still have 4 months left of updates. Selling for $390. It is the corporate edition.

=)

ps. Sorry for the advert..

Blackstone Media Group just switched from Basecamp to ActiveCollab and LOVE it. We have finally found a PM tool that is totally customizable and meets all our needs. Billing, tracking, approvals, mgmt and reporting. This app is great and highly would reccomend it to any design compan with lots of projects and a big team.

+1 vote for activeCollab. We customized the system to our needs and even developed some custom modules such as e.g. Chat and HR Manager, so that now we have all the necessary tools at the same place and simply love it.
For me the main advantage of activeCollab is that it is flexible and open-source.

Active collab isn’t that great, it has some problems with usability and isn’t fully featured. Redmine is a far superior alternative and it’s free.

Active collab is a pain in the ass. It’s slow as molasses, tickets can only be assigned to one category. The breadcrumbs are stupid. A user can only be assigned one role. I could go on.

This is not a system worth paying for.

http://www.redmine.org/

I was all set to give it a try for my second series of Project Management system reviews. Ugh. Ruby on Rails.

If I’m gonna review something for a blog article, it’s gonna have to run on PHP. And I’m a die-hard aC fan so you’re pretty much wasting your breath trying to persuade me to ditch it in favor of some other program. I’ll gladly try out and review other PM systems but I quite like aC, love their responsive support (try getting THAT out of a free piece of software), and am generally very happy with the way it works for us. It may not be for everyone, true enough, but is anything really? Someone is always going to be unhappy or find a reason to trash anything. And I’ve never found aC to be slow, but that may be because I have decently fast servers to begin with.

Here are big pluses you never find in other PM systems:
- it’s fully customizable and modules could be written during a week or so to make everything you want;
- it’s flexible in roles management and if you can’t do anything, you just edit it in s scripts spending just few hours;
- it’s becoming more and more popular, so in several months, I guess, activecollab 3 will be much more than you can find in 2nd version;
- there are already 27 modules to expand the system if you don’t find the features in native install;

Do you need more? Just wait for 3rd release and these guys will surprise you.

We have been also using active collab for a while, but only the ticketing system, which was kinda the only good thing about it, even with it sorting limits.

Now we use our internal tool info.wikicards.net, which works faster and allows batch editing, has an RESTful api, can be access from mobiles and in generally faster to use, especially if you have to enter multiple tickets at once.

It wouldn’t supprise me if aC paid for this product placement. There is very little criticism at all. The fundamental aspect of it, tracking tickets is broken. Just about every other project management tool has the concept of a workflow. Joel Spolsky’s blog describes it in detail, well worth the time to read! http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000029.html

Tickets go through stages like ‘needs review’, ‘resolved’, ‘closed’ etc. The only person who should close a ticket is the same person who created the ticket. aC only has ‘closed’ and ‘open’ and some silly ticket categories. The ticket status is one of the most important aspects of the system and it’s broken out of the box. There is a $150 planning plugin which tacks on the ability to have proper ticket statuses but why bother when systems like redmine, unfuddle, pivotal and countless others actually do this out of the box.

Then there is the tickets page. Tickets are grouped into milestones and only the title is listed. What I really need to see is a table layout of the ticket name, date added, priority, status, assigned to, category etc. You end up with a bowl of ticket soup which has no workflow and is really hard to sort through.

It may look very pretty and all but the usability of it is broken. We’ve had clients asking for the comments to be reversed into reverse chronological order, there is no setting for this. You’re kidding, I thought, I have to hack the source code just to put the comments in a common sense order.

If what you are looking for is a polished to-do list then active collab may workout great for you. If you want to actually manage projects there are many better alternatives.

I have used Active Collab for about 6 months and now I’m planning to buy corporate license…
I thought of doing a search on review of active collab and landed here.. I also worked with Basecamp but found it too costly and complicated..!!!

AC is very cool and very elegant when it comes from separating the design and logic

To Interested,

If you want to customized and wants to have a module that is not part of activecollab, u could contact me at my email address. I have a sufficient knowledge in AC