Act! CRM (formerly Swiftpage) aims to empower small businesses to build and manage client relationships and leads, so the user always has a pipeline of new, repeat, and referral business under control. Users can manage their businesses with Act! CRM every day, since it’s more than a CRM – it’s designed to present everything needed to stay on top of relationships, see what’s most important and actionable, and run sales and marketing in one place.
$22
per month
Bullhorn Jobscience (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Jobscience was a cloud-based ATS and CRM tool designed to help recruitment firms to streamline and grow their business. Built 100% natively on Force.com, Bullhorn Jobscience offered a CRM-based approach to talent acquisition. It has reached end of life, and has been discontinued.
$100
Per User per Month
Pricing
Act! CRM
Bullhorn Jobscience (discontinued)
Editions & Modules
Essentials
$22
per user, per month
Act! Premium - Basic
$37.50
per user, per month (billed annually)
Standard
$40
per user, per month
Expert
$55
per user, per month
Select - Extra Features
$79
per user, per month (billed annually)
Complete - Extra Features
$199
per user, per month (billed annually)
Advanced - Extra Features
$399
per user, per month (billed annually)
Practice
$100
Per User per Month
Placement
$125
Per User per Month
Workforce
$133
Per User per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Act! CRM
Bullhorn Jobscience (discontinued)
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
For SaaS version, discount available for annual subscription.
Swiftpage ACT! would be well suited if you are using a desktop computing environment. ACT! is an old product and they were on the desktop for many years (and still are). Also, ACT! would also be well suited if you are not as concerned about implementing a CRM product that might require a little more training (e.g. if you had employees/salespeople that needed to be trained). Also, ACT! seems to be more generic than some of the industry focused products you see nowadays. For example, MethodCRM works well with non-profits that are on the cloud.
Jobscience is a good fit for medium to large organizations, especially those who have various different lines of business and need one system to be able to handle them all. It is very difficult for me to imagine another system being able to accommodate the very different ways of doing business between our departments. Only a highly flexible system could have a chance at doing that.
Integrated Email Marketing: For a small business, you can have a strong method to handle email marketing in an integrated non-disparate solution.
Tailoring: There are no limits on what data you can store in the system and the ease of making changes can be done by a nontechnical person.
User Interface: The tool is easy to get around in both the desktop (fat client) and (webclient) which both are quite similar in functionality.
Integration: The tool integrates with Word, Excel, and Outlook nicely. And, it integrates with Google Mail and Contacts. There is a nice selection of third party tools available for various needs like AddressGrabber which allows for easy input of contacts from various sources such as email signatures, webpages, etc.
Templates: I have enjoyed being able to store tons of various templates for letters which we use over and over for various communications like sales proposals, quotes, and nudging clients along the funnel and sales process.
Automation: SwiftPage ACT! has a small business automation engine which allows for reminders and workflow to be administered by the system. It's not as sophisticated as some enterprise workflow automation solutions but for the price it's an awesome addition.
Maintenance: Very rarely have a problem which needs to be dealt with and costs to upgrade are minimal at best. We hosted the system internally for the web client and implemented it ourselves initially but had upgrades subsequently done by a local partner simply due to time/cost scenario. In other words, less to have someone else do it.
JobScience is extremely customizable and flexible. This is a strength because you can tailor it to your workflow, rather than having to change your workflow to fit a software.
JobScience is the most intuitive ATS / CRM I have ever used. This is particularly important when hiring and training new employees. The faster they can come up to speed on the core software in your business, the faster they can start generating revenue.
JobScience has extremely powerful built in reports. I have yet to need a report that I couldn't build using the internal report wizard. It helps us understand all the numbers at the heart of our business, which is critical in decision making situations.
JobScience also has powerful automation components. The email alerts and automated tasks you can set up are great and boost efficiency. We use them a lot, and I suspect we may have only scratched the surface.
Multiple users - when multiple users edit a page, it doesn't show that there is someone else on the page and it only lets one person edit which can cause the information to be lost.
Action grid - it is a helpful page to use however it is extremely slow and takes a long time to load and can be a bit finicky.
It's simple - this is is also a positive, but I also think there could be additional resources added to it to make it more up to date and advanced.
There are a lot of good SaaS options on the market but SwiftPage ACT still has a place in the mix today. It depends on your needs, goals, processes, and people
Try printing reports with each record's notes section - really awful output that you are embarrassed to show anyone. Want to add a new record to a group, ACT will present another record for the group assignment. Want to work seamlessly with email? Forget it!
There has been an ongoing problem with Google synchronisation which no one seems to be bothered about fixing, even though it clearly states on the website that the software synchronises with Google. When the customer-facing support team are on the phone, they are brilliant, it's the back-end development support which is severely lacking.
ACT! CRM is more cost effective than like a Salesforce, but that is for a reason, it lacks a lot of the functionality that a Salesforce has. Pipedrive is actually another cost effective platform I've been evaluating as a potential ACT! CRM replacement. I like it's modern day look and feel versus ACT!.
We use Jobscience to add candidates, upload resumes, and have certain fields such as Name, Location, Compensation Details, Non-compete Details, Packet highlights, and of course the Resume field, all of which are required in order to create a packet to submit to our clients. These packets are created using Conga ActionGrid, so Jobscience allows us to input all the information, and it would be great if we could create a packet directly through Jobscience, but we require Conga ActionGrid, as that is then used in Adobe PDF to create the final packet.
