Active Collab is a project management solution built around features such as task management, collaboration, time tracking, and invoicing.
$8
per member/per month
Celoxis
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Celoxis is a Enterprise online project management solution for midsize to large businesses to help them plan and manage complex and diverse project portfolios. The collective suite includes modules for resource management, budgeting, revenue forecasting, time and expense tracking, reporting and team collaboration. Celoxis includes features such as advanced scheduling, which combines real-world conditions, such as resource time off, multi-time zone, part-time resources, working weekends etc.,…
Scenarios where ActiveCollab works well 1) ActiveCollab works well for small teams specifically T&M teams.Its invoicing feature is unique & can make your life easy. 2) It is very easy to use & posses good range of filters like on the task list, we can drag/drop tasks, Filter by assignee's, tasks lists, due dates, or completed tasks. 3) It has some simple but awesome features like when you're in the middle of writing something i.e a comment on story and get interrupted, it retains what you wrote. 4) It allows you to tag team members in threads of comments to grab their attention, its really needed when teams are distributed. Thus helping team members to collaborate easily & stay on same page. 5) It integrates pretty well with other web apps like quickbooks , Slack, Trello, HubSpot, Zapier etc Scenarios where ActiveCollab did not work well 1) Tasks can not have multiple assignee's here so if two members are working on same task it did not allow you to reflect that. 2) Sorting capability is not their under invoicing 3) It did not work well for larger teams 4) Search option is not very detailed & you may end up wasting lot of time searching one particular bug or issue.
Celoxis is a great option if you are looking for an affordable, easy to use, easy to integrate project manegement solution. It is very powerful for waterfall project management. I evaluated more than 15 platforms and could not find any with a close evaluation in terms of cost-benefit to Celoxis. Of course there are more powerfull tools, for 10 times the price. So far, for project management, there hasn't been a requirement I haven't been able to solve with some work. It really lacks features for Agile methodologies, even if it provides a Kanban view, so far it doesn't provide and additional agile artifacts. If an organization has already reached a very mature project management practice and needs to improve on program and portfolio management, Celoxis won't provide any useful feature. If the organization has the resources (skills and time mostly) to develop some workflows and customization, it might work but with a limit. Hopefully Celoxis addresses these features in the near future.
It isn't possible to set members of staff as part time, so if someone is unavailable on certain days you must manually enter them as OOO every single day that they are not in, that other teammates work. Hours also can't be edited individually - everyone is treated as working the same hours in a day, rendering capacity planner useless for flexi working teams
Subtasks cannot be assigned their own hours and deadlines, meaning the To Do list view can't be seen in actual date order and capacity planner does not reflect all time allocated to an individual's schedule unless every task is set up as a separate task rather than subtask
There is no way to see all tasks of a certain type across multiple campaigns (e.g all copywriting tasks vs all technical tasks) - support team suggested exporting data and making spreadsheets
Kanban view isn't available for people's own task lists ('board' view here shows a list)
Not possible to have one task be assigned to more than one person
Notifications are not sent when tasks are updated, so you have to leave comments and tag people each time
We have not required support for ActiveCollab as it works pretty seamlessly. We didn't have any issues with using the platform or with any billing issues. The self-service aspect of the platform is robust and easy to navigate so we have not encountered any errors that required assistance from the support team.
ActiveCollab is easier to use and simpler in its setup. It has the right mix of features and simplicity. It's also project-oriented which is important for our workflow. Other tools are often too task-oriented, making it hard to track projects. Overall, ActiveCollab has a great mix of simplicity with good features.
I used an evalaution matrix built with input of several stakeholders in the company. In the end the matrix included 100 features (non of them was price related). The matrix was heavily focused on waterfall project management, agile related features were only 5 out of 100 features. Features were labeled as mandatory, required or optional. Products which lacked a mandatory feature (like providing technical support) were disqualified. Then a price vs features evaluation was made and only the products with the best combination were seleced to continue: Celoxis, ITM Platform and Mission Control. A final technical evaluation was made comparing the full evaluation but also the evaluation of only the 40 required features. Overall, Celoxis was the better evaluated (76% vs 65% of the second place), for the 40 required features, Celoxis got 91% against 78% of number 2. In the end we chose Celoxis even when it had higher licensing cost.
