Likelihood to Recommend 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 distribu
ted. 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.
Read full review The tool is pretty intuitive and relatively easy to and navigate. We have setup a process where a "won" project in SalesForce creates a base project in Planview AdaptiveWork and then sends notifications that a new project has arrived. We then apply the appropriate template to match SKUs that has been sold and assign project resources. From there the project manager uses Planview AdaptiveWork daily to track project progress and enter status information. Ultimately financial milestones are tracked and processed, leading to project completion
Read full review Pros Great for project and task assignments, project workflow and communications. Solid web-based platform that doesn't require software downloads, also includes great mobile platform. Great reporting tools for managing billing, estimating, project workflow and other essential project details. Allows for both the agency and its clients to interact on a single platform using role-specific permissions. Read full review Highly customizable, can develop organization specific workflows, modules, etc. Interface (in most instances) is easy to use. Timesheets, project details, and report modules are fairly easy to navigate and understand. Good comms tools like discussions, group pages, automatic reminders and notifications. Read full review Cons 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 Read full review Yes, Clarizen has time tracking functionality. But in the end, so does much other software, and they do it with a better, less confusing interface which is one of the reasons our organization ended up switching. The platform was crowded and made it confusing for users who only used it to track time (like me). Our organization also wanted software that would better house PTO information, in addition to time tracking, and Clarizen's program wasn't efficient enough. The point above also goes with expenses. We wanted a more diligent and robust expense report system. For our needs, Clarizen wasn't it. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I give my renewal of this product a 9. It's only because we never know what product may come out next and how other factors in our office political environment may cause impact upon this. If I always had my way, this is what we'd settle on as our de facto project management system.
Read full review Usability It is easy to configure, intuitive. The customization process is in some ways better than Salesforce.com. It has a great UI. It does however depend on how it's implemented. The design of it is generally fine, however the ability to data upload people from a spreadsheet is an obvious miss.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Sometimes it is slow when everyone is entering their time on Fridays or Mondays but other than that we rarely see downtime and maintenance notifications are well in advance.
Shel Hankley Information Systems Analyst, IT Project Manager and Clarizen Administrator
Read full review Performance Reports: Quick to Reasonable Most Ancillary Pages: Quick to Reasonable (By "ancillary" I mean lesser used/master data maintenance pages - e.g. People, Customers, Individual Tasks, Milestones, etc.) Work Plan (with 100 sub items): Reasonable to Slow
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Read full review In-Person Training • We worked with a Project Manager on their side. He was very good about developing a project plan to hit our goal. I think we had weekly or twice weekly calls – very steady cadence over 3 month period. • Their PM skills were great – kept us on task. For the last week, they sent 2 people on site and they did training for power users. After that a couple of them revisited here
Read full review Online Training Our trainer, Alex, is exceptional and knows the product really well. I swear he must have wrote the product himself! His manner with training is very easy going, gives you homework that is applicable to what you need to learn and stages it correctly for you. It was a pleasure to be trained by him.
Read full review Implementation Rating I performed the implementation with our Clarizen provide trainer, who knew the product 100% and it went quickly and without a problem. It was a pleasurable process without the problems other software implementation often encounter. Kudos to the Clarizen team for making this a worry free process for their clients because it is worry free.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Clarizen is easy to use, web based, and collaborative. It also does a great job organizing tasks across projects which is great for helping contributors get their work done on time. Management loves the reports they can create on overall status, costs, and when projects are forecasted to go live
Read full review Return on Investment Allows our team to stay organized and keep conversations on tasks. The To-Do List email every morning helps me mentally prepare and know exactly what I should be doing as soon as I start work. Powerful and useful integrations save lots of time (Google Drive, Slack, Dropbox, Zapier and more!). Read full review Great customer feedback related to real-time availabilty of project status. We could tailor gant charts to various customers within an organization fairly quickly. Seeing real-time breakdown of costs and time for projects was great. The main page with summary charts was a great way to get information at a glance. Clarizen use definitely helped us stream-line project planning and assisted with identifying bottlenecks. We run many projects in parallel with similar timepoints (pre-, interim-, and post-). The software was pretty straight forward, permitting us to create one project outline then dupiclating it (as a template) for a number of others. Read full review ScreenShots Planview AdaptiveWork Screenshots