Active Collab is a project management solution built around features such as task management, collaboration, time tracking, and invoicing.
$8
per member/per month
ClickUp
Score 8.8 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
ClickUp is a productivity platform that brings together work apps, data, and workflows. Also presented as a Converged AI Workspace, ClickUp eliminates work sprawl to provide context and a single place for humans and agents to work together. The platform currently boasts over 20 million users worldwide. ClickUp Brain² is deeply embedded into the workspace, offering conversational intake for project scoping and autonomous task generation. It can transform brainstorming docs…
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 …
I have used pretty much every checklist and project management tool there is and we've settled on ClickUp as being the most robust and flexible, while still being really easy for the end user.
ClickUp is just better because they have simplified not only the customer or employee-facing side but they crafted an easy environment for the admin to edit the workflow and the data points of the projects in the meantime that you are working within them.
The flexibility of Clickup was important to us. The price is also more affordable than other tools which were also very important to us. We picked ClickUp because it gave us the most amount of flexibility, the most features, and the most reasonable cost. We are able to find …
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.
I think it is great for task management and project management. It allows for much easier cross-team collaboration. Personally, I found it useful as a project and team manager to better keep track of all the deliverables that have been assigned to various members of the team. It is less appropriate to use as a CRM even though the website mentions it can be used as one, it still lacks many features which a full-fledged CRM would provide.
Task Management - you can easily track details and notes of the tasks, deadlines and important dates, and notes and key links for the task. This has really leveled up how we manage projects and tasks.
Operational efficiency - by tracking where time goes the most or which tasks go the most, it enables you to identify areas where the most time is being spent and if that process needs to be improved or changed to streamline workflow.
SOP/Document storage - it is easy to create documents for standard operating procedures and processes and have a file to easily locate and reference them.
Files for projects or clients - ClickUp allows you to create separate files, folders, and subfolders to easily store and locate any corresponding tasks, projects, or important documents for that specific project or client.
AI overview - for tasks or documents with longer note sections or that have spanned more time and have more notes involved, ClickUp has an AI overview tool that helps with summarizing.
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
It has been a game-changer in terms of project tracking, as animation is a demanding product that requires multiple layers of analysis, revisions, tracking, scheduling, etc. ClickUp simplifies many approvals as anyone can easily add items, and you can tag the people who need to look at them.
ClickUp is generally very usable once the workspace is properly organized. The flexibility of views, custom fields, task structure, dashboards, and automations makes it easy to adapt the platform to different teams and workflows. The main reason I would no rate it a 10 is that the amount of functionality can make the interface overwhelming, specially for new users. large workspaces with many custom fields, notifications, views, and hierarchy levels can also require some training and ongoing governance.
For over a year ClickUp was unavailable to us just twice for a couple of hours. I would say for a system this big and working globally that was a minor issue. They managed to fix all the issues within a couple hours and then it was back up and running perfectly fine.
The speed of ClickUp is average to be honest. This is one of the biggest flaws of the system, sometimes it's also lagging a little bit but we also have a lot of documents, lists etc. on our workspace. However, with the next version of ClickUp I've seen they are planning to increase the speed by almost 500%, probably by changing the technology, so I am more than looking forward to it.
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.
I started using ClickUp when it was what most would consider a baby company. There were the occasional bugs that made working in ClickUp a little bit of a headache, but the support feature allowed me to chat with a real persona and communicate my issues. I would always get prompt support and someone willing to really help me, not just point me to FAQ pages. Not feeling like a number really makes a difference.
There are multiple guides on literally all of the functions you can find within the system, therefore it's easy to learn anything you'd really like to use, starting from project and people management, down to Gantts, mind maps, time tracking, inviting Clients as guests to work with you on the projects and so much more.
Start small. Don’t try to build the most elaborate plans first. Resist the urge to get into Gantt charts if no one is used to them. Just get work written, add dates and assignees, and start getting used to it. If you did not use a work management tool before, you need to be gracious with yourself about the fact that you likely do not have the muscle memory for working this way yet. But you will get there.
And leverage people who know it if possible. Look for ClickUp experts and vendors. They can really supercharge your effectiveness at building the tool out and speed up the process.
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.
ClickUp is more robust and customizable than the ones we tried. I like Notion's user interface but seems more powerful to track progress. We didn't need the timetracker part of Monday and Asana seemed a little too cumbersome. So ultimately we went with ClickUp because it had the most potential... potential that we still have yet to harness.
Scaling with ClickUp is superb. If you create a workflow best suited for your organization then it's all about creating new accounts and teaching the new employees the workflow you're using. It's that simple. There is no black magic when it comes to Clickup.
