ActiveCollab vs. Flow (discontinued)

Active Collab is great for small teams who want a web-based project management platform to help them on their day-to-day workflow tasks, billing, estimations, vendor assignments and even client communications. It is also great for agencies with users who are sometimes remotely working. Active Collab starts to show shortcomings when you have an immense amount of projects in the system (1000+), and, being a web-based platform, can sometimes experience downtime.

Incentivized

Flow is great for a team that is managing many projects with a lot of different players involved. It lets people really drill down into the projects that they are a part of without getting distracted by everyone else's work. The features like "focus work" and muting notifications are great for a fast-paced workplace which creates distractions. It is too robust for smaller teams or individual work.

Incentivized

• Project Management - Makes it very efficient to manage projects using Gantt Charts, daily email reports and custom reports!
• Collaboration - Allows to collaborate with team members, tag them in tasks, send files/attachments.
• Task delegation - With just 2 clicks you can delegate tasks to other team members/users.

Incentivized

• The “catch up” tab is especially helpful for staying up to date with all the projects you are part of.
• Being able to overview all of the projects and their status within a team helps give our top-level leaders a snapshot of where we are at any given moment.

Incentivized

• 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

• Passing on a task to the next person takes multiple clicks
• Switching from task to project view isn't seamless
• Doesn't provide top-notch reporting

Incentivized

The support team is responsive to requests and their annual support fees are reasonable. Honestly, we don't have to contact them much. Updates happen automatically and the platform is very solid and does not require a lot of support. Documentation is good and the platform is easy to learn.

Incentivized

Since we moved from fixed capacity project to T&M we need some tool who support our billing & invoicing. HP ALM did not provide good support for invoicing so we moved out from HP ALM to ActiveCollab. The features like Timer, reminders are not available in other project management tools like JIRA, Rally & ALM making AC the first choice since we have strict SLA's & AC helps in meeting that.

Incentivized

Asana and Freedcamp are similar, but I feel Flow is easier to hit the ground running with. Add a strong mobile component (apps) and great customer support I feel they are doing PM software the right way. However, Asana is huge and constantly adding features, so over time the big players may easily address their pain points. There are so many similar programs like this now.

Incentivized

• A central communication portal is used to keep all members of the team informed as to the status of specific projects. All staff have access to read past discussions to enable contribution to the current discussion.
• We have found it difficult to get our clients to adopt usage of ActiveCollab for communication on a reliable basis.
• The cost per person is high when using it as a communication center.

Incentivized

• Implementing Flow has allowed for better performance at the collaborative level since communication is much more efficient.
• Thanks to that you can take better management of the projects ls deliveries of projects scheduled for certain dates is much faster.
• It is difficult to forget or pass a delivery date as it allows us to create reminders.

Incentivized