Active Collab is a project management solution built around features such as task management, collaboration, time tracking, and invoicing.
$8
per member/per month
Invoiced
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
Invoiced in Austin offers their invoicing and AR automation platform, providing a platform for collecting online payments or presenting electronic invoices, AR analytics, and support for subscription-based business management on higher service tiers with subscription analytics (e.g. churn, pricing plan management, 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.
A 1-10 employee company with no accounting system integration needs and no customization may be suited for Invoiced. Although I wish I could, I cannot in good faith recommend any other scenario for which Invoiced is the right solution. Perhaps a subscription service that is very streamlined on autopay could work as well, but I cannot speak to that scenario directly. I do not think Invoiced can be trusted to integrate with accounting software, certainly not NetSuite, given the aforementioned reasons. There is a very high risk of system failures, connection breaks, improper code built into the core bundles, and they will blame the company for anything that is not totally standard operations. In summary, if your business does anything unique at all from a transaction lens, I would be very careful as Invoiced may promise to handle it in a Sales pitch, and then 9 months later it could still be unsolved. All the while, they are charging you even if the product is not launched, and they also will not let you terminate, because Invoiced will deny a "breach" even in the face of a directly observable example just to ride out the contract and keep all the money.
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
Communication is the #1 failure - the Invoiced contract Term starts PRE-launch on day 1, yet Invoiced had an extremely slow and encumbered way of onboarding and trying to set us up.
Core Product: In our testing, their core product broke numerous times, and if this were in a live scenario we would have been devastated. Be very careful as they don't take ownership for maintaining their integrations with all software, and things can break at any moment with updates
Systems: Invoiced rolled out updates that contained faulty code and damaged our accounting system. The lack of expertise, at least in NetSuite, is very dangerous and I recommend having in-house develops watch Invoiced's moves very carefully if you do end up trying to use them.
Lack of Ownership: We tried to terminate multiple times, only be to requested over and over that they can fix the problems. We gave them more time since we were so heavily invested from a time perspective, but they did not own the failures and we were even lied to directly by senior management in a remarkable failure to adhere to basic deadlines.
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.
We selected Invoiced primarily due to their purported high level of customizations and flexibility to handle differing business needs. That, unfortunately, became the exact reason we terminated the contract though. They have a basic framework for something that could be really great, and the potential is there, but they lack the in-house expertise and the product is far too infantile at present. Major bugs and similar issues need to be stamped out first. I can only hope they take it as a learning experience.
