ActiveCollab vs JIRA

• Its billing & invoice feature worked pretty well for T&M teams. ActiveCollab version 5, the current version, allows you to directly track time to tasks using the Timer app and later create invoices based on those time entries. Their statuses will change through phases, as you are pending payment, or after they are set as paid.
• Here cost can be easily assigned to each team member, Team members can start the timer after they start their work, then allows you to export the time records of team members making it easy to complete the billing.
• File sharing feature is very useful for distributed teams as we can we can easily share files, screenshots.
• Also ActiveCollab ability to connect to Google docs, attach images and link to web pages make it unique from other project management tools.
• AC easily allows you to track your daily tasks & serves reminder if miss on the targets defined by giving daily / weekly reminders regarding tasks and any that have gone over due dates.
• ActiveCollab is quite easy to use. With just a few clicks, you can create a new project.
• The dashboard and options are easy to see and it is well laid out.
• Here user have an opportunity to select the number of emails they receive from ActiveCollab and for some email providers, such as Gmail grouping is enabled. So rather than getting multiple mails, it send you a summary of all the daily notifications in one mail.
• It allows users to upload several files at once on task comments, and if you are set with the owner role, or have the member role but are a project leader, you have a Batch Edit option available on project level. This allows you to edit multiple tasks at once and change all the details on them, such as assignee, due dates, labels, importance, and more.

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• The biggest impact from experience with JIRA is the transformation it took from when I first started using it, until now. It seemed like the good folks at JIRA really practiced what they preached and I reaped the benefits. When I first started using the agile boards, it was at a time when they had just come out with a new version if you will and were sunsetting the old version (I can't remember the names). Anyhow, the agile board worked enough for me to check the box that I had a backlog. It did the basics. As time went on however, I was thoroughly impressed at the features that they added. It was as if they had been sitting at my desk alongside me and noticing my frustrations and then fixing them.
• Other favorite features, dashboards, saved searches, workflow, labels, advanced search query, linked issues, follow issue, history, batch updates, view in issue navigator. All these features seriously make life easier when working in JIRA. The administrative headaches of product management are out the window.
• I also dig the administrative features like find my field. This makes it so easy for an administrator to identify the cause of a configuration error and fix/test quickly.

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• It does not provide support to scaled agile frameworks like SAfe which is there for Rally & Agilecraft.

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• Two layers of depth. Currently there are only issues, and sub issues. This causes problems when importing project schedules. We have found a creative solution, but the functionality of having multiple layers of issues is missed.
• Programmed in Java. One of JIRA's strengths is also its greatest weakness in my mind. The fact that it is written in Java means it is tricky to deploy in cloud based solutions. Java requires multiple threads and a large chunk of memory, making it expensive to deploy in the cloud. Personally I would love to see a compiled version of Atlassian projects that have been optimized for different architectures. This will greatly improve performance and decrease the impact on CPU and memory resources.
• More effective scheduled backup system. Atlassian recommends creating your own backup solution for Jira and other projects. While this does encourage people to tailor their solution to their needs, it does burn smaller companies and Admins that are less familiar with the system.

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• Active Collab has helped us to move to a completely digital project management system, moving away from physical time sheets and assignments many years ago. Since then, the platform has grown very quickly and very adeptly, and that is why we continue to use it.
• The Active Collab platform helps us with quick, easy access to our project management system, even for off-site users, vendors and clients.
• Time tracking and profit analysis has been great to help us price new agency services and change requests.

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• I can organize my tasks for the day or week in one view.
• I can see what's coming and prepare for the workload.
• I can run all my QA processes and recording findings in Jira tickets.

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