ActiveCollab vs. Kanbanchi for G Suite vs. Wrike

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

• If you need transparency around your workloads the product is great as it is easy to use and visually tells a story.
• It is ideal for SCRUM management as it plays into the ideas of Sprint

Incentivized

I believe it's well suited if you have multiple jobs/projects that you need to keep organized. We work with multiple job types from print/creative to web, copy and digital ads so it helps us stay organized. I don't think it would be suitable for a company that doesn't have a lot of jobs to manage. We average over 1,200 requests a year.

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

• Great for supporting SCRUM as part of Agile deliveries. We use the ToDo, Doing and Done and build GANNT charts to facilitate resource planning.
• We use it at a department level to manage workloads and help staff know what work is waiting for them and the relative priority.
• We have deployed it across the organisation and also work with suppliers and offshore development teams to coordinate activities.

Incentivized

• Keeps projects on track
• Provides tools that make editing and reviewing tasks much easier
• Helps our team work effectively and efficiently despite many of us being remote workers
• Visually accessible on multiple platforms which makes it easy to do work from anywhere

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

• Occasionally hangs at login but this may be to do with our authentication service.
• It would be nice when grouping cards together if there was an option to lay them over each other in a fan arrangement.

Incentivized

• Email alerts sometimes send too slowly.
• If you put a project on hold, it can be hard to find it once you are ready to return to it.
• Sometimes there are too many steps/tasks and the main page can get cluttered.

Incentivized

I wish that Wrike had more drag and drop functionality that would be connected to assignee and also I wish that the finish date of a task would update to the date where you checked completed. It does not do that. Also finishing a task doesn't move the start date of the next task it "protects your time in that way", but our management team wants us to quickly see what we have down the pipeline rather than having to scroll down the list of upcoming tasks.

Incentivized

It does take some time and work to really understand and use it properly, but I think the accessibility to help and documentation make that completely feasible. Once you know how to use it, I find it to be very user-friendly, and have very few complaints.

Incentivized

Over two years of (almost) daily usage without outages. Don't remember any errors. I give it 9 only because some Wrike plugins (for online document edit) are based on NPAPI architecture. These types of plugins are being phased out in new browsers, and NPAPI plugins are disabled by default in recent versions of Chrome so you have to do some browser adjustments when you switch browsers or move to another computer.

Wrike tasks loads fine, but I hate clicking files and wait for a bit of time since it is powerpoint or word, Wrike assumes I want to open those on Wrike. My suggestion is to link it to office 365 so we do not need Wrike based decoder for PPTX and DOCX

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

Time and time again, Wrike has proved that they listen to their customers and put us first. From sales to support - they are quick to respond, encourcage community engagement and I never feel like i am callling a help center

We had staff in person provide some training

Incentivized

I love the Wrike training options. Wrike Discover has tons of courses, learning plans, certifications, etc. This is an area where Wrike definitely shines! I wish these resources were more in your face for new people, because it seems like a lot of coworkers didn't know all of this training was available to them.

Incentivized

There are a lot of bells and whistles in Wrike, and not all of it is easy or intuitive to understand once it's plopped in your lap. It's easier when there are a few choice people who understand Wrike as a platform and articulate it in such a way where it makes it easy to pass it along to others in the group

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

We have used MS Project previously but ended up doing things in spreadsheets so KanBanchi has bridged this gap for us

Incentivized

Wrike's UI, combined with its low-cost solutions, has been the standout factor compared to the other options sought. They have multiple license types suited to different usage, a standout compared to others that don't leave you stuck paying high license fees for licenses you won't use to that extent.

Incentivized

I’d go with a 9/10. It scales really well across teams and use cases, especially once you set things up properly. The only reason it’s not a full 10 is that it can take some effort to structure everything cleanly at the start.

• 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

• We have seen great value in our planning for Agile deliveries especially when applying it to SCRUM.
• Using the product we have found it quickly surfaces resource constraints and blockers when planning for projects.

Incentivized

• Allow us to plan, execute, track, and effortlessly achieve the completion of all projects before the deadline.
• Great team collaboration that enhances team productivity and efficiency.
• Provide real time project status and progress easily.
• Projects stay well organized and assigning tasks to right people is simple.