Active Collab is a project management solution built around features such as task management, collaboration, time tracking, and invoicing.
$8
per member/per month
monday.com
Score 8.3 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
monday.com Work OS is an open platform designed so that anyone can create the tools they need to run all aspects of their work. It includes ready-made templates or the ability to customize any work solution ranging from sales pipelines to marketing campaigns, CRMs, and project tracking.
Unfortunately, I find that every single one of these alternatives is a better tool. ActiveCollab is a legacy tool my organisation had in place when I joined because their team had been much smaller and had less need for collaborative views and workload management within a tool …
monday.com
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Features
ActiveCollab
monday.com
Project Management
Comparison of Project Management features of Product A and Product B
ActiveCollab
3.6
13 Ratings
73% below category average
monday.com
8.3
2258 Ratings
7% above category average
Task Management
5.112 Ratings
9.22244 Ratings
Resource Management
1.08 Ratings
8.31917 Ratings
Gantt Charts
3.07 Ratings
8.21314 Ratings
Scheduling
1.011 Ratings
8.41872 Ratings
Workflow Automation
7.01 Ratings
8.61950 Ratings
Team Collaboration
6.113 Ratings
9.32198 Ratings
Support for Agile Methodology
7.07 Ratings
8.21168 Ratings
Support for Waterfall Methodology
7.01 Ratings
7.01 Ratings
Document Management
3.08 Ratings
7.91815 Ratings
Email integration
4.09 Ratings
7.81617 Ratings
Mobile Access
1.110 Ratings
7.91794 Ratings
Timesheet Tracking
2.09 Ratings
7.81053 Ratings
Change request and Case Management
1.08 Ratings
9.11166 Ratings
Budget and Expense Management
2.07 Ratings
8.01043 Ratings
Professional Services Automation
Comparison of Professional Services Automation features of Product A and Product B
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.
The platform has a good deal of versatility and extensibility, but I do not feel it is well suited for anything too complex. More complexity seems to bog down performance and increase maintenance to keep everything humming. As much as possible, avoid creating too many bespoke workarounds that will end up creating tech debt. The platform seems to work best for more straightforward scenarios and smaller to mid-size companies. Pricing can be reasonable for specific teams, but can feel a little too pricey for company-wide usage. It has served us well for the early stages of our company, but we find ourselves offloading the more complex use cases to other apps specifically developed for those, and reducing to just those teams that are more deeply embedded in the functionality.
I like summary of subitems, especially with subitasks as subitems and add item tracking for each subtask it can show total tracked in parent item. Similar with other columns, like numbers, status, date.
Dashboard features, Many kinds of dashboard view available, we can utilize on the basis of requirements.
monday.com workform is very powerful, easily share form link when submitted it will create line item in board with provided data.
monday.com automation is very helpful in order to automate steps with specific rules and easy setup.
monday.com also provides integrations in order to automate processes if need to integrate multiple app together. or need to transfer data between multiple apps.
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
I would like to see our company logo show up larger on the form feature.
I prefer the version of the form they have now instead of the new version for 2025. The current form shows the questions in bold font, and the new version does not. This may mean it could take our volunteers longer to get to the pertinent information on the form.
It would be nice if monday.com staff had monthly webinars showing how to use some features. such as, using formulas effectively.
Teams involved in content creation, such as marketing or editorial teams, could use monday.com to manage the entire content lifecycle. Boards might track content ideas, assignments, drafts, reviews, approvals, and publication schedules, helping teams collaborate and keep content production on track.
I give monday.com a 10/10 because I almost never encounter any lag or connectivity issues despite all of the many templates, boards, and automations we have. As a matter of fact, I feel like the last issue I encountered was over a year ago... and I'm in monday.com every single work day. Not only is monday trustworthy, it is easy to find what I'm looking for... making the overall usability extremely hard to beat.
Everything performs fairly well. Every now and then there are user errors where an employee will not click "ok" on a note they've created and simply exit out (I do wish that something was in place to prevent this, such as a pop "are you finished?")
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.
monday.com only really care about accounts that have 20 seats or more. While this is great for monday.com, it pushes smaller organisations to evaluate alternatives. We rate monday.com highly in our organisation because key staff have already got good experience with the application and we know we will get to 20+ seats one day. But, till then the billing model and lack of permanent enterprise features is a dread.
To have someone walk you thru the features and capabilities of Monday.com is priceless. Someone also coming along later in the contract to see if you are maximizing the program to suit your company needs is beyond helpful. The staff that have provided this training are fun, creative and very patient.
We signed up for the accounts. Created the accounts. Ran the trial version and tested it live while we were running multiple projects and found that it was fitting our needs perfectly. When the trial ended and we were asked to purchase the full version, we did. We have found other ways to use it and it's a breeze.
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.
monday.com is cleaner, offers more customization and is easier to design out with a team project focus in mind. With the ability to automate steps as well, it is super easy to move tasks along, have stages auto-update and to go through my personal to-do list of tasks to get things done.
For it to work across multiple departments and sites, I would like to see improvements made with integrations and automation. For this question, I am acknowledging not only the addition of internal triggers/automation, but also an expansion on external ones.
Much easier to review my prior month and report to clients on work completed; easy to extract the information and work done to Excel to add budget tracking etc - I see this is possible in monday.com and I will investigate how/if this is possible on our current plan.
Very fast and easy set-up of Boards.
Still lots to learn and grasp - many more opportunities to become more efficient using monday.com. I'm only just getting started.
The initial automations are quick and easy to set up, and if set up correctly.
My month-end client status and progress reports are now more accurate, and I can keep track of all the information in one place (inside monday.com).
