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
No answer on this topic
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
2253 Ratings
7% above category average
Task Management
5.112 Ratings
9.22239 Ratings
Resource Management
1.08 Ratings
8.41912 Ratings
Gantt Charts
3.07 Ratings
8.31310 Ratings
Scheduling
1.011 Ratings
8.41869 Ratings
Workflow Automation
7.01 Ratings
8.51945 Ratings
Team Collaboration
6.113 Ratings
9.22194 Ratings
Support for Agile Methodology
7.07 Ratings
8.21165 Ratings
Support for Waterfall Methodology
7.01 Ratings
7.01 Ratings
Document Management
3.08 Ratings
7.81811 Ratings
Email integration
4.09 Ratings
8.31613 Ratings
Mobile Access
1.110 Ratings
8.41789 Ratings
Timesheet Tracking
2.09 Ratings
7.61051 Ratings
Change request and Case Management
1.08 Ratings
9.21163 Ratings
Budget and Expense Management
2.07 Ratings
8.31039 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 is very well suited for our nonprofit programs that serve low-income clients who need diapers, wipes, and period products. It has helped us run our programs, capturing information and allowing us to view the data for reporting purposes. The ability to filter data is very helpful by allowing us to categorize information to get a better picture of the progress of our programs.
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
The desktop app for Mac seems to have a few issues with visual glitches appearing on screen, it only seems to go away when I close the tool and reopen it
Subtasks don't show on the individual users to-do list, only main level tasks
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 simpler and easier to grasp, apply and navigate than ClickUp, but the ClickUp free version has so much more functionality available than the monday.com free / low-cost options (sorry, but it's true!). Google Tasks is really simple and I shouldn't really compare them - it's just really nice to be able to see my tasks right next to my Google Calendar or Gmail (widget) - the "all on one" view on the screen is really nice ease of access, but the power of monday.com outweighs the nice-to-have of an all-in-one screen layout - it feels clumsy to bring in all my Calendar items from Google to monday.com, so an integration app to the Google screen where you can see monday.com tasks would be amazing.
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.
