Active Collab is a project management solution built around features such as task management, collaboration, time tracking, and invoicing.
$8
per member/per month
Pivotal Tracker
Score 5.0 out of 10
N/A
Pivotal Tracker is a project management program primarily for software developers. It is built from the ground up to facilitate the agile development cycle, and is optimized for structuring projects in sprints, or “stories.”
The solution is now owned and supported by VMware, and is part of the Pivotal / Tanzu product line up.
N/A
Pricing
ActiveCollab
Pivotal Tracker
Editions & Modules
ActiveCollab Project Management
$8
per member/per month
Self-Hosted Plan
$999.00
license
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ActiveCollab
Pivotal Tracker
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
$6.25 per member, per month, annual billing
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
ActiveCollab
Pivotal Tracker
Features
ActiveCollab
Pivotal Tracker
Project Management
Comparison of Project Management features of Product A and Product B
ActiveCollab
3.6
13 Ratings
73% below category average
Pivotal Tracker
6.0
1 Ratings
22% below category average
Task Management
5.112 Ratings
3.01 Ratings
Resource Management
1.08 Ratings
3.01 Ratings
Gantt Charts
3.07 Ratings
00 Ratings
Scheduling
1.011 Ratings
7.01 Ratings
Workflow Automation
7.01 Ratings
00 Ratings
Team Collaboration
6.113 Ratings
00 Ratings
Support for Agile Methodology
7.07 Ratings
7.01 Ratings
Support for Waterfall Methodology
7.01 Ratings
00 Ratings
Document Management
3.08 Ratings
00 Ratings
Email integration
4.09 Ratings
9.01 Ratings
Mobile Access
1.110 Ratings
8.01 Ratings
Timesheet Tracking
2.09 Ratings
00 Ratings
Change request and Case Management
1.08 Ratings
00 Ratings
Budget and Expense Management
2.07 Ratings
00 Ratings
Search
00 Ratings
5.01 Ratings
Professional Services Automation
Comparison of Professional Services Automation features of Product A and Product B
ActiveCollab
5.7
8 Ratings
30% below category average
Pivotal Tracker
-
Ratings
Quotes/estimates
6.97 Ratings
00 Ratings
Invoicing
6.96 Ratings
00 Ratings
Project & financial reporting
1.07 Ratings
00 Ratings
Integration with accounting software
7.94 Ratings
00 Ratings
Agile Development
Comparison of Agile Development 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 UI of the Pivotal tracker is really beautiful and amazing, which looks trivial, but we have it open all the time, so it's nice for us. In Pivotal tracker for me its very Easy to create tasks or stories anytime without facing any problems. Pivotal tracker provides us a ton of features to track the tasks and manage a team and the projects. Pivotal tracker allows for a entire team to be on the same page of the tool in regards to where is the project right now, right status of every task, what is being worked on and by whom.
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
In-story task management is still a weak point. The ability to @mention users in tasks and mark tasks as 'in-progress' would go a long way.
Epics do not span projects. This becomes troublesome when scaling Pivotal Tracker's agile methodology to multiple teams.
Splitting stories is often confusing for team members as there is no concept of a 'parent' story with child stories that have split off of it. There are only two levels: Epic & Story.
It was generally easy to use once you got the hang of it. The searching and tagging of tickets was fine, commenting worked well, and release planning was good. However, it wasn't the most intuitive tool in the beginning. The UI is pretty outdated and could have used upgrades over time.
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.
We've never had to request support in the 5 years I have been using it. A solid solution! Everything I have had questions about is on the website. New features are in their newsletter with more details on their website. Often I am using the new features within a few minutes of reading the article.
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 have had employees in the past look at Drupal, and other open source project management tools to assist in our needs. Unfortunately each solution took too much time to implement, design and configure that we could not stop the work we were doing for clients to complete a full set up of a project tracker. Thankfully Pivotal is a predefined solution with no configuration needed. Simply input your projects, design your Stories with Tasks and begin your tracking.
Time is money with development and a lot of things can fall through the cracks. Having a good system for making sure you're building the most relevant product for customers is really important so it was well worth it for us.
The process we used worked for us and it helped us streamline our development which reduced a lot of things falling through the cracks and headaches. I'm sure there are other products that can do the same job just as effectively but Pivotal Tracker worked well for us.