Active Collab is a project management solution built around features such as task management, collaboration, time tracking, and invoicing.
$7
per member/per month
Replicon Project Time Tracking
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Replicon's Project Time Tracking suite of applications allows users to track billable time, manage project hours and cost, track project expenses, as well as manage paid time off.
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.
I believe it is well suited for a small sized company, like my previous one, that does not want any IT overhead to onboard a new tool. This tool is available online and can be accessed via the internet. It has all the necessary components to help you record your activity. But the solution in its current form is not scalable. [I've] Given few of my reasons I feel this is not well suited for a large company (like the one I currently work at).
It allowed me to fill my work time sheet. Every week I had to fill this. Based on the numbers the company keeps track of which days I worked.
It reminded me to fill the time sheets constantly and also notifies me when it gets approved. So I never really forgot to fill it.
It allowed me to see my vacation days left, and plan ahead.
It had a list of holiday dates which was very handy to plan my trips or vacation.
It had categorization by department and my view of time sheets was only limited to me. I could not see others time sheets, and except for my manager, nobody else could look into mine.
It had internet access, which meant I could fill my sheets anywhere. It came in handy while working from home where a VPN connection may not be present. I also guess that this service being online meant no extra effort from IT department side.
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 UI in my opinion was too simple. Calendar views were pretty stale.
I don't believe there was a mobile app for this, or this site worked nicely when opened on small devices.
A better view of my time could have been shown. At the time I could only see small excel like boxes filled with numbers. Graphs, or some other visualization of remaining days would have been lucrative.
Very stupid login page. We had to fill "company name" at the login page and this name had to match exactly to what was set in the database. It was frustrating and I always had to refer my notes to get that right.
There wasn't any preselection option which made it hard to do it fast. If I can only set a few fields (because we had long list of dropdowns to choose from) then this process could be much smoother.
A major issue was not being able to see my team-mates schedule or calendar. E.g. when are they taking vacations. So I had to pester them offline to get this information. Many times due to inter-team miscommunication we didn't know about others vacation days during planning. A central place where I could see this information would have helped me a lot.
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.
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.
I believe it is not in my power to select the best tool. It depends on whatever company I work for. It just happens that we use a different system (and I don't even know if this is an internal system, or another online tool). But I do like my current system. It has a better UI, and more detailed insights about my time. It also shows my pay stubs and other small neat information like tax papers to help me organize. It also has notifications when something new comes up. All these features I think I lacked in Replicon (or maybe my company didn't have access to these).
Replicon helped me maintain a record of my time. This helped during my assessment where my manager could see my work hours.
Replicon was easy to use, so I didn't spend my precious time filling sheets in this site. As far as I can remember, this site only gave me problem once, but was never down.
Though a good tool, I actually never got the use case of recording your time sheets. I think it will be pretty hard for an employee to just fill the time sheet and not show up for work. There are so many meetings and people around you, that you cannot fake your presence. So I feel there is no need to fill time sheets. It is a functionality with no real world solution.
