Active Collab is a project management solution built around features such as task management, collaboration, time tracking, and invoicing.
$8
per member/per month
Time Doctor
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Time Doctor offers in-depth productivity analytics, giving business owners insight on how to improve performance and scale. Going beyond tracking and monitoring, Time Doctor’s suite of tools put data-driven improvement front and center, helping to ensure that teams of all sizes are actively working on the right things while also offering actionable insights to maximize performance and efficiency. Time Doctor tracks the collective hours a team puts in. But it also provides a…
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.
Time Doctor is well suited for certain businesses where some or many of the employees are now working remotely due to the pandemic and post-pandemic times. It is a good way for the employer to keep track of activity and (more or less) keep people honest. For businesses and employees where there are a lot of site visits, travel, etc., Time Doctor is a little impractical since it requires the employee to manually enter in whatever time was spent on tasks performed away from the computer. If an employer is hoping to track that activity, they still need to rely on the employees' honor systems to enter in times and tasks.
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
One thing I would love to see is integration with my cell phone. Time Doctor already has an app, but I want it to automatically capture the time I spend on my phone with clients. For now I have to manually enter in this time and must note when the call started and when it ended.
Integration into Wave apps where I generate my invoices. I'd like to be able to select a project from Time Doctor in my invoice and have it automatically populate the time I spent on it and the dates I worked on the project rather than manually finding and entering this information.
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.
The support was terrible! They never responded in sufficient time and their assistance was always super vague. I never felt like they had an actual solution to my concerns. They were nice, but I don't feel like they were trained in their own system. It felt like I was talking to a wall.
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 still use Rescue Time for different reasons. I review my stats once a week by email. I think it's a totally different product. My egg timer keeps me more on task, but it doesn't record my times
For a small amount each month I believe I get a huge return on investment in form of traceability of my hours spent. The major factor that made me choose Time Doctor was the price and the value. I don't think I would still be interested if it was more expensive.
