ActiveCollab
ActiveCollab Review: Project Work, Time and Pricing
ActiveCollab combines project tasks, shared conversation and recorded time. Its higher tiers connect that delivery work with expenses, budgets, profitability and invoicing, giving teams a path from an assigned task to understanding the work's financial result.
It also supports the ordinary coordination that happens before an invoice: calendars, chat and dependency relationships help keep people aligned. Explore ActiveCollab if you want those daily project activities together, with the option to add financial controls as your needs grow.
Following the work and its consequences
Tasks can have predecessor and successor relationships, set from the task or by linking items on the timeline. Overlapping dates produce warnings, and completing a predecessor notifies the successor's assignee. This gives the next person a useful signal that a handoff is ready.
Smart Rescheduling presents the tasks affected when a date changes. A project manager can inspect those consequences rather than updating an isolated date and overlooking related work. This is guided rescheduling, not a demonstrated system for unattended resource optimization.
Time recording spans the plans. Pro adds time reports and expense tracking, while Pro+ Get Paid adds budgeting, profitability, invoices and workload/capacity. A team delivering client work could use those layers to connect assignments with recorded effort and billing. The financial emphasis is useful where needed, but the underlying task and conversation tools also serve internal projects.
ActiveCollab pricing: plans and billable roles
Listed prices put Plus at USD 15 per month, or USD 12.50 per month on yearly billing, including three seats. Pro is USD 11 per user per month on monthly billing or USD 10 annually. Pro+ Get Paid is USD 17 monthly or USD 15 annually per user.
Pro adds time reports, expense tracking and Slack/Zapier connections. Pro+ Get Paid is the plan to examine for budgeting, invoicing, profitability, workload/capacity and QuickBooks. Pro storage is 100GB on monthly billing and 125GB on annual billing.
Only the Client role is free. Owner, Member, Member+ and Client+ occupy paid seats. For a client-facing team, distinguish the access a free Client needs from the extra capabilities that might lead you to Client+. Ten Pro seats would represent USD 100 per month on annual billing before any other charges; the role mix determines whether ten seats is the correct count.
Cloud and self-hosted options are advertised. Self-hosting uses a quoted one-time license with one year of support and upgrades. Obtain the maintenance price after that included year before comparing long-term costs with the cloud subscription.
Slack and accounting connections
Slack can receive task, time/expense and invitation updates. The account Owner configures the account-wide connection; self-hosted setup also needs Slack app credentials. Channel membership matters because people in a channel can see notifications for tasks hidden from clients, even though opening the task still requires ActiveCollab permission. Test with the actual internal and client channels you intend to use.
The QuickBooks Online connection sends new invoices there for processing. Sent invoices can no longer be edited in ActiveCollab. Invoices from before the connection become unavailable there until the connection is removed, though they are not deleted. Decide where your team will maintain invoicing before enabling the connector so everyday editing expectations match its behavior.
Owner-configured Zapier supports triggers and actions, and webhooks are documented. These offer routes for broader automation, with separate configuration work and any external subscription requirements to assess.
Setup and help
An initial project should include a dependency change, a time entry and the financial handoff you expect to use. If switching, check a representative import with the provider, including task history and financial records.
Live chat is available across plans. Yearly plans include onboarding, and more than 20 Pro or Pro+ seats qualify for a success agent. Those are concrete service distinctions when comparing commitments.
Alternatives and verdict
Asana is worth comparing when task coordination and portfolio oversight drive the purchase. ClickUp offers Docs, chat and time recording in a broader configurable environment. Use the project management comparison to decide how much of the financial workflow should live in the project tool itself.
ActiveCollab is a good candidate when you want daily delivery and recorded effort together, with a clear upgrade path into budgets and invoicing. Evaluate the plan around a real project and the roles of the people involved. Visit ActiveCollab to inspect that workflow and confirm the cloud or self-hosted terms that match your intended setup.