I reviewed Active Collab many years ago, in 2007 if I'm correct. It was a decent PM tool, but we opted for Teamworks Project which we have been using ever since in my company. Teamwork is a professional, efficient and very capable system and we have years of multiple project history with it with tons of documents, comments, etc. and hundreds of users. I have a grandfathered account with unrestricted users, and even with that Teamwork is not cheap.

I have also worked with almost every PM system you can think of, from Asana to Wrike and Zoho Projects and whatnot. I have written articles about PM for international magazines. So, I'm a bit of an expert in the field.

The reason I mention Teamwork is because ActiveCollab is very similar in terms of how it's organized. You get projects, in each project there's a task list, in each task list you have tasks that can host subtasks. Each task or subtask can be linked to a parent or child task, and each task can be commented as many times as needed by team members. Using labels and task lists it's very easy to always get a clear view about each project.

You also have Notes, which help you structure chunks of information, and time tracking if you don't forget to activate or deactivate it. The way this is structured is very clear and very easy to use. From my experience with Teamwork which has a very similar structure, 100% of clients and 100% of team members will use the system easily without needing any onboarding. In my view, Active Collab is far superior to the other PM tools that have been on sale on AppSumo, that are very limited.

As a PM manager the features that are lacking in this offer are : a gantt system (the timeline is good but not good enough), time estimates per tasks, risk estimates per task, advanced notifications and privacy settings for tasks among other things. But if you don't need those, Active Collab is perfectly capable and for that price it's a good opportunity. User seats are expensive in the PM world!

I'm getting this to organize my own workflow, and I won't invite anyone to my projects, so the way I see it is a To Do list on steroids. By using the projects/task lists/labels I can organize myself very well. This will limit my information overload and help me focus.