Developer(s) A51 Operating system License Proprietary | Development status Active Type Project management | |
Initial release July 2006; 10 years ago (2006-07) | ||
Active Collab is a web-based project management tool developed by A51. It launched under the name activeCollab in 2006 as an open source alternative to Basecamp, but it became a commercial product in 2007. Active Collab offers features such as task management, collaboration, time tracking, and invoicing. It provides users with needed flexibility to manage virtual projects.
Contents
It is available as a cloud service or as self-hosted software that is installed on a private server.
History
Active Collab started as a side project in 2005 by Ilija Studen. The goal was to make a simple system that keeps track of work tasks, similar to Basecamp. It was released in 2006 under an open source license.
In 2007, Goran Radulović joined as a co-founder and Active Collab became proprietary software developed by the company A51. Initially, Active Collab was only available as a self-hosted version. In 2013, the cloud service was introduced.
A new, completely redesigned version came out in May 2015.
Open source forks of Active Collab are being developed under Project Pier and Feng Office.
Features
Active Collab offers project management features such as task management, invoicing and time tracking, and collaboration features such as file sharing, discussions, assignments, collaborative writing, and reminders. For collaboration functions, Active Collab relies on email rather than chat.
Projects are divided into task lists, tasks, and subtasks. Projects also include their own files, discussions, notes, and time and expenses. Email notifications can be sent whenever there is an activity on a project.
Payments can be made within Active Collab using PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.Net, and Braintree gateways.
Active Collab is available as a cloud service with a monthly payment tiered by the number of users and with unlimited projects, and as a self-hosted software where a user pays a one-time fee and hosts it on their own server - this way they are not limited by the file size limits. The self-hosted version requires database and server skills plus knowledge of PHP.
Technology used
The front-end is developed using AngularJS, while the back-end is written in PHP and uses MySQL, Memcached, Redis, ElasticSearch, and Node.js.