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Important Update: Our free activeCollab alternative is now available! For details and download, visit the activeCollab BC project page.
There is no shortage of project management web apps available these days. Basecamp from 37signals is perhaps the most visible, but other fine options abound. activeCollab is one such option.
While previously open source, it seems that activeCollab chief developer Ilija Studen and team couldn’t resist the opportunity to make a buck. While it was no surprise that aC would add additional features for a price at version 1.0, it was assumed that much of the existing functionality of the open source beta would be included in the free version. No such luck. For use in any real business situation, you’ll pay premium prices for the original software, as well as annual upgrade and support fees.
While we aren’t as familiar with Copper, it looks like a viable alternative to activeCollab - given the fact that we can’t recommend aC on open source terms any longer. Our initial reaction is that we don’t care for the UI and we think the developers missed the point that a simple feature set allows for increased usage and thereby increased user productivity.
So which is it? Our suggestion is to follow the crowd. Basecamp scores all available points in ease of use and its pricing plan makes much more sense to us. What do we use? We actually took advantage of the currently open source activeCollab 0.7.1 and rewrote large portions of the code to look and feel almost exactly like Basecamp. The source code is nicely organized and relatively simple to re-purpose for your specific needs, though pure “theming” is CSS-only.
Update - September 21, 2007: In response to the complaints of their users, the activeCollab team has revised their pricing structure. The new rates seem much more fair to us, though there will no longer be any free or Lite version of activeCollab 1.0. However, the developers will continue to make activeCollab 0.7.1 (open source) available even after the release of 1.0 on October 5th.
In that light, Freelance Escape will soon release our revised version of activeCollab 0.7.1 that behaves much more like Basecamp. If you’d like to be notified, please let us know.
FURTHER UPDATE
Look for our Basecamp-ified activeCollab 0.7.1 any day now. Bookmark this page. This will be a full activeCollab installation, not simply a theme. It will also be possible to update your current installation of activeCollab 0.7.1. We’ll include instructions. We’ve finished editing, we’re just finishing up final testing. Stay tuned!
Special Announcement: Due to the tremendous response from people looking for our “basecamp” download, we will be developing our own branch of the activeCollab open source project, with a new name. We will post a link on this page when the project site is up and running, which should be shortly after our one-time “basecamp” aC is available. The new project will not seek to emulate Basecamp, but will be a unique open source product that expands on the feature set in activeCollab.
Filed under: Software
