Act! Reviews

Pros

I like this software. Being able to improve my communication, increase my sales and ensure the loyalty of my customers is so magical! And the ease of remote tasks is just incredible. And to think it's so easy to use!

Cons

Nothing to complain about! This software works like a charm and is easy to use.

Pros

ACT is easy to use and does what a CRM is supposed to do: manage contacts and contact information. It is easy to create contacts, companies, links and search for them. It can be used offline which makes it extremely convenient when there is no internet access (eg: business trips). The DB will synchronize when you are back online. Another thing is that it is an off the shelf product: it does not require any development to configure.

Cons

The software lacks customizable reports and dashboard. It is extremely complicated to setup a good dashboard with the reports that you need. There is not much options or flexibility, and the display does not always end up being right (missing items). So it is not the best for sales/opportunities management.

Pros

What's not to like First of all Client set up is a breeze! Once entered all notes are time dated. To email your client their is an Icon click on it and it automatically opens up Outlook and fills out the email address. Send and email and it keeps a copy of the email you sent to them and or received from them time dated. It allows you to set have set groups of which you can email everyone in that group. For instance maybe you have people who use tank cars, people may use box cars or need certain products you can have send a blast just to those people with a simple click on the group or groups. Want to see the locations a client there is an ico click on that a google maps opens and you can do a satellite view. Suffice it to say it does everything but wash the dishes.

Cons

Nothing! The survey is asking for a min of 40 words to describe what I don't like ok its not free!

Pros

Easy to set up and does what it says on the tin

Cons

We are happy so there are no cons for us

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Act!

Pros

Mostly used Act's features of contact management and marketing automation in CRM, it has a feature that brings together all of the customer data into a centralized database. Using automation tool is so easy and helps you track every steps.

Cons

Not so many features but the essential features are enough to get what is really needed. The support for the product has ended.

Pros

Familiar from days gone past. I like the 'promises' that ended up being misrepresentations (I'm avoiding the word lie)

Cons

Misrepresentation despite very clear presale's objectives being defined. Could not 'try' since marketing is not a feature available to free trial.

Pros

Easy to use for my purposes. I only use it to store contacts and create history files

Cons

I have had many cases where the remote database would stop working with the cloud. Always fixed by ACT, but frustrating. Also, I repeatedly have situations where ACT hangs, and often I have to close it out and start again. This has probably happened over 50 times. When I call ACT for support, it gets resolved, but I never get a good answer why it is doing this.

Pros

Act imports large data at once... without loss of any records. Stable, desktop version. Create shortcuts.

Cons

Everything is fine. It was hard to contact sales department due to high call volume but they did get back to me quickly.

Pros

There isn't much I like about using Act. It is clunky and there are a lot better CRM tools out there that are much more sophisticated and are better for integrating multiple programs. It is a relatively easy tool to use although it does not do a lot of what we would like it to be able to use.

Cons

Act seems to be patched together from add-ons over the year and has not had a comprehensive UX refresh. It also is not simple to integrate with our other software like a lot of other software tools are

Pros

I used ACT! for nearly 20 years in my previous role and when I went freelance I really missed it but thought it was not affordable. I am now so busy I really needed to get organised and I was pleasantly surprised at how affordable it actually is. It only really needs to save me one hour a month to give me more than return on investment - and it did that on day 1!

Cons

I made a silly error uploading and couldn't figure out how to undo so I shall be calling on the onboarding team for help.

Pros

I have pioneered the purchase of ACT! in my company. Back then, It offers a perpetual license per user which is great as you don't subject yourself to a monthly or annual subscription. I love the fact that ACT! marketing can be customised and very rare that it falls under the promotions tab of the email recipient.

Cons

ACT! can only be linked to a certain version of Outlook which i find not helpful. Not all the licenses we purchased were maximise as they find ACT! a work duplicate particularly on the finance side since only selected accounting software can be integrated in the ACT! system.

Pros

Ability to customize the product for my preferred activities - follow-ups, invoicing, managing client relations, sales pipeline tracking and more.

Cons

Nothing to complain about as they've gotten the product to work efficiently with the past 6 or 7 versions. Upgrading used to be inconvenient but they've made the upgrade process seemless

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Act!

Pros

Easy to setup and have customized fields. They have an option to run on your own server to avoid monthly fees of other CRM options.

Cons

Once you have over 10,000 contacts. It is harder and slower to organize CRM. Works much better for smaller contact lists.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Act!

Pros

There are multiple benefits to using Act as reported by our users. The Act database allows for a large quantity of information to be stored, meaning we were able to decommission several other systems holding various bits of customer data by merging it into Act.

We have found pricing to be competitive on a per-licence basis which suits us as a small team working within a non-profit organisation. Act makes it easy for users to update already stored customer/company information, so we always have up-to-date data for contacting, addresses, etc.
Communications to customers/companies are tracked in Act so other members of the department can see who has communicated with who, and what the correspondence was – this is useful if a member of staff is off and another needs to pick up some workload.

On the technical side, updates and hotfixes are provided regularly and it is relatively easy to install these during periods of downtime. The UI is easy to navigate, with clearly labelled menus and an in-built help area.

Cons

We have found it somewhat difficult to integrate Act with our current systems and have resorted to manually exporting CSVs with information to import into our systems. This is a legacy process and may have been improved upon however, we haven’t looked into this.

We have also had to purchase add-ins to enable certain features such as opportunities tracking, but Act plays well with these add-ons, so this is not too much of an issue for us.

From an admin’s perspective, it has proven difficult to set up an automatic installation that works with our MDT deployments, but we roll out images with Act on rarely, so this isn’t too much of an issue.

Perhaps in future, updates could be made to the UI to make it look a little less dated and bring it up to clean, modern, standards.

Pros

This is a robust software program. We have added many custom fields that allows us to track a lot of data really dig into for trends and statistics. We love how history is captured a for all the activity we do for and with a client. We rely on the relationship tab heavily as multiple people are involved in a transaction. We are really enjoying the new Marketing Automation. It has a lot of robust features that we are just beginning to tap into. We also like the groups feature. We have hundreds of groups that we can run reports and create statistics from. We can see how many groups a contact is part of which helpful as well. I like the statistics ACT generates from drip marketing. Knowing what emails bounced back or who opted out helps us improve our data.

Cons

When searching for a person, it doesn't give you the option of having similar names - the spelling must be exact. It crashes when we are in the social updates tab. Customer Service: Often the techs are hard to understand. The time we spend on the phone with customer service on average lasts about 1/2 to an hour depending on the issue. That is a big interruption to our workflow in the office.

One thing I wish ACT would do is send to 2 emails at once. When sending out an eblast, it pulls from the email field. If there is more than one email address followed by a semicolon, it won't send to both. It bounces back.

Pros

ACT! is working hard to make itself my highly valued CRM/Partner. Frequent functionality upgrades and increased reliability. Excellent technical assistance.
Expanded training videos and knowledge database. Act CRM is well integrated with Marketing Automation. It is not an add-on, but is central to and easy to use.

Cons

I have used ACT! for a long time. For much of the time, I was intimidated by its complications. Weak training did not help. A steep learning curve also required that I learn by trial and error. Much time was wasted learning to use ACT!'s power. ACT! 's muscle was hidden by requiring that I learn on my own instead of having good training.
ACT! would benefit from seeking out suggestions from users as to improvements in training. Some of these stunning features took forever to learn on my own.

Pros

I have been using Act! for decades via its various owners and takeovers. It served me well in sales and marketing, and now I use it to track my legal clients and court hearings, trials, etc.

Cons

It does not work in Windows 11, which came with my new computer. Your Tech Support was no help, telling me simply that Microsoft knows about it and "someday" will have a fix. Meanwhile, with a local technician, I had to roll back to Windows 10 (hundreds of dollars paid), then I had to pay a remote Act! specialist (not your employee) to help to get it to "work" even in Windows 10. It barely works now, freezing up constantly and repeatedly throughout my workday. It is practically useless, but I bear with it until I can find another product that works for me.

Pros

This product allows you to integrate the basic and most complicated processes within your business. I love the email link feature, any time I send an email to a client (who has their email in their account profile), the system automatically saves that email in the client profile. You don't have to search for it in your inbox, or click an extra button to push the details over to the profile, it all happens automatically. The icing on the cake, is now that it is in the client profile, other members of my team can see what emails I have communicated to client, and when they were sent. It helps to keep my team all on the same page. This is by far the best Client Database system I have ever used. AMAZING!

Cons

The biggest downside to ACT is there is not a built in funnel email system. You have to select the group or type of clients that you want to email, export that to another database and then send the communications from there. The system will still tag your emails as long as they are sent from your domain, but having to export the list an use an additional software or service to send the mass email notifications is a little frustrating. If they can fix this option, it would make my life a lot easier.

Pros

I enjoy having task and opportunity options. It makes me organized and I can manage my time. I love marketing automation as it's difficult to reach out to hundreds of contacts at a time.

Cons

I would like to change the colors of the program. The blue and white are a little too overwhelming for my eyes. I would like "Dark Mode" if that would be possible.

Pros

I was probably one of the first purchasers of Act. It is a great program that needs a company to put some serious thought behind making it work better. After shopping several other CRM software's I still think it is above the rest in both user friendly and functionality. You price for the product is more than fair (in fact, I think low) but the software runs like it is somebody's part time job.

Cons

Customer service is the worst. The guys in India are great and I have nothing bad to say about them but is there some reason I need to sit on a phone 45 minutes waiting to speak to the representative? Again I think Act could be the CRM leader but I don't see much improvement over the past few years. The principles of this company have sat back and let opportunities walk by not focusing on the customers needs. With all the apps and technologies available Act should have more to offer.When I purchase a product I do not expect to have to spend hours chasing down my answers through videos.

Pros

Familiar as I have been using ACT since 1991, starting with v2.0 and now have v22.1.

Cons

ACT worked 'great' up to and including v21. Since the release of v22, I get ACT "NOT RESPONDING" messages 6-8x per day and need to completely reboot my laptop. Also with v22, I have randomly and periodically had (2x) my template for Contacts changed/rearranged. This combined with the elimination of service contracts, makes using ACT and potentially upgrading to the next version of ACT "unattractive".

Pros

We have been using Act for 18 years. It's a nice product with as many bells and whistles thats needed for a CRM. Its easy to implement and set up databases. It has the necessary features for analytics and reporting for clients.We plan to upgrade to an Act cloud version soon.

Cons

The only feature I would like to see added would be an internal voip so that you could hit the call button and Act would dial automatically.

Pros

n/a.

Cons

the format design seems to have been taken away from a salesperson and given to a techie. The history now can be tricky to follow. It used to be very straight forward with corresponding dates/times per entry. No lomger the case you can have multiple entries per date so not accurate any more. also changing date for mat for future task was much easier, now you have to scroll through to get to a date. Painful, again a techie must have taken over design role, a sales guy would keep in nimple.

Pros

Online features make it easy to access data.

Cons

The UI could have some significant improvements. Immediate suggestions for the online version would be:

- Include keyboard shortcuts
- Ability to clear the search function with the click of a button
- Improve layout editing more user friendly

Pros

I like that I can still use a PC-based product that I control and provide security necessary to product our client and internal information. I like that my customized version fits my basic needs to manage contacts and periodically send email messages and letters.

Cons

I need ACT support to fix problems with email merge too often. The time required to send routine communications annually has increased at least 10 fold due to time needed to fix problems. Most of the problems seem to be keeping up with Microsoft.