Reviews Online Contact Management Software - ACT for Web

This post is part of a series of reviews of Online Contact Management Software. On this page, our review of ACT for Web.

ACT has been the leader in desktop-based contact management for almost 2 decades.  So while It took Sage a few years to get it right, we’re not at all surprised that with version 10, ACT for Web has developed into a robust online contact management application.

With features like an all new Activity Dashboard, the ability to add assign opportunities to multiple contacts (handy for those „committee decisions”) and the ability to create advanced queries for groups and companies and more, ACT certainly improved compared to previous versions.

The Web interface is intuitive and „looks and feels” like ACT. It’s a bit noisy - like many of the desktop versions of this product - but gets the job done. We suspect that current ACT users will have a very short learning curve.

What we liked is the hybrid model ACT offers, with the ability to have some users on a desktop client and others using the Web version - all connected to one single database.

There are, however, a few things that make ACT for Web tough to recommend:

1. Sage doesn’t offer ACT fully hosted or on a subscription plan. Sure, it’s web based - but it’s still software you have to buy, install and maintain on your OWN server. While this may not be an issue for companies with IT staff, it creates an unsurmountable issue for lone rangers and small teams.

To overcome this issue, a number of ACT integrators offer a hosted service where users pay a monthly subscription fee for Web access to the software. While we’re sure these are great companies, it’s the introduction of yet another „in-between” party we would have loved to avoid.

2. It’s way too expensive. Whether you buy and install or buy and host elsewhere, ACT for Web isn’t cheap. It’s only available as an option for ACT Premium (not for the regular version) and when we poked around a bit, we saw hosting offered for $35-$40 per month per user. For a product that retails at $300, we simply find this to be an unrealistic proposition.

3. It’s good - but still not as good as its desktop sibling. Compared to ACT Premium, ACT for Web misses the ability to synch your Outlook Calendar and with Palm or Pocket PC’s as well as the ability to use MS Word for Mail Merge - you’ll have to use the ACT Work Processor instead.

In summary, ACT for Web is a feature-rich contact management tool and while it would seem a logical next step for current ACT fans and a very serious option for new users, the combination of cost and „self-hosting”, however, makes it unsuitable for many small to mid-sized teams or individuals.

Read more reviews of Online Contact Management Software.