Marg Act!

It used to be a perfect program. Alas, no more.

I've used ACT religiously for the last 10 years. It used to be a wonderful product. I recently switched to the cloud based version. My first question to the sales person at Swiftpage was, "How fast is it?" She assured me it was much faster than the trial software they let you try. After I paid for a year's subscription and downloaded the software it turned out it was much worse. Unbelievably, Swiftpage would not refund my money and switch me to a desktop based version. When I say slow, I don't me a little slow, I mean unworkably slow. Put it this way, I'm currently trying to look up one of my clients in the database. I've written this review in that time and it still hasn't located the record. Avoid at all cost!!!

I don't have one. I hope someone at ACT gets the message and improves the product.

I've run my business with this software for more than a decade. I am now switching.

I have years of invested use and customization. So, I like that I am familiar with how to customize it to fit my business.

The support is difficult to get, long waits, and not always correct.

Don't do it unless you hear that their Support went from a one to a 10. The person in charge of their Support is either incompetent or does not care. They seem to care more about 1 Getting monthly commitments for fees and 2 Releasing new versions probably to help insure renewals and monthly commitments from users.

Manages sales activity for remote sales agents.

I have been a dedicated user since 1999. It is better than outlook for tracking events and customers. I do not use any of the social media features btw.

ACT Pro simply does not work with Windows 10. Activities do not roll. Outlook email does not integrate at all. Customer support offered a knowledge base article on the first problem with two fixes. One was for beginners and did not work. The other referenced menus and options that do not exist. Customer support did take over my pc remotely and caused my activities to roll - once. They have ignored my followup requests ever since.

Too buggy to consider right now. It just does not work with Windows 10.

It is a good program when it works - tracking many customers, clients, meetings calls and projects is easy using ACT. Their integration with outlook and google doesn't work well. I use companion link, a third party program, to sync with my android calendar.

As a software engineer who's worked in the field of IT for over 12 years I can say that this software is, without a doubt, the least user-friendly application I've ever encountered. It took myself and another highly trained, Microsoft / Cisco certified IT professional 14+ hours to upgrade to next version of ACT for Desktop (on 10 user PCs and update it with it's latest service pack. The upgrade process for ACT requires you to remove the previous version. Fine. However, the ACT uninstaller doesn't remove everything it should (registry keys and app-data folders abound. If the Protexis security service doesn't give you headaches over activating your copy of ACT you'll most likely run into a missing or corrupt COM error, and god forbid you intend to use this to sync with Outlook because Every time you change your password in ACT you will have to also change the password inside of the plugin's preferences and then re-sync the two applications. User's don't like being bothered, and ACT has a bad habit of getting in the way.

Negativity aside, you will have your own unique experiences with ACT. You may have 0 issues with it, or you might not be able to get it to run without IT support. Best of luck to you.

As an IT professional who is also a software engineer and works with the .NET framework I can get around ACT's blaring issues.... The rest of the folks I work with however, can't. Every year when we upgrade to the new version of ACT it's a circus. I figure with all the pain and suffering we've gone through the IT costs (not including ACT's licenses might just make the case for us to move to Salesforce. Salesforce isn't cheap, but it works.

If you're going to use ACT then look to the future. ACT is moving most of their offerings to the cloud via a web-based version of their desktop application. At some point that might be an ok option if you want to use ACT. Although GG dev team, maybe code the interface/ whatever javascript or postback code you're using to be cross-browser compatible. It's nice when you get the latest version of Act for Web, and using FireFox you encounter a message telling you "The browser you are using is not supported". It's 2016... not compatible with FireFox. ok.

It is a large rolodex of contact information, and weak relationship manager. It allows us to store contact info with custom fields and link contacts to a company object.

I have been with Act! for nearly 15 years and I have finally had it!!!! Who doesn't have an interface for Apple these days? Who doesn't have an App to access their site? I have tried to integrate to Google since their upgrade three weeks ago, on three different computers and still no success. The wait times on hold are ludicrous this whole company is a joke! I am in silicon valley and know how technology works, no one cares about being up to-date or current at Act! They don't care about the customer experience with hours of wait times or care about doing what they say they are going to do!!! It's been over a week since they said they would call me back on a problem I had that they said is an issue on their end!!!

I have never written a review before but.....Where do I begin with what I don't like???? I have the Cloud Premium, what a joke, the word "premium" is, there is nothing premium about their technical support HOLD TIMES in access of TWO HOURS!!! I am self employed and waiting on hold or paying my assistant to do so, cost a fortune in down time!!! The program in archaic and my engineer husband has been telling me to dump Act for over a decade but did I listen? NOOOOO and I am paying dearly for not taking his advise!!

NONE!!!