Act! 365 CRM

ACT! consistently beat the competition back in the day. Simple, easy-to-use, and highly functional/dependable was the mantra back then. Not to mention, affordable for the masses to acquire. Small business and independent sales and others could navigate with a few keystrokes and shortcuts. It all changed with attempts of sophistication, the loss of functionality, SQL lockdowns, bloated databases and longer backups, subscriptions that take advantage of users regardless of whether there’s any real improvements, poor performance on the cloud that matches the clunkiness of Salesforce, and a general ignorance of its original core and brand. ACT! should have kept its native structure and a new application/brand for mid-large organizations should have been developed that differentiated itself away from ACT! Associating appointments with contacts is very cool (something that neither Google/Gmail nor Apple does) along with custom fields, weak reports, and generic letter templates. However, it isn’t worth the continual payments or poor performance for the convenience. Besides, who wants to continually design layouts all day anyway; just to get the tab stops right?

Back in the day, Act! was the standard, the application that all other CRM‘s aspired to be. This app falls short of that standard. I could be wrong, but it looks like a Web wrapper instead of a fully-native app. The service is inexpensive, and I expect that many users will put up with the app for that reason, but I, for one, am disappointed enough to move on.