How do ACT! Pro & ACT! Premium Compare?

Sage ACT! is available in two editions, ACT! Pro and ACT! Premium.

Many functions are identical in both including creating histories, using groups and running mail merges but there are several important differences that we're focusing on in this post.

Number of Users

The Pro edition only supports a maximum of 10 ACT! users. In contrast, ACT! Premium doesn't have a defined limit so offers greater scalability to support larger, faster growing teams.

Web Access

ACT! Pro is fully networkable and also enables remote working so users can take an offline local database and sync their updates when the network is connected. However, this doesn't include ACT! web access as this is only available with the Premium edition.

ACT! Premium is supplied with applications for a regular Windows client installation and web access so mobile and remote users have greater flexibility to access real-time ACT! data via an Internet Explorer or FireFox browser.

Read more about ACT! Premium for Web

Team Dashboards

ACT! dashboards in the Pro edition only show data for one user. Views can be changed to show sales and activity data associated with different users but dashboards will only show data from one user at a time.

ACT! Premium enables team dashboards so comparisons and assessments to be more easily carried out across workgroups.

ACT! Premium team dashboard show data on multiple ACT! user accounts

Unattended Database Sync

To remotely sync ACT! Pro data the application must be open on the server or PC where the master database is installed. If ACT! processes aren't running on this machine local data can't be synchronised.

In contrast, ACT! Premium doesn't need the master database to be running on a server for sync to be completed. ACT! Premium can run a web sync process giving remote users and administrators more flexibility - especially if other processes need to run on the same server and there are advantages in freeing resources by not having ACT! constantly running.

Extra capacity for larger databases

Both ACT! editions are installed using a default Microsoft SQL Express 2008 database.

However, for organisations that have 30-40+ users who are concurrently working with the database and / or large volumes of ACT! data (including attachments, history and contact records) performance can be improved by deploying ACT! using a Microsoft SQL Standard 2008 database.

ACT! Premium gives administrators the option to install ACT! using SQL Standard 2008 (requires separate purchase) for greater scalability. As a guide we recommend SQL Standard for teams with larger user numbers or for databases with 30,000 or more contacts.

Extended database security

As an application that's geared towards supporting larger workgroups the Premium edition includes extra administration controls to manage and safeguard data. These include:

• Setting admin permissions to enable / restrict access to individual ACT! records
• Using field level security to hide sensitive fields from selected users, or prevent users from editing or deleting data from these fields
• Restricting user access to prevent ACT! data being exported to Excel or being synchronised to a local offline database

Team management

In addition to team dashboards, further ACT! Premium options help administrators manage groups of users.

To avoid the manual work of applying repetitive user access individually settings can be applied on multiple ACT! user accounts in bulk using team profiles that reflect role based permissions.

By setting group-wide user controls administrators are better able to save time implementing ACT! and managing user access.

Group Calendars & Scheduling

Compared with the Pro edition, ACT! Premium includes extra group scheduling tools that include options to:

• Check availability for other ACT users before assigning new activities to them and sending invitation requests
• Associate shared resources with ACT! activities for example: meeting rooms, IT equipment or parking spaces to check their availability and reserve them.

Because ACT! Premium isn't restricted to a maximum of 10 users, calendar and task list views can be filtered to reveal entries assigned to multiple users

Extra ACT! Premium resources

On request, additional resources are freely available to ACT! Premium users:

• Systems Administrator Password - enabling the SQL database to be partially opened up for carrying out back-up and reporting processes using external applications
• ACT! reader - creating access to database tables for external reporting

More options exclusively available with ACT! Premium include:

• Silent installation of ACT! Premium across a network including activation and registration
• Simultaneous creation of up to as many as 50 remote database to streamline set-up process for teams with multiple remote workers.

Please share any other differences you've encountered between the two editions and contact us if you want to find out more about ACT! Pro and Premium.