Dubsado vs Act
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Dubsado is in heads-down polish mode, shipping QoL fixes weekly for service-business owners.
Dubsado is on a fast cadence of small, customer-driven improvements: calendar reliability rebuilds, template tagging and archiving, prevent-reschedule controls, custom field reordering, smart fields in invoices, expanded bulk actions. Releases are typically bundled changelogs with dozens of fixes. Several are re-published across feeds with minor copy variants.
The team is investing in quality-of-life work over new categories — making the existing CRM stickier for solo and small-team service businesses. Many releases trace back to direct customer requests, including the recent ambassador event, suggesting a deliberate close-the-loop approach to roadmap. There is no visible push toward AI features or platform extension.
Expect this rhythm to continue with calendar/scheduling and template-management as the primary lanes. Customer-vertical specialization (hair, makeup, photography) will likely surface as preset templates or industry packages, given the ambassador-driven feedback loop.
Act! pivots from CRM-only to payment processor while modernizing its Cloud UX.
Act! is in the middle of a methodical Cloud modernization, rebuilding list views, navigation, and notifications to match the consistency users expect from modern CRMs. Alongside that polish work, Act! has just shipped Act! Payments via Propelr — turning the CRM into a place where credit card transactions close, not just leads. The product is still recognizably a small-business CRM, but its surface area is widening.
The release cadence shows two parallel tracks: weekly UX rationalization (notification center, list parity, faster task editing) and category expansion through embedded financial services. Act! is following the same playbook HubSpot and Pipedrive have run — keep the legacy users happy with quality-of-life work while quietly bolting on revenue-bearing features that compete with Stripe-adjacent SMB tools. Payments is the most directional move in years.
Expect deeper payments integration next — recurring billing tied to opportunities, dunning workflows from the contact record, and likely a payments-driven pricing tier that monetizes transaction volume rather than seats.
See more alternatives to Dubsado →
See more alternatives to Act →