On July 1^st of this year, licenses of Act! Pro will no longer be sold by Swiftpage. All existing supported versions will continue to work, but no new ones will be available for purchase.

This may come as a surprise to some, but It’s been a long journey to get to this point. Back in 2005, in the first year of Sage’s ownership of the Act! product, they introduced a whole new rewrite of the Act! program in SQL, and created two tiers of the product – namely Act! Pro and Act! Premium.

Over the years these two products went through small iterations in branding, but they’ve effectively survived the last 15-years as Act! Pro and Act! Premium.  The detailed differences between these two tiers can be learned HERE, but basically the Pro product line was for small workgroups under ten with simple networking and security needs, while the Premium was more suitable for larger groups, or teams with higher security needs and more sophisticated deployment requirements including web publishing.

In 2013 Swiftpage purchased Act!, and in May of 2015 converted the Premium product line to a subscription service, leaving Act! Pro as a perpetual license with limited support options. In the years since then it became obvious that this perpetual licensed product did not fit into the long-term plans of Swiftpage, as they began to focus increasingly on the subscription model and on bringing Act! to the cloud. So it was not a surprise in early 2019 they announced that Act! Pro would be officially sunset in June of 2020, and version 22 would be the last version released.

Pricing for Act! Pro v21 and v22 has jumped around a bit as we prepared for the final launch of this well-loved product, but it will likely sail into the sunset at $289.95 USD per seat for the last two months it’s on the market.

Since the Fall of 2019, Swiftpage has run aggressive campaigns trying to migrate legacy Pro users over to Act! Premium subscription (and those deals will likely remain available until at least the end of June), but for those looking to stick with Pro, many are wondering if v22 is worth the final spend before it’s officially deprecated. Yes, it’s true, the feature differences between v21 and v22 are few, but there are a number of reasons Pro users should consider one final upgrade, or adding users before that option is lost:

• Glide path: If you intend to keep using Act! Pro for years to come and drive your last purchase into the ground, it only makes sense to purchase the final version to extend your supported glide path.
• Fixes: Swiftpage will soon release Act! 22.1, and this patch will include over 240 known fixes, and many of these will apply to Act! Pro v22.
• Technical: Act! Pro v22 is safer because it removes support for deprecated versions of SQL and Windows, as well as support for an updated version of .NET
• Compatibility: No CRM is forward-compatible, so getting the latest version with as many patches available for as long as possible will ensure you’ll get significantly more mileage on that version versus a prior release. While Act! Pro v22 will cease to be available after July 1^st, support for this release runs until June 30^th , 2021.
• Future Proof your team: Whether you're using the latest version of Act! Pro, or one released in the last few years, if you expect your team to grow in the next 12-24 months, you need to purchase those extra licenses in advance because they won't be available if you wait until they're needed. You owe it to your team of Act! users to provide them headroom for growth while you can. 

While this writer would prefer to see Act! Pro continue a while longer, the reality is the publisher has made a different decision, and Pro users should take note. With virtually no perpetually licensed CRM programs left on the market anymore, now is the time to buy the last version while it's still available. It's taken 15-years for this version to run its course,  and when it's gone, it'll be gone forever.