Active Agenda is designed to help organizations control risk and loss associated with the performance of work. Active Agenda can be installed on a local computer, a Local Area Network, or as hosted Software as a Service (SaaS).

Active Agenda consists of more than eighty "stand-alone modules," many "global modules" which traverse the entire Active Agenda application, numerous "global features" available from all modules of the application, and a variety of "global views" capable of providing an understanding of enterprise risk only previously imagined. Active Agenda is an open source software application that is free to use, free to distribute, and free to customize so long as all extensions are shared with the global community. 

Active Agenda contains a module building platform called spec2app that allows organizations to extend Active Agenda's utility across the enterprise. Active Agenda's public license (Reciprocal Public License) requires extensions built using spec2app to be shared with the global community. However, a Non-Reciprocal Private License (NRPL) is available to anyone perferring to keep their extensions private. The NRPL is available for a fee or it can be obtained by making project contributions.