[citation needed] ECCO Professional was introduced by Arabesque Software in 1993, as a Personal Information Manager (PIM) with a database backend.

[5] A feature called "Shooter" puts a cut and paste tool at the top of the screen facilitating copy of data to and from ECCO.

[7] Ram based, the program was considered fast and relatively easy on laptop batteries,[5] but a heavy consumer of system resources.

[9][10] In 1995 PC Magazine praised ECCO as a workgroup tool for scheduling and task management and noted its ability to handle free form data, but considered version 2.0 a "poor choice as a contact manager" which requires customization to match features of contemporary products, and lacks structured and complex search queries, good reporting, logging and correspondence functions.

[14] Ecco Pro was originally developed by Pete Polash, who had sold an early Macintosh based presentation program to Aldus and Bob Perez, a Harvard-trained lawyer hired by Apple as a programmer and Evangelist in the 1980s.

According to Scott Rosenberg, a programmer using the handle "slangmgh" developed an extension to Ecco Pro posted to ecco_pro users group on Yahoo which includes fixes and upgrades to the program, and may incorporate the Lua scripting language.