10 Best PPM Tools For 2022: Comparison And Expert Reviews

monday.com is a great project portfolio management software because of the way the tool has done away with a lot of the trimmings of typical management tools and focused on simple, visually intuitive layouts that help clarify the sequence of work.

monday.com allows you to allocate & prioritize tasks, use various views in order to see where everything stands, and track multiple projects using dashboards that provide high-level insights in a visual and intuitive way. The platform is completely customizable so you will be able to adjust it to your workflow. The platform also provides powerful and customizable notifications and automation so you and your team can focus on what’s important.

With monday.com you can plan, manage, and track your budgets in an intuitive interface. You can track expenses, income, their dates, and attach needed files to each item. And thanks to the various columns, you can filter items by many different variables such as status, people, text, time, location and others. Formula columns are also available.

While monday.com doesn’t offer traditional automated reporting, it is built to show the big picture at a glance to help you analyze various aspects of your projects and processes. To learn about the different capabilities that help analyze performance, scope out their detailed explanation here.

monday.com’s integrations include project management apps like Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Jira, GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Typeform, and many more, accessible via Zapier.

monday.com costs from $6/user/month and comes with a free 14-day trial. They offer a free plan for up to 2 users.

Smartsheet isn’t a dedicated PPM tool but it does have a lot of really good reporting features that make it great for looking at project metrics on both an individual and high level.
So, while there really aren’t many finance or risk management features, Smartsheet offers some above-average reporting and visualization tools that are useful for portfolio management. For example real-time metrics and customizable dashboards that can be made to display specific project data for each project by modifying a drag-and-drop dashboard interface.

Indeed, reporting is the strongest feature of this tool in the context of managing a portfolio of projects, offering the ability to publish stakeholder-facing reporting dashboards and editable summary reports that you can easily export to Excel.

There are lots of project management and resource management tools, which I consider to be fairly standard among this type of software—it’s a well-rounded set of tools for scheduling, assigning resources, tracking work, and assigning and tracking budget. There isn’t a dedicate PPM module in this tool, but you’ll doubtlessly collect all of the project data you need to analyze a portfolio (budget and spend, resource allocation, capacity, etc) and do the rest with a prebuilt integration to a business intelligence tool like Tableau (below).

Smartsheet integrations include Microsoft and Google apps, as well as development essentials like Jira, and useful business apps like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Box, and Tableau. The platform is extensible through a REST API and webhooks.

Smartsheet costs from $7/user/month, with a minimum of 3 users and a maximum of 25 users. They also offer a 30-day free trial.

Celoxis is an all-in-one project portfolio management software and work collaboration platform that is successfully adopted by brands like HBO, Rolex, Virgin Care, Adobe, Staples, LG, and Deloitte. Being a full-featured project portfolio management system, Celoxis is still very intuitive and easy to use for teams of all sizes.

With Celoxis, you get comprehensive resource management capabilities. It lets you easily allocate resources based on skills, roles, and availability as well as view cross-portfolio resource workload to optimally utilize your workforce. You will find tools for capacity planning, demand management, and project requests. When it comes to tracking project financials, you can automatically get cost/revenue estimates from your plans. You can also track budgets, costs, and profits in real-time as well as plug billing leaks by timely invoicing your clients. Celoxis’ reporting features let you slice, dice, and visualize data your way. You can get aggregated information about your projects with fully customizable portfolio dashboards. Celoxis comes pre-built with common workflows to help bug/issue tracking and risk management. These workflows are very adaptable to suit your organizational processes without having to resort to emails and spreadsheets.

Celoxis integrates seamlessly with hundreds of popular business applications through first-class integration connectors and web-based API. This includes critical platforms like Jira, Salesforce, QuickBooks Online, Excel, Slack, Google Apps, and more.

Celoxis is one of the few tools that offer SaaS and On-Premise deployment options. Celoxis costs $25/user/month with additional commitment discounts.

Runn is a real-time resource planning and PPM software with integrated time tracking and powerful forecasting capabilities. Get a bird’s-eye view of all projects and people to stay on top of your business. Collaborate with co-workers to remain up-to-date and on the same page with remote teams.

Scheduling is easy and intuitive in Runn–simply drag-and-drop to create project phases and allocations. Create project milestones, project notes and add project budgets. Flick between monthly, quarterly and half-yearly views to plan for the short and long term.

Runn makes the data dynamic and visual. Watch the charts and reports update as you plan your projects. You can see visualisations of insights like capacity, workload, availability, and billable and non-billable utilisation. Plan out tentative projects to see how your resourcing plans and portfolio’s bottom line might change if the work gets confirmed.

Track projects, view forecasts, and get relevant metrics within Runn. You’ll have up-to-date data in one place to keep tabs on KPIs like utilization, project variance, and overall financial performance. Use Runn’s built-in timesheets to understand how much time was worked on your projects compared to what was planned, and know how this affects your project budgets.

Runn integrates with Harvest, WorkflowMax, and Clockify for importing project, client, and people data and syncing time entries. With Runn’s API, you can build your own integration to send data across your favorite tools.

Try Runn free for 14 days, no credit card required. Runn has three pricing plans: Free for Startup (5 or fewer people), $10 per person for Pro, and custom pricing for Enterprise. There is also a 20% discount on annual plans.

Acuity PPM is a lightweight portfolio management solution that is a great alternative to spreadsheets. The tool includes a beautiful interface to help you manage your project portfolio, as well as fundamental capabilities for getting visibility into your entire project portfolio, managing work intake, prioritizing projects, tracking project performance and status reports, and managing resource capacity.

PMOs can track project portfolios and get insights on project status, store status reports in one place, and view status history across your portfolio. Another great feature is the ability to view portfolio roadmaps and see timing and sequencing for projects in the portfolio. PMO team members can also score projects using Acuity’s scoring model and then easily prioritize projects.

Acuity PPM pricing starts at $399 per month.

Bubble sets itself apart in the project and portfolio management space by designing its software around end-user needs. The tool offers features for defining organizational strategies and targets, as well as configurable dashboards that provide a top-to-bottom understanding of the entire portfolio and what it’s delivering.

Bubble is easy to learn and intuitive to use. You can get comfortable with using it within an hour, and advanced functionality can be mastered in less than a day. The tool’s creators outline a 4-step rapid deployment process and provide quick-start guides, video explainers, and help desk support to ensure widespread adoption of the platform.

The software places a large emphasis on time-saving tools while allowing users to keep an eye on the project detail. Graphical status indicators ensure teams can identify what’s required to move projects forward, what the blockers are, and what they don’t need to worry about anymore. Real-time reports and updates can be shared easily (often with a single click). Bubble PPM also has fully integrated resource management, risk, and finance modules that automatically track dependencies across the platform according to the role, department, workstream, or other variables.

Bubble doesn’t currently have timesheet tracking, but its rough-cut approach to capacity planning ensures customers instantly see the impact of resource bottlenecks ahead of time so they can adapt their plans as priorities evolve.

Finally, a standout feature of Bubble is the prioritization module. This simple but powerful tool helps team leaders ensure all parts of their organization are working to the same priorities. Project lists default to the priority order, meaning users instinctively know what to prioritize. In resource management, the priority order identifies where individuals, departments, or the organization itself, will run out of capacity.

Bubble PPM costs from $45 user/month. The platform also supports integrations using API calls via REST API endpoints with access controlled by a client-owned API key.

Zoho Projects is an award-winning project management and collaboration tool from Zoho. It offers flexibility and customizations to suit the needs of traditional project managers as well as agile teams.

The resource utilization charts enable users to easily view the workload of team members. Managers can create and balance the workload with just a click of a button. Fix hourly rates, create invoices and have an eye on your project budget. Forecast project budget, keep track of your timelines with baselines and critical path analysis.

The interface and modules are highly customizable. All aspects of the UI from theme colors to arrangement and visibility of the various modules can be changed to suit a user’s preferences. Zoho projects also offer free onboarding for its customers and a comprehensive online help guide for all users.

Zoho Projects is one of the few PPM tools that allow the creation of dependencies between projects. The portfolio widget on the dashboard helps users to get an overview of all projects at a glance. Zoho Projects stands out in cases where there are multiple hand-offs involved. It is especially popular among IT companies, consultants and education organizations. With Blueprints, users can create and automate workflows, notifications, and escalations.

Being part of Zoho’s ecosystem allows Projects to connect to several of Zoho’s own services such as Zoho Books, Zoho CRM, and Zoho’s finance suite. The new Zoho marketplace allows 3rd party integrations as well.

Starts from $4/user/month billed annually. Also has a freemium version upto 3 users for 2 projects. No credit card information required.

Changepoint is a PPM tool with reporting and analytics tools that enable faster and more accurate decision-making with intuitive dashboards, AI-powered insights, and advanced analytics capabilities with cloud-based data warehousing designed for speed and scalability.

Changepoint’s adaptable dashboards provide a comprehensive picture of your full project portfolio, resource allocation, risks, and opportunities.

The tool also offers Gantt chart, task management, and workflow features, as well as advanced planning capabilities for assessing projects, prioritizing initiatives, and building & communicating project and portfolio roadmaps that highlight potential resource and budget constraints.

Changepoint is a flexible tool that can be deployed via the web, cloud, and/or SaaS, and it integrates with a large number of additional tools: Jira, ServiceNow, BMC, MS Project, SAP, Google, Dropbox, and many others.

Changepoint costs from $24/user/month.

Last, but certainly not least, we have Liquid Planner. For portfolio managers who are looking for a rich, clean visual experience, Liquid Planner delivers with its customizable dashboards and multiple views showing simple, clear visualizations of your project data. Liquid Planner’s whole system is quite visual and minimalistic, making it easy to learn and understand. Its cross-project visibility module makes it ideal for project portfolio management, with additional modules for smart scheduling, resource management, collaboration, time-tracking. On top of this, Liquid Planner provides a robust set of advanced analytics features to analyze project performance, costs, provides, client portfolios, baseline trends, and more.

Liquid Planner integrates with JIRA, Trello, Slack, Google Sheets, Zendesk—just to name a few.

Liquid Planner costs from $45/user/month.

Oracle has been in the game of software development for a long time, and they deliver enormous value and variety in their suite of project and portfolio management tools. The Primavera Portfolio Management solution has nearly unlimited configurability and is built to scale to an enterprise level. Of the PPM tools, Oracle Primavera is capable of higher complexity analysis—while some organizations require the deep levels of configuratibility and granularity, for others, the advanced nature of this tool could make it cumbersome. It’s a robust tool, and it comes with a learning curve.

Primavera’s resource management features include progress tracking, workflow configuration, tools for performing “What if” scenarios, tools for comparing past projects and projecting future ones. The financial administration features allow you to review projects and portfolios to identify where to assign and withdraw investment, with insights on business case, funding, and staffing that let you select the best investments. The reporting and analytics are highly configurable, and the platform offers a multitude of ways to analyze the projects in your portfolio—comparing sets of project metrics, high-level Gantt charts, investment dependencies, and much more.

Primavera’s integrations are more focused on enterprise organizations than on lean agencies who want to hook up all their time-tracking apps and Kanban tools. Instead, Primavera integrates with enterprise names like Oracle’s Autovue, SAP, an Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Projects, and several more.

Oracle Primavera costs $2,750.