7 best project portfolio management (PPM) software for 2023

Planview PPM Pro: Best for project resource management and capacity planning

Planview PPM Pro, formerly Planview Innotas, enables project management office leaders to prioritize tasks, track workloads and measure performance. The tool centralizes project portfolio management to establish a single source of truth for all work and resources. Moreover, Planview includes the capability for managing project cost against budget across portfolios by providing comprehensive views into each project’s budget, actual and forecast.

With Planview, managers can measure the team’s performance and view key performance indicators to determine if the team’s efforts align with company goals (Figure A). Planview also helps managers make informed decisions on projects and tasks based on resource availability, capacity and utilization to meet the organization’s current and future demands.

Figure A

Pricing

Planview PPM Pro pricing information is unavailable on the vendor’s website. Potential buyers can request a product demo to learn more about this tool’s capability and receive a custom quote.

Standout features

• Integrations with Microsoft 365, SAP, ServiceNow, Slack, Workday and Oracle.
• Project planning and scheduling, including project phases, tasks and milestones.
• Project financials management, including in-flight expense tracking to help teams stay on budget.
• Variance reporting of performance measurement against baselines to determine the differences between forecasted and actual efforts.
• Optimized resource allocation and risk management.
• Planning and management support for project operating and capital expenses.
• Automated notifications for new and out-of-tolerance assignments.
• Time and expense management.

Pros

• Improves team collaboration.
• Promotes lean and agile work.
• Provides configurable ribbons and tiles.
• Offers time tracking and capacity planning capabilities.
• Includes analytics and reporting plus executive dashboard reporting.

Cons

• Users report that this tool is pricey.
• There is a complex initial setup process.

Interested in Planview? Check out these other top Agile project management software.

Smartsheet: Best for reporting

Project teams and managers familiar with spreadsheets will find Smartsheet easy to use due to its spreadsheet-style dashboard. Smartsheet allows users to create formulas, manage projects, track progress, automate manual processes and customize workflows.

Smartsheet’s project and portfolio reporting capability allows users to visualize and report on portfolio data with configurable widget-based views (Figure B). Smartsheet automatically adds data from new projects to the team’s portfolio reports and dashboards. Project teams can also track projects, budgets and resources to ensure they align with the organization’s goals.

Figure B

Pricing

• Free: No cost for one user and up to two editors.
• Pro: $7 per user per month, billed annually, or $9 per user billed monthly.
• Business: $25 per user per month, billed annually, or $32 per user billed monthly.
• Enterprise: Contact sales for a custom quote.

Standout features

• Captures and compares variances between planned and actual schedules.
• Integrates with third-party services like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, Box and Dropbox.
• Provides report grouping into logical categories or classifications.
• Offers grid, Gantt chart, card and calendar views.
• Automates repetitive tasks and processes.
•  Benchmarks performance against expectations and goals to estimate value accurately.

Pros

• 30-day free trial.
• Highly customizable.
• Feature-rich.
• Excellent reporting capabilities.

Cons

• Smartsheet is expensive for small businesses.
• Users report that Smartsheet is infrequently slow when running large projects.

For more information, check out our full Smartsheet review.

Wrike: Best for task tracking and capacity management

Wrike is primarily a project management service provider with extensible PPM capabilities that help teams manage multiple projects and visualize and prioritize resources for a better workflow. The tool has a prebuilt, ready-to-use PPM template and project portfolio analysis capabilities (Figure C). These features help teams manage multiple projects, track progress and manage resources efficiently. And Wrike’s collaboration features help teams collaborate, communicate and coordinate tasks.

Wrike is available as a cloud-based, desktop and/or mobile app solution for businesses of all sizes. Aside from project portfolio management, Wrike offers additional project management features such as task management, subtask management, account-wide work schedules, personal work schedules, custom fields, workflows and statuses, and folder hierarchy.

Figure C

Pricing

Wrike’s project portfolio management features are only available in the Business, Enterprise and Pinnacle pricing tiers:

• Business: $24.80 per user per month for five to 200 users.
• Enterprise: Contact sales for a custom quote.
• Pinnacle: Contact sales for a custom quote.

Standout features

• Over 400 third-party integrations, including OneDrive, Okta, Slack, Jira, Zoom and more.
• Advanced resource and capacity planning.
• Workflow automation to eliminate manual processes.
• Drag-and-drop capabilities.

Pros

• Enhanced collaboration, especially among distributed teams.
• Time tracking capability.
• Visual proofing capability.

Cons

• Complex initial setup process.
• Steep learning curve.

For more information, check out our full Wrike review.

monday work management: Best for value

With monday work management, teams can create customized workflows, automate routine tasks and easily collaborate on projects. The software can be used by teams of any size in any industry and is available on the web and mobile devices. monday work management provides users with many beneficial features, including time tracking, customizable templates, team boards, calendar views, and integrations with other tools and services.

Further, monday work management allows managers to allocate resources and prioritize tasks to meet the company’s objectives. Its PPM templates give stakeholders a high-level view of their portfolio information and overall health (Figure D).

Figure D

Pricing

• Free: No cost for up to two seats.
• Basic: $8 per seat per month, billed annually, or $10 per seat billed monthly.
• Standard: $10 per seat per month, billed annually, or $12 per seat billed monthly.
• Pro: $16 per seat per month, billed annually, or $20 per seat billed monthly.
• Enterprise: Contact sales for a custom quote.

Standout features

• Resource utilization and capacity planning.
• Advanced reporting and analytics.
• Over 200 templates available.
• Integrates with many tools, including Slack, Jira, Zoom and Google Drive.

Pros

• Built-in time tracking.
• 99.9% uptime service-level agreement.
• Self-service knowledge base.
• Budget-friendly.

Cons

• Limited reporting capabilities.
• The user interface may take time to learn for first-time users.

For more information, check out our full monday Work OS review.

Asana: Best for small to large businesses and contractors

Asana PPM helps project managers monitor their team’s initiatives, such as project status, progress and resource allocation, in a unified dashboard. Asana provides a comprehensive view of an organization’s project portfolio, enabling managers to prioritize projects, allocate resources and manage budgets more effectively.

With Asana, teams can track project progress, collaborate on tasks, and set up reminders and deadlines. It also includes a workload view (Figure E), which helps managers identify team members’ capacity and balance their workloads.

Figure E

Pricing

Asana’s PPM features are only available in its Business plan, which is priced at $24.99 per user per month when billed annually, or $30.49 per user when billed monthly.

Standout features

• Project views for timeline, list, board and calendar.
• Integrations with tools like Power BI, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack and Salesforce.
• Custom workflow automation.
• Project planning, task management, risk management and issue management.

Pros

• Short learning curve.
• Excellent collaboration features.
• User-friendly interface.
• Highly customizable.

Cons

• Asana can be expensive for teams looking for more advanced features.

For more information, check out our full Asana review.

ClickUp: Best for customization

ClickUp consolidates productivity, project management, work management, document collaboration and communication in a unified platform. It is designed to be an all-in-one platform that can be customized to suit the needs of various teams and industries, from small businesses to large enterprises. ClickUp provides stakeholders with extensive insights into all projects’ progress and reports on milestones.

ClickUp has over 15 customizable project views and an extensive template library for various use cases (Figure F). The tool has over 50 native integrations, making it easy for teams to connect with existing apps in their toolkits.

Figure F

Pricing

• Free Forever: No cost for 100MB storage and unlimited tasks.
• Unlimited: $5 per user per month, billed annually, or $9 per user billed monthly.
• Business: $12 per user per month, billed annually, or $19 per user billed monthly.
• Business Plus: $19 per user per month, billed annually, or $29 per user billed monthly.
• Enterprise: Contact sales for a custom quote.

Standout features

• Advanced task views, such as Gantt chart, table, timeline, workload, box, activity, mind map, list, calendar and map.
• Task dependencies capability.
• Natural language processing.
• Work in progress limits.
• ClickApp mobile application.
• Risk management capability to assess multiple projects’ performance against strategic organizational objectives.

Pros

• Self-service knowledge base.
• Highly customizable.
• Support for multiple assignees.
• Over 50 native integrations.

Cons

• Steep learning curve.
• Mobile app has limited project views.
• Free and unlimited plans lack two-factor authentication.

For more information, check out our full ClickUp review.

Celoxis: Best all-in-one PPM and resource management software

Celoxis is all-in-one enterprise-level PPM software that offers project planning, resource management, task tracking, time tracking, budgeting, collaboration and reporting features for optimized project portfolio management. These features help businesses of all sizes plan, manage and track projects from start to finish.

Celoxis offers fully featured resource management capabilities to maximize team utilization and project performance. It enables managers to allocate tasks based on skills, roles and availability while considering employees’ time zones and work shifts. Celoxis also offers a comprehensive suite of real-time dashboards, reporting capabilities and customizable workflows to help managers measure, analyze and optimize team performance (Figure G).

Figure G

Pricing

Celoxis offers two deployment plan options: Cloud and On-Premises. Pricing information for the On-Premises plan is available upon request. For Cloud plans, customers have the option to purchase either monthly plans or yearly plans, with a minimum requirement of five users for all plans:

• Cloud monthly: $25 per user per month.
• Cloud yearly: $22.50 per user per month.
• Cloud 2-yearly: $21.25 per user per month.
• Cloud 3-yearly: $20 per user per month.

Standout features

• Intake management capability automatically captures and ranks project requests from web forms, emails and other sources.
• Resource management features optimize distributed teams’ resources and analytics.
• Customizable portfolio dashboards allow users to monitor schedules, margins and other custom metrics.
• Project accounting provides profit and margin tracking, revenue forecasting and custom financial KPIs.
• Third-party integrations with QuickBooks, Slack, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and more provide a more unified PPM solution.

Pros

• Time tracking.
• 30-day free trial.
• Multilevel approvals.
• PDF option for exporting reports.

Cons

• Celoxis lacks a free plan.
• Cloud user storage space is limited to 2GB per user.

See how Celoxis compares to our list of the top 10 project management software.