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Adobe Workfront vs Planview PPM Pro comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Adobe Workfront
Ranking in Project Management Software
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
Digital Asset Management (1st)
Planview PPM Pro
Ranking in Project Management Software
16th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
Project Portfolio Management (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Project Management Software category, the mindshare of Adobe Workfront is 3.4%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Planview PPM Pro is 2.6%, down from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Project Management Software
 

Featured Reviews

Graham Sprague - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized task management and simplified creative collaboration but interface is inconsistent
Adobe Workfront could improve its interface, which may benefit from an overhaul for better consistency between the web interface and the API. The current setup was not originally designed API-first, leading to some confusion and differences in available functions. Additionally, the low-code environment in Workfront Fusion is beneficial yet sometimes limiting, and it might be more powerful with enhancements.
MartinQuiroga - PeerSpot reviewer
Needs to improve roadmap, scalability and communication
The product feels like a toy. The tool needs to improve its roadmap. It needs to improve things on a project management level which includes communication as well.  I am working with the product for two to three years.  The product is not scalable. We have around 15-20 users for the product.  My…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Feature-wise, I would say that its overall ability to be infinitely customizable is valuable...My experience with the support team has been amazing."
"Instead of following everything on email, business users can track everything on Adobe Workfront when the other systems are integrated with it."
"Monitoring the progress of projects and tasks is very effective."
"I can say it is a powerful tool. We have everything in-house in that tool, like, creating reports, dashboards, creating various workflows, and everything we have inside one application."
"The tool is very user-friendly."
"I also like Workfront's integration. The solution integrates natively with other systems. It's easy to connect Workfront to any product that has a customer service database, such as a CRM or service ticket management solution."
"Workfront is innovative and these were plenty of features that I found valuable while working at Logitech. Workfront had this feature of Project Schedule Templatization. This saves time and effort and even leads to the standardization of processes that are well-assorted. The Intelligent Graphical Interfaces of Workfront allow one to look at a specific type of resource and a specific phase for a specific family of products. You can get quite granular with the data and even zoom in or out of the timeline. It also categorizes projects according to classes and portfolios so that over time, you can more easily understand what are the various metrics involved in producing a specific portfolio Another important feature is Workfront allowing you to validate milestones and investigate the project. This also helped me to understand which projects are performing well and whether it was beneficial to invest in the same. The IT and the app configuration is quite secure and it is one of the benefits. One more valuable feature is the integration of communication systems inside Workfront. This helps you differentiate between normal business emails and project-specific conversations. This is also known as ‘queues’ and I absolutely find this feature extremely powerful."
"The intake feature is the most valuable in Workfront."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is that my team can use one tool that's reliable, scalable, and provides the leadership team visibility to what's going on."
"PPM Pro has improved my organization through standardization. The big thing for us is that we came from a very immature state of play. Everyone had their own risk and issue management capabilities and their own different impacts for risks. We've been able to standardize that within the program delivery arena. That for us has been a major thing. We're all speaking the same language about the same things and using the same metrics in order to capture statuses."
"I liked the dashboards because I need to report out on tasks completed in the last two weeks, tasks scheduled for the next two weeks, what the risks and health are. What I've been able to do is create reports based on that and then put those reports into a dashboard. The old reporting was clunky, but the beta reports got better. But then I couldn't add the beta reports to the dashboards so now they released the new beta dashboards and it works great. It does everything I need to do."
"The solution's time-tracking abilities are one of the strong points. The only challenge is enabling it to the minute-level task. It's not at a project level but it's at an organization level. If I want it to be at a higher level as compared to some of the other projects where I want it to go to the nth level of a task for the time reporting, I cannot control it at a project level but it's controllable at an organization level. That's the only big challenge that I have."
"The solution is great for viewing projects and timelines."
"PPM Pro provides managers the insight they need to empower decision-making. The data is always in the tool. It's just making sure people are using it correctly. We track the requests as they come in. We track our demand by each of our teams within IT and then estimate that effort so that we can see if we are getting a lot of requests to certain teams. We check the demand versus capacity as those items come in."
"In my current company, it provides a quicker ramp up to understand what it can do for people by taking away all their barriers to entry: time, managing resources, and linking projects."
"Just about everything about the solution is valuable. I can't pinpoint one specific thing. The tool has helped us mature as an agency, has taught us to collect better data and the benefits of having good data."
 

Cons

"Sometimes, new users find it a bit difficult to handle Adobe Workfront."
"Our product and graphic designers are working with various Adobe products, but Workfront has a no-frills interface. It's a useful tool with everything we need, but it could be a little more attractive and present information in a polished way. It's a web interface, so it's accessible, but the appearance could be a little slicker."
"The solution's visualization feature could be user-friendly."
"I have used the product and instantiated it, almost seven years back. The process was fairly complex, however, I don't know if they have changed the same now. But this is something I think, if not addressed can be improved. Another area that needs a little attention, is the change of implementation lead. Back when we had Workfront instantiated, we often had our timeline delayed due to the change in the implementation lead. Now Workfront is under Adobe and, in case, this issue, isn't fixed it should be given due attention. Also, Workfront is a universal tool, which can pose a difficulty for small businesses and companies, who don't have the required time, effort, and knowledge to configure it periodically."
"Workfront's reporting capabilities must be improved."
"The interface can also be customized to fit and accept many tools for better performance and customer service improvement."
"Adobe Workfront could improve its interface, which may benefit from an overhaul for better consistency between the web interface and the API."
"I would say that the stability, honestly, has gone down since the Adobe acquisition, and the quality when they roll out their updates."
"The calculated field area needs improvement. There are a lot of formulas and functions available to make a calculated field, but it is still not comprehensive. We process the data to represent it through a report or dashboard. Due to the current constraints, for complex calculations, we do the data processing outside PPM Pro."
"Integrating with other tools should be easier and more straightforward."
"The reporting has some areas for improvement. It is not always as simple as we would like to get the reports we want or the information that we want."
"The initial setup was a little complex. There is so much to customize. It'd be good to have some templates out-of-the-box."
"The product feels like a toy. The tool needs to improve its roadmap. It needs to improve things on a project management level which includes communication as well."
"This solution does not work well as a task management system because it is very difficult to expand beyond just the basic tasks, and this would be a worthwhile area for improvement."
"Connecting funding and strategic outcomes with work execution is a challenge right now for us. Part of what we are facing is we have a couple of drivers of where projects are coming from. One of them is our innovation group. They are just sort of tangentially using PPM Pro for recording the status of projects and not really planning them within there. We need a stronger link between our current financial reporting system and Planview PPM Pro, so we can start to more easily record our external costs in the tool."
"The resource management tab is clunky, inefficient, and slow. And from a portfolio manager perspective, it would be nice if there were an easier way to view enterprise-wide resourcing to manage my team more effectively."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Adobe purchased Workfront in the past year, and they're putting work into developing the platform, so I expect the price to rise. It isn't cheap, but it's reasonable for the value it provides. It isn't Monday.com where you pick a license with a set price, and you've got a project manager."
"The pricing is a barrier to implementation. It is expensive compared to other competitors. Speaking about licensing, they have a private manager license for $1000, which you can use for administration as well. Then they offer a worker license for $500, and then a reviewer or contributor license which is free."
"We are partners with Adobe, so we get the licensing at a cheaper rate."
"Speaking about pricing, I wouldn't recommend it to a smaller company because I do think the price point is higher than other solutions that can work."
"The pricing of Workfront is completely license based."
"Adobe Workfront is an expensive solution."
"The pricing for me is more about understanding your own needs in the company because it is one license for one person model. So, you have to really understand how many licenses you need and what may be the influx of your staff. The good thing about Daptiv is that we just need a quick telephone call to our customer success manager if we want to increase our licensing. It takes a day or two to do. So, we can upscale very quickly. We've never downscaled, but I'm guessing if we had to, we'd have to wait till the contract completes or renegotiate a different licensing cost. So, you definitely need to understand what different types of licenses provide from a functionality point of view, and then order 10% more than you need based on the influx of staff in the company. There are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. We have the report functionality for which we pay separately for 10 hours per month."
"Our current license is from 2019 to 2022. So for that three-year subscription, it was $60,000 for the subscription, users, platform, and connections. Then there were some add-ons. Connecting to some of our other systems like HR for that period cost us around $12,000."
"Pricing was fair and I thought it was comparable to the other ones that we looked at. Other than ServiceNow, it was the most expensive, but we knew we were going to get a lot of value for that, so we went with it. We paid $40,000 for the implementation and for the workshops."
"We have their Flex plan."
"Bulk volume discounts are a little better. Right now we have to buy in lots of 20 at $200 a license. That's a little steep. For example, with Service Now, I pay $48 a seat for a license."
"The cost was in line."
"Because we have PPM Pro with Project place, we transitioned to the Flex model."
"A collaboration of all their tools truly gets the biggest bang for the buck."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
68%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Computer Software Company
4%
Healthcare Company
3%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Workfront?
I can say it is a powerful tool. We have everything in-house in that tool, like, creating reports, dashboards, creating various workflows, and everything we have inside one application.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Workfront?
Workfront incurs around a hundred thousand plus dollars per year. Licensing is strict, particularly with free accounts, however, it offers flexibility in project access, which could be enhanced fur...
What needs improvement with Workfront?
Adobe Workfront could improve its interface, which may benefit from an overhaul for better consistency between the web interface and the API. The current setup was not originally designed API-first...
What do you like most about Planview PPM Pro?
The product's deployment is straightforward.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Planview PPM Pro?
Licensing costs are competitive enough. The price is reasonable given that the solution is geared towards large companies.
What needs improvement with Planview PPM Pro?
The product feels like a toy. The tool needs to improve its roadmap. It needs to improve things on a project management level which includes communication as well.
 

Also Known As

AtTask, Workfront DAM
Innotas
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Advance Autoparts, Emerson, Covario, Cisco, Caroma, TREK, Sapient Nitro, ATB, LexisNexis, CarPhone Warehouse
The Weather Channel, corcs, Crayola, Scan Health Plan, Vermont, Bank of the West, North West Company, University of Southern Mississippi, Jeffries, Purdue University, Chesterfield County Virginia, City of Memphis
Find out what your peers are saying about Adobe Workfront vs. Planview PPM Pro and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
839,422 professionals have used our research since 2012.