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Avolution ABACUS vs Planview Portfolios comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 3, 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

Avolution ABACUS
Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Planview Portfolios
Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
Project Portfolio Management (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Enterprise Architecture Management category, the mindshare of Avolution ABACUS is 3.3%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Planview Portfolios is 2.3%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Architecture Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Avolution ABACUS3.3%
Planview Portfolios2.3%
Other94.4%
Enterprise Architecture Management
 

Featured Reviews

RS
Enterprise Architect at Roads & Transport Authority
Supports multiple frameworks but needs to improve Middle Eastern presence
Avolution ABACUS has the drawback of needing data filtering at the development level, unlike some tools that offer filtering at deployment. Two areas where Avolution ABACUS could be improved are regional support and flexibility in model selection. Sometimes, it's challenging to access support or updates in certain regions, which can slow down progress. Additionally, it would be beneficial if the tool allowed more flexibility in selecting multiple models within a single unit. It would be great if we could select multiple models within one project. Also, having better data filtering options would be useful. It would save a lot of time if the architecture diagrams could update automatically whenever the data changes instead of being updated manually every time.
Monabi Kingsley - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at 3M
Centralized planning has improved resource visibility and supports data‑driven financial decisions
The best features Planview Portfolios offers are visibility enhancement, robust system performance, and comprehensive resource management. This enhanced visibility in Planview Portfolios ensures that all users can easily track progress, identify bottlenecks, and make informed decisions to optimize workflow efficiency. When discussing robust system performance, the system's robust performance in meeting our various work requirements effectively and efficiently stands out. It is very stable and reliable, contributing to a seamless user experience, which enables users to focus on their tasks without disruptions. I also love the financial breakdown, planning and prioritization, and attribute collection on projects in Planview Portfolios. Planview Portfolios has positively impacted my organization since I started using it. It has enabled me to gain insights into the full scope of work consuming resources. I am able to know where the resources are being consumed more, especially which resources are consuming the most. I have been able to leverage resources management and resource time reporting, which enabled the generation of $90 million in annual revenue through labor billing to customers.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The ease of modeling and the ease of showing interconnectivity and relationships is the most valuable. It is fairly simple and out of the box. It is customizable in many ways. It is a pretty good tool."
"There are a lot of different features, but the business/decision-maker feature, visibility, and dashboards are most valuable."
"The most valuable feature is the traceability, you can trace any object to the other."
"There are plenty of features available such as the ability to test applications for issues and a user-friendly dashboard."
"The technical support is very good. They are responsive and the answers they provide are detailed."
"The tool's implementation is straightforward as everything is readily available. For instance, setting up a portal is seamless, allowing easy publishing and access to data. However, integrating with other tools like BI, Power BI, or Grafana requires setting up pipelines between them."
"If you face new challenges or issues then you can dynamically customize according to the business needs."
"The most valuable feature is that it has a customizable meta-model, which is key."
"Enterprise One has enabled us to eliminate Excel. We don't track financials anymore in an Excel format, which the company was doing before. Even now, being a new portfolio manager four months in, I'm able to just pick up my project. I'm able to see where I am right now. That improvised it to be more automated. The only missing part is the integration between tools. I'm not able to see my full schedule, but I know what are my important milestones are like watching the financials and all that stuff."
"The portfolio and technology management are well built."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reporting."
"The resource capacity planning is the most valuable feature because you can evaluate your team's capacity by team and what projects they're working on and you can forecast easily by team."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the completeness of the standard, underlying metamodel."
"I would say it works really well for forecasting remaining effort, especially in terms of forecasting the dollar amounts. We've gotten pretty good at adjusting rates because we have a lot of contract workers."
"Enterprise One provides end-to-end work management for the full spectrum of types of work in one tool. It affects our project management because our project management uses Planview to monitor their daily work. Every night it loads our SAP system and then they monitor the daily work. They use Planview as a full planning and monitoring tool."
"We've brought our portfolio altogether. We have had multiple ways of reporting out what our portfolio is, whether it's in Excel, Word, or in different places. We brought all of our projects together in one place. That has worked out well for us. We've been able to manage the work on Gantt charts and our resources better. The big thing for us on research and development is around managing people's time, on which projects they are working on, and how much effort does it take to launch our projects."
 

Cons

"The most valuable features are the catalog and the diagram."
"The tool doesn't have any intelligence built in. We have to design the dashboards ourselves, which is a challenge because we have to depend on the vendor for customizations."
"While Avolution ABACUS is flexible, it can be complex to work with as it requires knowledge of specific configurations to customize the product."
"It is vastly scalable but you can't run it on a Mac or Linux so it has limitations."
"The reporting could be easier to configure."
"I use reference models, which are taxonomies, in my EA work. It is a reference model/taxonomy of things with capabilities, sub capabilities, and sub-sub capabilities, so you're working it down. I haven't yet found a simple way to implement that in Abacus. It could be that it is there, but I don't know how to do it."
"While Avolution ABACUS is flexible, it can be complex to work with as it requires knowledge of specific configurations to customize the product."
"Having more control over page size is lacking in this product. Print utilization also needs to be improved."
"Being the IT development manager who implements the upgrades for Planview, I would love to see more thorough testing of expenditures and more thorough testing in general. When we do an upgrade, we have to do quite a bit of testing because we can affect the bottom line."
"Configuring the UI in the content management system is too elaborate and too time-consuming."
"The reporting is absolutely shocking. It's not good reporting and requires improvement."
"Some of the out-of-the-box reporting is not immediately useful and although it can be configured or customized, there are still improvements that can be made."
"There's still a lot of reluctance within the organization. We're not using all of the capabilities that we have today. We're still doing our strategic and capital investment planning on spreadsheets rather than using the capabilities that exist within Enterprise One. I definitely need to leverage the experts here at Planview to help drive a culture change. There's just a lot of reluctance on behalf of people within the company to put data into the tool."
"We are not very happy with the customer service. This is one of our main pain points. It doesn't cover the entirety of customer service, as there are reps who are really great and we've had good experiences. Many times, we've had people give us attitude, there was a delay in the response, or just a lack of interest. This got to the point where if there was a problem, we would rather try to solve it ourselves then call customer support."
"One of the reasons why we've upgraded so many times is because of performance standards. We've just run into issues where we've had performance problems. Maybe they are not upgrading, but they're adding more horsepower. Then, we do go upgrade and lose that horsepower, which is frustrating from my perspective as an admin to lose that horsepower. Hopefully, that'll change."
"Support is still a challenge. We find it challenging more due to the responsiveness and getting a case or ticket assigned to an analyst. That's what I was just doing. I was following up on an email that we opened last week. We haven't heard anything, so following up on that."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"To get a fairly extensive license for Enterprise Architects from Spark is approximately US $400.00, maybe less, but with Avolution Abacus it was approximately US $2000.00 per year, and that includes maintenance with the Abacus tool."
"This solution is expensive for some people's budgets and they need to offer a Lite version at a cheaper price"
"There is a subscription for this solution. We are on an annual subscription because you sometimes receive special offers the longer you subscribe."
"I'm paying on a yearly basis. I don't know whether it's a highly expensive tool or not. I'm getting a single version of it, and I don't have the enterprise part on it because I don't need the server component, and I don't need a web browser component. My estimate would be that it's a very reasonably priced tool given that you don't need to have licenses with everyone in order to get the information and the decision support capabilities out of the tool. You use the enterprise edition on top of the studio, which is the heart of the tool. I am not aware of any additional costs."
"The solution's pricing is not an issue."
"It is competitive. It is not chump change. I am just using the studio version. I am not using the full enterprise version, which would probably cost me three times more for single-use, but it gives a lot more capability and analysis. It is server-based as well, and it is reasonably priced compared to a lot of the other tools. There are other tools that have other sorts of capabilities, but in order to use them, you'd really have to have like 50 users for the price to become justifiable."
"My company makes annual payments toward the licensing costs of the solution. Considering the product's capabilities, its prices are very reasonable."
"It is expensive."
"When we went through that process, I believe it is competitive with others on the market. However, there are less expensive options available. It's a more premium offering at a higher price."
"The cost of other pieces and integrating them in needs improvement."
"Our licensing fees are approximately $50,000 USD annually."
"With the costs, they were very understanding. Knowing that we were an existing customer, they were very much willing to work with us to make sure that we were able to transition to Enterprise One from PPM Pro."
"We have unlimited licenses for all of our functionalities. Since we went global, we went with that model."
"We have portfolio managers, resource managers, project managers, and time reporting licenses. These are the licenses that we have."
"I think all in we are at $33,000 a year and that includes Projectplace and Planview. We used to have the integration to JIRA, but we don't pay for that anymore."
"We overbought our licenses. We looked at our needs three to four years down the road and tried based our contract on that. However, we were over aggressive. We use about a third of the licenses that we have. We're looking to adjust the makeup so we can start utilizing the amount of money that we are spending. Right now, we're overspending, and my organization is not seeing the value in Planview because we are paying so much for licenses that we're not using."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Government
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise60
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Avolution ABACUS?
The tool's implementation is straightforward as everything is readily available. For instance, setting up a portal is seamless, allowing easy publishing and access to data. However, integrating wit...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Avolution ABACUS?
It's pricey compared to Essential, Deltek, or Essential Cloud. However, its diagramming capabilities and metamodel design make it worth it. But it's not for large user bases. It has modules for app...
What needs improvement with Avolution ABACUS?
While Avolution ABACUS is flexible, it can be complex to work with as it requires knowledge of specific configurations to customize the product. It would be beneficial to have seminars or other met...
What do you like most about Planview Portfolios?
Planview Management integrates seamlessly with other tools and systems used within the organization, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, customer relationship management (CRM) syst...
What needs improvement with Planview Portfolios?
Enhancements are needed in: Advanced reporting and analytics: While Planview Management provides robust reporting and analytics capabilities, further enhancements could include more advanced data v...
What is your primary use case for Planview Portfolios?
We use Planview Management to assess the current project portfolio, evaluate resource availability, and prioritize projects based on strategic objectives, ROI, and risk factors. Planview Management...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Planview Enterprise One, Troux
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Barclays
UPS, NatWest, Ingram Micro, Canadian Tire, Viessmann, Volvo, NASCO, UNESCO
Find out what your peers are saying about Avolution ABACUS vs. Planview Portfolios and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,928 professionals have used our research since 2012.