Avolution ABACUS vs Planview Portfolios comparison

Avolution and Planview are both solutions in the Enterprise Architecture Management category. Avolution is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.0, while Planview is ranked #15 with an average rating of 8.5. Avolution holds a 3.9% mindshare in AM, compared to Planview’s 0.9% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of Avolution users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Planview users who would recommend it.

Avolution ABACUS

Read 15 Avolution ABACUS reviews

2,133 Views
1,057 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Planview Portfolios

Read 63 Planview Portfolios reviews

384 Views
220 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Avolution ABACUS

Planview Portfolios

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 3, 2024

Planview Portfolios and Avolution ABACUS are contenders in the project management and enterprise architecture categories, respectively. Planview Portfolios has an edge with its robust integration capabilities and strategic focus, although both products have unique strengths.

Features: Planview Portfolios includes robust capabilities for resource planning, strategy execution, and portfolio management, with seamless integration with tools like Power BI for flexible configuration and reporting. It boasts impressive project management and resource utilization bridging strategy and execution. In contrast, Avolution ABACUS offers a highly customizable meta-model and advanced modeling capabilities, making it ideal for complex reports and impact analysis. Its key strength lies in 3D modeling, providing significant flexibility in designing enterprise architectures.

Room for Improvement: Planview Portfolios needs refinements in user configuration, agile integration, and reporting speed, along with improvements to enhance workflow flexibility and customized modules. Users express difficulties with financial components and support responsiveness. Avolution ABACUS requires better integration, improved analytical reporting, and enhanced support for regional markets. It could also benefit from increased automation in data updates and better dashboards and simulation capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Planview Portfolios supports public, private, and on-premises deployments, offering flexibility and scalability suited to various organizational needs. The variability in customer service highlights issues with ticket resolution times and staff turnover, though technical support is generally positive. Avolution ABACUS focuses primarily on private and on-premises environments, providing consistent technical support, albeit with less emphasis on cloud deployments. Its customer service is often praised for responsiveness and expertise.

Pricing and ROI: Planview Portfolios is considered expensive, with licensing models like FLEX and enterprise licenses that offer cost efficiencies in larger deployments. Users perceive ROI through enhanced resource utilization and strategic portfolio management, despite difficulty quantifying exact figures. Avolution ABACUS presents competitive pricing, appealing to enterprises focused on detailed modeling without a vast user base. Its ROI is more qualitative, with gains in visibility and architecture planning, though less quantifiable than Planview's enterprise-level claims.

To learn more, read our detailed Avolution ABACUS vs. Planview Portfolios Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Avolution ABACUS vs. Planview Portfolios

January 2025

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Helped 831,265 peers since 2012

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

8th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Planview Portfolios

Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management

15th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Project Portfolio Management (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Enterprise Architecture Management category, the mindshare of Avolution ABACUS is 3.9%, down from 4.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Planview Portfolios is 0.9%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Architecture Management

Featured Reviews

JoseCamacho

Freelancer at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

Supports evaluating architecture through corporate objectives

I conducted an evaluation of enterprise architecture at the European Court in Luxembourg, reviewing and analyzing existing implementations to identify potential improvements and providing recommendations I conduct evaluations to identify potential improvements and make recommendations, forming a…

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Mark Hillman

Global Head of Portfolio Management at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees

User-friendly interface, but the reporting could be improved

The reporting is poor and requires improvement. The tiles and exception-based activities in the application are sufficient to get by. However, when it comes to producing executive reports, MI reports, or any other type of reporting, we must exit Planview and work offline. We have been working with them to improve on that, as well as using some of the Power BI capabilities that have been available for a while, but it's still more difficult than it should be. In the next release, I would like to be able to use the data in the tool to gain insight much more easily.

Read full review

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."

"Scalable and stable tool for roadmapping and modeling, with a good dashboard, end-to-end impact analysis, and portfolio management."

"The product is easy to use and well-structured for the integrations we need it to make."

"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."

"It is a very stable solution...The initial setup of Avolution ABACUS is very easy."

"It's more than just an enterprise architecture tool as it has a lot of nice features, e.g. messaging, simulation, etc."

"The technical support is very good. They are responsive and the answers they provide are detailed."

"Avolution ABACUS allows for flexible enterprise architecture analysis."

More Avolution ABACUS pros

"Our transparency is increasing a lot. It is helping us to get people together. There are no dark rooms anymore. In some areas or concepts, we want to add more light to every single concept. That's the big impact that the tool is having. It allows conversations between people."

"I like that it's an enterprise environment. I can look across everything that's going on and have a sense of what is going on within the organization."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the completeness of the standard, underlying metamodel."

"The biggest impact has been getting all these global groups into one space so we can even have intelligent conversations about what are we trying to accomplish. Before, it was just different regions doing whatever. Now, we're all talking the same language, and that's good."

"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."

"We're still in an early stage. Things will change as we use it more. I did program reports that are important and that will provide us with value."

"I like that the data that we store is available for everybody. We're not trying to hide anything. Being an administrator, I know a lot about the tool. It is very easy to show somebody how to use the tool and get used to it. Hopefully that user doesn't come back and ask the same question twice is really what it is about. It's a very intuitive product as well. For what we use the tool for today, it's easy to learn and pick up."

"The sheer amount of information available in one single interface is valuable. Everything is there. It is also a lot of work to maintain all the information, but generally, you can find everything you need within this one tool."

More Planview Portfolios pros

Cons

"If they want to expand in the European market then they are going to have to improve their technical support."

"It doesn't have the simulation capability, which would be helpful in doing some business process analysis and improvements."

"While this is one of the most powerful tools on the market it does not integrate well with Microsoft Office or others."

"They should take more initiative to implement things that competing products have already come out with."

"The usability of the tool is an area with shortcomings that need improvement."

"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."

"Having more control over page size is lacking in this product. Print utilization also needs to be improved."

"Their local presence in the Middle East could be scaled more, particularly in customer service. It would be good if they'd also have mobile dashboards for executive management out of the box."

More Avolution ABACUS cons

"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."

"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."

"The reporting capability and access to the fields for our system administrators to have access to the data without having to pay Enterprise One to get the data that's needed to create custom reports for management to create reports need improvement."

"The scheduling's kind of clunky in terms of its ability for us to see what stage work is at. They could have done better with that. It can be difficult to use."

"Its reporting needs to be improved. My main complaint when it comes to Planview is that it is good to maintain all the data but to actually use the information that is in it, you actually have to use a different tool. We use Power BI. So, we pull all the information, and then we use a Power BI dashboard to stage or look at the information."

"The administrative tabs are very confusing, especially in terms of configuring screens and users. It's not very intuitive versus many other applications that I have worked in the past. I have to go to separate sections than I think I have to in order to get to the place that I need to adjust something."

"The only area that I can see currently needing improvement is just the modernization of the look and feel of it."

"The technical support is a little overworked. At least, they have been in the past year. We need them to focus on somethings from time to time. You can tell that they're really focusing on many things. It has gotten better, but I think they could still use some relief."

More Planview Portfolios cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 pricing is quite good compared to the competition and it is part of the reason we chose the product."

"The solution's pricing is not an issue."

"It is expensive."

"There is a subscription for this solution. We are on an annual subscription because you sometimes receive special offers the longer you subscribe."

"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"

"My company makes annual payments toward the licensing costs of the solution. Considering the product's capabilities, its prices are very reasonable."

More Avolution ABACUS pricing and cost advice

"Planview is a little pricey. From a licensing perspective, for just a simple timesheet user who does nothing in the system but reports time, the licensing is a little pricey, but you have to look at it from what it is that you get. We have 6,000 users, and I don't manage the system at all. I just have to do add them to the system. The servers, maintenance, OS levels, security patching for the OS, and all other things are not something that we maintain. So, you have to look at it from an operational perspective. It is not just the product itself. A holistic view has to be taken when you look at the product and how you're going to support it. I would have to hire an entire operation staff to bring it in-house, and at the end of the day, that might cost me more."

"Our licensing costs are probably $150,000 to $180,000 a year with 270 licenses total."

"Our licensing fees are approximately $50,000 USD annually."

"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."

"We have unlimited licenses for all of our functionalities. Since we went global, we went with that model."

"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 several hundred licenses. It costs us several hundred thousand dollars a year."

"Our licensing costs are about a quarter of a million dollars per year."

More Planview Portfolios pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Government

13%

Computer Software Company

Educational Organization

Manufacturing Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Planview Portfolios?

Planview Portfolios is not too expensive. You get what you paid for.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 25% of the time

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Compared 22% of the time

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Compared 15% of the time

Visio vs Avolution ABACUS

Compared 12% of the time

ARIS BPA vs Avolution ABACUS

Compared 10% of the time

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Broadcom Clarity vs Planview Portfolios

Compared 13% of the time

Planview ProjectPlace vs Planview Portfolios

Compared 10% of the time

SAP Portfolio and Project Management vs Planview Portfolios

Compared 10% of the time

Planview PPM Pro vs Planview Portfolios

Compared 10% of the time

LeanIX vs Planview Portfolios

Compared 10% of the time

More Planview Portfolios Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Avolution ABACUS

January 2025

Download Avolution ABACUS product report

Buyer's Guide

Planview Portfolios

January 2025

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Also Known As

No data available

Planview Enterprise One, Troux

Learn More

Avolution

Planview

Overview

ABACUS is the enterprise architecture tool designed to have the quickest time-to-value. You can use it to build and maintain rich visual models from existing company data. ABACUS comes with standard industry frameworks as well as advanced analytic tools and best-in-class roadmapping and reporting functionality.

With Avolution ABACUS You Can:

Strategize and analyze your organizational architecture with ease using data-driven diagrams
Enjoy connected data, models, and metrics across your whole enterprise
Work directly and securely in your browser, which is ideal for global teams and remote working

Avolution ABACUS Features:

Modeling and roadmapping: ABACUS offers a fully provisioned modeling environment for enterprise and IT architecture, strategic planning, and digital business management.
Digital collaboration: Avolution ABACUS includes a feature that allows you to set up dashboards so you can tell data stories using business-friendly visualizations.
Portfolio management: Anyone can update their own data, which, in turn, reduces the workload of the enterprise architecture team.
Data-driven architecture: ABACUS’s data-driven architecture gives you the opportunity to design and automate key calculations using out-of-the-box or simple no-code algorithms.
Collaborative data management: Using this feature, you can save time with single sign-on (SSO) and AD Integrations; You can embed directly in MS Teams, Confluence, or other workplace social software.
Dynamic data visualizations: ABACUS’s graph view allows you to navigate through systems in a dynamic environment, as opposed to static diagram views.

Avolution ABACUS Benefits:

Time efficient: Models and roadmaps automatically stay up-to-date, saving your organization a lot of time so you can focus on other priorities instead.
Centralized location: With Avolution ABACUS, you can connect all data in one place, keeping everything both consistent and accurate.
Full flexibility: ABACUS gives you full flexibility to adapt and configure your own metamodels with ease.
Complete visibility: Your whole enterprise can have visibility of the architecture through the use of digital collaboration and visually clear dashboards.
Machine learning: With Avolution ABACUS, you can employ machine learning to speed data management and analysis.
Spot dependencies: ABACUS helps your organization spot dependencies and impacts that might trip up your projects.
Fully customizable: Avolution ABACUS is fully customizable; Select, configure, or adapt your repository and metamodel. You can also automate metrics and analytics specific to your business.

Reviews from Real Users:

Andre W., Enterprise Architect at Enterprise Architecture Perspectives, says, "The most valuable feature is that it has a customizable meta-model, which is key.”

The Lead Enterprise Domain Architects at a financial services firm feels that "The product is easy to use and well-structured for the integrations we need it to make.”

"There are plenty of features available, such as the ability to test applications for issues and a user-friendly dashboard,” says Suresh T., Enterprise Digital Solution Architect at a tech services company.

Planview Portfolios offers a comprehensive platform for managing IT, project and resource management, along with strategic planning. The tool focuses on optimizing resource allocation and financial analysis, supporting global operations.

Organizations use Planview Portfolios to streamline project tracking from inception to completion, enhancing strategic alignment with corporate objectives. The tool integrates with platforms like JIRA to provide seamless workflows and supports critical business processes, including budgeting and capacity planning. Teams benefit from customized configurations and robust reporting, further supporting effective decision-making. Despite its strengths, improvements are sought in navigation, documentation, and integration capabilities.

What are the key features?

Customizable interface: Allows personalization to meet specific needs.
Comprehensive resource and financial management: Enables detailed tracking and analysis.
Robust reporting: Provides extensive data insights.
Integration with Power BI: Enhances data access for stakeholders.
Resource and capacity planning: Optimizes workforce allocation.

What benefits should users expect?

Improved strategic alignment: Supports better decision-making.
Increased operational efficiency: Streamlines project management.
Enhanced resource optimization: Ensures optimal use of workforce.
Better financial insights: Allows precise budget tracking.

In industries like IT and project management, Planview Portfolios supports complex portfolio handling, ensuring visibility across global operations. Companies in these sectors leverage its strategic planning tools for strategic alignment and resource management, integrating with existing systems for improved process efficiency.

Sample Customers

Barclays

UPS, NatWest, Ingram Micro, Canadian Tire, Viessmann, Volvo, NASCO, UNESCO

Buyer's Guide

Avolution ABACUS vs. Planview Portfolios

January 2025

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