Microsoft Project vs Planisware comparison

"The features I find the most valuable are scheduling and reporting."

"Microsoft Project is used to track the project delivery and the project management."

"The pricing is pretty good on the enterprise agreement we have."

"The most valuable features of Microsoft Project are you can create critical paths pretty easily, and you can import from an Excel spreadsheet to your task list as you create it during your working sessions with your team."

"It is easy to use and pretty intuitive. User interfaces have stayed the same for the most part for the last 20 years. So, there is a familiarity."

"If you work with Microsoft, it's very easy to work with this."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Project is scheduling. The solution is useful on a daily basis."

"The solution is stable."

"It stands out by automating the intricate mechanics of project execution, eliminating the need for highly technical individuals to manage and reconfigure models."

"It has an inbuilt BI tool, which can be compared to Power BI or Tableau."

"Overall, our company has all disintegrated systems, and with Planisware, we are getting a very integrated view of my portfolio reporting, cost and load, and everything else."

"Planisware offers integration with multiple tools and provides a good level of customization."

"Planisware has introduced Agile concepts, making it capable of Agile management similar to Jira and other Agile tools."

"We have a variety of different modules, but it is mainly used for costs, risks, and resources."

"There are two things in particular that I enjoy. The first is the portfolio planning section. Another advantage is that it is highly customizable."

"The solution is performance-oriented and easily customized accordingly to many areas, such as performance KPI."

"I would like to see both Time and Team based options improved."

"It's hard to reach technical people to get the help you need."

"The full suite would be pretty expensive."

"This solution needs more templates focused on types of projects to ease setup."

"There are some things about it that I've always hated, and they haven't really changed them. It makes a lot of assumptions. It is also difficult to put business rules in it. You have to de-link it from the consecutive task if you don't want to do a What-If analysis, and sometimes, if you forget to do that, it changes everything. It is a pain in the neck to undo it. I would also like to see better integration with graphics. The graphics are primitive, and they need some major work. I would like to have the ability to do some small macros within the project for fuzzy logic. For example, if you're not sure how long a task takes, you can get the earliest guess. It is very time and manpower intensive to keep it up to date. You need to constantly update it. You will find that you are spending more time working on the Microsoft Project file rather than working on your project. I don't want to devote a person to just do that. That's silly. You can link it to some more modern applications so that it is dynamic when a real-time resource schedule changes, but it is not at all dynamic. It is only as dynamic as the person using it. It would be nice if we could plug it in real time for each project, subproject, or task. If something is going on, I want to see it in real time. Sometimes we have international clients, and they don't use the same calendar. They have a Thursday and Friday weekend, and we have a Saturday and Sunday weekend. I can change it in Microsoft Project, but I would like to be able to do it globally. There may be a way to do it, but I just haven't figured it out yet. I would like to be able to specify globally what weekend we want or what we want to call a weekend. We might have a project that works seven days a week. Some tasks are automated outside, like manufacturing processes. Embedding external processes is almost impossible because, in a practical sense, we don't have people who can do a lot of programming here, and also the interface of Microsoft Project is not the easiest because a lot of it is proprietary. It would be nice if we can link different tasks to external sources of inputs and outputs so that we could integrate them with a master project plan and see in real time what's going on. For example, you are manufacturing a batch of a chemical, and I have to rely on if a customer is making some type of complex chemical. Their system does not interfere with ours. We have to get the outputs from their system and enter them manually into the project to see the effect. That takes time. If you're talking about hours, you going to spend three to four hours, but there is the risk of getting it wrong or making a mistake. On tight projects, every minute counts. I would like to see some control system interfaces with Microsoft Project. A modern machine shop has a lot of computer numerical control (CNC) computers. In fact, virtually all machining is done with a CNC machine. Even 3D additive manufacturing is made with CNC. That data can go to a computer, and that computer can spit it out to a project so that you can see in real time whether you are going to finish a day ahead. If you had to finish a day ahead, you could talk to the systems' software, which can say that if I have this machine working for another hour and this one for one hour or less, I would be able to meet the schedule. It can then make those changes, but it can't do that. Everything needs to be done manually, which takes more time, and there's a risk of mistakes. It requires smarter automation and more machine learning. There is no machine learning capability in Microsoft Project. It just doesn't exist. That's why I say it is only suitable for small-sized to medium-sized companies and small projects. Most people don't have the problems that I have. I don't have them all the time, but when I have them, they're big. When you're bidding on a project that has to get done, you find yourself spending most of the time working on Microsoft Project, whereas you should be spending these hours managing the project. Thinking on a bigger scale, I would like better integration with Office, Visio, and Access. If you make a change in one, it should cascade to others and vice versa. It doesn't do that. It is not a dynamic program. I would like to see a dynamic program or at least the capability of being dynamic, that is, even if it is close to real time where it outputs to a module, and the module then talks to real-time things. The real-time data goes back into the module, and the module updates the project plan. Such dynamic capability would be nice. It may not be real time, but it is at least close. I would like to be able to link directly to the data in an Excel spreadsheet so that I don't have to keep going back and forth updating it. I don't want to have to create a dynamic link library. Whenever I change the data in Excel, it should update in Visio or PowerPoint. If I'm doing a pie chart or any kind of graphic, I don't want to constantly update my graphics. I want to link them together, and I want them updated automatically. I know it is a wishful thing. They don't make major changes every time they come out with a new version. They don't fix the issue. They just add a few features."

"It is a traditional Waterfall-based solution, so it doesn't lend itself particularly well to Agile development. You can record Agile sprints within it, but it is not really an Agile-based product. It can store the basic information about budgets that an Agile set of work is looking to use, but that's about it."

"Microsoft Project is very expensive, costing roughly double what it should. We purchase perpetual licenses due to the high cost of subscriptions, which are about 1,000 Australian dollars."

"The collaboration has room for improvement."

"The UI and UX of Planisware are not that advanced."

"More integration is needed with other kinds of products for better collaboration."

"The solution's user experience and user interface need improvement because they are not that great and intuitive."

"The learning curve is steep and there could be more avenues for opening up learning materials to a broader audience, enabling individuals to gain practical experience with the tool."

"They do not have anything that can assist customers with multi-year roadmap planning."

"The area that could benefit from improvement in this Planisware is the project management tool. I have previously used Project Server, which is a Microsoft solution, and I found it to be more user-friendly as it included a client solution. In contrast, with this solution, the only option available is the online version, making it difficult to create activities, milestones, and other necessary components. This is in comparison to Planisware, which offers a more comprehensive solution."

"Its stability should be improved. Its stability is the main issue, but we sometimes also have issues with calculations."

"The biggest con for Planisware is that if you are not a Planisware partner, you don't have access to their functions, making it difficult for beginners and new team members."

"Licensing costs vary depending on the user volume. The pricing is good, I'd rate it four out of five."

"Pricing-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten since I feel it is a bit costly."

"We purchase perpetual licenses due to the high cost of subscriptions, which are about 1,000 Australian dollars."

"The cost for an on-premises-based license is a one-time fee, and the cloud-based is an annual payment plan."

"You do not have to invest much in terms of configuring this solution to suit your needs."

"I am not involved with this."

"It gets expensive when having to add all of the plugins and everything that you need."

"The license fees for the professional version, which is estimated to be approximately $1,600, and the standard version, which is approximately $1,200, may be considered expensive by some users. This is something that could be improved to make the platform more accessible to a wider audience."

"The solution is expensive and support is an extra cost. There are three license types to choose from, and we only pay for support and cloud services depending on our needs."

"There are training and certification costs."

"The solution could be less expensive and the cost of scaling is expensive too."

"It comes with a high cost."