We performed a comparison between Microsoft Project Server and Planview PPM Pro based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Project Portfolio Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"Microsoft Project Server is easy to use compared to other similar solutions, such as Primavera. It functions similar to Excel or others Microsoft solutions which makes it simple for most people to be able to use right away."
"We use Microsoft Project Server for project management."
"The most useful feature of Microsoft Project Server is you can select a function to see the baseline."
"I found the portfolio management valuable."
"We are able to know what we are doing, how much we have spent, how much time we've taken, and it tells us how much money is left for the project. It also tells us whether we are below or above our expenditures, whether we are below or above our budget."
"I like the way you can build the schedule by the Don't Start Before or Don't Start After values. You can use it to build your schedule based on how you change your dates. This is how it actually builds the schedule."
"The stability of the 2019 version is quite good."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that the tool's reporting is very good."
"It gave us a clarity of purpose. Everybody knows what they are doing and that they are all aligned: Managers know what employees are doing. Employees know what they are doing and the managers think they should be doing. That is the clarity which really helps in efficiency."
"You can easily align strategic management and the portfolios within your organization. It helps you visualize all your strategic plans and the KPIs. It provides that information on a unified dashboard, in which you can track all your resources and the portfolios. It helps senior stakeholders and executives with clear reporting about project intake and demands, in real time."
"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."
"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."
"The product's deployment is straightforward."
"Time tracking, portfolio management reporting, and what-if analysis create visibility into project planning, resource capacity, and demand planning."
"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."
"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."
"There need to be more tutorials available to users."
"I'd like it if we could divide out the project calendars. On one project server, we might follow five projects or more at one time, and we'd like to see all of the items at once so that it becomes a long loop, but one where we can identify different projects in tandem and then focus on which we need to at the time. While I only have visibility into one, I'd like to see several at a time."
"It may be considered expensive."
"Permission management needs improvement."
"The reporting aspects can be improved, which is one of the reasons why I'm using Qlik Sense. In the older on-prem versions, reporting was lackluster, to say the least. Project Online has a better handle on that. However, we will still be using Qlik Sense. We're also looking at an add-on app from a company called OnePlan that adds some additional functionality where Microsoft is not as clean in its approach for things such as portfolio management and some of the trends analysis."
"Improvements are needed in the technical support process, aiming for a better user experience."
"The price of the solution could be reduced."
"Microsoft Project Server's user interface is pretty average, and sometimes it can have bugs."
"Based on my experience, the financial management screens have gone a long way, but I think there's still some room for improvement in terms of how you model them and the different version controls."
"Integrations need improvement. We have the ability now with the FLEX licensing to take advantage of the different applications. But if you want them integrated there's a really large cost associated with that. The integration should be included in the cost per license. We shouldn't have to pay these really high fees to get the systems to talk together."
"The downside to the way the solution tracks time is if your project manager doesn't add you to the project, you won't see it on your timesheet, even if you did do work."
"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."
"The biggest things are the status notes and internal notes. They have made some great improvements these past couple of weeks, but they are still lacking a bit. There are still a little kludgy. It just needs to be a bit more straightforward with notes, copying and pasting. They've made huge improvements, but it still could do some work. E.g., for some reason, the formatting is still looking a little bit weird on selecting different fonts."
"Training documentation improvement is required because there are some high-level words in that material, terms that a non-technical person is unable to understand."
"It takes more time than it should to create a new project because we can't bulk edit things very easily. That is definitely an area that has room for improvement."
"PPM Pro requires a great deal of internet bandwidth because it's a cloud-based solution. This can present a problem if a team member is working in a remote area where they can't access high-speed internet or experience outages. They may face challenges logging in or updating tasks. If the internet connection is inadequate, it may not sync with the solution."
Microsoft Project Server is ranked 6th in Project Portfolio Management with 55 reviews while Planview PPM Pro is ranked 5th in Project Portfolio Management with 34 reviews. Microsoft Project Server is rated 7.8, while Planview PPM Pro is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Microsoft Project Server writes "Provides holistic reporting and allows us to keep track of what's going on with projects". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Planview PPM Pro writes "Notifications of approaching project deadlines help us plan and also avoid delays". Microsoft Project Server is most compared with Microsoft Project, ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management, Planisware, Oracle Primavera Portfolio Management and JIRA Portfolio, whereas Planview PPM Pro is most compared with Planview AdaptiveWork, ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management, Planview Portfolios, Planisware and Microsoft Project. See our Microsoft Project Server vs. Planview PPM Pro report.
See our list of best Project Portfolio Management vendors and best Project Management Software vendors.
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