When we evaluated similar tools on a trial basis, we found Planview PPM Pro met our requirements. Microsoft Project, Jira, and Primavera were on our list. There are so many other products as well, but these were the products we looked at.

PPM Pro is much more efficient compared to Microsoft Project. It gives us unified visibility into tasks and progress through a dashboard, for stakeholders and senior executives. Microsoft Project doesn't have those kinds of features. However, unlike PPM Pro, it works in offline mode. Still, if an organization is using PPM Pro, there is no need to pay the additional cost to purchase Microsoft Project.

The features were the first priority for us and cost was secondary. The features we required were all part of PPM Pro. It provides visibility, visualizations, and analytics for our data. We needed a unified, single platform. We were not interested in deploying multiple solutions because that is always a bottleneck.

We evaluated Jira, Primavera, and some open-source tools. PPM Pro had all the features we needed, and it got lots of positive user reviews. 

Planview, ServiceNow, Microsoft were the three contenders.

The Gartner Quadrant is always a factor and price is a factor. But the fact that our marketing team went out and bought Projectplace on their own, it drove the company in that direction. We weren't going to win any battles getting them onto something else.

Everyone has their advantages and disadvantages. Within this project, the copy and paste feature and being able to link it to our calendar was their forte. ServiceNow, you could easily build dashboards and schedule reports. To me, that was their forte. With Planview, the portfolio was the best out of the three. It was a toss-up for me, but now that I'm on it and they're making changes to the dashboards, that was one biggest thing.

We looked at Planisware, CA Technologies, Upland, and ServiceNow. Planview was a perfect mix of usability and sophistication or rigor. It would be challenging for us, but it would still be easy enough to use and give us the data that we needed. I chose it because of the way it was sized and priced.

It's very comparable to ServiceNow but ServiceNow doesn't offer the training, resources, and materials, so you have to figure it out as you go. Planview has an extensive learning library, presentations and conferences, and things that we can do. Resources, I would say, are just as huge for us.

We did look at other products. We looked at Primavera, which is Oracle's product. At my previous job, I was with Hewlett Packard for 20 years, so I looked at HPE's product PPMC. Then, we wound up on PPM Pro for a couple of reasons:

1. It's cloud based.
2. The cost was in line.
3. It was going to scale as we grew. We could add more users and so on.

Primavera were extremely cost prohibitive. They wanted to sell a complete solution out-of-the-box. We talked about doing it on-premise. This means you need the data center to get involved. You need all that technology to evolve. We just didn't have it and needed to get going quickly. 

The speed was with PPM Pro. The power of the applications were with PPM Pro. The passion of the people that I met with Planview was just the clincher for me.

We also evaluated Asana which is not quite as robust as PPM Pro. They're both good products but focus on different things. It's difficult to make a decision between them because each covers one area extensively. If you're involved in a team working in product development at a task level, I prefer Asana. PPM, on the other hand, pulls a lot of information at the project level whereas that is complicated if you're using Asana.

We evaluated Planisware. In terms of maturity, PPM Pro was a much better fit for our organization. It was also highly configurable, so we could do a lot of it ourselves. It gave us the opportunity and a roadmap that as we mature, we can mature with Planview and still maintain our data. Whereas, some of the other tools were coming in right at the top end. Cost-wise, it was certainly one of the better value products that we had assessed the amount of functionality and flexibility that you got with the tool.

We did evaluate other options before choosing this solution. We looked at Microsoft Online, Clarizen, and some of the smaller tools like Wrike and Smartsheet. There are a few other tools, as well. Overall, we felt like we did a pretty good review of all of the major players in the area.

In the end, Planview stood out.

We also looked at Captivate, Adaptive, and Innotas. At the time we were very immature in the capability and maturity that Gartner put out there. That's where we started. Those tools were for very mature project and portfolio management offices. We were just beginning and we were looking for a tool that would grow with us. That's why we chose Innotas at the time because it gave us that flexibility. 

We had a homegrown tool in the past that crashed and burned. The reasoning behind that was due to the fact that the users were given too much upfront. It just became one more thing that they had to do. We took a different approach and said that we were going to do this step by step. We had the flexibility and it worked for us. 

It was just a straight swap because it was a sister product. It was in the same company. Before that, we went out to RFP, and we looked at several different solutions that were certainly in the top 10 of the Gartner, Forrester Magic Quadrant. The Daptiv/Changepoint company won hands down on all the different asks we had.

We did look at two other options before choosing this solution. One in particular just seemed a little more intuitive from an end-user perspective.

We tried other tools, like Microsoft Project, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Planner. What I like about PPM Pro is it puts all of those tools together into one integrated platform. So, you have a good overview of what is going on in the project space of your organization.

We did due diligence on a multitude of companies that offer solutions, then we narrowed it down to Planview and moved forward with it.

We evaluated six different firms, including CA Clarity, KeyedIn, and Microsoft Project Server. 

The Planview customer service and sales were excellent. Support was really good. We've been very happy with it to date. 

There were other solutions were a bit more cutting edge, but Plainview was more robust. We could actually build it out as we needed, e.g., the visualization, reporting, and integration.

CA Clarity has the Jaspersoft integration for reporting. Its ability to have plugins and integrate is a bit better, but we love the stability and growth potential of the Planview product.

The top contender was CA Clarity versus Planview. We went with Planview because Planview had a lot more flexibility than Clarity. 

Most of the attributes are configurable. We can change it to our own needs, which I didn't see with some of the other tools that I evaluated before starting Planview.

I would rate it at about eight (out of 10) only because we've been using it for two years but there have been some growing pains as we are learning how to use it and getting the team adopted. I definitely see that adoption has happened and people like what they're seeing. However, I also see some areas where they could make it stronger.

Some of the things that we are looking at seem to be maybe in Enterprise One. So, a lot of the talks are now on Enterprise One. We are saying, "Oh wow, they are pretty similar." Then, we start to talk with people, and they're like, "Yeah, we can do this there." So, we should maybe be looking at what the differences are and what exactly they can do

Microsoft project is always out there. Project Server was horrendous. However, for the desktop, a lot of people prefer Microsoft Project for managing their project tasks. 

The PPM Pro tool is where the portfolio program management and the milestone plan of the PM is done, but the detail project plan is still maintained by our PMs in the Microsoft project. 

We went with PPM Pro after evaluating a few products. We were looking to get visibility into our portfolio and what work we were doing and how it was getting deployed. PPM Pro gave us the tools to be able to get that insight. When you're running things off your desks or out of a spreadsheet, you're not able to get that same visibility as easily.

We evaluated the Jira product, which worked well from an agile standpoint, but it didn't have the portfolio management side of things as PPM Pro, at least not in the way that we were reviewing it.

We have tried using MS Project. We use P6 for our construction projects and I've used it for a few of the larger IT projects a few years ago. We found that this tool did what everything that we needed it to do.

We prefer the Planview PPM Pro vs Microsoft and how it has dealt with the portfolio management. We really couldn't easily get that from the Microsoft stack at the time that we evaluated it. From a project standpoint, for the functionality that we used, it was one-to-one. There wasn't anything that Microsoft could do that we couldn't do within Planview PPM Pro.

We looked at a whole list of vendors, include Project Server.

We chose Planview because of their support. Another reason was we had the ability to add notes onto time entries. We are different than a lot of their customers with billing. Our notes are how we explained to the customer what we did, and that was key.

We also looked at CA Technologies and Daptiv. 

The fully integrated solution that PPM Pro said they had between PPM Pro and Projectplace was not a true statement after implementation. So we've been working with them on making that happen. Other platforms were very stale and out of date. The visuals that we were shown for PPM Pro were actually, Enterprise One, not PPM Pro, so that was a bit misleading.

We also use Microsoft solutions for project management. They are doing far better than Planview is doing right now.

For individual projects, I would give a nine out of 10 for Microsoft versus Planview being a six or seven out of 10. And then for portfolio analysis, it doesn't really provide much of an option there. Planview has got that, PPM Pro is better in that regard.

I was not part of the decision to implement this tool, but it is my understanding that there was no evaluation of other products.

We are currently evaluating other options, as the organization has matured and we need a tool that provides resource management and planning capabilities beyond what Innotas can provide.

We previously evaluated Epic Clarity.

We evaluated ServiceNow.

We looked at another solution namely the CA Clarity tool.