Microsoft Project vs Planview Portfolios comparison

Microsoft and Planview are both solutions in the Project Management Software category. Additionally, 93% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Planview users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Project

Read 82 Microsoft Project reviews

3,927 Views
2,043 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Planview Portfolios

Read 63 Planview Portfolios reviews

957 Views
562 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Microsoft Project

Planview Portfolios

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Microsoft Project and Planview Portfolios based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Project Management Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Project vs. Planview Portfolios Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Project vs. Planview Portfolios

April 2025

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Helped 851,604 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

Microsoft Project

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Project Management Software (3rd)

Planview Portfolios

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Enterprise Architecture Management (14th), Project Portfolio Management (7th)

Featured Reviews

Nurul Asyikin Wahab

Management Design Civil Structure at Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd

Efficient project management with robust data tracking and an easy setup

When I have too many elements or items in a project, it becomes cumbersome, especially during printing. Non-technical users do not need all the data, so it's primarily for technical personnel. Without guidance, it's challenging to use the app. With guidance and expert knowledge, it becomes manageable, however, it's not for non-technical teams. The worst part is handling too many items, like 1,000 items, which Microsoft Project struggles with, especially when printing. Printing on A3 size is quite burdensome, so I prefer viewing it on a tablet or computer. On a tablet or phone, I can see the full project elements depending on the screen size.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The resource allocation features, which help allocate resources to tasks, are quite valuable."

"The built-in dashboards are powerful because they show both project and overall progress."

"The most valuable feature is probably the Kanban diagram. People are familiar with the Kanban tools. When they do their scrum meetings, they have that Kanban board where you can see the different tiles for all the queries and move them from left to right. IT is familiar with that because, for development, most of the tools have that capability. It could also be more graphical, like Asana."

"Microsoft offers good support."

"Microsoft Project offers comprehensive project overviews and the ability to rate down what we have and what we need in terms of software."

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

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Project is status reporting."

"It's a scalable product, especially the online version."

More Microsoft Project pros

"The most valuable features are scheduling, resource management, and, from a project perspective, the functions like issues that change orders. They are valuable because, from a project management perspective, we use the workflows that we build for project management and do active risk management and issue management for the projects that we want for our agencies."

"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 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."

"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."

"The portfolio management gives you a view of all the projects as well as all the information about the total amount of effort, time, and cost being spent on the projects. It gives the organization how much money and effort should be spent towards projects so they can budget and do better capacity planning in the next fiscal year. It gives them visibility into their resources and if they have capacity."

"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."

"Another good thing is that we can create custom reports, which is great. If I created a custom report, a tile that tells me how many people have logged in today. We currently have a little under 2000 users, and that's only users, we actually have integrations, that we created a custom form that sends hours directly to Planview. They're not using Planview directly, but they're sending their hours to Planview through an API."

"The financial planning capabilities are very useful. We have integration for an SAP system, and so we load financial data from SAP into Planview for prior months. And then we use the forecasting capabilities to get a complete picture of the cost of a specific project. The financial management is very useful."

More Planview Portfolios pros

Cons

"Its price can be improved."

"Tracking timeline, resource allocation, and monitoring are areas of concern for the tool where improvements are required."

"Its reporting and its integration with some of the other related systems should be improved. It is not very easy to integrate."

"It should be easier to break things. Breaking up the visualization from the task is sometimes a little bit tricky to do. You can do it, but it takes a minute. It's not an easy function to do. The way you have to format it and stuff like that takes a minute."

"The tool's most valuable feature is scheduling."

"The scalability is co-dependent on the stability of the product. We have 4000 users, and at times the product is slow."

"I would like to see the inclusion of multi-currency support."

"I would like to see an entire baseline, like in JIRA."

More Microsoft Project cons

"It could do with a quicker response time for some reports or portfolios."

"We don't use the Progression feature. We will use it at some point in time. Until then, we want to have a way to set time to help decide what's in the past, present, and future. It is one of the things we've been discussing with Planview."

"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."

"I would like a bit more flexibility, as far as the configuration, and have additional capabilities to configure, making it more flexible for our use."

"The out-of-the-box reports, as far as I can tell, are weak. We've had to build a lot of reports using Power BI, which we connected to it."

"When I started working with Planview, I didn't know anything about project or resource management. I had to learn everything: the admin side, then the user side of it. Probably, in the beginning, I would implement in the blueprint or workshops more demos. A live demo of how the system works because we would like a little deeper dive in how the application works for us to understand what we need to provide, what we are doing, what we will be doing. Because in the beginning, it was so overwhelming, and we didn't know anything about the tool."

"We do have some significant issues with our integrations that we're working through. Those are not as stable or reliable as what we would like."

"The content management definitely needs to improve. We don't really use content management for projects inside Enterprise One. We have actually switched to a SharePoint site. We have a feed from Enterprise One every night of all the projects that are created."

More Planview Portfolios cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"Microsoft Project is an expensive solution."

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

"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."

"You only need a Team's license in order to use Microsoft Project within Teams, which is very helpful."

"We have to pay for a yearly license for Microsoft Project."

"The solution is expensive."

More Microsoft Project pricing and cost advice

"We recently did a new bundle for all of Enterprise One. It includes some of the newer pieces, like Projectplace and LeanKit. It bundled our CTM in with it as well. I think the total came out to be about $900,000 a year. This is for unlimited licenses."

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

"The licensing part is a bit costly in comparison with the other available PPM tools."

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

"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."

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

"We have portfolio managers, resource managers, project managers, and time reporting licenses. These are the licenses that we have."

More Planview Portfolios pricing and cost advice

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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Project Management Software solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

64%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Has anyone moved from Microsoft Project to Smartsheet? How has your experience been with Smartsheet?

Hi @Eire Zimmermann, I helped an organization evaluate both MS-Project and Smartsheet when they were conducting their PM tool RFP. The short of it is this, MS Project is not caught up with the mo...

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Project?

The product's initial setup phase is easy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Project?

The issue with Microsoft is that the license is per personnel, making it expensive.

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

Jira vs Microsoft Project

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Project Server vs Microsoft Project

Compared 11% of the time

Planisware vs Microsoft Project

Compared 8% of the time

Asana vs Microsoft Project

Compared 8% of the time

ClickUp vs Microsoft Project

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Project Competitors

Broadcom Clarity vs Planview Portfolios

Compared 14% of the time

LeanIX vs Planview Portfolios

Compared 10% of the time

SAP Portfolio and Project Management vs Planview Portfolios

Compared 8% of the time

Planview PPM Pro vs Planview Portfolios

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Project Server vs Planview Portfolios

Compared 5% of the time

More Planview Portfolios Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Project

May 2025

Download Microsoft Project product report

Buyer's Guide

Planview Portfolios

May 2025

Download Planview Portfolios product report

Also Known As

Project Pro, MS Project

Planview Enterprise One, Troux

Overview

Microsoft Project helps you get started quickly and execute projects with ease. Built-in templates and familiar scheduling tools help project managers and teams stay productive.

Microsoft

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.

Planview

Sample Customers

Aston Martin, ABANCA, Airbus Group, Capita, Cardiff University, City of Saskatoon, Intel, Pegasus Airlines, South Australia Power Network (SAPN), Israeli Ministry of Construction and Housing

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

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Project vs. Planview Portfolios

April 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Project vs. Planview Portfolios

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Project vs. Planview Portfolios and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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