What are the top capacity planning tools for 2024/5? How can they improve productivity and performance? And what are the must-have features?
In the world of resource management, capacity planning software can make your life much easier. Automated updates and real-time visibility over resources means you can save time and money, completing projects on schedule and on budget.
Traditional manual capacity planning techniques are labor-intensive and error-prone. Spreadsheets might start out looking tidy, but require a lot of work to maintain.
With resource capacity planning software, you can get much better visibility and insights over your resource capacity at the click of a button. You can share insights with managers and teams for resource synchronization, making your project run smoother and more efficiently.
In this article, we’ll run through some of the strengths and advantages of fourteen of the best capacity planning tools on the market.
A capacity planning tool is something that allows you to forecast your future resource needs and allocate resources at the right time.
For example, if you’re running an IT company or consultancy, it will help you find available people with the right skills for upcoming projects. Businesses that are rapidly expanding or experiencing bursts of high demand must ensure that they have the resources available to handle the increasing number of projects. As a result, capacity planning has become an essential aspect of many companies’ strategic planning.
This may seem like something you can do manually, but one of the big advantages of capacity planning software is that it accounts for fluctuations and changing situations automatically.
There are a large number of factors that can impact the exact resource requirements and timings, particularly in projects with multiple stages and dependencies.
Capacity planning software provides visibility helping project managers understand exactly how things are playing out.
Other benefits of capacity planning software include:
Capacity planning software also helps to avoid resource clashes, delays and confrontations. This is particularly beneficial in larger organizations with competing departments and priorities, and finite resources.
Before we jump into our comparison of the nine best capacity planning tools currently on the market, let’s talk features. What functionality does a capacity planning platform typically offer - and what do you need?
This one is pretty obvious. A capacity planning tool lets you calculate and visualize the capacity you have in your business. This might be current capacity - who’s available right now for more work - or future capacity - what time and resources you have to take on new projects.
You should be able to see capacity from different angles, for example, specific teams, skills, or job roles. This will help you surface spare capacity and use it, as well as identify and address capacity issues - for example, by reallocating resources, recruiting new ones, or reskilling the resources you have.
Capacity planning is all about the projects you have - now and in your pipeline - and the people you have to work on them. So your chosen software needs to include project and resource planning tools as well, as these combine to create a comprehensive picture of your business capacity.
Features might include: Gantt charts to schedule projects; a searchable, centralized resource pool to find suitable team members; and the ability to drag-and-drop resources into projects.
You need to be able to see the impact of projects and resource allocations too. Will Project A take you over-capacity? Is Team B over-scheduled? Does Resource C have availability to do more? Etc.
To make confident, data-based decisions you need in-depth reports and at-a-glance insights. Capacity planning tools should provide the option to run off-the-shelf reports, as well as customize your own.
They should also include data visualization tools that make it easy to spot spare capacity or clashes. For example, calendars and heatmaps that show when you’re nearing - or over - capacity.
There are a range of different capacity planning softwares on the market, so how do you know which is best for you? These tools can target a specific problem, or aim to deliver capacity planning solutions in different ways.
These are fourteen of the best capacity planning tools available now, what makes them so good, and how they can help project managers today.
Runn is a sophisticated resource management tool that’s designed with project managers, operations leads, and resourcing managers at the forefront. It’s highly visual and engaging, which brings insights to life, and really aids understanding of your capacity management.
Users can see all projects and resources at once with a bird’s eye view calendar, making it easy to identify resource risks and double-bookings. As well as high-level capacity reports, you can drill down into specific team members' assignments to understand how well they’re being utilized, including in real-time. This includes monitoring an employee’s split between billable and non-billable work.
The multi-layered universal calendar can be filtered down to departments, roles or other custom tags for specific visibility and understanding that you just can’t get in a spreadsheet.
On top of that, Runn’s capacity charts are a real plus if you need to maximize your resources. They visualize the scheduled workload your resources have next to the available time. This means that you can easily see where there is still some capacity you can use up and where you need to add more resources to ensure balanced workloads for everyone. You can structure the charts to reflect the time frame you need, along with special tags to filter the information by teams, roles, skills, and other criteria relevant to you.
TPG, one of Runn’s loyal customers, finds resource capacity planning particularly useful in their projects as they have around 600 people and somewhere between 30 and 40 projects running at the same time in Runn.
The capacity planning we had done in Excel - which had taken weeks - well, when we did that same work in Runn, it was completed in two days. - Cindy Tan, General Manager of IT Planning in TPG
Runn is also one in a kind of its own that allows you to control your project financials.
Continue reading: From Weeks to Two Days - How TPG Telecom Streamlined Their Capacity Planning with Runn
Toggl aims to empower project managers to utilize resources and staff as much as possible, without crossing over into over-working or putting too much stress on resources. Aimed primarily at agencies, Toggl helps you track the time your people spend working on projects so you can find ways to optimize their performance and bill your customers for all the work provided by your team.
Toggl’s own message is Productive over busy, which illustrates what it’s designed to achieve. It's made to be easy to use, so you can get straight up and running.
Calendars and projects can be shared with clients on a customizable basis, and it’s also designed with remote teams in mind. Flexible tasks can be drawn up with as much, or as little, information as is needed, and drag and drop timelines enable visual roadmaps for specific projects and resources.
As well as being a fantastic capacity management and planning software, Float brings visibility and understanding to teams and individuals working on projects too.
Teams and team members can be assigned titles and roles to bring universal project visibility across all departments. You can also set default work hours and have customized availability for individuals, which also boosts the understanding of all project stakeholders.
Float’s capacity planning is built on a people-first approach. It aims to give you a granular view of your team's schedule to plan capacity and assign work with confidence. Another benefit here is that you get to plan your capacity within one platform, accounting for things like vacation time, syncing calendars and local holidays, and even setting custom work hours and locations. All of this helps you streamline your project management workflow with relevant milestones, phases, dependencies, and tentative scenarios.
Another intuitive feature allows capacity planners to identify skills or resource gaps ahead of time, to assist hiring or contracting in advance.
Float integrates with common workplace systems such as Slack and Asana, and while it only has paid plans, it does offer a free trial.
Resource Guru offers different levels of paid plans to help manage human resources and other bookings. It’s useful for giving you visibility over in-demand individuals, or team members that are being under-utilized.
Features include alerts for booking clashes to avoid last-minute compromises, calendar visibility for all team members and departments, and an integrated leave management system for booking time off.
As a user, you can filter out custom resource features such as skills or business area, drag and drop functionality and an availability bar that helps you to see who’s available, when, and for how long.
In short, Resource Guru gives you a bird’s eye view of availability across your teams so you can spot under-capacity early on and maximize the potential of your resources from day one.
You can filter your people by skill, department, and location to make data-driven decisions and have realistic expectations for your upcoming projects. On top of that, you can constantly monitor utilization levels to better understand whether you need to adjust your staffing levels.
Resource Guru stands out because of its simplicity and calendar views and is a perfect solution to manage people's schedules, but companies tend to outgrow it quickly, looking to add more functionality to their tech stacks, such as more project planning features or project budget management.
Its basic plan starts from $3/user per month.
Workplace collaboration software Smartsheet acquired SaaS capacity planning company 10,000 ft in 2019, and the result is an excellent capacity planning software.
It has simple resource allocation that allows project managers to find the best team/individual for a given task, accurate pipeline projections, and pre-populated timesheets that make it easy for staff to submit their hours.
Smartsheet is also able to generate insightful reports that allow users to identify trends, understand business performance in different areas, and make further growth plans with the availability of resources front of mind.
This tool helps its users pioneer new ways of working, where you can always capture and track your plans, resources, and schedules. It helps you accurately forecast hiring needs and keep all the workflows on track.
Same as Toggl, it gives your resources the option to register their time so you can track how your resources spend their productivity hours and bill your clients fair. To make it easier for users, Smartsheet offers pre-filled timesheets with an intuitive design which means you don’t need prior training to get started.
Smartsheet also integrates with other CRM and workplace communication tools to create unified, simple project updates and communication.
Kantata - formerly known as Mavenlink - provides connection, efficiency and insights that make capacity planning simple and easy. It pitches itself as a disruptive software that’s modern and in tune with what today’s project managers need.
Users get instant understanding of staffing demands both now and in the future, and can allocate additional resources to projects as needed. Up to the minute perspectives give real time visibility over budgets, spending, resourcing and timelines. There’s a strong degree of control that allows users to take action and make impactful changes at the click of a button.
You can also forecast effectively and generate valuable reports that all contribute to sound capacity planning and productivity.
The tool helps you forecast capacity with hard and soft allocations so you can always easily balance supply and demand for your resources. This, in turn, will help you reduce staffing times and enable real-time responsiveness.
As with many other capacity planning softwares, Saviom illustrates resource utilization both in real time and into the future to allow for better planning. Users can see the demand for individual resources, book resources when they’re needed and build out strategies for times where resources are unavailable.
One of the advantages of Saviom over other capacity planning softwares is that it has features designed to adjust to changing circumstances. Users can adjust timelines, retrain employees and add to their workforce if needed - and Saviom helps to identify when these (and other) contingencies are needed.
Saviom also incorporates business-wide resource visibility for a total understanding of capacity and demand.
Birdview PSA is a full-cycle solution for service delivery teams that combines robust resource, project, and financial management functionalities within a single centralized platform. Thanks to advanced capacity planning tools, your managers can identify and fix team underloading and always find the right people for the job to maximize your resource utilization in real time.
With Birdview PSA, you can create insightful BI-powered reports that take into account any changes in the team’s schedule, as well as the project timelines, to help you accurately plan your future resource needs and keep up with the deadlines. These reports can be used to make any resource-related decisions and help you figure out whether you have enough resources to fulfill your current tasks or to take over new projects.
Birdview PSA also integrates with 2,000+ of the most popular tools and can be used as a core of your business environment.
Forecast has recently added capacity planning to their full-suite PSA software. If you're on the lookout for the tool to manage your creative agency work (projects and tasks) and combine it with resource planning and financial management, it might be a good option. Suitable for professional services companies of 50+ employees, Forecast makes it easy to assign work and collaborate cross-functionally.
Their key capacity planning features include:
Ganttic specializes in the resource planning side of project management. Ganttic users can create a visual workflow of all of their projects, tasks, and resources, using the tried-and-trusted Gantt chart format. Like Runn, it offers the ability to schedule projects – then search, select, and drag-and-drop resource allocations.
Ganttic’s strength lies in its detailed insights into project timelines and resource allocations. But what about capacity planning?
Visual capacity heatmaps provide at-a-glance insights into capacity in real time, so you can easily spot peak periods and bottlenecks. There are also capacity planning reports for those that need more detailed data for decision-making. You can also track utilization to understand how well resource supply meets demand, and capacity plan accordingly.
Capterra reviewers graduating from spreadsheets and other basic resource management tools love Ganttic’s improved visibility into project and resource scheduling.
However, more advanced users complain that reporting and usability could be better, particularly around grouping and splitting tasks and allocations. One reviewer describes Ganttic as have a ‘short but steep’ learning curve, while others praise overall ease of use.
Adobe’s Workfront is a heavy-duty work management platform for large businesses, promising to break down silos and streamline operations. It has a strong focus on scalability, firmly targeting the enterprise market, as you’d expect from a giant like Adobe. This may be overkill for smaller teams that need more basic functionality and budget-friendly tools.
Workfront excels in managing complex workflows and coordinating cross-functional teams, providing end-to-end project planning and status monitoring – such as project requests, review and approval workflows, and automation.
Resource and capacity-planning-wise, Workfront has visual resource management tools that let users analyze requests against priorities, balance workloads, and identify the best team members for every job.
Workfront has a large functional footprint. But the price of comprehensiveness is often complexity. One Capterra reviewer complains ‘With all that functionality, the tool becomes confusing to do simple project management.’ While another says ‘It also gets confusing with the different levels and their hierarchical order, which I think even they get lost in sometimes themselves.’
Productive pitches itself at agencies, offering an ‘all-in-one agency management platform’ that goes above and beyond just project and resource management. It includes tools for sales and lead management, capacity planning, project management, time tracking, and financial management too.
Productive offers real-time resource and capacity management, to identify resource allocations and availability to take on more work, supporting equitable workload distribution. It also lets users forecast and schedule their projects and resources. Financial tools help agencies manage budgets, expenses, and billing in one place.
It really is a one-stop-shop for savvy agencies to manage everything from lead gen to invoicing, and everything in between. It is reasonably priced and highly flexible.
But reviewers on Capterra are torn. Some love the comprehensive end-to-end functionality that integrates all their agency departments into a single system. However, many complain about system bugs and slow response times from the development team.
Like most of the platforms here, Teamwork has an extensive suite of features for busy professional service firms. It lets you manage projects and resources with ease, using visual tools like Gantt charts, schedules, and heatmaps to understand capacity and allocations.
Workload management tools let you plan and distribute everything from tasks to whole projects, while timeline visualization gives users a clear view of project status and staffing. You can view each individual’s capacity in the ‘Workload Planner’, and drag and drop their tasks to achieve a more balanced workload. There are also time-tracking tools to help keep on top of billable time and make invoicing easier and more accurate.
As the name suggests, Teamwork has a strong focus on collaboration – between team members and clients themselves – with a wealth of features around review and approval workflows, and in-tool communication like messaging and tagging. It also has other useful functionality for managing client needs, such as built-in digital asset management for storing and retrieving client artwork, etc.
Teamwork’s full-fat functionality comes with a potentially steep learning curve and costs. But the extensive suite of project management and collaboration tools pack a mighty punch for client-focused firms.
Asana is a popular work management platform whose ubiquity means we can’t miss it off our list, even though capacity planning is only a small part of the program. The focus is project and task management, workflows and automation, and goal tracking – all in an intuitive user interface. The range of pricing tiers makes Asana a popular choice for organizations of all sizes.
Project management tools provide a central place to plan and track the progress of everything in your pipeline. Users can see work as a list, calendar, timeline, Gantt chart, or Kanban board – and break big projects down into manageable tasks with clear owners and due dates.
Asana’s resource management functionality is a little lacking compared to dedicated resource management platforms. However, capacity planning tools still allow leaders to align resourcing to high-level strategic goals. Users can see the insights they need to optimize resource utilization, gain visibility into overall capacity and capabilities, and visualize current and future assignments to understand what capacity they have left.
We like Asana’s Goals feature, which lets you set goals and key results at team, or company level, and see how they ladder up to overall business success. Asana now also boasts AI to boost productivity.
Capterra reviewers like the usability, flexibility, and integrations that Asana offers. Though some have said the functionality and cost may not be worth it for smaller firms.
We knew you were going to ask that. As you’ll see above, different solutions suit different businesses.
We’ve said Runn is the best capacity planning software for IT services. But we’ve also rated Birdseye PSA highly for professional service firms.
There really isn’t one best capacity planning tool. Rather, its about what’s best for your business and your capacity planning goals.
Here’s some factors to consider when choosing the best capacity planning software for you.
What do you actually need your capacity planning platform to do? Don’t get carried away by functionality you might not need. Consult stakeholders and create a MoSCoW list of what your tool Must, Should, Could, and Won’t include.
Some businesses need a cheap-and-cheerful solution with just enough features to plan capacity in a small team. Others will want to invest in enterprise-grade capacity management for a large and complex workforce.
Don’t forget to consider your growth goals. If your business is set to scale, make sure your capacity planning platform can grow to accommodate additional users - or projects and resources managed.
We’ve focused on what project managers need. But they’ll not be the only users of your system. Consider functionality for individual resources - such as the ability to view their own allocations and calendar - as well as what senior leaders need - like access to data for decision-making.
You need a capacity planning tool that makes planning easier. So usability should be high on the agenda. Intuitive functionality, an attractive user interface, and easy-to-understand data visualization are important.
Could you cope with a free tool or do you need a paid platform to get the functionality you require? What is better capacity planning worth to you? Consider the cost benefit of paying for a suitable tool - in terms of time saved, capacity surfaced, and opportunities seized.
Do you have other critical business systems that you need your capacity planning platform to integrate with? Do you need out-of-the-box integrations or do you have developers who could build their own?
Do you need your software to be on-premise or do you prefer cloud? Do you prefer support from the vendor or have you got people in-house to manage the system?
All in all, capacity planning software is a staple tool for project managers today - they’re generally fairly cheap and make a significant difference to the ease and efficiency of project planning.
As with many other softwares, many have cheap or budget options that come without some of the most advanced features and functions. These value-add features can enable significant efficiencies in terms of fully utilizing resources.
Runn capacity planning software gives you the best of all aspects of capacity planning. Affordable and intuitive, it’s among the best capacity planning software for its usability and insightfulness. See how Runn can help your capacity planning needs with a free demo today.
