10 Best Capacity Planning Software To Improve Utilization In 2024

Parallax is a service operations software with resource management, sales and pricing, project financials, and business intelligence functions. The software helps project managers better understand their current and future resource needs, track business financials, and monitor business performance and efficiency. All of this supports informed capacity planning and management.

This software solution is particularly suited to professional service providers, agencies, and studios. It tracks the availability of resources across different teams over time and provides an overview of upcoming tasks and projects, helping project managers plan ahead rather than react to immediate needs. Users can assign tasks with confidence as they can see which team members have the most available time at any given moment. For organizations juggling multiple projects, deadlines, stakeholders, and clients, this software can be a great solution for keeping everything on track.

The financial features of the product help users manage budgets across projects and resources. Features like service offer templates and project financial tracking and forecasting support more consistency in costs, profit, and budgets. Users can also track performance and finances using the business intelligence features.

The platform has native integrations for Asana, Harvest, Hubspot, Jira, Microsoft Teams, Oracle NetSuite, Salesforce, and Tempo. Book a free demo through the site and receive a quote for your use case.

Wrike is a work management platform that lets you plug into 400+ integrations and customize your workflows, dashboards, and request forms.

This tool offers all-in-one capacity planning software where users can monitor projects, fill required gaps in workloads, capitalize on resources, and lean on a variety of templates to accelerate common projects and tasks.

Wrike has a user-friendly interface with advanced customization capabilities. For example. you can organize, see, and manage project timelines using Kanban boards, drag-and-drop Gantt charts, and detailed dashboards. Additionally, you have access to advanced insights with a suite of analytics, resource management, and performance-reporting features.

Wrike offers native pre-built integrations with more than 400 popular platforms, including Microsoft, Google, and Dropbox, along with sales and marketing software from Salesforce and Marketo.

Wrike starts at $9.80/user/month and has a free version for up to five users. There is also a 14-day free trial for paid plans.

Runn is a resource and capacity management platform that helps project managers optimize their team’s workload according to their business needs.

With Runn, you can plan and forecast capacity so you can schedule your projects accordingly. The tool’s calendar enables you to access your resources in real-time and see the involvement of every team member. The software also helps you differentiate between billable and non-billable work, making it easier to price your services and raise invoices.

Runn’s highlight is its capacity forecasting feature. This feature helps you determine whether your team has the skills and resources to take on certain projects, and how new work would impact your team’s workload.

Runn integrates with multiple tools, including WorkflowMax, Harvest, Clockify, and more.

Runn costs from $10/user/month. You can access a free trial for 14 days. The solution also offers a free-forever plan for up to five users.

Kantata (formerly Mavenlink + Kimble) is a resource management tool that enables managers to automate workflows, optimize their resource allocation, and improve their team’s operational performance.

The tool is great at organizing your data. The software’s dashboards allow you to compare your plan against your team’s timesheets and progress, giving you an accurate view of your performance and profitability.

The best thing about using this software is that it offers a real-time view of what every member of your team is doing. You can see when someone is struggling with a task, so you can prioritize the task and allocate more resources to speed up its completion.

Kantata (formerly Mavenlink + Kimble) integrates with multiple apps, including Microsoft 365, Oracle, Google Docs, Slack, JIRA, QuickBooks, and more.

Kantata (formerly Mavenlink + Kimble) offers customized pricing upon request. You can access a free 10-day trial and request a demo.

Productive is a complete workforce management software designed primarily for agencies and other service-based industries. The software's resource planning module helps make the most of every team member's time and keep workload capacities in check. Users can access visual representations of team members’ workload and availability, and use this information to assign tasks and distribute work. Employees can also be grouped by skill sets and departments to enable better resource allocation.

The software's time tracking tool is directly connected to its capacity planning functionality, because employees can log the time they're spending on various tasks and projects. This information feeds into the resource planning tools, supporting smarter scheduling through forecasting and predictive insights. Project managers can use previous project data to forecast future work requirements accurately, including estimated time ranges to complete a tasks and what-if scenarios.

Budgeting and financial planning are also included in the feature set. This can be tied to the capacity and workload planning tools, ensuring teams don't go over budget on projects. Other functionalities included in the software are project management, document management, billing, and reporting tools.

Teams can connect the software with their other SaaS tools like Dropbox, Google Workplace, Jira, Outlook, Microsoft Calendar, Slack, QuickBooks, and Xero. A Zapier integration is also available for configuring additional integrations.

ClickTime is a comprehensive capacity planning system that helps organizations achieve smarter time management, greater profitability, and happier clients. It can help you predict hiring needs, plan team sizes, and schedule employee workloads.

The platform's capacity management heatmap provides a visual representation of staff hours available and assigned. This helps you keep on top of team efficiency and resource utilization while avoiding individual overloading and burnout.

Features include ClickTime’s ability to show team capacity up to 6 months out, helping you take on new projects and clients as well as hire staff, leading to informed business decisions. The software's customizable views help you grasp your team’s capacity and staffing levels by role, division, or employee.

Integrations include Sage, NetSuite, QuickBooks, Jira, BambooHR, HiBob, ADP, Zenefits, Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho, Box, Google Drive, Slack, and task management tools like ClickUp. An API is also available to build custom integrations.

Paid plans start from $10 per user, per month, and a 14-day free trial period is available.

NetSuite ERP stands as a robust and versatile capacity planning software solution, designed to empower businesses in efficiently managing and optimizing their production and resource capacities. With its comprehensive set of features, NetSuite ERP enables organizations to forecast demand accurately, balance workloads, and allocate resources effectively, ensuring optimal utilization of available capacities. Its real-time data and collaboration tools facilitate agile decision-making, allowing businesses to adapt swiftly to changing demand patterns and avoid capacity-related bottlenecks.

NetSuite ERP distinguishes itself with its seamless integration of demand planning and order management features. Unlike many competitors that treat these functions separately, NetSuite links demand forecasts directly to order processing and production scheduling. This enables businesses to align production and resource capacities precisely with anticipated customer demand, minimizing the risk of overproduction or stockouts.

NetSuite ERP offers a unique what-if scenario modeling tool that allows users to simulate various capacity allocation scenarios and their potential impacts on production and resource utilization. Businesses can test different assumptions and variables, such as changing demand patterns or introducing new products, to evaluate the feasibility and consequences of different capacity allocation strategies. This capability enhances decision-making by providing insights into the best course of action to optimize resource capacities while minimizing risks and costs.

Additional key features include accounts payable and receivable, cash management, billing and invoicing, fixed asset management, tax management, multi-currency accounting, general ledgers, purchase orders, expense tracking, and project accounting.

Integrations include BambooHR, Constant Contact, DealRoom, DocuSign, Domo, Fieldmagic, HubSpot Marketing Hub, Ledgible, Mailchimp, Orange Logic, Project Insight, Recurly, TrueCommerce, Twilio Flex, Zendesk, and other software options.

NetSuite ERP pricing upon request and offer a free demo.

Saviom capacity planning solution helps replace silos of information by recording and consolidating every resource demand on a centralized platform. It enables businesses to analyze resource excesses or shortages and bridge the gap by implementing corrective measures ahead of the curve.

Saviom’s features include resource demand management, forecast capacity vs. demand, foresee utilization, pipeline management, bench management, and forecast project financials.

When you are using the software, you can foresee the utilization of every resource and enhance productivity by mobilizing them from non-billable to billable or strategic work. It also gives you insights on project vacancies and people on the bench to help minimize hiring-firing cycles.

Wanna talk numbers? Saviom helps you track critical project financial indicators such as costs, revenue, profit margins, forecast vs. actuals, and other KPIs in real-time.

Saviom’s integrates with other applications for data imports and exports such as Salesforce, MS Excel, SAP, and more.

Saviom offers pricing details upon request and also offers a 60-day free trial.

Hub Planner is a modern, cloud-based resource management and scheduling platform that serves team-based businesses of any size or industry. It offers a wide variety of products besides resource management, including vacation and leave management, timesheets and approval, reporting and analytics, and skills matching. The platform’s main function is to aid project managers when it comes to the management, capacity planning, and monitoring of projects and resources within a central location.

Hub Planner provides a modern resource scheduling and management module that enables project managers to effectively conduct resource capacity planning and scheduling using a simple drag-and-drop mechanism. This makes the process of scheduling teams and allocating resources easier and more efficient Their project and resource planning feature allows managers to set their budgets so they don’t overspend or overextend valuable resources. They can plan their budget in hours and budget in cash. A currency feature is also available, allowing teams to set the proper currency for international projects.

Hub Planner includes a natively optimized mobile application and doesn’t require users to download any additional apps. They log in through any browser or device to access multiple dashboard views that contain all the information they might need, including project and task progress, schedules, as well as resource availability and utilization data.

Hub Planner costs from $7/resource/month and offers a 30-day free trial with unlimited projects and resources; all modules are available for users to pick and install. Businesses can customize their Hub Planner deployment and pay only for the products that they’ve implemented from the main platform. Premium Hub Planner extensions are also available, ranging from smart groups, custom fields, and approval workflows to task checklist creation and task management.

Resource Guru is a resource management software that helps you schedule teams, people, and projects. Its drag-and-drop interface lets you assign work in seconds, and its entire UI follows the mantra of being clean and simple.

The software has two things I like a lot. The first is clash management which ensures that you avoid double bookings and overtime while taking into account individual working hours, workloads, and vacation time. The second is the waiting list. This feature keeps tabs on your resources and prevents over-allocation, so every resource has a manageable workload.

Finally, powerful reports give oversight of team utilization rates and capacity, so you know exactly where your time is invested and how much other work you can take on. These reports can then be automatically generated and sent via email to everyone on the team so they stay on track and informed.

Resource Guru integrates with Outlook and Google Calendar directly and with thousands of other platforms via Zapier.

Their martial arts inspired plans start at $2.50/user/month and offer a 30-day free trial.