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10 Best Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Tools In 2023

The Best PPM Tools

Here’s a list of the best PPM tools:

  1. 1. monday.com — Best PPM tool for workflow customization capabilities
  2. 2. Kantata — Best portfolio dashboards for professional services teams with 30+ members.
  3. 3. Wrike — Best for live tracking of team workloads and capacity
  4. 4. Smartsheet — Best for reporting features
  5. 5. Sciforma — Best for product development and IT
  6. 6. Runn — Best for growing IT and software teams
  7. 7. Bubble PPM — Best enterprise PPM tool for NPD and Innovation
  8. 8. Acuity PPM — Best lightweight PPM tool
  9. 9. Zoho Projects — Run multiple projects effectively with Zoho
  10. 10. ClickUp — Best for multiple portfolio customization and arrangement options.

As your company and your team grow, the number of projects you handle increases. This situation can get to a point where it's difficult to consolidate information across company initiatives. Portfolio management tools allow you to see the big picture and keep projects aligned.

The project portfolio management tools in this review can help you see your projects at a high-level view, their progress, and how they relate to other projects. You can use this information to handle communications with different PMs across your organization and align project outcomes to business goals.

Need expert help selecting the right Project Portfolio Management Software?

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Overview Of The Best Portfolio Management Tools

Any project portfolio management solution from this list should help you with managing projects and strategic alignment across your portfolio. Feel free to check out how I picked the software on this list at any time.

1

monday.com

Best PPM tool for workflow customization capabilities

monday.com is a project portfolio management software that focuses on simple, visually intuitive layouts that help clarify the sequence of work.

Why I picked monday.com: It allows you to allocate & prioritize tasks, use various views in order to see where everything stands, and track multiple projects using dashboards that provide high-level insights in a visual and intuitive way. The platform is completely customizable, so you will be able to adjust it to your workflow. The platform also provides powerful and customizable notifications and automation so you and your team can focus on what’s important.

With monday.com you can plan, manage, and track your budgets in an intuitive interface. You can track expenses, income, their dates, and attach needed files to each item. And thanks to the various columns, you can filter items by many different variables such as status, people, text, time, location and others. Formula columns are also available.

While monday.com doesn’t offer traditional automated reporting, it is built to show the big picture at a glance to help you analyze various aspects of your projects and processes. To learn about the different capabilities that help analyze performance, scope out their detailed explanation here.

monday.com Standout Features & Integrations

Features include resource and project management, time tracking, collaboration, file management, collaborative docs and reporting dashboards.

Integrations include project management apps like Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Jira, GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Typeform, and many more, accessible via Zapier.

monday.com Plans & Pricing

Pricing starts at $10/user/month and comes with a free 14-day trial. They offer a free plan for up to 2 users.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.7 8065

14-day free trial + freemium plan available

From $8/user/month (billed annually, min 3 seats)

2

Kantata

Best portfolio dashboards for professional services teams with 30+ members.

Kantata Industry Cloud for Professional Services is the professional services solution formed by the merger of Mavenlink & Kimble.

Why I picked Kantata: It supports resource management, project management, financial management, and business intelligence. Additionally, it is designed to foster team collaboration and bring your team together in one view.

Their project portfolio management capabilities provide an overview of all your projects in a customizable view that is located in a tab inside the Project Health dashboard. In it, you will find RAG indicators providing quick info on overall health status, margin %, burn rates, risk, and more. Additionally, each item in your scoreboard can take you to more detailed information with a simple hover and click.

Kantata Standout Features & Integrations

Features include resource forecasting, real-time utilization, capacity management, skills management, scenario planning, and role-based planning.

Integrations include pre-built connections with these tools: Expensify, G Suite, Xero, Salesforce, Netsuite, Jira, Hubspot, Slack, Concur, Dynamics 365, Qualtrics, Quickbooks, and Sage Intacct. They also provide an integration platform called M-Bridge that’s designed to simplify integration between Kantata and other business apps like CRM, HCM, and financial software.

Note: Kantata is a viable option for teams with over 30 people as per their pricing form.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.1 715

Free demo available

Pricing upon request

3

Wrike

Best for live tracking of team workloads and capacity

Wrike is an award-winning, easy-to-use project portfolio management software that is highly configurable and includes AI capabilities that can assess at-risk projects and help to optimize your portfolio. Users can customize workflows, dashboards, reports, request forms, and more.

Why I picked Wrike: Its interface enables users to switch between Kanban boards, interactive drag-and-drop Gantt charts, and traditional workload views, providing a full overview of resources in real-time.

Wrike also features advanced portfolio insights including project and team performance reports, resource management and allocation, time tracking, and more. The reporting features provide an accurate overview of your portfolio to help minimize risk. You can also schedule real-time insights to be sent to your inbox for a picture of overall portfolio health.

Wrike Standout Features & Integrations

Features include pre-built templates, custom request forms, interactive Gantt charts, visual proofing, workflow automations, time tracking, project portfolio management, and dashboards.

Integrations include 400+ pre-built native integrations, including integrations with the most popular file management software from Microsoft, Google, and Dropbox, along with sales and marketing software from Salesforce and Marketo.

Wrike Plans & Pricing

Pricing starts at $9.80 per user per month. There are four different price points, including a free version and plans which offer the ability to invite free external collaborators to a paid account.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.2 2544

Free plan available

From $9.80/user/month

4

Smartsheet

Best for reporting features

Smartsheet is a spreadsheet-like project management platform. Although it isn’t a dedicated PPM tool, it does have a lot of great reporting features that make it apt for looking at project metrics on both an individual and a high level.

Why I picked Smartsheet: The platform offers some above-average reporting and visualization tools that are useful for portfolio management. For example, real-time metrics and customizable dashboards can be made to display specific project data for each project by modifying a drag-and-drop dashboard interface.

Indeed, reporting is the strongest feature of this tool in the context of managing a portfolio of projects, offering the ability to publish stakeholder-facing reporting dashboards and editable summary reports that you can easily export to Excel.

There are lots of project management and resource management tools, which I consider to be fairly standard among this type of software. You will certainly be able to collect all of the project data you need to analyze a portfolio (budget and spend, resource allocation, capacity, etc) and do the rest with a prebuilt integration to a business intelligence tool like Tableau (below).

Smartsheet Standout Features & Integrations

Features include dashboards, reports that consolidate multiple sheets, workflow automation, resource management, multiple views, forms to collect information, and digital asset management using Brandfolder.

Integrations include Microsoft and Google apps, as well as development essentials like Jira, and useful business apps like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Box, and Tableau. The platform is extensible through a REST API and webhooks.

Smartsheet Plans & Pricing

Smartsheet has three plans and starts at $9/user/month, with a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 25 users. They offer a 30-day free trial.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.4 7399

Freemium version available

From $7/user/month

5

Sciforma

Best for product development and IT

Sciforma PPM is a robust project portfolio management software solution that allows PMOs and project delivery leaders to achieve higher growth and reach strategic objectives through more efficient and effective management of the project portfolio. Functionally scalable, PMOs (no matter what the PPM maturity) can take advantage of Sciforma’s critical PPM capabilities: portfolio and program, resources, demand, project planning, time tracking, and collaboration to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Discover powerful portfolio status overviews, project health scores, portfolio simulations, strong capacity planning, and much more.

This tool provides a flexible platform in which you can manage multiple project environments on both the project- and portfolio level, including IT, NPD/R&D, professional services and public sector. In Sciforma, PMO managers will find rich strategy and portfolio planning facilities, while team members can take advantage of its offering of state-of-the-art tools for project collaboration and task execution. Sciforma makes the most sense from a technology deployment risk-reward perspective: it’s robust, easy to implement, and quick to scale.

Sciforma’s demand and portfolio management help prioritize the project portfolio. Its features include advanced budget-driven ranking options, dynamic business case criteria, and scoring, and multi-scenario simulations. For project and resource management, you’ll find features to deploy and mobilize projects: a powerful Gantt view with the critical path, sophisticated cost, and budget management, integrated agile, resource utilization reporting, and capacity planning. You can analyze and optimize projects with key project metrics on configurable dashboards and reports.

Sciforma integrates with various line-of-business tools most common in organizations through the software’s API. This includes platforms such as Exchange, Google Calendar, Jira, Salesforce, Sharepoint, Yammer, Quickbooks, VersionOne, Oracle, SAP, Sage, and many more.

Sciforma costs starting from $20-$60/user/month plus a one-time implementation fee. Discounts are available for selected user types.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.2 56

Free trial available

From $60/user/month

6

Runn

Best for growing IT and software teams

Runn is a real-time resource planning and PPM software with integrated time tracking and powerful forecasting capabilities.

Why I picked Runn: The software is extremely intuitive and its Gantt view has drag-and-drop features and a colorful user interface. The free version of this software lets you build unlimited projects and offers a project portfolio view, which makes it perfect for small project teams.

Runn makes the data dynamic and visual. Charts and reports update as you plan your projects, and you can see insights like capacity, workload, availability, and billable and non-billable utilization. Finally, you can keep tabs on KPIs like utilization, project variance, and overall financial performance.

Runn Standout Features & Integrations

Features include resource scheduling, capacity management, project scheduling, timesheets, forecasting, and reporting. All features are available in the free plan.

Integrations include Harvest, WorkflowMax, and Clockify for importing project, client, and people data and syncing time entries. With Runn’s API, you can build your own integration to send data across your favorite tools.

Runn Plans & Pricing

The free version is available for up to 5 users. Paid plans start at $10/user/month.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
3.7 41

14-day free trial and free plan available

Plans start at $10/person managed/month

7

Bubble PPM

Best enterprise PPM tool for NPD and Innovation

Bubble® PPM is a scalable, highly configurable platform designed for mid-to-large size companies looking to align strategy with delivery and increase efficiency and confidence in execution.

Why I picked Bubble® PPM: 

Bubble® PPM is an intuitive PPM Software that’s designed with its end-users in mind. It provides a range of customizable dashboards, reports, and tools to support portfolio-oriented company leaders and project delivery teams. The system also offers a range of out-of-the-box tools based on best practices from their many years as a specialist consultancy, so that teams can hit the ground running. 

By leveraging a modular and permissions-based platform, the software is easily tailored to current organizational needs, but can also grow and evolve as the company's needs change. Bubble makes it easy for users to see the whole picture or just the views and slices of data that are relevant for their role. In-built notifications also help to ensure that users are getting the right Information at the right time, to work proactively and mitigate risks.

40% of the company’s international customer base is from the Fast-Moving Consumer Packaged Goods (FMCG/CPG) sector, but the platform is equally suited to R&D, New Product Development, Capital Projects, or Change Management programs. To see the company’s short explainer video, click here


Bubble® PPM Standout Features & Integrations

Features include in-built stage and gate governance tools, risk management tools, project scorecards, project planning and baselining tools, easy to use report and dashboard builders, plus all the features you’d expect of a full-featured Project and Portfolio Management system.

Integrations are a key feature of Bubble® PPM and the company’s managed configuration and maintenance service enables data to be shared between connected systems securely and automatically via a library of preconfigured applications or through a Workflow designer for more complex integrations.

Bubble® PPM Plans & Pricing

14-day free trial

From $17 user/month (USD)

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.6 15

14-day free trial

From $17/user/month

8

Acuity PPM

Best lightweight PPM tool

Acuity PPM is a lightweight portfolio management solution that is a great alternative to spreadsheets.

Why I picked Acuity PPM: The tool includes a beautiful interface to help you manage your project portfolio, as well as fundamental capabilities for getting visibility into your entire project portfolio, managing work intake, prioritizing projects, tracking project performance and status reports, and managing resource capacity.

PMOs can track project portfolios and get insights on project status, store status reports in one place, and view status history across your portfolio. Another great feature is the ability to view portfolio roadmaps and see timing and sequencing for current and potential projects in the portfolio. PMO team members can also score projects using Acuity’s scoring model and then easily prioritize projects.

Acuity PPM Standout Features & Integrations

Features include portfolio tracking, portfolio roadmap, project scoring and prioritization, project request management, and resource capacity planning.

Integrations are only included in the Enterprise plan.

Acuity PPM Plans & Pricing

Pricing starts at $599 per month.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.8 7

15-day free trial

From $599/month

9

Zoho Projects

Run multiple projects effectively with Zoho

Zoho Projects is an award-winning project management and collaboration tool from Zoho. It offers flexibility and customizations to suit the needs of traditional project managers as well as agile teams.

Why I picked Zoho Projects: The resource utilization charts enable you to easily view the workload of team members and you can create and balance the workload with just a click of a button. Fix hourly rates, create invoices and have an eye on your project budget. Forecast project budget, keep track of your timelines with baselines and critical path analysis.

The interface and modules are highly customizable. All aspects of the UI from theme colors to arrangement and visibility of the various modules can be changed to suit a user's preferences. Zoho projects also offer free onboarding for its customers and a comprehensive online help guide for all users.

Zoho Projects is one of the few PPM tools that allow the creation of dependencies between projects. The portfolio widget on the dashboard helps users to get an overview of all projects at a glance. Zoho Projects stands out in cases where there are multiple hand-offs involved. It is especially popular among IT companies, consultants and education organizations. With Blueprints, users can create and automate workflows, notifications, and escalations.

Zoho Projects Standout Features & Integrations

Features include task management, task automation, blueprints, time and issue tracking, reporting, and forums for detailed discussions with your team.

Integrations. Being part of Zoho's ecosystem allows Projects to connect to several of Zoho's own services such as Zoho Books, Zoho CRM, and Zoho's finance suite. The new Zoho marketplace allows 3rd party integrations as well.

Zoho has a freemium version upto 3 users for 2 projects. No credit card information required.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.2 286

10-day free trial + freemium plan available

From $5/user/month

10

ClickUp

Best for multiple portfolio customization and arrangement options.

ClickUp is a project management software that is fully featured and ready to handle your toughest projects. You can access the portfolio feature by clicking on the three dots from the left bar (bottom) and selecting ‘portfolios.’

Why I picked ClickUp: The portfolio view lets you monitor progress around your different projects as it happens, and you can use the prioritization column to highlight the projects that better align with your goals. When you first access the portfolio view, it’s empty. This is on purpose, as ClickUp wants you to select which projects have been shortlisted to be in this important view. Once you create your portfolio, you will be able to add or hide fields from the ‘+’ option on top of the table.

Rearrange them as you like by dragging them up or down, color coding them, or using other custom field options. If you decide to open one of the projects, it will do so in a separate tab.

ClickUp Standout Features & Integrations

Features include real-time reporting, whiteboards and shared documents for collaboration, task management with different views, goal tracking, and templates.

Integrations include native ones with Slack, G Suite, Dropbox, and many more tools, as well as over 1,000+ integrations through Zapier.

ClickUp Plans & Pricing

ClickUp’s free plan is robust and includes all primary features. The unlimited plan starts at $9/user/month and offers additional functionality.

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.7 4135

Freemium plan available

From $9/user/month

The Best PPM Tools Comparison Chart

Here’s a table you can use to compare all the tools we just covered in the overviews.

Tool Free Option Price
1
monday.com

Best PPM tool for workflow customization capabilities

14-day free trial + freemium plan available

From $8/user/month (billed annually, min 3 seats) Visit Website
2
Kantata

Best portfolio dashboards for professional services teams with 30+ members.

Free demo available

Pricing upon request Visit Website
3
Wrike

Best for live tracking of team workloads and capacity

Free plan available

From $9.80/user/month Visit Website
4
Smartsheet

Best for reporting features

Freemium version available

From $7/user/month Visit Website
5
Sciforma

Best for product development and IT

Free trial available

From $60/user/month Visit Website
6
Runn

Best for growing IT and software teams

14-day free trial and free plan available

Plans start at $10/person managed/month Visit Website
7
Bubble PPM

Best enterprise PPM tool for NPD and Innovation

14-day free trial

From $17/user/month Visit Website
8
Acuity PPM

Best lightweight PPM tool

15-day free trial

From $599/month Visit Website
9
Zoho Projects

Run multiple projects effectively with Zoho

10-day free trial + freemium plan available

From $5/user/month Visit Website
10
ClickUp

Best for multiple portfolio customization and arrangement options.

Freemium plan available

From $9/user/month Visit Website

Other Portfolio Management Tools

These PPM tools did not make it to the top 10 but are worth considering if you want to expand your tool research.

  1. Corporater

    Best for holistic view and linking projects, portfolios, teams, and strategies to GRC

  2. Forecast

    Best PPM tool for AI and automation capabilities

  3. Accelo

    Best PPM tool for automations

  4. Oracle Primavera

    Best PPM tool for enterprise

  5. ProjectManager.com

    Best for built in and custom report templates

  6. Hive

    Best PPM tools for collaboration

  7. Planview Clarizen

    Best PPM for medium to large enterprises

  8. Adobe Workfront

    Best PPM tool for service teams

  9. Portfoleon

    Best PPM tool for growing organizations

  10. KeyedIn

    Best PPM tool for user experience and user interface

How I Picked The Best Portfolio Management Tools

I evaluated and compared the most popular PPM tools on the market, both for their reviews and user interface. Then I weighed factors that make software a good option for this level of project management, such as the ones that follow.

Resource management

Like resource scheduling software, PPM software with resource planning will help you make better decisions around project planning at the portfolio level. This includes features for resource allocation, capacity planning, resource utilization, managing timelines, and projections.

Financial administration

PPM tools should help improve your accuracy in managing financial projections, with functionality for estimating project costs and managing budgets. The best software has the option to manage and streamline payrolls and payment invoicing in general.

Risk management

Risk management tools and change management features enable us to plan accordingly for risks and change requests, make risk response plans, and easily estimate the impact of 'What If' scenarios.

Reporting & analytics

Modern portfolio management software must provide multiple options for generating reports. Spreadsheets are a baseline, but there are plenty of modern PPM tools with great data visualization tools for communicating data to stakeholders.

Integrations

Because there is no perfect PPM software out there, we need tools that sync or integrate with other project management tools, task management tools, or time tracking tools.

Project Portfolio Management Tools FAQs

Find answers to common questions on this topic.

Portfolio Management Tools Buyer's Guide

How to choose the best project portfolio management software for your projects.

What is your PPM maturity level?

According to the Gartner model, you can determine your enterprise’s maturity by placing it into one of the 5 models (in ascending order of maturity):

  • Reactive – this accounts for all organizations with an ad-hoc approach to projects. There is a minimal requirement for high-end PPM tools, although they’ll prove necessary for growth.
  • Emerging Discipline – next level of management and approach to projects. It involves the use of basic PPM tools but on a more frequent and advanced level.
  • Initial Integration – follows a more holistic approach to PPM. This is the point where a larger organization pattern is needed. Risky decisions could surface, and data tracking must be on point.
  • Effective Integration – This is the point where automation becomes necessary, and a manager needs as much help as possible in order to execute everything on time, and under budget.
  • Effective innovation – This is the end-game everyone strives for. PPMs are fully utilized on multiple levels, and an Enterprise Project Management Office is installed to facilitate the execution.

What are the main requirements?

Take the time to carefully plan out the requirements that your team has for a PPM tool. Analyze the past work and the potential future projects, and try to make an assessment as objectively as possible. Use this article as a cheat sheet and consult as many sources as you can before deciding on your ideal PPM tool.

How would the PPM tool fit into your workflow?

Think about every tool you and your team use besides a PPM tool. Check for integration compatibility and were in the project lifecycle you are going to integrate the newly acquired tool first.

Ensure the tool is compatible with the project management processes and methodologies your organization uses, whether it’s agile, waterfall, or a hybrid methodology.

How long does it take to set up?

Just keep in mind that your current projects might need to come to a short halt in order to fully integrate a new PPM tool.

What should I consider for onboarding?

Your team will need some time to learn and adapt to the new set of PPM tools that are going to be presented to them. Account for every factor like: time to learn, availability of learning material, training, and support from the software provider, etc.

Think about the support for different native platforms, like Android and iOS, and fit it into your team accordingly. You should also consider whether the software solution is on-premise, cloud-based, or a SaaS.

What's Next?

We have an amazing podcast interview with Michelle Watkins, Founder & Managing Partner at Global PMO Partners. She talks about how to optimize your project management portfolio and how tools & technology were key to streamlining processes at every level and ensuring there was data integrity and real-time visibility.

If you are an experienced PM and are looking for more in-depth information about enterprise-level portfolio management, check out what is enterprise PPM and a 5 step plan to implement EPPM .

Related tool lists:

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By Ben Aston

I’m Ben Aston, a digital project manager and founder of thedpm.com. I've been in the industry for more than 20 years working in the UK at London’s top digital agencies including Dare, Wunderman, Lowe and DDB. I’ve delivered everything from film to CMS', games to advertising and eCRM to eCommerce sites. I’ve been fortunate enough to work across a wide range of great clients; automotive brands including Land Rover, Volkswagen and Honda; Utility brands including BT, British Gas and Exxon, FMCG brands such as Unilever, and consumer electronics brands including Sony. Ben's a Certified Scrum Master, PRINCE2 Practitioner and productivity nut.

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