10 Best Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Tools In 2023

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.

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.

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.

Celoxis is an all-in-one project portfolio management software and work collaboration platform that is a full-featured project portfolio management system, very intuitive and easy to use for teams of all sizes.

Why I picked Celoxis: You get comprehensive resource management capabilities. It lets you easily allocate resources based on skills, roles, and availability as well as view cross-portfolio resource workload to optimally utilize your workforce. You will find tools for capacity planning, demand management, and project requests. When it comes to tracking project financials, you can automatically get cost/revenue estimates from your plans. You can also track budgets, costs, and profits in real-time as well as plug billing leaks by timely invoicing your clients.

Celoxis’ reporting features let you slice, dice, and visualize data your way. You can get aggregated information about your projects with fully customizable portfolio planning dashboards. Celoxis comes pre-built with common workflows to help bug/issue tracking and risk management. These workflows are very adaptable to suit your organizational processes without having to resort to emails and spreadsheets.

Celoxis Standout Features & Integrations

Features include a real-time project tracker, task management, resource availabilities and utilization, timesheets, project finances, risks, issues and to-dos.

Integrations include hundreds of popular business applications through first-class integration connectors and web-based API. This includes critical platforms like Jira, Salesforce, QuickBooks Online, Excel, Slack, Google Apps, and more.

Celoxis Plans & Pricing

SaaS costs $25/user/month, and on-premise costs are available upon request. Both require a minimum 5-user sign-up and come with a 30-day free trial.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.