LiquidPlanner Reviews

Pros

The ability to dynamically update your entire portfolio based resource availability or task completion helps our small team set the right expectation and understand the impact each project produces across our customer base.

Cons

Its built for enterprise integration, so in our industry the lack of integration into our CRM systems was limited.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Project, Basecamp and ConnectWise PSA

Reasons for Choosing LiquidPlanner

ConnectWise's project management module is not user friendly and lacks any type of coherent portfolio management. When we run 30-50 projects at a time, we need a tool that can easily handle the dynamic nature of that many projects and keep the team on track.

Switched From

ConnectWise PSA

Reasons for Switching to LiquidPlanner

This platform solved our exact need for our IT project management focused on a FIFO approach.

Pros

liked that LiquidPlanner was a cloud-based project management solution that adapted to change and uncertainty. It offered advanced features such as dynamic scheduling, resource management, real-time data, business process automation, and calendar management.

Cons

There is not much that I dislike about LiquidPlanner, but if I had to choose something, I would say that it can be a bit complex and overwhelming at first. Some users might find it hard to learn how to use all the features and functionalities of the software, especially if they are new to project management.

Alternatives Considered

Nifty and TeamGantt

Switched From

Nifty and TeamGantt

Pros

LiquidPlanner automates over 87% of manual task and project management procedures which saves time and improve productivity.

Cons

I do not like that LiquidPlanner lack some capabilities such as instant messaging and internal communications.

Pros

We use LiquidPlanner to track ongoing tasks and client budgets/burn rates. In this regards, it is easy to set up clients, projects, and tasks, and from there, to log our efforts to those tasks.

Cons

Given that prioritization works by the 'higher' a task is in the list, the greater priority it is given, prioritization has been difficult as we list projects alphabetically. That means that all tasks in project "A" will be prioritized over project "Z". We've had to create separate packages for prioritization, which leads to a lot of overhead.We have a lot of 'retainer' type clients, who have monthly budgets. We need to track ongoing work, as well as remaing budgets. In order to calculate how much is remaining in some of our reports, we have had to create tasks with assigned roles (such as "Sr Consultant" or "Jr Consultant") to 'hold' time on accounts for specific skills sets, and then, on a daily basis, go and update those 'holding' tasks. We have validated with LP support and they felt this was the easiest approach, but again, leads to a lot of overhead.The platform has not really changed since I have been using it (the last 6 years). A new version of LiquidPlanner is rolling out, but would require a full migration in order to benefit from new features. We have seen some other platforms that appear to offer significant upgrades in certain areas.

Pros

LiquidPlanner streamlines project and task management procedures by automating workflow in real-time.

Cons

Unfortunately, LiquidPlanner has steep learning curve and it lacks offline access.

Pros

Ease of tracking project's progress,time and expense.
Multi-project management and monitoring.
Online project budgeting and planning.
Tasks scheduling, planning, editing and updating.
Online proofing and file sharing.
Internal team communication via BIM persistent thread chats.

Cons

LiquidPlanner software over delivers all in its performance, I crown it.

Pros

Prioritizing task in order of their urgency.
Tasks editing and updating.
Collaboration of tasks and project.
Cloud invoicing and billing.
Time ,expense (budgeting) and activity tracking.
Impressive architecture and web-user-interface as well as GUI design.

Cons

Considering its Incredibility, nothing to regret.

Pros

LiquidPlanner makes a breeze to manage, plan and track projects in one place.

Cons

I do not like the fact that I must be connected to the internet to use LiquidPlanner.

Pros

LiquidPlanner automates workflow which saves time on project portfolio & remote monitoring and management processes.

Cons

LiquidPlanner is pricey and lack robust features such as file sharing and web design but it integrates with external apps.

Pros

It is straightforward to plan and predict uncertainties with LiquidPlanner. This is the main reason why I like LiquidPlanner since it is the only PPM tool with such capabilities.

Cons

Ultimate plan is way too expensive compared to alternative platforms.

Pros

One of the things I liked most about LiquidPlanner was its robust project management features. The platform offered advanced scheduling and resource management capabilities, allowing me to efficiently plan and track my projects. The dynamic Gantt chart and priority-based scheduling helped me visualize project timelines and dependencies effectively. The ability to assign tasks, collaborate with team members, and track progress in real-time was highly beneficial. Moreover, the integrated time tracking and reporting features provided valuable insights into project performance and resource utilization.

Cons

While LiquidPlanner had many strengths, one aspect I liked least was the initial complexity of the platform. It required some time and effort to fully grasp its functionalities and configure projects according to my specific needs. The learning curve might be steeper for users who are new to project management software. Additionally, the user interface could be improved to enhance ease of use and navigation. Despite these minor drawbacks, once I became familiar with the system, I found it highly effective for managing complex projects.

Pros

I like 2 things most about this software: 1. The top-down scheduling engine2. The ability to use a "package" to pull tasks from different projects and prioritize them amongst themselves for any given week. This helps our resources who work on multiple small projects understand the priority of the tasks against everything they are working on.

Cons

Understanding what pushes a resource load color coding to red. Sometimes it's obvious why a resource is overloaded. Other times, not so much.

Pros

LiquidPlanner is easy to use and automates my routines, which saves me time. LiquidPlanner's use of Gantt charts to manage tasks and project progress provides a unique representation of the realities of a project's business, eliminating the need to manually update, recalculating deadlines and completion dates. I was also able to communicate more efficiently and effectively with my team members because I have a list of tasks to complete on a priority basis. Apart from that, it offers task management capabilities to store project documents, tables, and data in one place for all team members, making it easy to have everyone on the same page in terms of conversations and planning, and makes integrations straightforward.

Cons

Positives outnumber negatives in LiquidPlanner. It is a low-cost, easy-to-use project management application. The LiquidPlanner user interface is appealing, adaptable, and easy to understand. The notification system is excellent.

Pros

Prior to Liquid Planner, all of our client projects were in individual Microsoft Project files - which isn't ideal when you have shared resources. Now that we've used LP for a few years, we have much better visibility to work coming down the pike as well as potential conflicts/overbookings. However, the tool is only as good as the team's willingness to use it in a timely and accurate manner.

Cons

The nature of our business and projects is much more complicated than what is featured in the sales process. Clients have a role in the process, and delays on their part push out all our deliverables. This is hard to capture/manage in LP without additional manual updates by the project manager. Also, we've had to devise a bit of a workaround workflow to allow us to properly prioritize individual tasks across multiple projects - again, requires some manual management/movement of tasks. When any of the manual work falls by the wayside, the quality of the projections in LP is diminished greatly.

Pros

LiquidPlanner is a good tool for tracking employee time against tasks and projects. We use this LiquidPlanner for tracking time associated with specific projects and clients.

Cons

With any tool, there are some limitations. LiquidPlanner does a decent job of reporting and dashboarding by project. For our organization, reporting and dashboarding by client and/or by month is more important. Unfortunately, there is not a good solution in LiquidPlanner to help us with this. The solutions that exist are clunky and/or partial. LiquidPlanner has the ability to create shared tasks which is a great feature. This allows multiple employees to be on the same task. Unfortunately, schedule timelines and priorities do not calculate well when using shared tasks. It's better for every employee to be on their own task for schedule timelines and priorities to calculate properly.

Pros

LiquidPlanner helps us stay organized and keeps all of our team's communications in a centralized place. I like that the scheduling and prioritization of projects is flexible. And I like that we can adjust the number of seats each month as the size of out team and freelance staff changes.

Cons

It seems difficult for people to catch on to the UI quickly. Most of our staff took a while to adjust to the way LP works and how to most effectively use the software. It might be worth looking into more user testing to find ways to make the navigation and data entry more intuitive.

Pros

It helps to organize the tasks and get people the right information to work on.
It helps to prioritize what needs to happen and forecast how long it takes.
It does a great job of managing hand offs within a team.
It provides more tools than a typical user will ever need. The deeper you go the more value you can get.

Cons

It can be difficult to get people to understand that this is not typical planning software.
A more robust tutorial and a better description of what this tool is would help get teams to start faster.

Pros

LiquidPlanner allows our teams to track thousands of tasks across hundreds of projects. Features critical to us include the ability to effectively view hundreds of projects, define sub-folders (ie. summary tasks) more than one level deep, and define filter views (to limit on screen content) are critical features.

Cons

No ability to create private projects and tasks. No ability to create more than one workspace. No ability to assign or limit personnel access per project (only per your single workspace). The very limited functionality of the mobile application make it effectively useless.

Pros

I like sevaral things about Liquid Planner. Here are just a few.

I like the project management in general. I like the range of hours for tasks. This helps improve overall project scheduling.

I like being able to add custom fields to tasks and projects.

I like the ability to do ASAP Tasks.

Cons

While great, Liquid Planner is not perfect.

I wish the reports and analytics worked a bit more intuitively. There are several things that I have tried to do that I have not been able to figure out. Some I have been able to resolve with customer support. Others I found were things that are not possible.

Although Liquid Planner is set up great for tracking time for projects it doesn't work well for projects that are firm fixed priced. Most of the projects we work on here are firm fixed priced. I am aware of the baseline feature, but frankly it just isn't very good, nor are the graphs for tracking to plan.

There are a few other things that I'm not remembering at the moment.

Pros

Really powerful, the gantt chart overview was really useful while our estimates were kept up to date. Project-focused organization allows us to keep a broad view of a complex project and tagging and export features are able to generate a variety of views of our data in an organized way.

Cons

Our executive team and eventually our developers stopped using it. Primary interface of the projects tab was too overwhelming & complex. No way to give teams a link that included the filters down to what they actually care about or give people a link to the exact view & set of filters that I was sharing during screen sharing. Not enough integration with external services (github, perforce, JIRA, bug tracking). Quite expensive. Overwhelming interface meant users didn't update tasks, which meant our data got out of date. Gantt chart stopped being accurate or useful and just got overwhelming. Dashboards could be made for visibility but didn't offer the teams opportunities to modify a limited view. Not easy enough to link to a specific task, or generate a new ticket in the right place with a simple link to a user-speakable identifier like a ticket-based system. Still great for people who are technically minded and want the big picture, not great for people who want a limited view of a subset of the project or are too busy to learn how to use the tool effectively.

Pros

It's so easy to assign tasks to individuals and groups alike. The level of functionality is as much or as little as you want. We can track ballpark revenue vs expenses at a glance, allocate projects based on existing workload.

Cons

It's unfortunate that you can't assign fixed labor costs, or add non-labor expenses to tasks and projects. This could allow for more accurate tracking of total billing vs total expenses at a glance without resorting to using additional software. Being able to generate invoices would also be a great benefit that would negate the need for additional software.

Pros

We were able to set up Liquidplanner (LP) within a few hours. We fine tuned it in the weeks/months to come. But it worked for our team. We were able to easily enter our projects and tasks. Other PM sofware require multiple fields to be entered before your data can be tracked. I as the manager can then track the amount of hours, work pending for the various projects. I can show upper managment nice reports of the work we accomplished and work pending. If I ran into an issue with LP, I call support and they were able to quickly help me. The training videos also helped.

Cons

There really no much I can complain of. When we transitioned to another PM software, we called LP and they help me dump all of our data. That was very nice of them. The new PM software we transitioned to was not so nice. It was hard to use, just seemed like trying to put a square peg in a round while. To update a task you have to go through 5 screens and udpate 10 fields. I wished we stayed with LP.

Pros

The ability to track time for projects to give adequate quotes for other projects

Cons

The ability to duplicate a template based on the limited number of tasks needed to be duplicated

Pros

The ease of putting everything into LP to the completion of a project is so easy with LP. The flow of work dealing with a project is simplified to the point that the work is effortless.

Cons

The only drawback that I witness with LP is the fact that it is designed for huge organizations and we are a small organization. Still small organizations can groom it to fit their specific needs.

Pros

Excellent time tracking and scheduling features, bonuses like setting dependencies, and comprehensive analysis and reporting features.

Cons

Optimized for large, involved projects and as a result the Task designation isn't as helpful as it might be. Needs richer functionality in Tasks for short projects where it isn't worth setting up a project folder.