Top 14 Capacity Planning Software and Tools in 2024

Capacity planning ensures that your company’s operations are functioning smoothly by optimizing resource allocation, managing workloads, and supporting efficiency.

To get these benefits for your business, check out our list of the best capacity planning software for effective capacity planning.

Productive is an all-in-one platform for getting optimal resource allocation, balanced workloads, and strategic planning based on utilization and financial insights.

Additionally, alongside advanced capacity planning features, Productive includes other crucial capabilities for supporting business management.

In short, Productive is a tool that you help you run a profitabile agency and get full visibility over agency operations.

Let’s explore Productive’s main capacity planning features in more detail.

Click to skip ahead to the feature you’re most interested in:

With the Resource Planning feature you can make sure work is equally distributed among your project teams.

Productive’s resource planner offers a visual overview of your employee workloads. You can also turn capacity indicators on and off to see whether a person is over or underutilized.

Since Productive includes Time Off Management, you can also account for employee availability when making your plans. There are also many HRIS integrations, such as BambooHR, HiBob, Humaans, Justworks, and more.

Productive also includes two special types of bookings: tentative bookings and placeholders.

Tentative bookings are used to plan for unconfirmed projects, which you can then switch to confirmed bookings. Placeholders are used to account for external or to-be-hired staff.

Both can help you manage your capacity planning efforts.

Your agency’s utilization is one of the most crucial metrics to handle — it tells you how efficient your teams are, and also points to the future capacity needed to meet demand.

With Productive, you can visualize and forecast your resource utilization.

With the Reporting feature, you can build and customize your utilization reports and view it across different metrics: department, seniority, skill, etc.

To share your reports, you can set up separate dashboards with widgets, or schedule your sending to Slack or email with Productive’s Pulse.

Within the resource view, you can also forecast capacity for any future projects you might have to ensure you can meet capacity requirements.

You can also check forecasted capacity within reporting.

Alongside utilization forecasting, the Resource Planning feature is also connected to the Budgeting feature.

With Budgeting, you can create and manage budgets of various types, including fixed-price, hourly, retainer, and more.

You can then monitor how your budget and profit margins are progressing according to billable hours tracked, employee billable rates and cost rates.

However, if you use the resource planner, you can also turn on Forecasting.

Forecasting predicts key metrics (revenue, budget burn, profit margin) based on your current resources allocation to help you make informed business decisions.

You can use it to spot potential issues in your workflows and implement changes before they impact your financial management.

Time tracking in Productive includes a built-in timer that you can start once you get to work on a specific task to track your time automatically.

You can also do your time sheets manually at the end of the day.

Project managers can manage billable vs non-billable time and lock timesheets for increased accuracy.

From a resource scheduling perspective, you can book people on specific projects for a period of time so you know who’s available and when.

You can also turn on automatic time tracking, which will create time entries based on your resource bookings.

Other features: Client Portal, Automations, Permission Builder, Revenue Recognition, Purchase Orders

Productive offers various integrations with HR, accounting, and collaboration tools.

Integrations include Slack, Google Calendar, and Outlook for scheduling and updates; Xero and QuickBooks for accounting; BambooHR, Breathe, Humaans.io for HRM; Memtime for time tracking; and more.

You can go for a free 14-day free trial before you decide to check out a paid plan.

Smartsheet is a spreadsheet-like solution for managing resource efficiency, but its interface can be unintuitive to some users.

Key Features:

Pro: Smartsheet offers a range of customizable templates, making it a fairly flexible solution for managing different types of projects.

It can also be easy to learn if you’re a spreadsheets expert: “The learning curve is relatively low if you’re an MS Excel user so the look and feel of the platform is fairly intuitive” (Source: G2).

Cons: Smartsheet’s spreadsheet-like interface might not be everyone’s favorite:

Source: Capterra

The advanced features in Smartsheet come at a higher cost, which may not be suitable for smaller agencies or agencies with limited budgets.

Smartsheet is also considered one of the top Workfront competitors, so you can head over to that list to learn more.

ClickUp is a popular project management software solution for managing various workflows, but lacks in-depth budgeting features.

Key Features:

Pros: ClickUp provides a wide range of integrations with other tools, enabling seamless workflow management.

Cons: ClickUp doesn’t offer a budgeting feature, which means that you won’t be able to profit from advanced reporting and financial forecasting.

Some users also report persistent issues with ClickUp’s performance and bugs — find out more in our list of the top ClickUp alternatives.

Wrike can be a good work management platform for professionals in the creative industry or design agencies, but you’ll have to invest in the priciest plan for the budgeting.

Key Features:

Pros: Wrike offers a solid range of features, including project management capabilities integrated with capacity planning.

Cons: Wrike’s financial management (budgeting and billable hours) are available only in the most advanced pricing plan, which might be inaccessible to some businesses.

Read our comparison of Wrike or Asana to learn more.

Asana is a popular project management software solution, but it has limited reporting and analytics.

Key Features:

Pros: Asana is fairly simple to use, and it offers a free verson for up to ten team members, which can make it a great choice for smaller teams.

Cons: The reporting and analytics capabilities in Asana are relatively limited, which may be a drawback for agencies with larger teams that require in-depth project insights.

Source: G2

Parallax is a pretty comprehensive tool for managing human resources, but as it’s a fairly new solution, there can be some growing pains with bugs and performance issues.

Key Features:

Pros: Parallax offers a solid range of integrations with third-party timesheets and CRM software.

Cons: On the other hand, it doesn’t provide an integrated CRM software for agencies. Additionally, as it’s a fairly new solution, significant features are still being rolled out, which can cause bugs and difficulties with onboarding.

Source: Capterra

monday.com is a collaborative work management tool with customizable dashboards, but may be underfeatured for more advanced capacity planning and real-time reporting needs.

Key Features:

Pros: monday.com provides extensive customization options, allowing agencies to tailor the software to their specific workflow requirements.

Cons: Though Monday does provide some capabilities for allocation and current workload management, some users believe that portfolio management can be difficult.

Check out how monday.com compares to other tools, such as alternatives to Hive or Plutio competitors to learn more.

We also have a comprehensive comparison of Monday vs ClickUp vs Asana vs Trello.

Saviom is a robust software for capacity planning and demand forecasting, but may look outdated compared to more modern software.

Key Features:

Pro: Saviom offers comprehensive capacity optimization capabilities, enabling agencies to align their capacity with project demands effectively.

Cons: The learning curve for Saviom can be steep for new users, requiring dedicated training and onboarding support. Additionally, the user interface can look outdated:

Source: Capterra

Hub Planner is a capacity planning and scheduling software with capacity planning tools, capacity tracking, and team collaboration capabilities, but could provide better project and task management.

Key Features:

Pros: Hub Planner offers a visually appealing and intuitive interface, making it easy for agencies to manage their capacity and schedules effectively.

Cons: Some users have reported occasional performance issues and slow loading times when working with larger data sets in Hub Planner. Additionally, some features outside of managing capacity plans are not as developed:

Source: Capterra

Forecast is an AI-powered project and capacity planning platform with in-depth capacity planning features, but it can be difficult to learn to use.

Key Features:

Pros: Forecast leverages AI and machine learning to provide intelligent resource recommendations, optimizing capacity planning and resource utilization.

Cons: Some users find Forecast difficult to use effectively, and the initial setup and configuration can be time-consuming.

Mosaic is a good option for supporting your capacity planning process, but might not be the best all-in-one business management platform.

Key Features:

Pros: Mosaic provides robust reporting capabilities, offering detailed insights into resource utilization, project planning, and forecasting.

Cons: Multiple users state that developers are slow to fix issues, and that Mosaic doesn’t fully cover their business requirements.

Check out how Mosaic fares as a Resource Guru alternative.

Tempo.io offers a variety of products that integrate with Jira, so it can be a good option if you’re looking to upgrade your existing software.

Tempo provides products such as:

Pros: If you’re already using Jira, Tempo can be a solid option for implementing some additional functionalities.

Cons: On the other hand, if you’re looking for an all-in-one tool, it might be best to find an option that comes integrated with these features, out-of-the-box.

Find out more about LiquidPlanner alternatives.

Teamwork is a comprehensive solution for project planning with some additional features, but there’s no advanced availability tracking.

Key features:

Pros: Users usually enjoy Teamwork for its collaboration and advanced business management features.

Cons: While managers can add unavailable time, there’s no built-in process for requesting and approving time off in Teamwork. Teamwork also has limited HRIS integrations.

Find out more in our comparison of Teamwork and ClickUp.

While Runn can be great for managing capacity, it doesn’t offer robust budgeting features or profitability insights.

Key features:

Pros: Runn is a fairly affordable software solution with a list of features focused on capacity planning.

Cons: You won’t be able to manage your budgeting, billing, costs, and in-depth insights within Runn, so you’ll need to consider implementing budgeting tools.

Capacity planning software is designed to assist businesses in effectively managing and optimizing their capacity and demand, including human resources and finances.

Resource planning tools allow agencies to forecast resource requirements, allocate work efficiently, monitor progress, and ensure that projects are completed within the specified time frame. By using such these types of tools, agencies can improve productivity, reduce bottlenecks, and achieve their business goals.

Here are some key features that a capacity planning solution should have to enable effective short and long-term capacity planning:

When choosing your best capacity management tool, you’ll need to consider basic things such as pricing, feature set, and target industry.

However, consider three additional factors: scalability, UI/UX, and the customer support team.

Scalability means that the tool is actively updated by the vendor to include the latest features and improvements. This ensures that your software will be able to meet your needs as your organization grows and develops.

UI/UX and customer support and important for similar reasons.

Implementing capacity planning software can be a lengthy process, but a user-friendly interface and responsive support team go a long way to promoting adoption and seeing a positive ROI.

Here’s a quick summary of some of the software solutions we’ve compared in this article:

If you’re looking for an agency management software that can provide insights into business performance, Productive is a great option. It’s particularly suitable for professional services firms.

Book a demo with Productive to learn more.