Best Engineering Project Management Software Compared (2024)

It’s never too late late to switch from spreadsheets to engineering project management software.

In this list, we’ll explore everything from modern, user-friendly solutions to legacy software. Keep reading to find the best project management software for engineering firms with key features, benefits, and user reviews.

Productive is a comprehensive software solution designed to support the needs of professional services, including software development, design, and architecture studios.

The biggest benefit of Productive is that it integrates collaboration, budgeting, billing, and resource planning into one platform.

However, unlike heavy legacy products or ERPs, Productive provides a streamlined and modern interface that supports team adoption.

Additionally, Productive enables real-time insights into not only current, but forecasted key performance metrics.

Let’s explore some of Productive’s key features in more detail.

Productive’s Project Management offers multiple project views, including Gantt charts, Kanban boards, Workload, List, Calendar, and more, allowing teams to plan and track projects from various perspectives.

Task management includes setting assignees, estimating time on tasks, defining task dependencies, milestones, subtasks, and to-dos, and adding various custom fields to keep a closer eye on progress (and Automations for repetitive workflows).

With the Client Portal, you can also collaborate with clients directly from your workspace, and even provide them with visibility into your budgets.

Built-in Time Tracking (including a timer, manual entry, and automatic tracking) ensures accurate logging of billable hours, making it easier to manage project timelines and budgets efficiently.

Productive’s Budgeting tools allow users to set up project budgets, monitor financial performance, and track project expenses.

Budgeting supports different types of projects, including fixed-price, hourly, retainer, hybrid, and more.

You can also monitor your project schedules and key performance metrics in real time, including budget burn, revenue, and profit margins.

Productive also supports overhead management, expenses, and revenue recognition.

Productive includes built-in Billing, so you can create and send your invoices from the platform.

Features include simple invoicing templates, subsidiary, and tax management.

With Automations, you can also set up your invoices to be created automatically when specific budget conditions are met (for ex. budget is marked as delivered).

Productive also includes built-in integrations with Xero and QuickBooks, so you can copy your invoicing information from Productive, and finalize your workflows from these apps.

Productive’s Resource Planning supports long-term engineering projects and portfolio management by providing visibility over employees and their workloads.

With Productive’s engineer scheduling software, you can create a responsive resource plan, create allocations, and then reschedule employees with simple drag-and-drop.

You can also organize and view employee information. This includes custom fields such as department, skills, utilization targets, and other information that can be used to generate detailed analytics.

You can both visualize and forecast utilization across different metrics for informed decision-making.

Productive also includes integrated Time Off Management for managing time off requests and files through the platform.

With Reporting, you can use the templates library to get real-time insights into project and business metrics.

Another crucial thing to mention is Forecasting, with helps businesses visualize their future performance.

Financial forecasting is based on your scheduling, and delivers insights into forecasted profit margins, revenue, and budget burn.

You can also create reports from scratch and customize them with custom fields, formulas, filtering and grouping options, and different visualizations.

To share reports, you can build custom dashboards, or automate sending to Slack or email via Pulse.

Additional features include: CRM, Permission Builder, Docs, Productive AI

Productive offers seamless 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 also use Productive’s Open API to create custom integrations.

Try out Productive with a 14-day free trial to find out if its the right option for your needs.

Asana is a popular software with simple task management tools, but it’s not suitable for advanced financial management and reporting.

Key features:

Pros: Reviewers appreciate Asana’s intuitive interface and ease of use. It’s particularly effective for organizing tasks, tracking project progress, and supporting efficiency.

Cons: Some users report that Asana lacks robust time-tracking capabilities and advanced reporting. Additionally, it can become cluttered with too many tasks and projects if not managed carefully. Pricing can also become costly for larger teams.

Accelo stands out for its ability to integrate essential functionalities into one platform, but its steep learning curve and unintuitive interface can be a drawback.

Key Features:

Pros: With Accelo, you’ll be able to integrate multiple useful functionalities into a single platform. The CRM feature is useful if you’re working with in-house sales teams and want to minimize silos and put more focus on revenue operations.

Cons: Accelo is reported to be difficult to learn and unintuitive according to some users.

Source: G2

It was also sold in 2024, which may or may not have an impact on its further development – find out more.

Paymo can be a solid tool for simple project management and communication among team members, but it lacks some advanced features for larger organizations.

Key features:

Pros: Paymo is one of the more affordable project management solutions. It can be suitable for startups and small teams, as its free version is available for unlimited users (but limited projects and clients). It’s also reported to be fairly user-friendly.

Cons: Paymo is best for smaller businesses, so it might not be enough to support complex engineering projects. Some notable downsides that users mention include limited resource management and invoicing functionalities.

Monograph is designed to suport engineering teams, but users sometimes report having issues with inaccurate or underfeatured reporting.

Key features:

Pros: Reviewers generally enjoy Monograph’s design. Its overall reported to be easy to learn and use, with a responsive support team.

Cons The most frequently report downside of Monograph is the reporting feature. This includes some inaccuracies in how data is collected and limited profitability reports.

Source: Capterra

Additionally, Monograph’s pricing isn’t available online, so you’ll need to reach out to the vendor to learn more.

BQE Core is an engineering project management software for architecture, consulting, and professional services firms, but its performance can be lacking at times.

Key features:

Pros: BQE Core provides extensive features that can support complex projects, with resource allocation, project planning, and client billing features. It also has modular pricing structures, so users can combine which features they need and request a price.

Cons: The most frequently mentioned downsides of BQE Core include complexity and performance issues. User reviews also report slow loading times.

Source: Reddit

ClickUp can be a good option for customizing your workflows, but its performance issues can be significant, especially when dealing with larger datasets.

Key features:

Pros: Users love ClickUp’s flexibility and customization options, allowing teams to tailor it to their unique workflows. It also has some features geared towards website development teams, such as sprint cycles and reports.

Cons: The most frequently reported downsides of ClickUp include occasional bugs and performance issues, particularly with larger projects and data-heavy use cases. You can also check some similar solutions to ClickUp with more robust features.

Notion is a great tool for managing complex information and processing data, but it’s best used alongside a collaboration-focused project management platform.

Key features:

Pros: In comparison to other knowledge and documentation management tools (a popular Notion-like tool is Obsidian), Notion can be a bit better for project management needs, as it includes built-in collaboration and task management features.

Cons: While Notion does have enough flexibility and customization to be used as a project management tool, it will take more extensive set up. It might be more effort than it’s worth, when you can simply get software designed to support project outcomes.

Source: Reddit

Microsoft Project is a project management software designed by Microsoft. It can be useful for integration with some Microsoft apps, but certain users find it unintuitive.

Key Features:

Pros: Microsoft Project’s biggest benefit is that it shares some workflows with other Microsoft apps, and integrates seamlessly with them.

Cons: Some users find Microsoft Project difficult and uintuitive, going as far as to call it “antiquated”. It might not be the best for managing agile methodologies, but for complex projects (and project management methodologies such as waterfall), it can be useful.

Celoxis is an enterprise project portfolio (PPM) management software with a rich feature set for managing complex workflows, but the interface can be outdated.

Key features:

Pros: Users appreciate Celoxis for its robust reporting and customization options. The platform is known for being highly flexible, making it suitable for businesses with complex project management needs.

Cons: Some users find the user interface outdated, which can make the platform as a whole more difficult to use and navigate.

Source: G2

Jira can be a good software solution for IT engineers and software project management, but is usually not the favorite choice for designers and other creatives.

Key features:

Pros: Reviewers praise Jira for its powerful agile project management features, making it ideal for software development teams. It’s highly customizable, allowing teams to tailor workflows to their needs.

Cons: The main downside reported is its complexity; new users often find Jira difficult to learn. It can also be overwhelming for non-technical teams due to its feature-heavy interface.

Monday.com is another customizable work management software. While it’s good for organization and collaboration, it’s not ideal for project budget tracking.

Key features:

Pros: Users enjoy Monday.com for its level of customization. Project managers and users can set up boards however they like, add custom fields, and switch up workflows accord to their project’s complexity.

Cons: Monday is similar to ClickUp in that it provides custom workflows and a user-friendly interface, but doesn’t offer some comprehensive features for analyzing project performance and business metrics.

Deltek is a project management and accounting software that’s well-known in the A&E space, but users report that it can feel outdated compared to more modern solutions.

Key features:

Pros: Deltek has strong accounting features, and it’s overall a powerful platform which can support engineering projects with more advanced business needs.

Cons: Users find that certain workflows are unintuitive. Similarly to BQE Core, the interface is outdated, which can make it difficult to use on a daily basis. Reviews report that performance can also be slow.

Source: G2

Engineering project management software is specialized to support the planning, execution, and management of engineering projects.

Engineering project management tools support the needs of engineering firms with architecture, construction, and design teams.

While there are different types of tools out there, this software usually facilitates project scheduling, resource allocation, budgeting, and collaboration among team members.

Engineering project management software comes with a range of features designed to meet the specific needs of engineering teams.

Using engineering project management software brings numerous benefits to firms, especially those handling complex, large-scale projects.

One of the main advantages is increased efficiency, as it automates repetitive tasks like scheduling, invoicing, and resource allocation. This saves time and reduces the risk of human error.

Improved collaboration is another benefit, allowing teams to communicate effectively through shared dashboards, client portals, and real-time document updates.

The software also provides better visibility into project status, enabling managers to track progress, identify bottlenecks, and make informed decisions quickly.

By keeping budgets on track and offering accurate forecasting, it also helps enhance profitability. Ultimately, these tools can lead to improved project outcomes, satisfied clients, and a better bottom line.

Here’s a quick summary of some of the software for engineering firms we’ve explored in this article:

Productive provides teams with an overview of project status, alongside resource planning and budgeting for advanced business performance management.

To learn more, book a demo with Productive today.

Brigada is a spatial design agency that combines architecture, spatial and product design.

Before Productive, Brigada used a number of disconnected tools, which spread their data across multiple platforms. Workarounds were used for time tracking, and Excel was the only way they could get their profitability metrics.

With Productive, Brigada was able to manage their long-term project planning, and review their project profitability at each stage of the process.

They can also forecast their hiring needs and plan out exactly when contractors will need to be hired to mitigate potential risks and delays.

Learn more about how Productive’s project management software for engineering firms supports designers and architects.

Engineering firms specializing in architecture, construction, and design can benefit from using accounting and project management software for engineering firms. This includes improved collaboration, profitability, and overall operational efficiency.

Deltek is often recommended for engineering firms due to its robust project accounting features, time tracking, and expense management complex engineering projects. Productive is a great software engineering project management alternative if you’re looking for more user-friendly workflows.

Engineering-focused software includes features like project accounting, resource forecasting, and expense tracking, which are essential for managing technical projects, unlike general task management tools.

Some of the best options include Productive and Jira. Jira has useful agile project management capabilities and DevOps integration, but Productive is better for more complex financial and business performance management.

Engineering scheduling software helps firms plan, allocate, and manage resources effectively across projects. It includes tools for creating schedules, assigning tasks, tracking progress, and optimizing utilization and workloads to prevent resource overbooking or delays.