Top 6 Scenario Planning Software & Tools in 2025

What if your scenario planning software was simple to use and implement?

In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits and downsides of integrated vs dedicated tools with scenario planning features. Find out all you need to know to make the best decision.

Productive is a professional services automation software for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

It offers end-to-end features for managing day-to-day workflows and business strategy.

Unlike a lot of dedicated software, Productive offers features at lower costs and provides a modern user interface—you won’t need a dedicated tech team or a legion of consultants to start working on your projects.

Additionally, it can be used both by leadership and management and your production teams, since it also provides time tracking, collaboration, and task management features.

Productive’s core features for strategic planning include:

Let’s find out more, starting with the most important feature: the Scenario Builder.

Productive’s Scenario Builder is a tool for simulating future scenarios and improving your financial performance.

Productive’s scenario plans include data on:

You can build your scenario by adding services provided (either manually or importing them from predefined rate cards). Then, define quantities (for ex. total hours dedicated to the project), resources or employees that will be working on the project, and billing types.

You can also switch to another view to check your resource availability and working periods. Any hours booked in this view will translate into Used Hours and will be applied to your financial scenarios.

All of this data contributes to an accurate overview of potential outcomes.

When you’ve built multiple scenarios (by changing around quantities, employees, billing types, etc.), you can compare these financial models side by side on a single page to find your best path forward.

Then, you can apply this scenario to your current plans.

The scenario planning framework can be applied to your projects and your sales deals, to help you create more accurate (and profitable) proposals for potential clients.

Watch the video below to learn more:

Productive’s financial forecasting can help you further monitor your future outcomes on a chosen scenario.

Once you’ve scheduled your staff, you can check how your revenue, budgets, and profit margins will look until the end of your project.

If you add additional staff, change booked hours, or change your scope, these changes will be reflected in your forecasting charts.

With Productive, you can get valuable insights into your current performance and resolve future uncertainties with reliable data.

You can also forecast utilization, which can help you predict future hiring needs and avoid resource bottlenecks.

In additional to forecasting and scenario modeling, you can create a variety of reports within Productive and share them with teams and clients.

Productive’s Reporting includes more than 50 templates on time tracking, resourcing, utilization, profit and revenue, project progress, and much more.

Reports can be customized with specific data and parameters, grouped and filtered in various ways, you can add custom formulas, and switch between various visualizations.

To share your reports, set up automated sending sequences with Productive’s Pulse, or add your reports into a custom dashboard with widgets.

Productive’s Budgeting is connected to scenario planning and forecasting.

Within the platform, you can set up your billable rates and bundle them into agency rate cards. You can also define employee cost rates, and get calculations on your overhead.

Overhead management and expense tracking are built into Productive to help you get more accurate insights into true profitability.

Time tracking and billing are connected for hourly rate projects. Track billable vs non-billable hours and pull this data to create brand-friendly invoices and send them from the platform.

Invoicing also includes:

With Productive’s Resource Management, you can create a responsive resource plan and ensure that you’re never in a situation where you: don’t know what are employees are doing, who’s available to work on which project, and who’s off.

The resource plan is connected to your scenario planning and financial forecasting. It’s the basis of creating plausible scenarios, based on staff cost rates and billable rates and hours scheduled.

To help you manage your plan, you can drag and drop entries, see capacity and availability at a glance with heatmaps, and switch between different views (projects and people-centric).

There are also placeholders for scheduling for future staff, and tentative bookings for scheduling for unconfirmed projects.

Productive’s Project Management features include multiple project views for organizing progress. This includes:

You can also manage your tasks and collaborate with team members. Break up tasks into smaller segments with to-dos, subtasks, and link them together with different dependencies. For managing project information, there’s Docs.

Productive offers seamless integrations with HR, accounting, and collaboration apps.

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 try Productive with a free trial.

Scenario modeling software is a powerful tool that enables businesses to simulate and analyze different potential outcomes based on various assumptions and data inputs.

It allows businesses to create multiple scenarios and compare them to assess potential risks, opportunities, and impacts of different decisions before deciding to go through with them.

For example, you can create a scenario where a development senior works on a project, and model a different scenario with two mid-level developers. Then, you can compare how it impacts budgets and profit margins.

This is a simplified example—scenario modeling is very powerful, and can be used for financial planning, sales planning, project planning, resource planning, and more.

It’s also suitable for businesses of various shapes and sizes, although mid-sized to larger enterprises that work with multiple projects, resources, and financial scenarios might see more benefits from it.

Ultimately, scenario modeling software helps businesses build resilience, improve agility, and make data-driven strategic decisions.

Depending on which system you’re using, the steps towards building a scenario plan can differ. Here is a generic outline for scenario development:

Scenario planning solutions offer significant advantages for organizations looking to navigate uncertainty and make informed decisions. Key benefits include:

By leveraging scenario planning tools, businesses can strengthen resilience, improve forecasting accuracy, and position themselves for long-term success.

You have a couple of different options when looking for tools for scenario modeling.

If you’re working in a midsized company or larger, you have time and resources to invest in implementation and consulting teams, and a dedicated team to manage your planning tool, you can consider a dedicated solution like Workday or Anaplan.

If you want to keep working with spreadsheets, you can try boosting your processes with an Excel add-on tool such as Vena Solutions as a temporary solution (until your business grows larger).

And, if you want to get the best of both words, you should try Productive. It’s a great option for professional services businesses that want to manage projects, model scenarios, and optimize their financial management, all in one tool.

Book a demo with Productive today to learn more.