EPM Live vs. RationalPlan

I think EPM Live might be the right solution for a much smaller company, who does mainly business to business material sales. As a software company with a ramped subscription model and heavy use of Salesforce, it was not well suited to our business.

Appropriate as a great alternative to MS Project. RationalPlan provides most of the features needed to develop and maintain mid-level complex schedules. Less Appropriate for large complex schedules of long duration. These can be a challenge due to Duration at top-level. It is also a challenge to generate reports for management - reporting feature is limited.

• Fantastic project management features
• Cost and Resource management features more than paid for the software
• Social Collaboration tools improve communication between departments

• Portfolio view is great to get a feel for how your programme is running at a glance and which areas possibly might require attention. The fact that you can customise your view by adding your own columns is another plus.
• All project information in one tool is a big plus for me considering the amount of projects we run with. This really improves efficiency and saves me time. You have the ability to add documents to tasks, manage risks, email resources tasks due for projects they are assigned to(might need some refinement depending on your requirements), material db with costing etc.

• This is a solid product. I do not have any suggested changes based on our experience. Cannot understand why there are any negative reviews here. The reviewer(s) must not have given the product a fair chance.

• Milestones should be a primary option instead of 0h to create one.

Incentivized

The product is just not fitting our needs so we are looking at other alternatives. The system has gone down 3 times in the last 6 months and was down for at least half a day, timesheets have duplicate tasks, and it takes too long to save and submit. When trying to process updates it randomly changes our dates so we have to go back and fix them, sometimes tasks are lost and the system is just very confusing and hard to manipulate

Incentivized

We get support when needed.

Incentivized

I had to ask for support once and got a response immediately.

EPM was easier to use, with better and simpler UI. The product was also a great combination of price and functionality compared to other tools

Incentivized

RationalPlan is cost-effective and allows most users to prepare and manage their schedule. The software lacks comprehensive reporting and duration changes at the top level of a project.

• We had to pay EPM for a solution that was, for our business, unusable
• We gained much needed experience in working with third party software vendors

• Helps explain the target schedule and resource estimates for cost of the project

Incentivized