Get the best project management tool for manufacturing and technology teams. LiquidPlanner gives you schedules you can trust, and helps you work on the right thing at the right time.
With LiquidPlanner, you can:
Organize your work
Collaborate seamlessly
Manage resources accurately
Capture the uncertainty in every project
Take the pain out of time tracking
Connect to the tools you already use
We built a project management solution driven by the belief that teams work best when they organize tasks by priority, make best/worst case estimates, and collaborate in one central location. Whether your team is working on big projects or small ones, LiquidPlanner makes scheduling a breeze. Try LiquidPlanner for free today!
Pros
The product is well designed so that it is a relatively low bar to learn how to use it effectively. It is easy for team members to interact with the software and to enter the information according to each users project role. When used as intended, the software does an excellent job providing the necessary views into project status. The software definitely lives up to its name as modifying project plans and priorities is easy and the impacts of such changes are essentially instantly available. The numerous but intuitive ways to manage project subtleties such as available time, delays, etc. make it straightforward to create realistic project schedules.
Cons
I do not have any specific negatives with respect to Liquid Planner. Like any software of this class, It does take some training and experience to get the most out of it. My best advice is to spend some time to understand how the designers intended the product to be used use it accordingly. LP has a rich set of features and if used properly will contribute positively to project management.
This tool is extremely powerful and robust, but like any other tool, the quality of the data which comes out of it is only as good as the data that is put into it. We attempted over the course of 12 mos. to integrate this tool into our small agency (<25 users). While simple to use, the biggest challenge was buy-in from other department captains in using the tool to its full potential.
Pros
I was very happy with the ease of use this product provided compared to some of the tools we used previously. It is built in a contemporary look and feel and is easy to navigate and manipulate data points in order to determine trends and better inform decisions. If you have the time and resources to dedicate to making sure the latest project data is always available, that is, due dates, estimated levels of effort remaining and hours logged are all kept up to date in a real-time basis, this tool has the potential to truly provide a wholistic and accurate view of the workload within an organization, along with any potential risks. The way the data are refreshed using the forecasting algorithms is a great feature which allows project managers to shift tasks around to determine how resources are affected.
Cons
Despite the name of "Liquid" Planner, there were some decidedly "unliquid" principals in which the software was built upon which power the accuracy and overall value of the product. If more then 25% of these principals are not known or regularly updated, the entire product grinds to a halt and the value it provides is completely lost. It's not a fault of how the product was built. I never encountered a time where the service/software was down or unavailable and each time I reached out to the support team they were courteous and prompt with their response. Overall, I felt frustrated by the amount of data the tool needs (and how that data need to be structured) in order for the tool to be valuable and viable. More often than not, I felt myself and the team responsible for the tool were spending more time administering the tool itself rather than using the information coming out of the tool to better our projects.
Because of the lack of integrations, I have been looking for something to replace Liquid Planner with, and after seeing them, I could not stand to stop using Liquid Planner. I think that alone speaks volumes.
I think you would be foolish to not look at their product. And there you have it.
Pros
As a web development agency, I can tell you the one feature that has prevented me from using another product, that is their task estimating feature. Why nobody else does this is beyond me (full disclosure: a lot of things are beyond me) :)
When setting up a task you can actually estimate the time it will take the same way real people estimate tasks, with a time range. Who in the world ever hits their single estimate time targets all the time? NOBODY. With Liquid Planner you enter a range, 3 - 6 hours, 1-2 hours, etc. THAT IS A LIFESAVER FOR US.
Another concept of theirs called "packages" is also brilliant. There you can take tasks and bundle them up into "folders" that make sense to you, so you can look at your projects
Cons
The thing that I dislike the most is there are not many integrations with third party time keepers for tasks and billing programs. Harvest would be an example, as would many others. They have their own time tracker, but to use it you ahve to have the app open. Lose internet, forget about it. Working in a car or on the train without internet? Forget about it.
Also, their mobile app is not really of much value.
Through thoughtful design, LiquidPlanner has made a project management application that is a perfect fit for dynamic and collaborative teams. It could replace your current project, task, time management tools and company blog by integrating them all in a natural way.
Liquid Planner has a transparent way of making you be mindful of exactly how the team is using its precious time. Our company president pleaded with me to get it set up so that he could use it as a tool to help the partners understand the team's capacity. He wanted a convincing way to show why more projects could not be taken on without an increase in staff. Liquid Planner allowed me to do this within a day.
I feel like the Liquid Planner designers traveled into my mind to design the perfect project/task/time manager.
Pros
Having used many project management tools over many years, it's hard to not fall in love with LiquidPlanner. It feels like I've traveled to bizarro world where everything goes right.
I can now put together comprehensive projects faster than I can plan them in my mind. I've never had this experience (including with Excel). Simply put, I don't feel the interface slowing me down. It feels like all "busy work" has been removed.
I never thought I'd have a real-time schedule because of the requirements to maintain it, but LiquidPlanner delivers on this promise. Thank you. I'm embarrassed to say that "what if" scenarios are so easy and fast to do, I've developed stronger intuitive scheduling techniques without understanding exactly why they work. Am I now smarter or dumber?
If you are not the type to love the clock-in/out button on each task, you might be the type to get hooked on adding a few notes when you complete each task because your notes are shared in the team's "blog."
Cons
Introducing a new company-wide system is always hard, but you you can use Liquid Planner to replace your project management tools, time-tracking tools and company blog so that should help reduce the total number of systems.
Currently companies that need a fully-featured document library should stick with what they have. There is an API and the company has been aggressively releasing new features so maybe someday.
If you haven't experienced a lot of project management tools, you may not be as passionate about it as I am. Part of it's appeal is that it does what any other project management tool integrated with a company portal can do, but it does it fast and easy enough that it's actually worth using.
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.
14-Day FREE trial at professional level;
PROFESSIONAL: $45 user/month (billed annually)
ENTERPRISE: $69 user/month (billed annually)
Super-charge your team's performance with a flexible, end-to-end project management solution.
Modern teams need a fast, streamlined way to manage their work. Our unique approach offers an easy alternative to Microsoft Project and can be used by just about anyone – traditionally-trained project teams, agile teams, or even teams that use ad-hoc processes. LiquidPlanner customers report an average of 16 hours saved per month due to automation.
LiquidPlanner is a cloud-based project management solution that allows project managers to schedule multiple projects, streamline complex processes, and nimbly respond to changing priorities. A collaboration tool at the core, it lets teams work seamlessly together and complete tasks faster, without having to put up with the limitations of both Microsoft Project and simple project collaboration tools like Basecamp.
Taking feature-rich to new levels, some of LiquidPlanner’s key features include best/worse case estimates, priority-based schedules, time tracking, collaboration, and resource management. Other noteworthy features are drag-and-drop prioritization, document storage, workspace comments, and role-based access controls. All subscription packages come with native iOS and Android apps.
Built with project teams in mind, LiquidPlanner is a project management software that takes the edge off project plan revising by automatically adjusting a plan schedule when priorities suddenly change. The app also allows portfolio managers to organize and prioritize multiple tasks and projects, and manage a pipeline of pending, active, and approved projects to better balance costs and resources, and visualize profits.
Dashboard and custom reports afford organizations the requisite business intelligence to make relevant business decisions, identify execution best practices and rooms for improvement, and conduct post-implementation assessments.
Keeping a realistic schedule that you can trust is vital for project managers to complete their projects on time and on budget. However, pinpointing the exact amount of time to finish a task can be tricky, especially considering unforeseen circumstances that may hamper its advancement.
LiquidPlanner allows all users to set realistic estimates, two to four hours for a certain task, for example, and the software creates a timeline of when you’re likely to finish the project, also taking into account vacations, staff availability and priorities.
When done manually, project planning and scheduling can be tedious and time-consuming. With LiquidPlanner’s priority-based scheduling system, you create task assignments and duration estimates, and arrange them according to priority with drag-and-drop ease. LiquidPlanner then automatically generates a schedule with possible start and end dates for each of the tasks created.
Because shifting priorities are a constant fare in companies managing concurrent projects at any one time, whenever changes affecting task dates are made to a plan/schedule, LiquidPlanner automatically recalculates the project’s timeline and assigns new dates to the affected task and all other tasks tied to it.
LiquidPlanner comes with timesheets that are pre-populated with your most relevant tasks. In the event your assigned tasks change, the timesheet is automatically updated. LiquidPlanner also has built-in task timers so you need not rely on after-task guesstimates to track the total amount of time you spend on tasks. Simply click the timer on/off when you start/finish a task.
Completed timesheets are then sent to team managers for review, approval, and export to the company’s billing system. Custom fields can also be used to make invoicing and reporting easier.
For people to effectively collaborate, conversations must be in context and connected to tasks. With LiquidPlanner, recent conversations grouped by tasks are shown on the homepage, keeping you up to date with your team’s projects.
The app also provides one unified inbox to capture all of your team’s tasks. Comments can be made via email and they’re automatically captured in LiquidPlanner. PDFs, photos, documents, and virtually any file type can be shared with other members of the team. Files can be uploaded from your hard drive or third-party cloud storage services like Box, Google, and Dropbox.
When you’re managing multiple projects with fluctuating deadlines and you don’t necessarily have an abundance of human resources to tap, it can get pretty challenging to ensure each project receives the requisite amount of attention while not overbooking your staff.
LiquidPlanner’s resource management feature ensures that everyone in your team has just the right amount of work via its cutting-edge scheduling engine that takes into account staff availability. Events, vacations and dependencies are automatically factored into schedules, so you get more realistic plans and timelines.
Aside from its developer API which allows companies to integrate their existing business systems, LiquidPlanner has ready-made integrations with [Google Drive] (http://www.getapp.com/collaboration-software/a/google-drive/), Box, [Dropbox] (http://www.getapp.com/collaboration-software/a/dropbox-online-sync-and-file-sharing/), [Salesforce] (http://www.getapp.com/customer-management-software/a/salesforce/), and [Zapier.com] (http://www.getapp.com/integration-solutions-software/a/zapier/).
LiquidPlanner offers three subscription packages: Standard at $29 per user per month, Professional at a monthly $39 per user, and Enterprise at $49 a month per user. (The dollar figures apply if billed annually.) All plans require a 10-user minimum purchase, and free trials are based on the Professional feature set.
Below are some frequently asked questions for LiquidPlanner.
LiquidPlanner offers the following pricing plans:
Starting from: US$45,00/month
Pricing model: Subscription
Free Trial: Available
14-Day FREE trial at professional level;
PROFESSIONAL: $45 user/month (billed annually)
ENTERPRISE: $69 user/month (billed annually)
LiquidPlanner offers the following features:
LiquidPlanner has the following typical customers:
Freelancers, Large Enterprises, Mid Size Business, Non Profit, Public Administrations, Small Business
LiquidPlanner supports the following languages:
English
LiquidPlanner has the following pricing plans:
Subscription
LiquidPlanner supports the following devices:
Android, iPhone, iPad
LiquidPlanner integrates with the following applications:
APIANT, Bitium, Bugsnag, Cyfe, Hubstaff, Insightly, LeadMaster, Rippling, Trainual, VisitorTrack
LiquidPlanner offers the following support options:
Forum, Knowledge Base, Online Support, Phone Support, Video Tutorials
Our team is fairly small (~50 users across the company) so we do not have dedicated resources to just maintain the information in Liquid Planer. However, Liquid planner is accessible and intuitive so we can have several team members contribute to the maintenance of project schedules as part of their duties.
We use Liquid Planner to manage the temporal aspects of project management. The tool is very good for what it is designed to do. There are a rich set of reporting tools that allow for customization to meet our needs. It has done this job for us very well. The support provided has been timely and effective.