LiquidPlanner Reviews

Liquid Planner is a Very Effective Tool for Project Planning and Management.

Comments: 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.

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.

An In-Depth Review of LiquidPlanner

Comments: Overall, LiquidPlanner is a great tool for managing projects. It has an intuitive user interface and powerful features that help users plan, track, and manage projects with ease. The cost can be a bit steep for some, but it is definitely worth it for those who need a comprehensive project management solution.

Pros:

LiquidPlanner is an incredibly powerful project management tool that helps users plan and manage projects with ease. It provides an intuitive user interface to help users easily navigate through the software, allowing them to quickly understand the process and get started. With LiquidPlanner, users can easily manage tasks and resources, track progress, collaborate with team members, and make sure that deadlines are met.

Cons:

While LiquidPlanner is a great tool, there are a few drawbacks. The cost of the software can be quite expensive for a small business, and the learning curve can be quite steep for new users. Additionally, the customer support could be improved, as sometimes it can take a while for them to respond to inquiries.

[LiquidPlanner Classic] Decent product, feels dated

Comments: Overall, LiquidPlanner does very well in a very limited capacity. However, as our company grows, we are beginning to feel that we have outgrown the platform.

Pros:

We use LiquidPlanner to track ongoing tasks and client budgets/burn rates. In this regards, it is easy to set up clients, projects, and tasks, and from there, to log our efforts to those tasks.

Cons:

Given that prioritization works by the 'higher' a task is in the list, the greater priority it is given, prioritization has been difficult as we list projects alphabetically. That means that all tasks in project "A" will be prioritized over project "Z". We've had to create separate packages for prioritization, which leads to a lot of overhead.We have a lot of 'retainer' type clients, who have monthly budgets. We need to track ongoing work, as well as remaing budgets. In order to calculate how much is remaining in some of our reports, we have had to create tasks with assigned roles (such as "Sr Consultant" or "Jr Consultant") to 'hold' time on accounts for specific skills sets, and then, on a daily basis, go and update those 'holding' tasks. We have validated with LP support and they felt this was the easiest approach, but again, leads to a lot of overhead.The platform has not really changed since I have been using it (the last 6 years). A new version of LiquidPlanner is rolling out, but would require a full migration in order to benefit from new features. We have seen some other platforms that appear to offer significant upgrades in certain areas.

LP Review

Comments: It has raised us to next level in our production and efficiencies. The ability to see exactly what is happening within projects has greatly reduced production times. The money it has saved us internally well pays for the cost of using the tool compared to others.

Pros:

The automatic resource allocation, and automatic scheduling. Their customer support has been amazing from the LP team.

Cons:

Has been difficult for building internal dashboards to track all our revenue data. This is greatly improving and look forward to the new enhancements.

Liquid planner bridges the gap between manufacturing and construction.

Comments: We sit between manufacturing and construction, this system bridges the gap between a resource planner and project management tool. It is the only system we have found that makes intuitive changes to project dates based on changes to resource or changes to projects and assigned personnel.

Pros:

The software is intuitive combining both resource planning and project management, both systems influencing each other, giving accurate predictions based on real time information and updates.

Cons:

The Gant chart for individual and the overall project portfolio is very basic cannot be exported as a report. When changing priorities the effect of the change cannot be demonstrated against the previous expected finish dates as the previous dates are lost. It would be good if you could mock run a change of the project priority and the system showed the previous finish dates dates against the new dates, demonstrating the effect the priority change has on the project finish.Sending an email on significant project milestones would be a good feature.

Happy Customer

Comments: The product itself is great and we rarely need assistance from the LP team to get the most out of the platform. Our reporting and ability to manage multiple projects has greatly improved since implementing LiquidPlanner into our operations.

Pros:

The ability to dynamically update your entire portfolio based resource availability or task completion helps our small team set the right expectation and understand the impact each project produces across our customer base.

Cons:

Its built for enterprise integration, so in our industry the lack of integration into our CRM systems was limited.

Great platform, but you need to use it a lot to understand it

Comments: It was difficult to understand the platform at the beginning, but when you understand it, I really liked it. The thing is : I invested a lot of time just to understand it and you put the expensive price on top of that, at the end it costs me a lot more that it save in first 6 months.

Pros:

I really like that you can do a lot to help with your project management and team management. All the informations is in one place (you need to create a structure that represent your company and your staff) and everybody can find what he wants. It's easy to do follow-ups with clients. The best thing is that you don't need a few platforms to see the time left, the budget and the tasks.

Cons:

It took a lot of time to find LiquidPlanner easy to use and to find a structure that represent the company and our employees . The interface (or UX) is not simple. The price is a bit expensive if you have a small team.

Cumbersome & More Expensive Than Most

Comments: - Like the Flexibility
- Swifted Away from LiquidPlanner to a More Time-Efficent Application, But Gave Up Several Advance Features in the Trade-Off
- Too Expensive for Multiple Users on the Same Team
- Adoption Process for New Team Members Extremely Time Consuming

Pros:

- Customizable (To a Degree) - Reporting Capabilities - Excellent Interface with Our Client Invoicing Application

Cons:

- Extremely Time Consuming to Set Up & Deploy - Frequent Software Changes Requires Extra Time to Maintain & Reconfigure - Expensive Relative to Similar Application Alternatives

Project Management and Not Much Else

Comments: I do like the tool. It's fairly simple to learn. Menu structure and feature overload are intimidating at first, but you get over that (to an extent). iOS app is important to my team - quick reference to projects running is very good to have and many other products like LP don't have a mobile app at all. Overall, it's just not for me and my team. If there are better connections with development tools (Jira, BitBucket, Slack etc.) in the future, we may reconsider.

Pros:

It's easy to set up hierarchy and control a project using LiquidPlanner. Feature set is very good and there are few gaps. For project planners, it's a great tool because it allows you to assign tasks, add time, and see a Gantt chart in a few clicks.

Cons:

It's not for me. I'm in Product Management and my team was looking for a tool that will integrate with (or be less friction) with our current development tools. We currently use Atlassian (Jira, BitBucket) products for development and Google Sheets for our sprint management. The cons of LiquidPlanner is that it's a PROJECT tool, not a Product tool. I know LP probably doesn't plan on filling that need for a Product tool but there is a gap in that market and providing integrations with products like Atlassian could allow for LP to expand into a completely new market. All the features are there, just need to engineer some more automated and simplified ways of managing products, rather than large scale projects with LP.

LiquidPlanner - excellent for repeating processes

Comments: Made repeating processes very easy to manage, and email notifications let you know when it is time to start working on an assigned task.

Pros:

LiquidPlanner is excellent for coordinating on repeating projects/processes. In my previous employer, which was a consulting firm, we used this software to manage our client engagements. Every time a new engagement began, we would apply the correct template, customize dates, and immediately begin working as a team. It saves a lot of time.

Cons:

I would not use LiquidPlanner for large complex projects that are not repeating. In those instances, it would take too much time to set up the projects. I recommend JIRA for those kinds of projects.

The best project management tool for teams

Comments: 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.

Hard to get over the preconceived notions, but worth it

Comments: I am very much a fan of this software. I think the limitations for how it can help is more around people understanding what it does differently than Project or similar tools than with the tool itself. One of my most recent experiences tells the story well. When we were discussing the pros and cons an individual with a lot of influence was complaining that dates in the tool move if someone is sick and not getting to their tasks. I had a hard time understanding a perspective that a plan with a date should be static regardless of what people do. This tool is about understanding your progress based on what people do, not a static planning tool that people never look at or influence by there actions and therefore allows us to pretend that finish dates don't change regardless of peoples actions or issues that can arise. My overall opinion is the tool is limited more by peoples perspective than anything else and if you want better tracking, predictability, and ability to influence results you need to invest 30% of your time on the tool and 70% of your time getting people to wrap their heads around what this is doing and not what it might replace.

Pros:

It helps to organize the tasks and get people the right information to work on. It helps to prioritize what needs to happen and forecast how long it takes. It does a great job of managing hand offs within a team. It provides more tools than a typical user will ever need. The deeper you go the more value you can get.

Cons:

It can be difficult to get people to understand that this is not typical planning software. A more robust tutorial and a better description of what this tool is would help get teams to start faster.

Manager's view

Comments: It's a great improvement over our prior way of working, but after a few years we still haven't perfected our system to get exactly what we needed. Ideally, the only manual steps would be timely tracking of work on tasks and revised estimates, but to get our needs met we've needed more manual work.

Pros:

Prior to Liquid Planner, all of our client projects were in individual Microsoft Project files - which isn't ideal when you have shared resources. Now that we've used LP for a few years, we have much better visibility to work coming down the pike as well as potential conflicts/overbookings. However, the tool is only as good as the team's willingness to use it in a timely and accurate manner.

Cons:

The nature of our business and projects is much more complicated than what is featured in the sales process. Clients have a role in the process, and delays on their part push out all our deliverables. This is hard to capture/manage in LP without additional manual updates by the project manager. Also, we've had to devise a bit of a workaround workflow to allow us to properly prioritize individual tasks across multiple projects - again, requires some manual management/movement of tasks. When any of the manual work falls by the wayside, the quality of the projections in LP is diminished greatly.

Awesome project management tool with time tracking and more

Comments: Full PM tool, time tracking, billing.

Pros:

We've been using Liquid Planner for the last 5 years now and I can say that we are now managing 100% of our projects with it. Building a platform like Potion is a lot of work in product design, marketing, development and customer support but Liquid Planner has been a huge help when it comes to managing our projects. Whether it's dealing with our internal or customer projects, Liquid Planner (my guys call it LP) has been a huge help. We're using only part of the tools provided by LP, such as packages, tasks, attributions, deadlines, time tracking, resource planning and scheduling, but it's already bringing a huge providing us with both flexibility and structure. The help resources are really thorough also and help us get the information we need to use it in an even better way. Finally, and I think it's certainly one of the biggest strength of Liquid Planner, its support team is tremendous. All of our requests are always answered with concise and clear replies that push us forward.

Cons:

As any PM tool, there is a learning curve and you need to get the team using it in the good way. Thankfully, the help resources are great.

Great for PM/OPs, bad for Devs & Creatives

Comments: I love it, however, our devs and creatives find it frustrating to use despite large amounts of training and personalisation. There are a number of tools that would make this more helpful and less painful to the "doers". Our business needs are well met, though there are other aspects that don't accomplish our requirements. Kanban, for example, as well as cross-team/project sprint planning whilst maintaining a weekly outlook. Finally, with the latest price hikes it doesn't feel "good value" and I'm now faced with justifying the expense when before it was self explanatory. This is compounded by exchange rates.

Pros:

I have recommended. I like the meld of planning and projection. I love the hi/lo estimations and the detail I can provide clients

Cons:

Useability for doers, especially timesheets Lack of integrations with SCM. Poor connectivity/communication for my clients; their portals don't show custom fields, board views or timelines for tickets/tasks. True Kanban is not feasible Sprint-based planning for cross-team/project resource is not possible alongside weekly overviews A desktop app would be great; especially for devs etc The mobile app hasn't changed since we started using this in 2012 and is highly impractical. Doesn't work well on ipads

There are cheaper and more full-featured solutions, but

Comments: Liquid Planner is offering our business both a more consolidated approach to project management, as well as some features and functionality we didn't have before. Overall, I think it is helping our productivity.

Pros:

It does a lot of things well. It offers a lot of advanced scheduling functionality for project managers. The Projects tab is incredibly powerful. Time tracking works well. Tagging people in comments is a useful feature.

Cons:

Liquid Planner's interface is kind of slow for us (we have a lot of projects). The Home and My Work tabs aren't very useful to me--they never seem to show me the right subset of tasks, which is possibly due to the way we're organizing projects and tasks, which causes most people to use the Projects tab, which is powerful, but advanced and cluttered. API integrations work well enough, but the Zapier integration, in particular, is lacking much useful functionality in my opinion. For example, what if someone wanted to send a Slack notification to a particular person every time a task was assigned to them? Currently, either not possible or at least much more difficult than it could be.

A versatile tool, adaptable to any project or process type.

Comments: Overall my experience has been good, but frustrating. It took a lot of effort and time to build out the templates I needed, and getting the team to adapt it has been a roller coaster. There are a lot of functionalities I haven't gotten to explore yet, because most of my time has been spent on maintenance of projects. That is just for my situation though, and I don't have a ton of extra time to devote to expanding my usage of reports and dashboards. I would really like to set up dashboards, I just haven't had time.

Pros:

I like that it allows me to make templates for projects, it really makes it a lot easier to start a project off. I also love that I can make custom fields, it really helps me to capture all of the important data for our type of process. Plus, everybody can choose which fields they see on their project dashboard, it helps to make sure each person only sees what is important to them and nothing superfluous.

Cons:

I really wish there was the capability to collaborate on documents - that really would make this the perfect tool. I have asked multiple times about that, but I don't think it is in the plan to add anytime soon. You can add a link to a cloud based shared file, but nothing on internal servers. Just adds an additional step to complete work.

Cloud-based Project and Department Resources Management Tool of Choice

Comments: The customer support from LiquidPlanner has been excellent! We recently had some very helpful web conferences with the customer support team and found some new features we were previously unaware of.

Pros:

LiquidPlanner has been our project management software application since 2016. We manage hundreds of projects for six different clients and internal projects. With an agile team of 11 employees, this tool has allowed us to balance employee workloads, better predict time-to-market, and analyze our department efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Cons:

It took nearly a year to real 'dial-in' the software to our unique use case. There was a lot of trial-and-error in the beginning and a number of hours spent with tech support from LiquidPlanner. However, we have the tool running very well for our processes now and find new areas of our business where the data from LiquidPlanner has been beneficial to decision-making.

Heavy on features

Comments: LP sits at the center of our workflow, for better or for worse. On the whole it's a very helpful and robust work planning solution. It's actively updated and they listen to their customers.

Pros:

- Manage nearly every aspect of work planning - Decent interface - Tons of options to visualize data - Frequent updates - Great support If you want to plan your work, LiquidPlanner can accommodate almost any workflow

Cons:

Because it has so many options, it can be overwhelming. The best thing you can do for yourself when using this software is to determine what works for you early on. There are many different ways to implement different workflows in LP so take the time to define yours. There are some UI quirks that are really difficult to get around. The "my work" tab should be much more customizable in my opinion. The UI itself takes some getting used to as well.

Expensive but the Features are Worth It

Comments: I used this product for myself, because the firm I work for uses Microsoft Planner (free) which is crap. Liquid Planner isn't perfect, but it's one of the best out there. I like that it schedules my time for me. My main complaint is that you cannot assign clients to tasks like you can for projects. It is obviously optimized for companies that work on very large, involved projects, whereas, I do many short, discrete projects - like writing a NR or a newsletter. I set these up as tasks because it isn't worth the time to set up a project. Then, I have to nest them inside a project folder to assign them to a client. Frustrating

Pros:

Excellent time tracking and scheduling features, bonuses like setting dependencies, and comprehensive analysis and reporting features.

Cons:

Optimized for large, involved projects and as a result the Task designation isn't as helpful as it might be. Needs richer functionality in Tasks for short projects where it isn't worth setting up a project folder.

Comprehensive project management software for multiple staff across an organization

Comments: Overall it has been a way to help other staff get more organized. I honestly was doing fine just using Excel spreadsheets before, but it has helped management see more of what is on everyone's plates.

Pros:

LP is eminently flexible and encourages staff to think out the full life-cycle of a project. I appreciate custom fields and tags, estimated times, the ability to follow other people's projects, time-tracking, in-project messaging, the breakdown of projects-tasks-checklists, and more. Not to mention reports and dashboards.

Cons:

Onboarding is a huge effort, and maintaining project management is somewhat time-intensive. Also, our management team has done a poor job ensuring all staff use it in the same capacity, and management hasn't led by example.

Detailed Management with East of Use

Comments: LiquidPlanner has enabled me to bring resource conflicts to my stakeholders with the information to make recommendations and have the impacts of those recommendations available to communicate.

Pros:

This software allows the user to manage multiple projects and see the impacts, dependencies and conflicts among them. The prioritization, and ease to change priority, are key to knowing where projects are running into issue.

Cons:

We are waiting for resource pools to be able to assign work to a specific group that has a limited number without assigning the work to a specific person. Also, the need to constantly refresh each area when a change is made adds to the time is takes when creating a schedule or working through issues in a schedule.

The best project management software I've ever worked with

Comments: LiquidPlanner is a very complete software for managing projects, time spent, people, clients and analyzing the overall performance of your company. It has a lot of different functionalities. You'll probably never use all of them, since the system is so complete it has different features for different needs of all kinds of companies. We work with advertising and LP is invaluable in our day to day life. Customer support is rarely needed, but when it is, they are fast, polite and helpful. Having compared LP to other project management software, I can say I've never found one that adapts itself to our needs as much as this one.

Pros:

Very large feature set, great support.

Cons:

It's almost perfect, but there are some features I do miss and since it's so complete, sometimes it can be difficult to learn how to use a tool for the first time.

Does exactly what I need it to do. Could do some things better.

Comments: Pros: 1. As a service provider, I find it incredibly useful to manage all client projects and tasks through a single system. Invoicing my clients, which used to take 8 to 10 hours every month, now takes half an hour. The time tracking at each task is fantastic, as is the ability to have different billing rates for different customers. We integrated the downloadable timesheet CSV file into a database to assign our own invoice numbers and produce consolidated reports. 2. Our team is geographically dispersed, with members in different time zones and working different schedules. We use LP to collaborate on tasks, capture notes, and track documents. We've recently started to use Google Docs more than Microsoft Office documents, which we link through each task's "Links" section. We've found this to be a great extension to LP. At the same time, we still often upload documents, especially for version management and published documents. Cons: We manage a lot of tasks across a small team. The more tasks we have, the more difficult it is becoming to stay on top of them. The search feature has improved dramatically over the past few months. So that has helped a lot. But, we still find ourselves on occasion creating duplicate tasks, because the original isn't immediately apparent. The single sheet approach to a task has it's own pros and cons. But in my opinion, having separate tabs for "Task", "Planning", "Notes", etc would be a better approach. It would be even better to have flexibility to add custom tabs, so each task could have multiple note fields on their own tabs. I would use this to have a tab for Contacts, for example, and another for general notes. Ideally, this could be set up as a template, so that every task I create would automatically have the tabs I want. Managing task dependencies is cumbersome. Export tasks to PDF is cumbersome (or maybe I don't know how to use it right).

Project software I would recommend

Comments: Liquid planner has enabled us to track project hours in a more detailed way. We can see the allocation of hours across the spectrum of the project where as before liquidplanner we only had a total number of hours for the project but could not see where those hours were spent. We also couldn't do projection planner for staff assignment before Liquidplanner.

Pros:

I like how easy it is to use and how you can adapt it to any industry. I work in curriculum development and we were having a hard time finding a project management system that worked for our needs and our industry. LiquidPlanner has been flexible to meet our needs.

Cons:

I don't have any cons about the product.