10 best capacity planning tools (free and paid)

What are the best capacity planning tools for 2023-2024? How can they increase performance and efficiency? What features are essential?

Capacity planning tool can greatly simplify your life when it comes to resource management. With automated updates and real-time resource visibility, you can save time and money while completing projects on time and on budget.

Using resource capacity planning tool allows you to quickly and easily gain greater visibility and understanding of your resource capacity. By sharing this information with teams and managers, you can synchronize resources and improve the efficiency and fluidity of your project.

In this article, we’ll review some of the benefits and features of the top 10 capacity planning tools in 2024.

Why is capacity planning software important?

With the help of a capacity planning tool, you can forecast your future resource requirements and plan resource allocation accordingly.

For example, if you own an IT consulting company or organization, it will help you find free agents with the necessary expertise for upcoming projects. Companies that are expanding rapidly or going through periods of high demand need to ensure that they have sufficient resources to handle the growing volume of tasks. As a result, capacity planning has become a crucial element of strategic planning for many companies.

While it may seem possible to accomplish this task manually, capacity planning tool offers a number of advantages, not least the ability to automatically take account of variations and changing circumstances.

Many factors can influence resource requirements and precise timetables, particularly in multi-stage, mutually dependent projects.

Project managers can see exactly how things are progressing thanks to capacity planning tools.

Capacity planning tool offers other advantages:

• Eliminate uncertainty in resource allocation and demand projections
• Recognize potential obstacles in advance
• Review production and group workloads to improve workforce management
• Plan resources automatically
• Avoid waiting periods for essential and reserved resources
• Replace Excel-type spreadsheets, which often reach their limits in shared use (e.g. unsynchronized versions, formula errors, etc.).

Dynamic organizations with limited resources and always urgent priorities will find planning tools particularly useful!

Important features of effective capacity planning software

Let’s talk features first, before diving into our assessment of the nine best capacity planning solutions available today. What features are typically included in a capacity planning platform, and what’s required?

Capacity planning tools for project managers

Of course you can! It should go without saying. You can determine and visualize your company’s capacity using a capacity planning tool. This can be your future capacity – how much time and money you can devote to new projects – or your current capacity – which is currently available for additional work.

It should be possible to look at capabilities from several angles, such as specialist teams, job responsibilities or skill sets. This will help you find available capabilities, use them and recognize and solve capability problems. For example, by recycling existing resources, reallocating them or recruiting new ones.

The tool must therefore be available:

• Real-time data to help you decide what to do with your projects based on their current status.

Project and resource planning

Capacity planning focuses on your current and future projects, as well as the personnel assigned to them.

Project and resource planning tools are therefore essential to include in your software selection, as they work together to paint a complete picture of your company’s potential.

Potential features include the ability to drag and drop resources into projects, use a centralized, searchable resource pool to find qualified team members, and plan projects using Gantt charts.

The effects of the projects and the allocation of resources should also be visible to you. Will you be over-capacity for project A? Is team B planning too much? Can resource C handle additional tasks? etc.

The tool must therefore be available:

• A single resource pool with details of roles, skills, company costs and working hours
• Simple project planning and resource scheduling, including budget, phases and milestones
• Resource allocation functionalities: information on capacity, availability, utilization and existing allocations

Data visualization and reporting

You need comprehensive reports and fast information to make informed decisions. Capacity planning tools help to run both customized and pre-defined reports.

Data visualization tools that make it easier to identify conflicts or excess capacity should also be included. Calendars and heat maps that show when capacity is nearing or exceeded are two examples.

The tool must therefore be available:

• robust functionality with predefined and customizable reports
• customized dashboards: quick access to your favourite reports
• intuitive data visualization, including heat maps, pie charts and bar graphs.

Top 10 software solutions for capacity planning

How do you decide which capacity planning tool is right for you when there are so many options available? These tools like Teambook can focus on a particular issue, or take a variety of approaches to providing capacity planning solutions.

Here are the top ten capacity planning tools currently available on the market, along with an explanation of their benefits and current applications for project managers.

1. Teambook – facilitates project management

To bring your projects to fruition, Teambook is a project resource management tool that helps you plan, organize and track your resources effectively. Thanks to its user-friendly interface, Teambook makes it easy to manage your teams collaboration and their tasks. You can manage schedules, monitor the availability of individual team members and centralize project resources.

This capacity and  resource planning tool lets you manage schedules, time tracking and planning.

Teambook lets you :

• Plan and allocate your human resources visually: Get an overview of your consultants’ workloads and quickly find available talent
• Save time on projects, increase employee utilization and boost your company’s profitability.
• Analyze your capabilities for the period ahead: By abandoning forecasting, you can become a planning superhero.
• Benefit from a Swiss system, a guarantee of quality, precision and security, as your data is not stored abroad.
• Save money compared to competitors because pricing is based on the number of projects rather than users
• Facilitate onboarding, as the software is extremely simple, intuitive and fast.
• Work in most languages (French, German, Italian, Spanish and, of course, English) with efficient, multilingual customer service.

 

2. Runn – capacity planning for IT services

Project managers, operations managers and resource managers were the main designers of the free, high-tech Runn resource management software. This app helps people understand your capacity management because it’s truly visual and captivating.

A bird’s-eye view calendar enables users to monitor all projects and manage resources at the same time, making it easier to detect double-bookings and resource risks. In addition to high-level capacity statistics, you can look at individual team members to see how much they are being used, including in real time. This means tracking the time a worker spends on billable and non-billable tasks.

 

Capacity planning process from Runn are also a valuable resource if you want to make the most of your enterprise resources availability. They show the planned workload for your resources in relation to the time available. So you can quickly determine where you can add resources to maintain a fair workload for all employees, and where you still have capacity to use. Charts can be organized according to the desired time period, and you can apply unique labels to filter data according to teams, roles, skills and other relevant factors.

Runn is another unique tool that gives you financial control over your project.

3. Toggl – View your team’s schedule

The aim of Toggl is to enable project managers to make the best use of employees and resources while avoiding overloading them. Primarily designed for agencies, Toggl makes it easy to track employee time spent on projects, so you can identify methods to improve employee productivity and bill your customers for every team effort made.

 

 

It is also designed for remote teams, enabling customizable sharing of calendars and projects with customers. Drag-and-drop calendars create visual roadmaps for specific projects and resources, and flexible tasks can be created with as much or as little information as required.

4. Float – Improving capacity management in creative agencies

As well as being an excellent capacity management and planning tool, Float gives individuals and teams working on projects visibility and understanding.

To ensure universal project visibility across all departments, titles and functions can be assigned to teams and their members. In addition, you can customize availability and define default working hours for each person, improving communication between all project stakeholders.

 

Capacity planners can also easily detect skill or resource gaps in advance, facilitating advance hiring and outsourcing.

Float offers a free trial and only subscription services, although it connects to popular work apps such as Slack and Asana.

5. Resource Guru – Comprehensive resource planning

Resource Guru offers a range of premium plans to help you manage bookings other than just human resources. It lets you know which team members are under-utilized or which staff are in demand.

Management features include calendar visibility for all team members and departments, scheduling conflict alerts to avoid last-minute compromises, and an integrated leave management system for vacation planning.

 

In short, Resource Guru gives you an overview of the availability of all your teams, enabling you to identify cases of under-capacity and make the most of your resources immediately.

To make informed decisions and set reasonable expectations for your potential projects, you can filter your staff by location, department and level of expertise. What’s more, you can constantly monitor utilization rates to determine whether your workforce needs to be adjusted.

Resource Guru is an excellent tool when it comes to managing employee schedules due to its calendar views and simplicity, but companies tend to quickly outgrow it when looking to add other functionality to their technology stacks, such as project budget management or more advanced project planning capabilities.

The monthly cost of the basic plan is $6 per user.

6. 10,000ft by Smartsheet – For simple resource allocation and planning

Workplace cooperation software. Excellent project management tool was produced following Smartsheet‘s 2019 acquisition of 10,000 ft, a SaaS capacity planning startup.

It offers accurate pipeline estimates, pre-filled timesheets that allow employees to easily report their working hours, and direct resource allocation that allows project managers to choose the best team or person for a given job.

 

With this program, users can always record and control their plans, resources and schedules, enabling new working methods to be developed. It helps to accurately estimate hiring needs and maintain the efficiency of all processes.

Similar to Toggl, it allows your resources to record their working hours so you can control how they use their productive hours and bill your customers accurately. Smartsheet simplifies things for users by providing pre-filled timesheets with an easy-to-use interface, so you can get started without any prior training.

To generate uniform, direct project updates and communication, Smartsheet also connects to other CRM and workplace communication applications.

7. Mavenlink – designed for resource management

Mavenlink makes capacity planning fast and simple by connecting people and providing efficiency and insight. It presents itself as innovative, up-to-date and aware of the needs of today’s project managers.

Users can immediately see staffing requirements for the foreseeable future, and add resources to projects as needed. Real-time visibility of budgets, expenses, resources and schedules is ensured by up-to-the-minute perspectives. At the click of a button, users can act and make significant changes with a high degree of control.

 

However, Mavenlink and Kimble recently merged to form Kantata, which means greater impact and capacity. Using both firm and flexible allocations, the tool helps you forecast capacity and ensure that supply and demand for your resources are constantly in balance. As a result, it will help you reduce recruitment lead times and facilitate rapid response times.

8. Saviom – Detailed capacity reports and demand planning

Like many other capacity planning software packages, Saviom provides real-time and forward-looking visualizations of resource consumption to improve planning. Users are able to plan ahead for periods when resources will not be available, reserve resources when they are needed, and monitor demand for specific resources.

 

 

Saviom includes features that adapt to changing conditions, giving it an edge over using right capacity planning tools. If necessary, users can modify schedules, retrain staff and increase headcount; Saviom helps them determine when these and other emergency measures are required.

9. Birdview PSA – All-in-one capacity planning software for professional services companies

For service delivery teams, Birdview PSA is a comprehensive solution that integrates powerful resource, project and financial management functions into a single, centralized platform. Thanks to sophisticated capacity planning tools, your managers can detect and resolve team underload, and always find the right person for the job, to maximize resource utilization in real time.

 

You can effectively predict your future resource requirements and meet deadlines by using Birdview PSA to create relevant BI reports that take into account changes in team schedules and project deadlines. You can use these reports to inform all the resource decisions you make, and to determine whether you have sufficient resources to complete current tasks or take on new ones.

10. Forecast – Project management software and capacity planning in a single tool

Capacity Planning is a new addition to the comprehensive PSA software range from Forecast. It can be a wise choice if you’re looking for a tool to manage the projects and activities associated with your creative agency work, as well as resource planning and financial management. Forecast facilitates the allocation of work and interaction between different functions, making it ideal for professional services companies with more than fifty people.

 

According to a recent press release, the new essential components of capacity planning are as follows:

• Reserved spaces allow you to delimit resources without tying yourself to the services of a particular person.
• AI-based recruitment recommendations based on position, talent and availability
• Smooth allocations allow you to reserve the resources you need in advance
• The probability of winning is included in the capabilities overview to show the chances of a project’s success and the impact on resources.

Which is the most effective program for capacity planning?

We’ve anticipated your question. As you can see above, companies need different solutions.

The best capacity planning tool isn’t really a tool at all. Rather, it depends on your business needs and capacity planning objectives.

Here are a few things to consider when selecting the capacity planning program that’s right for YOU:

How do you choose the right platform for capacity planning?

Capacity planning objectives

What functions should your capacity planning platform actually perform? Don’t be fooled by features you may not need. Draw up a list of what your tool must, should, could and must not include, after consulting your stakeholders.

Size and complexity of your business

Some companies need an affordable, easy-to-use solution with just enough capacity to plan the work of a small team. Others, with large and complex workforces, may wish to invest in an enterprise-grade capacity management solution.

The ability to evolve

Don’t forget to consider your growth objectives. Make sure your capacity planning platform can expand to accommodate more users, projects and resources if your organization is ready to grow.

Diverse user requirements

We’ve focused on the needs of project managers. However, they won’t be the only ones using your system. Think about user-specific functionality, such as the ability to view their personal schedules and resource allocations, as well as functionality needed by senior managers, such as access to data for decision-making.

Use

A capacity planning tool that facilitates planning is needed. Ease of use must therefore be a top priority. Intuitive functionality, a visually appealing user interface and clear data visualization are essential.

Costs

Can you make do with a free tool, or do you have to pay for a platform to get the functionality you need? What’s the value of better capacity planning to you? Think of the time saved, the capabilities demonstrated and the possibilities offered when you assess the cost-benefit ratio of buying the right product.

Integration and compatibility

Does your capacity planning platform need to interface with other vital business systems? Do you have developers capable of creating your own integrations, or do you need out-of-the-box solutions?

Accommodation and support

Do you prefer cloud computing, or do you need your software to remain on site? Do you prefer the supplier to help you, or do you have system administrators on staff?

Capacity planning tools: what you need to know

All things considered, capacity planning software is a necessary tool for project managers in the modern age. They are generally not too expensive, and greatly improve the simplicity and efficiency of project planning.

Like many other software products, there are low-cost versions that lack some of the latest features and functionality. These value-added functions can deliver considerable savings in terms of resource utilization.

Using capacity planning software allows you to take advantage of all the benefits associated with it. It’s among the best capacity planning programs because of its affordability and ease of use, as well as its insight. Get a demo and a free trial with Teambook to see how it can meet your capacity planning needs.