Resource management tools help you understand what's going on with your people and your projects. Discover the best resource management tools, honestly tested and reviewed.
Here’s the reality most project managers find out sooner or later: project resources are finite.
Without proper methods to analyze the available resources, their utilization, and which skills to map with specific tasks, your project is doomed to fail, no matter how detailed it is.
There must be something that can simply fix this, right?
You bet. Enter resource management tools.
Briefly, resource management software helps project teams improve visibility into their resources by helping resource planning, workload management, reporting, and more.
Such a tool also lets you:
The real benefit of using a resource management tool, however, is that it helps you optimize resources across multiple projects simultaneously. You get more done with fewer resources, which improves project profitability without raising costs.
Here’s a full rundown of the benefits of using resource management tools:
To date, resource management has been an incredibly manual process. Because of its complexity, many organizations relied on a combination of multiple spreadsheets, email, and other tools to manage their resources across different departments. This created a lot of inefficiencies as well as errors that could cost companies millions of dollars in lost productivity and revenue.
As project managers started to realize that colored-coded spreadsheets were too error-prone and difficult to maintain, it led to the gradual emergence of advanced solutions. Resource management tools and techniques have been developed to address these challenges by providing organizations with one centralized system for managing resources across entire departments and projects.
So without further ado, here are the top resource management tools that can significantly improve resource planning, resource allocation, and resource scheduling.
Runn is probably the best resource management tool you’ve never heard of but actually need. Runn brings together projects, people, timesheets, and profits under an intuitive interface, so teams of all sizes can forecast their revenue and future capacity needs with accuracy.
You can use Runn for both improving your resource allocation process and measuring resource utilization.
What’s worth noticing is that Runn is putting people front and center. I’m talking about their current workloads, future availability, holidays, even billing rates, and actual payroll; something that will help you balance resources and costs more efficiently. You can then filter after their role, team, and skills to find the right talent for a project.
$8 per user/month. Enterprise packages are available — please contact the team for a custom quote.
☝️ Manage all your resources and projects in one place. Runn lets you effectively manage resources in one place — see what their skills, interests, and availability is like, how under- or over-utilized they are, and when they last took time off. But you don’t have to take our word for it — try Runn for free yourself.
Float bills itself as a resource management software that can be used for capacity planning and resource scheduling, implying more functionality than typical project management resource tools.
Despite its amazing features, the lack of a project revenue forecast stops Float short from becoming a complete resource management platform. Another drawback is that the amount of overbooked hours is only available under the user’s unscheduled column and not on the actual timeline.
Starts at $6 per user/month.
Dig deeper: Runn vs Float - Putting the Best in Resource Planning to Test
Resource Guru is an early player in the project and resource management tools space, now doubling down on fundamental resource management features for high-growth teams.
However, because of its straightforward approach to resource management, Resource Guru lacks some capabilities other platforms offer, such as integrated timesheets, advanced reports, and native integrations with third-party apps.
For this reason, companies that value capacity planning over profitability will find Resource Guru a reliable HR resource management platform.
Starts at $4.16 per user/month and $2.08 per non-human resource/month.
Previously known as Mavenlink, Kantata is a popular enterprise project and resource management tool specializing in resource optimizations.
Since Kantata is an enterprise tool though, some customers expect to have more granular features such as requesting resources for approval. They also want to be able to add resources directly at a project level, but these are features this resource management tool lacks.
However, on the whole, Kantata works best for companies looking for a solution that connects resource optimization, business intelligence, and automated workflows under a single roof.
Quotation-based.
Previously 10,000ft, Resource Management by Smartsheet pledges to be a resource capacity management tool that supports companies with their hiring decisions.
Looking more like a Smartsheet add-on rather than a stand-alone app, Resource Management by SmartSheet ticks all the standard resource management features.
One con, however, is that this resource management tool compromises user experience. The interface is rather clunky, the horizontal scroll inexistent, and you can't drag and drop bookings on the resource calendar.
Timesheets also don’t show up on the main schedule, but the platform is robust enough to support existing Smartsheet customers.
All in all, existing Smartsheet users stand to benefit most from this tool. Still, a more intuitive interface and a double-way sync between bookings and project phases dates would improve the experience.
$7 per user/month.
Yet another enterprise IT resource management tool, Saviom has sacrificed usability for extensive customization to reduce enterprise-related resource costs.
The platform has emerged as one of the key enterprise market players ever since 1999 (yes, you read that right!).
Being an ERP tool, the business intelligence dashboards are as customizable as they get — even though some custom fields may be unavailable in reports.
Additionally, integrations exist to connect with your existing workflows and process. This drives the point back to Saviom’s focus on customization, which ultimately enables scalability across all resources.
Quotation-based.
Silverbucket promises to be the smartest planning tool for project businesses, meaning those that charge by the hour. And for good reasons.
As for reports, reference customers experience some issues. They are not so flexible, as fixed-rate projects and part-time schedules can ruin final numbers.
Silverbucket makes up for this with a great resource forecast chart, accompanied by a resource baseline for comparing the project post-mortem results with the initial allocation plans.
Starts at €9 per user/month.
Hub Planner proves to be a strong human resource management tool.
All these features make Hub Planner a great choice for large organizations that employ hundreds of employees. The very few complaints revolve around the difficulty of assigning colors to bookings and the platform’s initial high learning curve.
Starts at $7 per user/month.
Teamdeck acts as a single source of truth, reuniting resource scheduling, time tracking, and leave management under a sleek UI.
Thanks to its reporting feature and granular interface, Teamdeck has, without a doubt, the potential to serve many industries. However, the best fit would be as an agile resource management tool in our opinion.
Starts at $3.60 per user/month.
The correct answer depends largely on your team’s needs and budget.
All you need to remember as you select a resource management tool is that the software should: