8 Best Resource Management Tools (Honestly Reviewed)

Resource management sounds simple on paper: match the right people to the right work at the right time. But in professional services, it quickly becomes one of the hardest operational problems to get right - and one of the most expensive when it goes wrong.

That’s because resourcing isn’t just a scheduling exercise. It’s a moving puzzle made up of competing priorities: shifting client needs, tight deadlines, evolving project scopes, and the constant reality that people aren’t interchangeable.

Skills, seniority, availability, billable targets, time zones, and personal constraints all matter - and they change week to week (sometimes day to day).

Resource management software brings clarity to this complexity: it centralizes availability and skills, helps teams plan ahead without losing flexibility, and connect resourcing decisions to real outcomes like revenue and profitability. Instead of relying on spreadsheets and frantic last-minute coordination, teams can make faster, smarter staffing decisions with confidence - and create a system that scales as the business grows.

Considering the importance of RM tools, there's an abundance of contenders on the market. In this article, we answer the question - what are the best resource management tools? - and explain their benefits.

• Benefits of using resource management tools
• Best resource management tools

What are the benefits of using resource management tools?

The real benefit of using a resource management tool, however, is that it helps you optimize resources across multiple projects simultaneously. It enables you identify ways to 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: 

Improve resource visibility across all projects

With reliable software at hand, it's hard not to spot resource issues before they cause trouble. Advanced systems will alarm you about potential risks to run overtime or over budget with time enough to take corrective measures. You will easily see if your resources are spread too thin or if someone has too many commitments. 

Avoid spreadsheet chaos

As your company grows, so do your resource management needs. Unfortunately, spreadsheets become unwieldy under the weight of all the data you’re collecting, from project requirements to people’s skill sets.

Dedicated resource management tools are designed to handle large volumes of data and users more efficiently than spreadsheets, meaning they can scale with you as you grow.

Related: 8 Reasons to Move from Spreadsheets to Resource Management Software

Align capacity to delivery needs

Resource management software helps align capacity (people + time) to delivery needs (projects + deadlines) by making projects and resources visible, comparable, and adjustable in one place, so you can spot gaps early and rebalance before they turn into missed dates or burnout.

Resource management software brings together:

• Demand: projects, roles needed, planned hours, deadlines
• Supply: team availability, contracted hours, holidays, non-project work

So you can clearly see whether you have enough capacity to match work coming down the pipeline.

Balance healthy workloads

Resource management tools give you a great visualization of the whole team's workload and make it easy to see when someone has too much work to handle within specific periods of time. This helps you make adjustments when needed and eliminate the risk of employee burnout. 

Help employees develop their skills

Resource management tools help you create a skills index to keep track of everyone’s skills and professional interests as well, as their relevant seniority. This makes it easier to surface opportunities for upskilling and skill development, and find the people most interested in those opportunities.

Identify and fix resource conflicts

When you are working with a single resource pool and multiple projects at the same time, it is easy to double-book your resources or cause some conflicts. With a resource management tool, however, this is easier to avoid, as you will always have sight of individual workloads and projects assigned. 

Maximize billable work and resource utilization

Resource management tools are all about making the most out of your existing resources and avoiding overstaffing. They also help you see if people are losing time to admin tasks or other non-billable work that could be optimized for increased profitability. Not to mention the fact that when work hours are logged, the work provided will never slip through the cracks and you can be sure to bill your customers for all the services provided. Check out how this is possible in our new case study:

Forecast resource demand and future capacity

A good tool will help you make accurate predictions about the way your resource situation will change and the way it can impact your bottom line so you can make staffing decisions accordingly. 

Support hiring decisions and training requirements

With all the insights accumulated from your resource management tool, you will be able to easily tell if someone needs extra training or if there are some skills gaps to fill with new hires.

Related: 9 Ways to Get Buy-in for New Resource Management Software

Best resource management tools

In the past, resource management was 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.

1. Runn - The best resource management tool for IT and custom software businesses

Runn is resource management software that aligns projects, people, and strategy under an intuitive interface, so teams can match supply and demand and forecast their capacity needs with accuracy.

Too robust for small teams, Runn works best for teams from 50 to 2,000 people. It's the perfect solution for professional services businesses that want high-level visibility over their people and projects.

Key features: 

• Project planning. Plan projects without getting into the task level. Runn helps you create high-level project plans where you don't need to worry about the details. Toggle on tentative projects if you want to see how they reflect on your team's capacity.
• Resource scheduling. Just click and drag on the timeline to add the work days, then specify the work hours. If you’re not happy with the initial scheduling, split it, transfer it to someone else, or assign it to a placeholder if you don’t know who to assign it to yet. (Talk about quickly editing changes!)
• Capacity planning. Turn on Runn's charts to get clarity on your people's availability, workloads, and commitments.
• Skills management. Runn is built for businesses that depend on assembling highly technical teams who have the skills needed to tackle complex projects. You can tag all your employees with their skills and experience levels, so you are always able to search and find out who on your team has necessary capabilities for upcoming projects.
• Time tracking. Unite your resource planning with timesheets in a single platform. Download Runn's Chrome extension to register time on projects with ease.
• Finances. Track your project budgets including cost, revenue, and profit in real time. Budget by phase is available too. ‍
• Customizable reporting. Create capacity reports, utilization reports, availability reports, bench reports, actual vs. planned - you name it. You can match Runn's reporting capabilities to your needs based on the data that's in the system.

What’s worth noticing is that Runn is putting people front and center - 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.

In addition, check Runn's new Insights feature with high-level utilization data: 

Price: 

Plans start from $7 per resource per month. Check out plans and pricing ➡️

2. Float - Resource scheduling tool for creative teams

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.

Key features: 

• Minimalistic design. It features a date range selector that allows you to visualize your team’s workload, resource availability, and capacity for a given period.
• Merged timelines. Float’s timeline merges the actual scheduled time with the logged one. Time tracking users will love this, as they’ll better understand their efforts in relation to the initial resource forecasts.
• Personal tags. Equally valuable are the personal tags to identify skills at a glance, the “Me” toggle for viewing individual hourly bookings, and the possibility to set a scheduled status to alert your team that you’re working from home (connects with Slack too).
• Simple analytics. You can keep tabs open on your resource utilization, project budgets, and time off without too many configurations whenever you access a people or project report.

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Price: 

Starts at $6 per user/month.

Keep reading: Runn vs Float - Putting the Best in Resource Planning to Test

3. Resource Guru - Simple entry-level resource management software

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. 

Key features: 

• User-friendly interface. In the past year, the platform’s design has evolved into a sortable table layout where clients, projects, bookings, resource availabilities, and days off are skimmable at a calendar view level.
• Resource clash management. This is Resource Guru’s main differentiator. You can automatically prevent overbookings — those with diagonal bars over a red background — by putting them on a waiting list that you can deal with later on.
• Physical resources tracking. Another unique feature is physical resources to account for meeting rooms and equipment, although they cost extra. 

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 resource management platform. 

Price: 

Starts at $4.16 per user/month and $2.08 per non-human resource/month.

4. Kantata - Enterprise resource management tool

Previously known as Mavenlink, Kantata is a popular enterprise project and resource management tool specializing in resource optimizations.

Key features:

• Master planner. The master planner feature displays workloads and allocations across all projects, helping you take a resource-first approach to managing resources.
• Team builder. This feature helps with resource allocation, letting you staff projects by recommending resources based on their role, skill, and availability. Note that each criterion can be weighted on a scale of 0-10 to create your recommendation engine.
• Resource forecasting. This feature is Kantata’s ace in the hole. Project managers can compare the actual resource costs against a project’s total revenue to better understand their project pipeline’s needs and timing. Beware though, resources with different hourly rates might mess up your final profitability figures.

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. 

Price: 

Quotation-based.

5. Resource Management by Smartsheet - Resource planning tool by Smartsheet

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. 

Key features: 

• Resource schedule. It gives you a talent pool for matching skills with job roles, timesheets, and a visual resource allocation heatmap that acts as a window into your team’s capacity.
• Granular account settings. The tool’s key strength lies in the granular account settings that customize different resource-related aspects.

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.

Price:

$7 per user/month.

6. Teamdeck - Best agile resource management tool

Teamdeck acts as a single source of truth, reuniting resource scheduling, time tracking, and leave management under a sleek UI.

Key features: 

• High visibility. Bookings, timesheets, and availabilities are stacked up by default one under another to limit distractions and increase the overall visibility. You can still re-arrange them and save the preferred view, along with a few indicators for the remaining and tracked hours.
• Time tracker. Teamdeck aims to simplify time tracking by introducing a start-and-stop timer for convenience, in addition to the classic timesheets. After everyone has logged their hours, you can create a utilization hill-chart report to measure their productivity and spot patterns early on.
• Robust reporting. There are six available report templates to help you out. While the custom ones allow you to group data after specific parameters, say the overbookings for a specific project and job role.

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.

Price:

Starts at $3.60 per user/month.

7. Productive - Best resource management tool for agencies 

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Productive is the one-stop shop for agencies of different types and sizes when they’re seeking to improve anything from resource planning and budgeting to reporting and time tracking. This tool gives you a unified system to consolidate all agency data. It helps you run projects all the way from prospect to payment and makes complex budgeting a lot simpler. 

Key features:

• Resource planning. This feature helps you balance your team’s workload and gives visibility into everyone’s setup: who’s working on what, who’s off or on vacation, etc. You can also use this feature to create placeholders for upcoming work so you can later hire contractors or additional staff and see how much it will cost you. 
• Budget planning & forecasting. The tool signals you when a project is about to run out of money and helps you stay on top of all financials. You can use this unified system to plan and predict your finances, as well to bill your customers for the delivered work. 
• Workload management. This feature is one of their latest additions but it is of great values to agencies of different sizes. It helps you visualize everyone’s daily and weekly workloads so you can be sure to never spread your resources too thin or risk timely project delivery. 

Price: 

Starts at $9 per user/month when billed yearly. 

8. Scoro – Advanced resource management with built-in financial clarity

Scoro is a full professional services automation (PSA) platform with resource management at its core.

Unlike lightweight scheduling tools, Scoro combines capacity planning, utilization tracking, project timelines, and financial data in one system. Giving agencies and consultancies a clear view of workload, availability, and profitability.

Key features:

• Live utilization and availability. Scoro shows real-time workloads across people and roles, with utilization heatmaps that highlight who’s at capacity and who has room for more work.
• Capacity forecasting with financial context. You can see how ongoing projects and upcoming deals will impact future capacity. Helping teams make confident hiring or outsourcing decisions.
• Flexible scheduling and scenario planning. Drag-and-drop scheduling, soft (tentative) bookings, and automatic dependency updates make it easy to allocate work and replan quickly when timelines change.

Price:

Starts at $19.90 per user/month, depending on plan and configuration.

What’s the best resource management software for you? 

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:

• Give you the means to see who’s working on what, when, and for how long.
• Help you find the right person for the right job (read: assist with efficient resource allocation).
• Ensure your employees don’t burn out in the process (help you track their vacation, for example).

Continue reading: 

• What Are Some Red & Green Flags When Evaluating a Software Vendor?
• The Buyer's Guide to Resource Management Software