The 10 Best Resource Management Software & Tools Of 2024

Kantata is a well-rounded tool that bridges the core planning, execution, project accounting, and analysis systems in a single operating environment. It has modules for project management, accounting, resource management, business intelligence, and team collaboration for services teams and agencies.

Why I picked Kantata: What appeals to me about Kantata is their system of dashboards, live time and expense tracking features, and their great documenting system. The resource management module offers real-time utilization and margins at the project and even the task level. From what I've seen, Kantata truly offers a comprehensive RM suite that even includes accounting tools like project costing, budget management, and invoicing. Despite requiring time to really master, Kantata has been widely recognized as being easy to use and learn and I believe that Kantata's benefits are worth the time.

Kantata Standout Features & Integrations

Features that are particularly impressive include Kantata's professional services. The platform makes its Kantata BI Consultants available to users, meaning you have access to a team who can build reports specifically for your business and provide training to your resources to help mitigate the risks and costs of implementation. Further worthwhile features include resource forecasting, capacity management, skills management, scenario planning, and role-based planning.

Integrations include pre-built integrations with tools like Expensify, G Suite, Netsuite, Jira, Hubspot, Xero, Salesforce, Slack, Concur, Qualtrics, Dynamics 365, and Quickbooks. They also provide an integration platform called M-Bridge to help you build your own integrations.

Runn is a real-time resource, demand, and capacity planning tool with integrated time tracking and powerful forecasting capabilities. I think it is a great tool for getting a bird’s-eye view of all projects and people to instantly spot over-bookings and identify resourcing patterns.

Why I picked Runn: I chose Runn for this list because of how easy it is to create project phases and allocations. You can drag and drop assets, as well as toggle between monthly, quarterly, and 6-month views to plan for the short and long term. If you don’t have the right person at the right time, you can use placeholders instead, which I think is an excellent way to visualize when projects or teams will need to scale up and hire more team members to meet workload requirements. Planning out tentative projects also allows you to see how your resourcing plans might change if the work gets confirmed.

Runn Standout Features & Integrations

Features that make Runn stand out include its impressive visualizations of capacity, workload, availability, and billable and non-billable utilization. You can drill into different roles, teams and tags to compare trends and understand which groups are overbooked. Runn lets you track projects, view forecasts, utilization, project variance, and overall financial performance. And its built-in timesheets will help you understand how much time was worked compared to what was planned.

Integrations include apps like Harvest, WorkflowMax, and Clockify for importing project, client, and people data and syncing time entries. With Runn’s API, you can build your own integration to send data across your favorite tools.

Saviom is a resource management software that I believe is best suited to large enterprises. It's equipped to provide a visual overview of complex team needs and scheduling for projects with multiple moving pieces.

Why I picked Saviom: I chose Saviom for this list because it allows you to quickly identify which resources should be allocated where, based on factors like cost, availability, location, and competency, across the enterprise. You can easily gain high level visibility even in the presence of complicated matrices (for example, when you have verticals like domains, regions, teams, and departments, in addition to individual projects). Their project forecasting functionality helps to identify future vacancies, while keeping an eye on financials like profit margin, revenue, and costs.

Saviom Standout Features & Integrations

Features of Saviom that I find particularly impressive include their real-time BI, which allows you to meet changing demands. You can build portals, analytics, reports, and dashboards that are tailor-made for your needs, since Saviom is highly expandable and configurable. You can also control the visibility of data with filters. Other notable features include a multidimensional resource scheduler and planner, advanced forecasting and capacity planning, and real-time business intelligence.

Integrations include Outlook, Google, Salesforce, Jira, and custom integrations you can build using its data exchange framework.

Resource Guru is a dedicated resource management software that aims to make resource management user-friendly with quick scheduling tools.

Why I picked Resource Guru: I chose Resource Guru for this list because of its conflict resolution capabilities. Resource management and team collaboration are built in to make resource booking more straightforward, with clash management, leave management, and a waiting list to prevent over-booking. It helps project managers make bookings simultaneously with no chance of stepping on each other’s toes. Clashes are automatically prevented, which I hope will save you a huge headache.

Resource Guru Standout Features & Integrations

Features that really stand out to me for Resource Guru include individual resource dashboards that allow each staff member to log in and know exactly what they should be working on. To monitor business performance, powerful reports help identify which projects and clients are being over-serviced and assist you with monitoring team utilization and future capacity planning. Other notable features include drag-and-drop scheduling, equipment management, meeting room booking, capacity planning, and forecasting reports.

Integrations include calendar apps like Outlook calendar, Calendly, and Google calendar. Thousands of additional apps are accessible through Zapier.

Productive is an all encompassing agency management tool. This online resource management tool supports time tracking, employee cost rate management, budgeting and profitability reporting (among other features). You also get progress reports which show you the future revenue on every project.

Some other, standard resource management software features include multiple views (per project/person/team). Booking indicators tell you who’s overbooked or underbooked at a glance. You can also schedule people on custom events (vacation, sick leave, education, or anything else). It also factors in overheads and employee costs when calculating profitability, ensuring you can focus on improving your metrics without getting burdened by non-billable work.

One of the best things about this resource planning software is that Productive has very active development and a well defined roadmap. It was built to replace a non-integrated tool stack agencies usually struggle with, both in terms of cost and quality of reporting. All in all, Productive gives you an amazing, top-down view of your people’s capacity that also reflects on the rest of your business (reports, time tracking, profitability).

Productive’s integrations include an assortment of accounting tools such as QuickBooks Online and Xero. A Zapier integration is available too, along with an open API anyone can use.

Productive costs $9/user/month (billed annually). They also offer a fully-featured, free 14-day trial.

Celoxis is a web-based software for managing projects, resources, issues, risks, timesheets, workflows, and collaboration.

Why I picked Celoxis: I selected Celoxis for this list because its project dashboards and reporting options are customizable, which I think is especially important for ensuring that you can see resources, tasks, and project details in a layout or format that works for your team.

Other features and capabilities of Celoxis include accurate resource loads, resource utilization management, resource capacity, and efficiency. These features are helpful for planning and decision-making around resource allocation. In my opinion, the real-time and customizable reporting options are also helpful for decision-making.

Celoxis Standout Features & Integrations

Features include project request tracking, automatic scheduling, multiple resources per task, RAG health indicators, revenue forecasting, custom financial KPIs, and portfolio management.

Integrations include Microsoft Project, Excel, Google Drive, Outlook, Salesforce, dozens of other pre-built integrations, and thousands more through Zapier.

Celoxis Plans & Pricing

There is a cloud and an on-premise license available. Pricing for the cloud solution starts at $25/user/month, and on-premise pricing is available upon request.

ClickTime is a SaaS product that focuses on resource management and time tracking for businesses. With ClickTime, you can easily track employee hours, allocate resources, and gain insights into your team's performance and productivity.

Why I picked ClickTime: I chose ClickTime primarily for its ability to allow customers to manage projects, staffing, and capacity at once. I think it's perfect for businesses that need to keep a close eye on their projects and workforce. ClickTime's user-friendly interface and powerful features make it easy to track time, manage resources, and analyze data, in my opinion. However, I think the most value comes from its ability to prevent costly over-servicing mistakes, scope creep, and runaway project costs.

ClickTime Standout Features & Integrations

Features include the ability to combine billing rates, project budgets, staff vacation time, and more for a real-time view into a business. ClickTime captures both billable and non-billable tasks to ensure utilization is on target, so you can watch for wasted time or administrative overload. Another one would be budget tracking because it helps you track project budgets and expenses, making it easy to see where your money is going and identify areas for cost savings. Finally, its mobile app really helps with the software's adoption as it allows tracking on the go, making it easy for remote and field-based teams to stay connected and up-to-date.

Integrations include Sage, NetSuite, QuickBooks, Jira, BambooHR, HiBob, ADP, Zenefits, Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho, Box, Google Drive, Slack, and task management tools like ClickUp. It also supports single sign-on (SSO) with popular identity providers like Google, Microsoft, and Okta, making it easy for your team to access the platform securely. If you want to build custom integrations, you can use its API. However, if you don’t have the resources on hand to build your own custom integrations, they have a Professional Services team who can do the integration work for you.

Silverbucket is a resource planning tool for project-based businesses designed for use by architects, engineers, and IT professionals. Silverbucket is easy to use and allows users to view and compare resource plans and actual hours to get insights into the success of resource management activities, which I think makes it a great tool for project-based work.

Why I picked Silverbucket: I'm especially impressed by the Gantt chart visualization and drag-and-drop functionality. These two features offer a clear view of company resource allocation activities, including conflicts, workloads, and capacity levels, while making it easier for project managers to allocate team members to tasks and projects.

Skills tracking features such as tracking competencies and abilities are also included, as are reporting tools such as performance dashboards, insights on past resourcing plans, and forecasting for future resource management plans. Project managers can even keep an eye on project events through the informative activity feed, which tracks any updates to the project team, resource allocations, tasks, risks, or journals.

Silverbucket Standout Features & Integrations

Features include filtering and search options for easy navigation, utilization rates, and data-driven insights and analytics to support decision-making. Silverbucket also offers a max function to reserve a person's capacity to prevent overbooking.

Integrations include HubSpot, Microsoft Azure, Deltek, ValueFrame, PlanMill, Millnet, Power BI, Visma Severa, Marathon, Parm AG, and more.

Pricing starts from €10/planned person/month.

Microsoft Project includes familiar management tools for assigning project tasks to team members and using different views like Grid, Board, and Timeline (Gantt chart) to oversee the resource planning. Users can view and compare how resources are used across projects to optimize assignments.

In my experience, most people have used a Microsoft platform before. If you are familiar with other Microsoft programs, in particular Excel, then the interface and navigation will be familiar to you. I believe that this can help teams on a Usability level, as familiar software makes for easier training.

However, you probably know as well as I do that Microsoft isn't always perfect. A few critiques that would make this solution better for resource management is that you can’t open different projects across different windows (for, say, easily comparing resources between the two) and PDF exports look messy, so if you use them for reports or printable projects you will need some manual design intervention.

Integrations include other Microsoft software, like Outlook, Excel, Skype, and more.

MS Projects costs from $7/user/month and has a free 30-day trial.

Paymo is a resource management software that, in my opinion, has some of the best resource planning, scheduling, and management tools on the market all in one place. Based on my research, I would say that Paymo is best for small and medium-sized businesses or teams. With Paymo you’ll know who’s working on what and for how long and, more importantly, who’s under or overbooked.

Paymo can help you cut down on the unnecessary communication that happens every time you need a quick status update. My personal favorite feature is that you can work without email or Slack interruptions since in Paymo you get an accessible visual timeline 24/7. Paymo’s team scheduling tool also helps you plan unscheduled work by dragging and dropping tasks on that timeline. It sets auto-generated ghost bookings based on task time estimates, which you can then convert into actual bookings. Plus, you can plot out-of-office alerts so that workload is scheduled accordingly. Paymo has a built-in leave planner so you can easily set days off (parental leaves, sick leaves, or paid sabbaticals) and plan vacations in bulk.

Paymo integrates with Slack, Google, Zapier, to name a few.

Free for freelancers and teams of up to 10 users. Paid plans start at $9.95/user/month. Paymo comes with a 15-day free trial.