LiquidPlanner Review | PCMag

LiquidPlanner is an impressively complex and powerful project management app. After a massive overhaul of both its code base and interface in 2021, it's also easier to use, though “easier” is a relative word. The app still requires a significant time investment to learn, set up projects, and—hopefully—one day master. While we classify LiquidPlanner as project management software, it can do much more than simply manage projects. It helps teams track and schedule not only work, but also resources, including staff, external partners, and resources like equipment. If you commit to mastering LiquidPlanner, the payoff is worthwhile, especially for large organizations juggling multiple projects and large teams. 

If LiquidPlanner sounds like overkill for your needs, there are many other excellent options for project management apps or even more modest collaboration apps that can help you manage your workload.

What's New in LiquidPlanner?

Every couple of years since 2014 or so, we take LiquidPlanner for a test drive. We're happy that in 2021 LiquidPlanner rolled out not only a new look but a wholly new version of the app. Customers who had been using LiquidPlanner before the 2021 release have the option to continue using the old version of the app, now known as LiquidPlanner Classic or LP Classic.

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The new version of the app is easier to use and has a much improved interface, but offers different features. Here, I cover the highlights.

Pricing and plans are entirely new, covered in depth in the next section. The highest tier of service costs a little less than the previous Professional plan, though you get more options now to pay monthly, quarterly, and so on.

The Workspace Hub has some new features and changes that make it easier to find what you need, including training and support. A new Organization section houses your plan information. Dashboard-like Usage tiles have color-coded meter bars that turn orange when your plan reaches 90% usage of any limited features. Other changes and improvements related to account management simplify the ability to upgrade or downgrade plans, view how many licenses an account has, and so forth.

Managing access control has been simplified somewhat with a checkbox system, though it's still complicated. LiquidPlanner has a series of access levels called Explicit, Implicit, and No Access, which you manage at different levels. For example, if you grant someone access at the level of a Package level, they implicitly have access to all the Projects within it. Explicit access is access at the Workspace or Container level, meaning the broadest access. When looking at a page showing each person's permissions, the designation appears as a color in the checkbox: Explicit Access is dark blue, implicit access is light blue, and No Access is an empty gray checkbox. It takes time to wrap your head around this system.

These are just a few of the changes. If you're jumping over to the new LiquidPlanner from LP Classic, you'll notice many others, such as some menu items having moved, changes to the permissions given to each Role, and the fact you can now contact support without leaving the workspace.

How Much Does LiquidPlanner Cost?

Since we last reviewed the app, LiquidPlanner has expanded its offerings to be more cost effective for small- and medium-sized organizations. It now has four plans: Free, Essentials, Professional, and Ultimate. A 15-day trial of the Ultimate plan is available. I recommend signing up for this trial only when you can dedicate several hours to learning how to use LiquidPlanner during that window. It's difficult to overstate how important it is to make time to learn LiquidPlanner.

For all the paid plans, you can choose to pay monthly, quarterly, semiannually, or annually. Below I list the monthly (least cost effective) and annual (most cost effective) prices only for simplicity.

Plans and Pricing

The Free plan is truly free with no time limit and no banking details required. It supports five team members, three projects, and a maximum of 300 tasks. You don't get every feature with this plan, as summarized in the next section.

Essentials costs $19 per person per month or $180 per person per year. This plan includes the same features as the Free plan. The difference is there's no limit on team members, and you can have 50 projects and a maximum of 5,000 tasks. 

Professional costs $32 per person per month or $300 per person per year. It supports 500 projects and a maximum of 50,000 tasks. You get all the same features included in the Essentials plan, but you miss out on some of the features that would be appealing to very large organizations for organizing and managing users, groups, Workspaces, and so on.

Ultimate costs $45 per person per month or $420 per person per year. It has no limit on the number of projects or tasks you can put into your account, and it includes every feature LiquidPlanner offers. Very large teams can contact the company for a volume discount. 

Included Features for Plan Types

Free and Essential plans come with the same features. You get all the core project management tools and Predictive Scheduling, but you don't get most time-tracking features, customization options, and several other tools.

Professional and Ultimate plan members get some features Free and Essentials users don't get, including:

• Custom fields, custom filtering, and customizable cost codes;

• Package dashboards for creating and sharing dashboard widgets that scale across projects;

• Timesheet review and export to Excel so managers can easily review and analyze time-tracking performance; and

• Workspace dashboard for drawing quick insight across a workspace.

Ultimate plan members get some unique features, beyond what you might expect to find in an enterprise-grade version of a software-as-a-service tool, such as:

• Members and Resource Groups, which allow very large organizations to more effectively filter and analyze data, as well as controlling who has access to what;

• Project access controls for finely customizing different people's access to projects and packages;

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• Multiple Workspaces for separating brands or departments in a way that makes sense for your organization;

• Group Workload and Board Views, which are group-focused views you can save and view easily at any time; and

• Access management tools for granting or limiting permissions of project managers, project editors, and project observers in a simplified view.

How Do LiquidPlanner's Prices Compare?

LiquidPlanner used to cost much more than other project management apps, but that's not the case anymore now that there are four tiers of service at varying price points. That said, the plan that most teams will want if they find LiquidPlanner a fit is the highest tier of service.

It's tough to get an accurate price comparison among project management apps because they offer a variety of plan types, and some use complicated pricing structures. Regardless, LiquidPlanner Ultimate's rate of $45 per person per month is high.

Other high-end apps run about $40 per person per month or more for their highest tier of service, and even more for an enterprise-grade plan. Mavenlink and Clarizen are two examples. They're both powerful and rich with features. A rough estimate for an enterprise plan for those apps, based on research and prior conversations with representatives, is $45–$80 per person per month. Celoxis is a lower-cost alternative that has advanced project management tools for only $25 per person per month for a cloud-based system or $450 per person (one-time fee) for a self-hosted installation.

Small organizations that don't need enterprise-grade software can expect to pay a lot less, somewhere around $10 per person per month. Zoho Projects and GanttPro, which are Editors' Choice winners, and TeamGantt, all fall into this category.

Apps with a mid-range price go for around $15–$30 per person per month. Smartsheet, Paymo, EasyProjects, and Microsoft Project are a few examples. These apps sometimes offer more than others, although what they offer varies. If you need something specific, such as integrated invoicing and billing or proofing tools, you can usually find it in this mid-tier, but you'll have to do some research to get what you want.

What Makes LiquidPlanner Different?

The simplest project management apps help you define a project, list all the tasks that need to be done to complete the project, assign those tasks to workers, and then track the progress of work while it occurs. All project management apps give you some amount of insight into when people miss deadlines and how one task's delay may affect other tasks down the line. LiquidPlanner does more. Here are a few of its standout features.

Predictive Scheduling

LiquidPlanner's signature feature is Predictive Scheduling. It's an automated way of figuring out when tasks should be done and when a project will finish based on a number of factors. Some of those factors include resource availability, whether preceding tasks will be completed on time, and staff availability. Predictive Scheduling is dynamic, adjusting the dates right when work should be done in real time right before your eyes when factors change. In short, LiquidPlanner figures out the start and end dates for tasks for you, so you don't have to do it.

You get options, such as whether to set a firm deadline for when a project must end so that you get warnings if you're in danger of not hitting that deadline, or you can leave the end date open and continue scheduling tasks until everything is finished. When you use Predictive Scheduling, LiquidPlanner gives you a realistic estimate for when the project should wrap up, based on a best-case and worst-case scenario.

In many other project management apps, you enter a deadline for every task manually. Some apps also let you enter start dates as well as a time estimate for how long you think each task will take—but not all of them do. In any event, the point is that in most project management apps, it's up to you and your team to add deadlines and make sure you aren't scheduling anyone to do the impossible, though some apps will draw your attention to a potentially bad situation, like someone on the team being assigned too much work. Almost no other project management apps offer predictive automated scheduling, though, one exception being Celoxis.

Time Tracking and Scheduling Together

In addition to having fields where you can estimate how long a task will take, LiquidPlanner has a built-in time tracking tool. It's not the only project management app that includes time tracking, but it's worth calling out because not having it can be a deal-breaker for teams that need it.

Time tracking is useful for both figuring out how long tasks take as well as billing clients. You can switch on a time-tracking module and run it in your browser while you work. When you're done, you stop the timer and either save or discard the minutes captured. The recorded time gets attached to the task in your project and a timesheet. You can export all this captured time to use in a separate billing or invoicing system, as LiquidPlanner does not include them. If you forget to launch a timer, you can always enter time worked manually or correct a time log after the fact.

Managing Resources Other Than Humans

Another standout feature in LiquidPlanner is resource management. Again, it's not exclusive to LiquidPlanner, but very few project management apps offer it.

In LiquidPlanner, you get tools for viewing and managing people's workloads, i.e., human resources, and you get a similar tool for managing capital ‘R' Resources. A Resource is either a nonhuman resource, such as a piece of equipment, or a person or group of people who are external to your team and don't log into your LiquidPlanner account. Having Resources lets you schedule these additional people or assets. You get two Resources in your account for every licensed user.

To understand Resources, a simple example helps. Say your organization rents one video editing bay, and everyone on the team must share it. Each team that needs it must reserve the editing bay at the right time in their project schedule. If their schedule slips, they can't just push their deadlines by a few days willy-nilly because the editing bay might be reserved for another team. LiquidPlanner lets you first create a Resource and then set its availability, such as Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Being able to enter days and hours is especially useful when you have truly limited access to a particular resource. Once you have a Resource set up, you can assign it to tasks as needed and LiquidPlanner will figure out when you'll be able to do those tasks based on all the factors.

In addition to Resources, LiquidPlanner gives you Placeholders. You can create different Placeholders and then use them as stand-in assignees when you don't know who should be assigned a task yet. For example, you might make a Placeholder called Engineer and use it as the assignee when setting up tasks when you don't know which engineers will be available.

Before Starting, You Must Learn LiquidPlanner

When you first sign up to try LiquidPlanner, you can choose to start with a sample project. It's enough to give you a sense of the app's structure, but not enough to see its power. A few pop-up boxes tell you what's what, and there's an in-app tutorial called The Academy that could take you well more than an hour to go through if you read everything, watch all the videos, and take the time to make sure you understand it all.

In addition, there's a whole page of Quick Video Tips, but they are hardly “quick.” A video called Resource & Workload Reporting comes in at 57 minutes. Capacity Planning 101 is 59 minutes long. Tracking Your Project Costs is an hour. The company offers 30-minute demos, too, if you prefer to set up a time to learn from a human being.

LiquidPlanner offers all this help and more because you'll need it. I would not recommend picking up LiquidPlanner unless you can set aside a few hours a week for several weeks to learn how to use it.

If you're getting started with LiquidPlanner and already have a project in progress or have outlines of coming projects, you can upload tasks from an Excel sheet. LiquidPlanner provides an Excel template if you need one as well. The only hitch is you can only upload 100 tasks at a time.

LiquidPlanner includes some sample templates to help you get started and learn the ropes in a hands-on way. You can make your own templates, too.

Task Details

Tasks hold a wealth of data. Every task can have subtasks, and both tasks and subtasks have best and worst-case time estimates, a recording of hours logged and hours of work remaining, and more fields for collecting and tracking data. You can mark a task to be scheduled in order or independently from other tasks in the project. You also have the option to complete the task to be automatically scheduled “as soon as possible” in the project schedule or within the context of the Package (a group of projects) if necessary.

LiquidPlanner offers insights at the task level as well. For example, if you've scheduled a task to be completed in order following other tasks, and those prior tasks are taking longer, a little tip appears to tell you the task is taking longer for that reason.

Any task can have a short description in the main view as well. A notes field for formatted text and uploaded images is available, but it's under a separate tab. You cannot attach PDFs or other kinds of nonimage files to tasks, however, although you can in LP Classic. A workaround is to attach a link to a file, although then you must make sure the link has the appropriate sharing permissions. It would be much better if LiquidPlanner supported file attachments.

Assignees use the task view to update the number of hours worked on a task, though doing so takes more clicking and opening of windows than it seems like it should. In many other project management apps, you get an editable field right in the main task view.

Gantt Charts

Like nearly every project management app, LiquidPlanner has Gantt charts. The Gantt chart appears alongside a table view of tasks, and it shows tasks as spanner bars along a timeline. There are three big differences in how LiquidPlanner presents Gantt charts compared to other project management apps, and if you're coming to LiquidPlanner from a different app, they may be a bit of an unpleasant surprise.

First, you cannot dynamically interact with the Gantt chart, whereas in other apps you can drag and drop tasks to change their scheduled dates or draw connecting lines among them to create dependencies. In LiquidPlanner, Gantt charts are a view-only affair. LiquidPlanner does let you rearrange the order of tasks by dragging and dropping them in the table, however, and Predictive Scheduling kicks in automatically to adjust dates for all tasks right before your eyes. In other words, as soon as you rearrange the priorities of tasks, you watch your Gantt chart shift to accommodate the change. Still, there's no way to make changes to your project by directly futzing with the Gantt chart.

Second, LiquidPlanner does not show dependencies on the Gantt chart with the standard connector lines you see in other project management apps. It takes care of dependencies for you, and there's a symbol in the table view indicating when a dependency exists, but it doesn't show them in the Gantt chart itself. The Gantt chart also doesn't show subtasks, which feels very unusual. In most project management apps, you can expand a task with a drop-down button to see subtasks on the Gantt chart. LiquidPlanner only shows parent tasks and not subtasks in the main view. You can open a task in a new window to see subtasks represented as spanner bars, but they're not in the primary Gantt view.

Third, you can't zoom in and out on the Gantt chart. You can expand the view by collapsing some of the tables to the left of the chart, but you cannot zoom in or out to see the amount of time you choose.

Other Views

Another view, the Board view, shows tasks on a kanban-style board. Each column represents a stage in the task workflow, such as In Progress or Done. Viewing tasks on the Board can make it easier to see at a glance the status of many assignments. To change the status quickly, you just drag and drop the card representing the task. LiquidPlanner comes preloaded with several task statuses, though you can change them or add to them to better reflect your team's work and workflow.

LiquidPlanner offers a few other types of views and insights, including several ways to look at employee workloads. In terms of resource management, LiquidPlanner offers more than most other project management apps. For example, you look at a graph that shows when employees have tasks assigned to them and how much of their time is accounted for, with planned time off appearing in gray. You can see the remaining hours of work you can schedule for each employee and availability used shown as a percent. By default, you see a 30-day window at a show, which you can change to 60 or 90 days.

Managing Work and People Beyond Projects

LiquidPlanner isn't just for managing projects and resources. The app can handle ad-hoc work, too, meaning tasks that are not part of a deadline-driven project. For example, it's possible to set up the app to help you manage ongoing work, such as ticket queues.

When balancing workloads and figuring out who is available for work, it sure does help to know about people's planned time off. LiquidPlanner lets you schedule time off for individuals as well as everyone in the account. When you mark people as unavailable for work in this way, the Predictive Scheduling feature won't assign them work during that time and will adjust other timelines and due dates accordingly.

Reports and Dashboards

LiquidPlanner includes a range of reports and dashboards, so be sure to set aside some time to learn what they are, which ones you can create, and how to customize them. Some of the valuable reports are more like views or insights within LiquidPlanner, rather than reports you create and export. For example, there's a Rollup report summarizing work that's done versus left to do when you expand a parent task view.

As mentioned, if you have one of the lower tiers of service with the new LiquidPlanner, you can see on a dashboard how close you are to reaching any of the limits set on your account, which is supremely helpful. The resource management reports, where you can see a list of how much work is assigned to each person as well as when people have time off, is also quite useful on a day-to-day basis. Timesheet reviews and the ability to export timesheets to Excel files also make the resource management aspects of LiquidPlanner highly valuable. Related to timesheets are cost codes, which help you keep track of billable work. LiquidPlanner lets you include them in your exported timesheets.

Integrations

The new LiquidPlanner doesn't offer integrations with other apps, though a representative from the company said a Slack integration is in the works.

LP Classic supports integration with several services, including a variety of online calendars, Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive. At one point, it offered an integration with Salesforce, but that's been discontinued. LP Classic lets you set up a few other integrations, but they're not a one-touch setup, requiring you to use third-party tools or APIs.

If you need to integrate your project management app with other apps, LiquidPlanner may not be a great fit. Zoho Projects is better, seeing as its part of the larger Zoho line of business software. ProjectManager.com also supports a long list of integration options. Celoxis is strong in this area as well.

What's Missing?

When you're in the LiquidPlanner interface, there's no generic Help search bar like you get with some apps, and for an app this complicated, it sure would help to have one. Many times, while testing LiquidPlanner, I wanted to type in the name of a tool or function to figure out where it lives in the interface, the way you can with Google Docs, for instance. You can search the Academy help files, but that's different from being able to quickly find the tool you need in the moment.

LP Classic has milestones, but the new LiquidPlanner does not. Milestones are nothing more than moments during a project when some set of work has been completed. Project managers sometimes create milestones because it helps them think through and plan their projects accurately. For example, “By such and such date, we need to have accomplished X, Y, and Z to be on time and move to the next phase.” You can almost get the same effect by arranging tasks and subtasks in a certain way such that X, Y, and Z are subtasks to a parent task, meaning when they are all complete, the parent task is complete and therefore acts as a milestone. But then you run into the problem of not being able to see X, Y, and Z on the Gantt chart. In any event, many project managers want to be able to add milestones independently of tasks and subtasks.

If your team thrives on group work, where two or more people might be responsible for a single task, LiquidPlanner isn't especially useful. Only one person or resource can be assigned to a single task. You can, however, create a custom field for Multiuser, which appears in the task's properties, but that's still different from being able to assign one task to multiple people.

Automated Schedule and Resource Management

LiquidPlanner is a capable online project management and work management tool. Its areas of specialization and differentiation are 1) automated predictive scheduling and 2) resource management, both human and nonhuman. At the highest tier of service, you also get a lot of customization features that ensure your app experience best reflects how your team works. Because LiquidPlanner is feature-rich and uses a unique system for scheduling, it requires a significant time investment and commitment to learn to use correctly and to its fullest extent. If your team juggles a lot of projects and people, LiquidPlanner is a great project management tool built for you. 

If LiquidPlanner sounds like it offers more than you need, there are plenty of other options. Small and growing businesses may like Editors' Choice winners Zoho Projects, GanttPro, and Teamwork. Zoho Projects is extremely affordable and fully featured. GanttPro is competitively priced and simple to learn to use. Teamwork is more of a mid-tier service and focuses a bit more than other apps on supporting client-based work.