LiquidPlanner Reviews

- Customizable (To a Degree)
- Reporting Capabilities
- Excellent Interface with Our Client Invoicing Application

- Extremely Time Consuming to Set Up & Deploy
- Frequent Software Changes Requires Extra Time to Maintain & Reconfigure
- Expensive Relative to Similar Application Alternatives

I was very happy with the ease of use this product provided compared to some of the tools we used previously. It is built in a contemporary look and feel and is easy to navigate and manipulate data points in order to determine trends and better inform decisions. If you have the time and resources to dedicate to making sure the latest project data is always available, that is, due dates, estimated levels of effort remaining and hours logged are all kept up to date in a real-time basis, this tool has the potential to truly provide a wholistic and accurate view of the workload within an organization, along with any potential risks. The way the data are refreshed using the forecasting algorithms is a great feature which allows project managers to shift tasks around to determine how resources are affected.

Despite the name of "Liquid" Planner, there were some decidedly "unliquid" principals in which the software was built upon which power the accuracy and overall value of the product. If more then 25% of these principals are not known or regularly updated, the entire product grinds to a halt and the value it provides is completely lost. It's not a fault of how the product was built. I never encountered a time where the service/software was down or unavailable and each time I reached out to the support team they were courteous and prompt with their response. Overall, I felt frustrated by the amount of data the tool needs (and how that data need to be structured) in order for the tool to be valuable and viable. More often than not, I felt myself and the team responsible for the tool were spending more time administering the tool itself rather than using the information coming out of the tool to better our projects.

The product is well designed so that it is a relatively low bar to learn how to use it effectively. It is easy for team members to interact with the software and to enter the information according to each users project role. When used as intended, the software does an excellent job providing the necessary views into project status. The software definitely lives up to its name as modifying project plans and priorities is easy and the impacts of such changes are essentially instantly available. The numerous but intuitive ways to manage project subtleties such as available time, delays, etc. make it straightforward to create realistic project schedules.

I do not have any specific negatives with respect to Liquid Planner. Like any software of this class, It does take some training and experience to get the most out of it. My best advice is to spend some time to understand how the designers intended the product to be used use it accordingly. LP has a rich set of features and if used properly will contribute positively to project management.

As a web development agency, I can tell you the one feature that has prevented me from using another product, that is their task estimating feature. Why nobody else does this is beyond me (full disclosure: a lot of things are beyond me) :)

When setting up a task you can actually estimate the time it will take the same way real people estimate tasks, with a time range. Who in the world ever hits their single estimate time targets all the time? NOBODY. With Liquid Planner you enter a range, 3 - 6 hours, 1-2 hours, etc. THAT IS A LIFESAVER FOR US.

Another concept of theirs called "packages" is also brilliant. There you can take tasks and bundle them up into "folders" that make sense to you, so you can look at your projects

The thing that I dislike the most is there are not many integrations with third party time keepers for tasks and billing programs. Harvest would be an example, as would many others. They have their own time tracker, but to use it you ahve to have the app open. Lose internet, forget about it. Working in a car or on the train without internet? Forget about it.

Also, their mobile app is not really of much value.

This software helps our agency thrive and manage a lot of work with ease. We have out entire in house team as well as select contractors set up in this tool for our time tracking and project management of tasks and projects. It offers tons of flexibility and allows us to follow a hybrid waterfall/agile approach to managing work. Schedules are easy to create and export on the fly, reassigning team members and forecasting are easy, etc. It's also very easy to prioritize project work and escalate accordingly and look out and plan months in advance.

Might be a little outdated feeling in that there isn't a Trello-style board to drag and drop projects/tasks/people, though there is a similar functionality still built in to the tool. It's also not really designed to allow external project teams (your clients) into the system, but there are workarounds.

I like the conversation that LP forces around how much time something will take and the idea that building out a list of smaller to-do's will help you identify how much time a task will take to complete. I like LP so much more than a traditional project management tool.

There is a lack of flexibility when looking at projects and tasks together. In Notion, I am much more able to plan out task due dates across multiple projects and tasks that are in-flight at the same time. LP does not have enough flexibility to really meet the needs of a small team working on lots of things at the same time. It is too siloed.

The thing that I like most about LiquidPlanner is the ability to schedule projects and tasks far out, and the accuracy of the scheduling algorithm related to the work that you should be doing in relation to the deadlines you have.

The thing that I like the least is that the software currently doesn't have as many capabilities for calculations and financial tracking. I wish there was more abilities to track expenses and project costs in relation to the work you have tracked.

The automatic resource allocation, and automatic scheduling. Their customer support has been amazing from the LP team.

Has been difficult for building internal dashboards to track all our revenue data. This is greatly improving and look forward to the new enhancements.

Very easy to use, but also robust project planner. The priority-driven schedule makes getting a snapshot of your overall project a breeze. Not making your dates? Rearranging the priorities of tasks simply by drag and drop to see the outcome. Reporting is easy and offers many options and the dashboards are very helpful.

I do wish there were more reporting options to allow greater customization. I know they have an API for this sort of thing, but I don't want to dig into that. Just a few more fields, options and customization opportunities would be nice. I do have to say that their support team is always very interested in hearing about customer wants and needs, so to be fair, I have not actually requested any of these reporting wish list items yet.

Having used many project management tools over many years, it's hard to not fall in love with LiquidPlanner. It feels like I've traveled to bizarro world where everything goes right.

I can now put together comprehensive projects faster than I can plan them in my mind. I've never had this experience (including with Excel). Simply put, I don't feel the interface slowing me down. It feels like all "busy work" has been removed.

I never thought I'd have a real-time schedule because of the requirements to maintain it, but LiquidPlanner delivers on this promise. Thank you. I'm embarrassed to say that "what if" scenarios are so easy and fast to do, I've developed stronger intuitive scheduling techniques without understanding exactly why they work. Am I now smarter or dumber?

If you are not the type to love the clock-in/out button on each task, you might be the type to get hooked on adding a few notes when you complete each task because your notes are shared in the team's "blog."

Introducing a new company-wide system is always hard, but you you can use Liquid Planner to replace your project management tools, time-tracking tools and company blog so that should help reduce the total number of systems.

Currently companies that need a fully-featured document library should stick with what they have. There is an API and the company has been aggressively releasing new features so maybe someday.

If you haven't experienced a lot of project management tools, you may not be as passionate about it as I am. Part of it's appeal is that it does what any other project management tool integrated with a company portal can do, but it does it fast and easy enough that it's actually worth using.

It does a lot of things well. It offers a lot of advanced scheduling functionality for project managers. The Projects tab is incredibly powerful. Time tracking works well. Tagging people in comments is a useful feature.

Liquid Planner's interface is kind of slow for us (we have a lot of projects). The Home and My Work tabs aren't very useful to me--they never seem to show me the right subset of tasks, which is possibly due to the way we're organizing projects and tasks, which causes most people to use the Projects tab, which is powerful, but advanced and cluttered. API integrations work well enough, but the Zapier integration, in particular, is lacking much useful functionality in my opinion. For example, what if someone wanted to send a Slack notification to a particular person every time a task was assigned to them? Currently, either not possible or at least much more difficult than it could be.

LiquidPlanner is a powerful project management tool. It can be used to track tasks, projects, employee capacity, schedules, deliverables, and hours. I find that the most important and helpful feature of LiquidPlanner is its ability to track employee capacity and move estimated completion dates back if someone is overloaded. This is crucial if you are working in an environment with multiple projects going on at the same time who are obliged to share certain resources (2D artists, programmers, video editors, etc.)

At most I can think of only two cons related to LiquidPlanner
1. Setting up a project in LiquidPlanner is definitely time-consuming. Project managers will need to dedicate several hours to transforming their WBS information to something that works in LP. However, this is just a drain on PMs and not project team members.
2. In some environments it can be difficult to get employees to "buy-in" to LiquidPlanner and consistently update their hours and tasks. It's a behavior change and culture shift that must be encouraged and re-enforced regularly.

It allows for multi-platform communication between teams that are separated by distance and also time. Since project statuses are sent to email, I can respond through my email back to the software to offer updates and answers when I am away from my desk.
The drag and drop capability of including word, spreadsheeet and pdf files allows for information to be posted to the project entry allowing us to maintain project oversight at all times.

It can be complicated to new users. The interface isn't immediately clear for helping a new user understand what the product can offer. While I can respond to a email sent to me from the software, I cannot email the project directly for status updates.

LP does just about everything we need it to do, and is incredibly flexible and adaptable to different types of projects.

The reporting is a little cumbersome, with lots of different kinds of reports that all have different metrics associated with them. It could use a 'wizard' type tool to help design reports, or at least help you find the report type that will best suit your needs.