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Avolution ABACUS vs Planview Portfolios comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 3, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Avolution ABACUS
Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Planview Portfolios
Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
Project Portfolio Management (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Enterprise Architecture Management category, the mindshare of Avolution ABACUS is 3.1%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Planview Portfolios is 2.8%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Architecture Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Planview Portfolios2.8%
Avolution ABACUS3.1%
Other94.1%
Enterprise Architecture Management
 

Featured Reviews

JoseCamacho - PeerSpot reviewer
Freelancer at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
Supports evaluating architecture through corporate objectives
I conducted an evaluation of enterprise architecture at the European Court in Luxembourg, reviewing and analyzing existing implementations to identify potential improvements and providing recommendations I conduct evaluations to identify potential improvements and make recommendations, forming a…
Monabi Kingsley - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at 3M
Centralized planning has improved resource visibility and supports data‑driven financial decisions
The best features Planview Portfolios offers are visibility enhancement, robust system performance, and comprehensive resource management. This enhanced visibility in Planview Portfolios ensures that all users can easily track progress, identify bottlenecks, and make informed decisions to optimize workflow efficiency. When discussing robust system performance, the system's robust performance in meeting our various work requirements effectively and efficiently stands out. It is very stable and reliable, contributing to a seamless user experience, which enables users to focus on their tasks without disruptions. I also love the financial breakdown, planning and prioritization, and attribute collection on projects in Planview Portfolios. Planview Portfolios has positively impacted my organization since I started using it. It has enabled me to gain insights into the full scope of work consuming resources. I am able to know where the resources are being consumed more, especially which resources are consuming the most. I have been able to leverage resources management and resource time reporting, which enabled the generation of $90 million in annual revenue through labor billing to customers.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It is a very stable solution...The initial setup of Avolution ABACUS is very easy."
"The portfolio management is really good, and the dashboard and the reports for the end-to-end impact analysis are really good."
"This product is very strong in terms of the meta-model because you can customize a lot according to the business plan."
"It is a great tool for helping you understand what you really want to develop in an immature EA practice, providing a lot of flexibility in meeting a client stage and serving as an excellent early development tool."
"It is a very powerful tool that does what an enterprise architect needs it to do and it supports the business in knowing more about the business so that they can do better."
"Scalable and stable tool for roadmapping and modeling, with a good dashboard, end-to-end impact analysis, and portfolio management."
"Avolution ABACUS allows for flexible enterprise architecture analysis."
"There are a lot of different features, but the business/decision-maker feature, visibility, and dashboards are most valuable."
"Planview Portfolios has increased our ability to monitor and guide processes, process health, and compliance automatically without manual intervention."
"Planview Portfolios helps us manage both investment and execution risk while also ensuring optimal value realization in my organization."
"The portfolio and technology management are well built."
"Another good thing is that we can create custom reports, which is great. If I created a custom report, a tile that tells me how many people have logged in today. We currently have a little under 2000 users, and that's only users, we actually have integrations, that we created a custom form that sends hours directly to Planview. They're not using Planview directly, but they're sending their hours to Planview through an API."
"Having that being sort of a single source of truth for the risks and for the resource forecast, that's been very useful for us."
"We can easily see which functions are overcapacity. Before, we did not have visibility into that."
"It gives you the ability to see across a portfolio the cost and resource demands, helping ensure that we're working on the right things with the right amount of resources and giving us visibility into future demand to help us plan for resourcing."
"The portfolio and technology management are well built."
 

Cons

"The tool doesn't have any intelligence built in. We have to design the dashboards ourselves, which is a challenge because we have to depend on the vendor for customizations."
"It is vastly scalable but you can't run it on a Mac or Linux so it has limitations."
"Having more control over page size is lacking in this product. Print utilization also needs to be improved."
"They should take more initiative to implement things that competing products have already come out with."
"While Avolution ABACUS is flexible, it can be complex to work with as it requires knowledge of specific configurations to customize the product."
"It needs more flexible analysis parameters and more capability as a BPM tool and doing BPM simulation, compared with Bonita BPM or Bizagi."
"There are probably some things that Avolution could add to the product to enhance it and keep up with what some other products are introducing."
"This solution needs to improve resource usage because it has a heavy browser. It is easy to use, but it takes time to load and to run other programs."
"I would like to see more documentation pieces. I would like to see more out-of-the-box features with document repository capabilities."
"Many times, we've had people give us attitude, delays in response, or just a lack of interest."
"Because in the beginning, it was so overwhelming, and we didn't know anything about the tool."
"Its reporting needs to be improved. My main complaint when it comes to Planview is that it is good to maintain all the data but to actually use the information that is in it, you actually have to use a different tool. We use Power BI. So, we pull all the information, and then we use a Power BI dashboard to stage or look at the information."
"The resource area needs improvement. The improvements that have been made recently in the later versions have been good improvements, but I think there are some more improvements needed there."
"Being the IT development manager who implements the upgrades for Planview, I would love to see more thorough testing of expenditures and more thorough testing in general. When we do an upgrade, we have to do quite a bit of testing because we can affect the bottom line."
"From a financial perspective, it is good; from a scheduled perspective, it is not so good, and from an execution perspective, it is even worse."
"I think Enterprise One is great at being a source for data, but our company is still running reports externally."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My company makes annual payments toward the licensing costs of the solution. Considering the product's capabilities, its prices are very reasonable."
"The cost of Avolution ABACUS is reasonable, given the features they offer in comparison to other tools."
"It is competitive. It is not chump change. I am just using the studio version. I am not using the full enterprise version, which would probably cost me three times more for single-use, but it gives a lot more capability and analysis. It is server-based as well, and it is reasonably priced compared to a lot of the other tools. There are other tools that have other sorts of capabilities, but in order to use them, you'd really have to have like 50 users for the price to become justifiable."
"The solution's pricing is not an issue."
"It is expensive."
"To get a fairly extensive license for Enterprise Architects from Spark is approximately US $400.00, maybe less, but with Avolution Abacus it was approximately US $2000.00 per year, and that includes maintenance with the Abacus tool."
"This solution is expensive for some people's budgets and they need to offer a Lite version at a cheaper price"
"There is a subscription for this solution. We are on an annual subscription because you sometimes receive special offers the longer you subscribe."
"The cost of other pieces and integrating them in needs improvement."
"We have portfolio managers, resource managers, project managers, and time reporting licenses. These are the licenses that we have."
"We recently did a new bundle for all of Enterprise One. It includes some of the newer pieces, like Projectplace and LeanKit. It bundled our CTM in with it as well. I think the total came out to be about $900,000 a year. This is for unlimited licenses."
"In the time that I've used it, we've doubled up the amount of dollars on our intended projects."
"Planview is a little pricey. From a licensing perspective, for just a simple timesheet user who does nothing in the system but reports time, the licensing is a little pricey, but you have to look at it from what it is that you get. We have 6,000 users, and I don't manage the system at all. I just have to do add them to the system. The servers, maintenance, OS levels, security patching for the OS, and all other things are not something that we maintain. So, you have to look at it from an operational perspective. It is not just the product itself. A holistic view has to be taken when you look at the product and how you're going to support it. I would have to hire an entire operation staff to bring it in-house, and at the end of the day, that might cost me more."
"Our licensing fees are approximately $50,000 USD annually."
"With the costs, they were very understanding. Knowing that we were an existing customer, they were very much willing to work with us to make sure that we were able to transition to Enterprise One from PPM Pro."
"We have unlimited licenses for all of our functionalities. Since we went global, we went with that model."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise66
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Avolution ABACUS?
It's pricey compared to Essential, Deltek, or Essential Cloud. However, its diagramming capabilities and metamodel design make it worth it. But it's not for large user bases. It has modules for app...
What needs improvement with Avolution ABACUS?
While Avolution ABACUS is flexible, it can be complex to work with as it requires knowledge of specific configurations to customize the product. It would be beneficial to have seminars or other met...
What is your primary use case for Avolution ABACUS?
I conducted an evaluation of enterprise architecture at the European Court in Luxembourg, reviewing and analyzing existing implementations to identify potential improvements and providing recommend...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Planview Portfolios?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been that Planview Portfolios is one of the best and a very cost-effective tool.
What needs improvement with Planview Portfolios?
Planview Portfolios can be improved as the user interface defaults to the last opened portfolio, which can waste a lot of time loading a large portfolio if that is not what I need at that moment. J...
What is your primary use case for Planview Portfolios?
My main use case for Planview Portfolios is to ensure governance and decision auditability by incorporating embedded workflows, approval management, and key document retention supporting a single c...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Planview Enterprise One, Troux
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Barclays
UPS, NatWest, Ingram Micro, Canadian Tire, Viessmann, Volvo, NASCO, UNESCO
Find out what your peers are saying about Avolution ABACUS vs. Planview Portfolios and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.