Microsoft Project vs Planview Daptiv comparison

"Microsoft Project is used to track the project delivery and the project management."

"I find all the features of the solution valuable."

"They now have MS project Online and they have two levels, so it's easier to access what you need and to choose specifically what you'll use. You can start at a lower level, for example, and be more cost-effective and move up if it suits you."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Project is status reporting."

"The most valuable feature is probably the Kanban diagram. People are familiar with the Kanban tools. When they do their scrum meetings, they have that Kanban board where you can see the different tiles for all the queries and move them from left to right. IT is familiar with that because, for development, most of the tools have that capability. It could also be more graphical, like Asana."

"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that the product's GUI is very good...The product's scalability is good."

"One of the best features is that it is easy to use."

"The user interface is simple and it helps me in planning what needs to be accomplished."

"The timekeeping features are great and very helpful."

"The powerful collaboration is definitely the most valuable and the fact that you can adjust flexibility to almost any methodology, and the easy creation of complete new functionalities without programming code."

"Changepoint gives us a view of the project status and needs very clearly, which are things that we used to miss with MS Project and Excel."

"It's difficult to pinpoint just one most valuable feature, as there are many features that can be beneficial. For the specific use case of my client's project management office, they found the project management features of the application to be particularly valuable, such as project boards, reporting, and the ability to customize views. Additionally, task management and project scheduling were also highly utilized. However, capacity planning was not used as much as the others, as there was a lack of support from executives to invest in training and implementing it due to a lack of processes in place. The project planning features, dashboard, and reporting capabilities were considered the most valuable."

"I like the reporting engine, IBM Cognos, especially the analytics. That's a good tool. It's quite strong on the ideation and capacity-planning side, which is a huge plus."

"Its user experience can be improved while configuring it. Its reporting can also be better. Reporting is not very easy. Reports do not always work. I was trying to download some reports, and they didn't work. I don't know if it was related to the configuration that I was using. I didn't go too deep to check if something was missing."

"Tracking timeline, resource allocation, and monitoring are areas of concern for the tool where improvements are required."

"Microsoft Project could improve the interface, it should be more intuitive. It could be adjusted a little bit to make it a little easier to use and more user-friendly. It is a very powerful tool and it takes people a while to get used to it."

"This solution needs more customization."

"There needs to be better integration with other Microsoft products such as SharePoint, and the like."

"It is a traditional Waterfall-based solution, so it doesn't lend itself particularly well to Agile development. You can record Agile sprints within it, but it is not really an Agile-based product. It can store the basic information about budgets that an Agile set of work is looking to use, but that's about it."

"We'd like to have more resource allocation and monitoring features."

"There are some things about it that I've always hated, and they haven't really changed them. It makes a lot of assumptions. It is also difficult to put business rules in it. You have to de-link it from the consecutive task if you don't want to do a What-If analysis, and sometimes, if you forget to do that, it changes everything. It is a pain in the neck to undo it. I would also like to see better integration with graphics. The graphics are primitive, and they need some major work. I would like to have the ability to do some small macros within the project for fuzzy logic. For example, if you're not sure how long a task takes, you can get the earliest guess. It is very time and manpower intensive to keep it up to date. You need to constantly update it. You will find that you are spending more time working on the Microsoft Project file rather than working on your project. I don't want to devote a person to just do that. That's silly. You can link it to some more modern applications so that it is dynamic when a real-time resource schedule changes, but it is not at all dynamic. It is only as dynamic as the person using it. It would be nice if we could plug it in real time for each project, subproject, or task. If something is going on, I want to see it in real time. Sometimes we have international clients, and they don't use the same calendar. They have a Thursday and Friday weekend, and we have a Saturday and Sunday weekend. I can change it in Microsoft Project, but I would like to be able to do it globally. There may be a way to do it, but I just haven't figured it out yet. I would like to be able to specify globally what weekend we want or what we want to call a weekend. We might have a project that works seven days a week. Some tasks are automated outside, like manufacturing processes. Embedding external processes is almost impossible because, in a practical sense, we don't have people who can do a lot of programming here, and also the interface of Microsoft Project is not the easiest because a lot of it is proprietary. It would be nice if we can link different tasks to external sources of inputs and outputs so that we could integrate them with a master project plan and see in real time what's going on. For example, you are manufacturing a batch of a chemical, and I have to rely on if a customer is making some type of complex chemical. Their system does not interfere with ours. We have to get the outputs from their system and enter them manually into the project to see the effect. That takes time. If you're talking about hours, you going to spend three to four hours, but there is the risk of getting it wrong or making a mistake. On tight projects, every minute counts. I would like to see some control system interfaces with Microsoft Project. A modern machine shop has a lot of computer numerical control (CNC) computers. In fact, virtually all machining is done with a CNC machine. Even 3D additive manufacturing is made with CNC. That data can go to a computer, and that computer can spit it out to a project so that you can see in real time whether you are going to finish a day ahead. If you had to finish a day ahead, you could talk to the systems' software, which can say that if I have this machine working for another hour and this one for one hour or less, I would be able to meet the schedule. It can then make those changes, but it can't do that. Everything needs to be done manually, which takes more time, and there's a risk of mistakes. It requires smarter automation and more machine learning. There is no machine learning capability in Microsoft Project. It just doesn't exist. That's why I say it is only suitable for small-sized to medium-sized companies and small projects. Most people don't have the problems that I have. I don't have them all the time, but when I have them, they're big. When you're bidding on a project that has to get done, you find yourself spending most of the time working on Microsoft Project, whereas you should be spending these hours managing the project. Thinking on a bigger scale, I would like better integration with Office, Visio, and Access. If you make a change in one, it should cascade to others and vice versa. It doesn't do that. It is not a dynamic program. I would like to see a dynamic program or at least the capability of being dynamic, that is, even if it is close to real time where it outputs to a module, and the module then talks to real-time things. The real-time data goes back into the module, and the module updates the project plan. Such dynamic capability would be nice. It may not be real time, but it is at least close. I would like to be able to link directly to the data in an Excel spreadsheet so that I don't have to keep going back and forth updating it. I don't want to have to create a dynamic link library. Whenever I change the data in Excel, it should update in Visio or PowerPoint. If I'm doing a pie chart or any kind of graphic, I don't want to constantly update my graphics. I want to link them together, and I want them updated automatically. I know it is a wishful thing. They don't make major changes every time they come out with a new version. They don't fix the issue. They just add a few features."

"This solution needs more standard connectors to other solutions."

"I find the solution has an excessive amount of features. Many aren't even kept current. Some aren't useful at all. There's an overall lack of coherence within the solution. It can make the execution difficult. Many features can easily be eliminated and it would help streamline the solution. They should get rid of 80% of the features and then really focus on the leftover 20% to make it a really great product."

"The areas that should be improved in Planview Daptiv are a subject that can be viewed differently depending on who you ask. I feel they should focus on excelling in one specific area rather than providing average capabilities in many areas. For example, their project planning software is satisfactory but not as advanced as Microsoft Projects. The same goes for the capacity planning tool and reporting capabilities, which can be improved upon by using custom Excel spreadsheets or by hiring a business analyst for additional support. In short, the biggest weakness of Daptiv is that it does not excel in any one area and only provides average performance."

"Expense management, simulation scenarios, and budget control could be great and useful features to include."

"It would also be nice to see some improvements on the IBM Cognos Analytics. There's still work to be done on the analytics side of things, like your condition formality."

"The product is not expensive. My company has opted for an annual subscription."

"I believe the licensing for the solution is based on an annual fee."

"It gets expensive when having to add all of the plugins and everything that you need."

"I am not aware of any additional costs apart from the standard licensing fees of the solution."

"I am not involved with this."

"Pricing-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten since I feel it is a bit costly."

"I rate the solution's pricing a three out of ten."

"It was a three-year license deal that was reconciled on a quarterly basis. It is a reasonably priced product, and I consider that we got good value for money."

"The licensing is pretty complex. Each kind of user is a different price. It's approximately $300 per year. They charge additional fees for technical support and other additional services."

"It's a yearly license, but it's not an open license. It's based on users and their roles. So your administrator is priced differently from your timesheet user."