The 7 best capacity planning tools in 2026 : pros, cons & software pricing compared

Let me guess. You’ve landed here because you’ve likely:

1. Outgrown the trusty but isolated capacity spreadsheets you’ve been relying on
2. Grown frustrated with the limitations of your current capacity planning software or all-in-one solution  
3. Been tasked with finding a better way to plan capacity, forecast availability, and match skills to work to keep you people and profit on track

Did I get at least some of it right? 😉

Whatever brought you here and regardless of your current capacity planning approach, you are about to get a few valid software options to choose from. And to get there, you can <highlight>choose your own adventure</highlight>: 

• Scroll to the next section and read a quick definition of capacity planning software (that's to make sure you’re in the right place and don’t need, say, resource management software instead)
• Read this overview of the 3 main types of capacity planning tools
• Check out a quick tool comparison table
• Skip it all and go straight to the tool list

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[fs-toc-omit]What is capacity planning software (and is it for you)?

Capacity planning tools give resource, operations, and program managers the visibility and control to match people to projects, prevent over- and under-allocations, and plan profitably from the start.

They replace static and isolated spreadsheets or bloated PSAs with a live, centralized view of availability and utilization, and team capacity—so you can make faster, more profitable decisions about what work gets done, when, and by whom.

Capacity-focused software helps:

Plan work with confidence

• See your team’s current and future availability in a single place
• Manage workload effectively (eg. avoid over-assigning work or allocating resources inefficiently)
• Make sure projects are prioritized and staffed correctly, with the right skills on the right project

Protect time and profitability

• Accurately monitor resource utilization in real time 
• Spot bottlenecks before they impact delivery
• Forecast revenue and track margins in real time to increase project profitability

In other words: capacity planning tools help you confidently answer questions like Can we take on this project?, Do we have the right team for the job?, and How will this impact our margins?

See a practical example

An urgent marketing request just came in: can the 4-person team below be assigned to it this week? The answer is ‘maybe’, depending on the project’s focus—three of the four team members are already maxed out, and while the fourth one one looks freer, their vertical skills (product marketing) may or may not work with the request.

If you’re the person in charge, one glance at this dashboard and you’d already know you might need a different solution.

3 categories of capacity tools

All the tools we cover below support capacity planning, but they take different approaches:

1. Pure player capacity management tools

Purpose-built and laser-focused on capacity planning and resource management. ‘Best-of-breed’ solutions are intuitive, fast, and designed to give you full visibility and control over your people and projects—without the complexity and (unnecessary) bloat of larger systems.

‍Jump ahead to Float, Resource Guru, and Runn
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2. Enterprise work management software (ERPs) and Professional service automation software (PSAs)

ERPs and PSAs bundle capacity planning and resourcing into broader work management or financial platforms. They are often the default choice for enterprise-level companies that are already using other products within the platform—but capacity planning is not the core offer, so it tends to get less attention and be deprioritized on a competitive product roadmap.

Stephanie Ito, Chief Operating Officer at Metalab, raises this useful orange flag: “We had a PSA tool that tried to be all things to all people. It tried to be a project management tool, a financial reporting tool, and a resource management tool. But when you do none of them well, or you’re only functional in each, at the end of the day, it’s just not a good tool.”‍

Jump ahead to Smartsheet and Kantata
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3. All-in-one project management tools

Project management suites with light capacity planning features. They can be good for teams looking for one tool to do it all, but the features are often shallow and lack the financial insight or resourcing depth that purpose-built tools provide.‍

Jump ahead to ClickUp and monday.com
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Best capacity planning tools in 2026

To help you compare the top capacity planning software, our review below covers seven tools, their pricing models, and their performance across several areas: planning, reporting, scheduling, time tracking, customer success, security and governance. Here is a top-level summary: 

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Tool|Category|Pricing|Core features|Best for~

Float.com|Profitable resource management & capacity planning|Transparent per-seat pricing with plans for basic and complex needs, including Enterprise-level. Pro annual at $12/person. Free trial.|Resource & capacity planning, scheduling, forecasting, utilization & reporting, integrations with PM/finance/HR tools.|Mid-market teams and professional service agencies that need a dedicated capacity planning tool.~

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Resource Guru|Resource management|Three tiers: Grasshopper, Blackbelt, Master. From $4 per person/month.|Visual scheduling, clash management, tentative bookings, basic reporting and heatmaps on higher plans.|Small teams needing affordable, straightforward resource scheduling.~

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Runn|Resource & capacity management|Starter $10 pp/m, Professional $14 pp/m, Enterprise custom; free for up to 5 users.|Resource planning, forecasting, reporting & utilization views, guided placeholder workflows, HR/time integrations.|Growing teams that want forecasting and reporting without extra complexity.~

‍
Resource Management by Smartsheet|Resource management add-on|Sold as a separate premium add-on on top of Smartsheet Business/Enterprise.|Resource database, allocation, time tracking, reporting, percentage-based planning, enterprise portfolio views.|Enterprise orgs already invested in Smartsheet that need integrated resource management.~

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Kantata Professional Services Cloud|PSA / work management|No public pricing; typically 50-seat minimum with high per-user contract pricing.|End-to-end PSA: resource, project & financial management, BI, workflow automation, AI-driven “Expertise Engine.”|Large, complex professional services firms needing a full PSA suite and can absorb enterprise cost.~

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ClickUp|Project management (all-in-one)|Free tier; Unlimited $7 pp/m, Business $12 pp/m, Enterprise custom. AI add-on extra.|Tasks, docs, dashboards, workload view, time tracking, automation, ClickUp Brain AI for content & workflow help.|Teams wanting an all-in-one PM/AI workspace with light capacity planning via workload views.~

‍
Monday.com|Project management / work OS|Free, Basic $9, Standard $12, Pro $19 pp/m; Enterprise & Advanced Work Management custom.|Boards, dashboards, automations, workload widget, time tracking (Pro+), portfolio & Resource management (Enterprise), monday AI & agents.|Teams that want a flexible visual PM platform and are willing to assemble light capacity views.
</table>

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1. Float.com

🏢 Founded in: 2011
🎯 Primary software category: Resource management
🏆 G2: 4.3 (1,995+ reviews); Capterra: 4.5 (1,600+ reviews)

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Float.com (or ’just’ Float, hello 👋) is the #1 software for profitable resource management, purpose-built for mid-market professional service teams. Unlike disconnected spreadsheets, bloated PSAs, or all-in-one project tools, Float combines live capacity planning with accurate financial forecasting and live scheduling, helping operations leaders and resource managers keep their people and profit on track.

We’ve been building with and for professional services teams since 2011—some of our 4,500 customers include Ogilvy, Deloitte, and M&C Saatchi. As a company, we’ve got well over a decade’s worth of customer feedback and product iterations, helping us deliver what hundreds of thousands of users across the globe want and need from a capacity tool.

PS: we put ourselves in position #1 because we’re literally #1 in G2 for Resource Management—and we have been for all of 2025.

👌 Top reasons to choose Float

• Purpose-built for profitable planning and resourcing
  Float is designed for resource, operations, and delivery teams in client-serving orgs. It connects people, projects, and profit data to prevent overbooking, track utilization, and protect project margins from the start.
• A clear view of capacity, by skill and team
  See who’s available (and who isn’t), filter by role, department, location, or skills, and forward plan with confidence. Track leave, holidays, and custom schedules in one shared view.  
  
• Built-in financial intelligence
  Estimate projects with real cost and bill rates. Add expenses, set baselines, and track profitability in real time as plans change.
• Time tracking that keeps data clean
  Use built-in timers and pre-filled timesheets to capture actuals with minimal effort, and get accurate data for forecasting and reporting.
• Live scheduling with stakeholder visibility
  A clean UI and powerful filters make it easy to slice and dice your resourcing and capacity data. Shared saved views help project leads and people managers stay aligned.
• Fast to integrate (including via AI), easy to adopt
  Float integrates cleanly with your project, time, and finance tools: no bloated setup, no forced replacements. You get a single, accurate source of truth at the center of your tech stack—and you can use our MCP to work with other MCP-enabled systems like your CRM, ERP, or finance software.
• Built to earn trust
  Float is SOC2 certified, GDPR compliant, and proudly B Corp certified since 2024. Our 24/5 support team is fast, helpful, and human, and our global Slack community is open to all customers.

🔍 Something to consider

• Best fit: 30–1,000 people
  As you may have seen in the badges above, Float is not for everyone—and we don’t try to be! Float is ideal for mid-market professional services teams with multiple offices, projects, and planners. If you need to schedule more than 1,000 people in one account or are a solo freelancer/consultant, you will likely find a better fit in some of the tools listed below. 

Float pricing

• ‍1. Starter. $7 per person per month, billed annually. Essential for basic resource scheduling, with unlimited projects and reporting.‍
• 2. Pro. $12 per person per month, billed annually. Everything in Starter, plus built-in time tracking, single sign on (SSO), and workflow features designed to scale. ‍
• 3. Enterprise. A custom plan that includes everything in Pro and is designed for larger organizations with heavier compliance and support needs.‍
• Free trial: Yes, 30 days.

🔥 See all pricing details here.

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Want to see how Float compares to your current solution?

Start a free 30-day trial and discover why we’re the #1 solution for profitable resource management 🔥

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2. Resource Guru

🏢 Founded in: 2011
🎯 Primary software category: Resource Management
🏆 G2: 4.6 (420+ reviews); Capterra: 4.7 (500+ reviews)

2011 was a particularly active year for capacity planners everywhere, since Float and Resource Guru arrived on the scene pretty much at the same time. Now 13 years later, Resource Guru is a remote-first company that still offers one of the most affordable plans out there for basic resource capacity planning; the tool also checks most of the boxes for small teams that need a simple project scheduling solution.      

👌 Pros

• A simple and visual UI that reduces complexity and increases at-a-glance clarity  
• Support for organizational hierarchies and the option to set ‘approvers’ for booking requests
• A clash management engine helps prevent overbooking: when a resource doesn’t have enough availability, their booking can be added to a waiting list for a capacity planner to confirm or resolve at a later date.  
• Add tentative bookings (unconfirmed work) to your schedule
• New reporting and heatmap features: in 2025, the team rolled out a reporting suite with Jira integration and heatmap views that show total and billable utilization, and hours available.

🤔 Cons

• Reporting available on premium plans only: downloadable reports (in cvs or xlsx format) are available starting from Resource Guru’s mid-tier ‘Blackbelt’ plan only, while access to in-app reporting insights is only available on the premium ‘Master’ plan.
  Note: at Float, reporting is available on all plans, including the entry-level Starter one: we believe that planning with the full picture is crucial, so reporting shouldn’t be negotiable in capacity planning software.
• Limited custom fields that help you see capacity: custom fields to categorize by skill, department, location etc. over the coming days, weeks or months are not available on the basic plan, and are limited to 10 in the mid-tier ‘Blackbelt’ one. If you want unlimited fields, you need to go with the premium option.
• Heavy limitation with projects on entry-level plans: project rates and budgets only available on higher tier plans, which severely limits margin and profitability tracking for those on entry-level plans. Plus, you can’t add project start or end dates or milestones until you pay premium pricing. 

💰 Pricing

• 1. Grasshopper. $4.16 per person per month. The basic plan includes resource booking, absence management, and project views—but does not include reports. You can however add non-human resources (eg. meeting rooms, vehicles, and bookable equipment) for $2.08 each.
• 2. Blackbelt. $6.65 per person per month. Everything in Grasshopper plus reports. Non-human resources at $3.33 each.
• 3. Master. $10 per person per month. This plan adds SSO, data imports & phone support. Other resources are $5 each.
• Free trial: yes, 30 days.

3. Runn

🏢 Founded in: 2018
🎯 Primary software category: Resource management
🏆 G2: 4.5 (1 review); Capterra: 4.8 (30 reviews)

Runn is the last of the purpose-built resource management and capacity planning tools in our list. Founded in 2018 and hailing from New Zealand/Aotearoa, Runn is run (ha!) by a fully remote and global team of 35+ folks whose musical references are on point, as their product demo above demonstrates.

The company successfully raised $2million in seed funding in 2021, right in the middle of Covid uncertainty and disruption, with co-founder and CEO Tim Copeland announcing his vision for Runn to become “as flexible as work environments are unpredictable.” Since then, Runn has continued to invest in forecasting and reporting, rolling out new reporting views, utilization insights, and workflow improvements through 2025.

👌 Pros

• Designed for project managers and senior leaders who need a quick and clear glimpse into their team’s work
• Free for teams of up to 5 people, making it a good option for small teams that want to get out of the spreadsheet and start using a dedicated tool for capacity and resource planning.
• Powerful integrations are available to help Runn directly integrate with time tracking tools like Clockify and Harvest. As of December 2024, Runn’s integrations also allow capacity planners to pull in people and time off from HR platforms, including BambooHR, Alexis HR, HiBob, and CharlieHR.  
• Recent reporting enhancements like visual charts and utilization views can give better at-a-glance insight into capacity and billable vs non-billable workloads compared to earlier versions of the product.

🤔 Cons

• Some useful functionality is still in the works: Runn is younger than Float and Resource Guru, and some more advanced capabilities (like deeper scenario modelling, richer financial forecasting, or a deeper integration ecosystem) still lag behind more mature and established tools on this list.
• Not many third-party reviews: unlike other products on this list, Runn has fewer than 30 reviews on G2 and Capterra combined, so it’s a little hard to get unbiased, third-party opinions about the tool. But let’s be fair to the Runn team: the reviews they do have are positive, so this is ultimately less of a ‘con’ than it looks.

💰 Pricing

• 1. Starter: $10 per person/month. Best for small teams with basic resourcing needs.
• 2. Professional. $14 per person/month. All features with additional services like notifications, 5x custom fields, and advanced filters.
• 3. Enterprise. Custom pricing that includes premium features like premium support, bespoke implementation services, full API access.
• Free trial: yes.

4. Resource Management by Smartsheet

🏢 Founded in: 2005
🎯 Primary software category: Work management
🏆 G2: 4 (130+ reviews); Capterra: 4.2 (65+ reviews)

Smartsheet has been around since 2005, but it only branched out in the capacity planning space after acquiring pure player 10,000ft back in 2019. The resulting solution, Resource Management by Smartsheet, is a resource management and capacity planning tool that helps enterprise teams with resource allocation, project planning, time tracking, and reporting.

👌 Pros

• Ideal for senior management at the enterprise level: Smartsheet favors high-level views and functions, including percentage-based planning—this means enterprise-sized teams tend to choose it for centralizing the finances of large project work.
• Great for getting a single view of capacity and assigning work: Smartsheet RM’s people management function serves as a resource database, almost like an intranet for a company’s projects. It includes inputs like role, department, rates, and availability and can capture extremely granular details, including phone numbers, all in the same database.  
• Perfect if you’re used to Excel or other spreadsheet-based systems: as an independent reviewer puts it, this spreadsheet-based tool is perfect for “MBA types who think in Excel.”  

🤔 Cons

• Opaque add-on pricing: Resource Management is a premium add-on and is sold separately from Smartsheet, with no clear public per-seat pricing, and is typically paired with higher-tier Smartsheet plans—so it’s harder to predict total cost than with a standalone tool (according to this online review, the minimum purchase is a 15-person licence).  
• Slow and (possibly) confusing UI: some online reviewers have complained about the tool being occasionally slow and unresponsive—and if you don’t love spreadsheets, Smartsheet’s interface might not be very intuitive.

💰 Pricing

Note: the pricing in this section covers core Smartsheet plans, not the separate Resource Management add-on (whose pricing is opaque and usually tied to Business/Enterprise). 

• 1. Pro. $12 per user per month. Track, share, and manage projects with unlimited sheets and user management.
• 2. Business. $24 per user per month. This plan includes timeline views and team workload tracking.
• 3. Enterprise. For organizations that need enterprise-level security and controls and AI-enhanced formulas, texts, and charts.
• Free trial: yes, 30 days.

5. Kantata Professional Services Cloud

🏢 Founded in: 2008 (as Mavenlink)
🎯 Primary software category: Work management
🏆 G2: 4.2 (1,490+ reviews); Capterra: 4.2 (620+ reviews)

Kantata PS Cloud (formerly Mavenlink + Kimble) combines resource management, project management, team collaboration, financial management, business intelligence, and workflow automation functionality. It’s a go-to for more than 2,000 large corporate teams who need a comprehensive suite of tools and have a budget for enterprise software.  

In addition to its traditional PSA capabilities, in 2025 Kantata introduced an AI-powered “Expertise Engine” (in beta as of December 2025) to help improve resourcing decisions for professional services teams.

👌 Pros

• Everything (and a lot of it) in one place: Kantata brings finance, project, and resource management together to help track operations, project-related costs, and revenue all in one place.
• Purpose-built for complex professional service teams to level up their operations, streamline project accounting, and deliver maximum margins.
• Multiple integrations with project management and financial service tools including Slack, Jira, Salesforce, QuickBooks, Xero, Avalara, and Microsoft Dynamic 365.
• New AI features like the Kantata Expertise Engine use skills, availability, and historical project data to recommend staffing and surface insights, which can be valuable for larger firms running many projects in parallel.

🤔 Cons

• A complex learning curve: Kantata is a powerful and comprehensive platform, but the learning curve can be steep, especially for people who don’t have a lot of previous experience with an integrated planning and management system.  
• Lack of transparent pricing: plans are not available online (see below), and there is no free self-serve trial option for teams.

💰 Pricing

Pricing is not available on Kantata’s website. You’ll need to fill in a form and provide information about your industry, company size, and HQ location so Kantata’s Account Advisors can “review [it] and walk through all of your options when [you] connect.” ‍

Third-party analyses suggest that contracts frequently require a minimum of roughly 50 seats, with per-user prices in the region of ~$50–$110 per person per month—putting annual license costs in the ~$35K–$66K range before any implementation or consulting services.

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6. ClickUp

🏢 Founded in: 2017
🎯 Primary software category: Project management
🏆 G2: 4.7 ( ~10,700 reviews); Capterra: 4.6 (4,500+ reviews)

ClickUp is widely considered one of the best all-in-one project management solutions out there for folks needing to collaborate and manage multiple projects effectively—but like other all-in-one solutions, it’s not specifically designed for capacity planning. As of late 2025, it offers “everything you need in one converged AI platform” and “100+ features to maximize human and AI productivity:” this means it does have several key features to give you a general idea of your team’s capacity to aid your planning, but it’s not as accurate or insightful as the view you get with a dedicated tool that focuses on fewer things, deeper. 

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Hot take: capacity planning and project management tools are not an either/or

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At Float, we don’t think you should choose between a capacity planning tool like ours and a project management tool like ClickUp. It’s not an either/or, and the two can complement each other really well! Float is where people planners do their project planning and estimating then schedule and allocate resources, whereas project management tools like ClickUp are for project managers who need detailed task lists to help their teams stay laser-focused on processes and execution.

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👌 Useful features

• The Workload view feature helps plan and visualize a team’s current capacity and identify over-worked or under-utilized team members, which helps capacity planners make predictions about future project workloads
• The Pulse feature sends detailed daily reports of individual resource utilization
• ClickUp Brain*, an AI platform (with tiers like AI Standard and AI Autopilot) that can summarize work, generate content, power AI agents, and connect to docs, tasks, and other work to automate repetitive tasks and surface information quickly.

🤔 Cons

• Lack of core capacity planning features like defining resources, allocation, and optimization. While the Workload view certainly helps visualize current capacity based on assigned work, capacity is more than just that—it also includes future availability. ClickUp offers templates that capture inputs like someone’s personal schedule, but doesn’t streamline this feature set into how you use the tool itself.‍
• AI is a separate paid add-on: the more you lean on ClickUp Brain (and related AI capabilities), the more your effective per-user cost increases compared with a dedicated capacity planning tool where planning and reporting are included by default.

💰 Pricing

The below plans are billed yearly:

• 1. Free. A plan for personal use, with collaborative docs, Kanban view, and more.
• 2. Unlimited. $7 per member per month. A plan for small teams with unlimited storage, Gantt charts, native time tracking, and resource management.
• 3. Business. $12 per member per month. A plan for mid-sized teams that includes everything in Unlimited, along with SSO, advanced time tracking, workload management features, and timelines.
• 4. Enterprise. You need to contact ClickUp for a custom price. This is a plan for large teams.
• Free trial: no, but a free forever plan for personal use is available.

*As of December 2025, the ClickUp Brain add-on now starts at $9/user/mo for AI Standard (billed annually), with an AI Autopilot tier at $28/user/mo, plus optional paid add-ons like Talk to Text and AI Notetaker.

7. Monday.com

🏢 Founded in: 2012
🎯 Primary software category: Project management
🏆 G2: G2: 4.7 (14,600+ reviews); Capterra: 4.6 (5,600+ reviews)

‍Monday.com is all-in-one project management software that we initially debated having on this page since it largely doesn’t have dedicated capacity management features on its lower tiers (e.g. roles, rates, work hours, skill tags, departments, and teams), although its Enterprise plan now includes a dedicated Resource management capability.

However, it does include several functions and features that can get some of the capacity planning work done, which is why you’re reading about it. In 2025, monday.com also expanded its AI offering, which helps automate workflows and generate insights across boards. However, these are still layered on top of its project management focus rather than replacing a purpose-built capacity planning solution.

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Hot take: capacity planning and project management tools are not an either/or

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At Float, we don’t think you should choose between a capacity planning tool like ours and a project management tool like ClickUp. It’s not an either/or, and the two can complement each other really well! Float is where people planners do their project planning and estimating then schedule and allocate resources, whereas project management tools like ClickUp are for project managers who need detailed task lists to help their teams stay laser-focused on processes and execution.

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👌 Useful features

• Customizable enough to help with capacity planning: a Workload widget can be added to existing dashboards to show an overview of how a team’s tasks are assigned, which makes it relatively easy to see who is over- or under-capacity.
• Powerful automations can make workflows and the capacity planning process more efficient—for example, you can build automations like “When [status] changes to [working on it], start [time tracking]” that help you keep an eye on availability over time.  
• AI features (such as AI Blocks and monday agents) launched throughout 2025 can summarize updates, suggest or run automations, and orchestrate multi-step workflows across boards, which reduces some of the manual admin work for project managers.

🤔 Cons

• Limited capacity planning options: given its primary focus on project management, monday.com is (unsurprisingly) designed for getting work done rather than planning work effectively. Its more advanced portfolio and resource management capabilities are only available on the Enterprise plan, putting true capacity planning behind an expensive, up-market contract for many mid-sized teams.
• Manual tasks are required to make capacity work: for example, you’ll have to manually input everyone’s public holidays (as opposed to doing an automated bulk import) or create separate schedule templates to capture variance in freelancer availability.  
• Very manual setup that also involves subscribing to enterprise contract plans if you want monday.com’s built-in resource management, rather than piecing together boards, dashboards, and widgets.

💰 Pricing

• 1. Free. Up to two seats for individuals to keep track of work.
• 2. Basic. $12 per seat per month. A plan that helps you manage your team’s work with everything in Free, plus unlimited items and 5GB storage.
• 3. Standard. $14 per seat per month. Everything in Basic, along with timelines and Gantt charts, calendar views and automation.
• 4. Pro. $24 per seat per month. Everything in Standard, plus time tracking and more automation.
• 5. Enterprise. Advanced reporting and analytics, multi-level permissions, etc.
• Free trial: yes, 14 days.

[fs-toc-omit]Getting started with capacity planning

Capacity management doesn’t need to be a headache for operations and planning folks—it can (and should!) run almost on autopilot in a dedicated tool, so you can get back to the heart of your work. If you want an effective way to plan capacity and allocate resources that foster happier people and healthier margins, give Float a try today.

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The #1 tool trusted by 4,500 of the world’s top teams

Curious to learn why teams like Metalab, Ogilvy, and Deloitte choose Float for their resource management? Check out Float’s capacity planning features, then kick off a free 30-day trial and find out!

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📚 Want to learn more about capacity planning?

We have several additional resources for you 👇

• A (very) comprehensive overview of all things capacity planning
• A how-to guide for capacity management done the right way
• An agile capacity planning guide for teams that work in sprints
• An overview of the biggest capacity management challenges (and tactical advice to overcome them)
• Tools and tactics to create an actionable capacity planning report your entire team benefits from

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