7 Best Capacity Planning Tools: Pros, Cons & Pricing (2024)

Assign the best team for the job, every time

Fio Dossetto, Content Lead
Last updated: 24th January 2024
resource management

Let’s see if I can read your mind. You’ve just landed here, so you have probably:
1. Outgrown the (beautifully organized) spreadsheet you use to plan your team’s capacity
2. Grown frustrated with your current capacity planning software and want to find an alternative
3. Been tasked with researching the best tool for capacity management and planning

Did I get at least some of it right? 😉

Whatever brought you here and whatever your capacity planning strategy, we’re going to help with a list of seven options for you to choose from. And to make sure you’re in the right place (and don’t need resource management software instead), we’ll start with a super quick definition before moving right on to the actual list.

What is capacity planning software (and is it for you)?

Capacity planning tools help resource, program, and operations managers understand and manage the demand and supply of their people for project-based work. They streamline the process of tracking everyone’s availability and scheduled team workload, ensuring that teams have a reliable source of truth for planning work.
Capacity-focused software helps:

Assess your team’s current and future availability for taking on project work in one single place
Accurately monitor resource utilization and plan for prospective projects in your team’s pipeline
Ensure projects are prioritized and staffed correctly
Optimize how your team’s time is allocated
Manage workload effectively and avoid over-assigning work or allocating project resources inefficiently
Identify bottlenecks, make adjustments, and deliver projects efficiently
Track spending and increase project profitability

In other words: capacity planning tools make sure that folks tasked with capacity planning can confidently answer questions like Can we take on this project?, Do we have the team for the job?, and How much will this cost us?

For example: a new marketing request just came in; can the 3-person in-house team below be assigned to it in October? The answer is ‘maybe’, depending on the project’s focus—two people are almost maxed out and while the third one looks freer, they have a week of pre-agreed paid time off. If you’re the person in charge, one glance at this dashboard and you’d already know you might need a different solution.

7 of the best capacity planning tools for 2024

To help you compare the top capacity planning software, our spreadsheet below covers seven tools, their pricing models, and their performance across six areas: planning, reporting, scheduling, time tracking, customer success, security and governance. Use it as your overall reference point before taking a look at the individual tool deep dives further down the page.

Click to see the full version →

3 types of capacity planning tools

The capacity planning tool spreadsheet above is organized into three groups: pure players, enterprise work management software, and all-in-one tools. They all help with capacity planning, but how they approach the task is different.

1. Pure player capacity management tools
Pure players are purpose-built for and laser-focused on capacity planning and resource capacity management. This ‘best-of-breed’ software is intentionally designed to help see capacity at a glance in a simple and intuitive way, avoiding the inevitable complexities of more comprehensive project or work management systems.
Jump ahead to learn about the pure players: Float, ResourceGuru, and Runn

2. Enterprise work management software

Enterprise software bundles capacity planning tools into larger work management platforms. These capacity tools often become the default solution for enterprise-level companies who are already using other products within the platform—but capacity planning is not the core offer, so it can receive less attention or be deprioritized on a competitive product roadmap.
Jump ahead to learn about enterprise work management software: Smartsheet and Kantata

3. All-in-one project management tools

All-in-one suites offer capacity planning functionality among their many project management features. They can be perfect for someone who needs everything to be in the same place, but the lack of specific focus results in basic features that only partially solve your capacity planning problems and don’t fully address your needs.
Jump ahead to learn about all-in-one PM tools: ClickUp and monday.com

1. Float

🏢 Founded in: 2011
🎯 Primary software category: Resource management
🏆 G2: 4.2 (1,200+ reviews); Capterra: 4.5 (1,570+ reviews)

Float (👋 that’s us!) is a resource management, planning, and scheduling software that’s been around since 2011—which means as a company, we’ve got well over a decade’s worth of customer feedback and product iterations, helping us deliver what 2 million users want and need from a capacity tool.

We put ourselves in position #1 because we’re the only capacity planning tool we know inside out and can honestly vouch for, and because we’ve been rated #1 for popularity and customer satisfaction on G2. We’re also the tool of choice of more than 4,500+ happy customers worldwide:

👌 Pros

Purpose-built for the resource manager role to plan resources effectively so you can assign the best team for the job, every time.
A single source of truth for tracking availability. Set default work days and hours and customize them individually for any point in time; import public holidays add time-off policies; track leave balances; set up manager access rights to approve work scheduling and time off.
Clean UI and powerful filtering to see what you need on the Schedule. The search bar helps you filter across multiple dimensions, from skills and location to departments and availability, giving you an at-a-glance understanding of resource availability for any point in time.

Saved shared views make it easy for stakeholders like people and project managers to monitor their team capacity and forward plan together.
Training and support with humans, not bots! We offer 24hours/5days customer support, weekly live-training sessions, and monthly open office hours.
An exclusive and global community for team planners: all Float customers are invited to join a dedicated Slack community and interact with other business owners, project managers, and operational leaders from all over the world.
Secure, compliant, and run by people who care: we are SOC2 certified and GDPR compliant, and we’re also in the final stages of becoming a certified B Corp.

🤔 Cons

Best for teams up to 1,000: as you may have seen in the badges above, Float is not for everyone—and we don’t try to be! We are ideal for operations, program, and resource managers who work within agencies, consulting firms, and in-house professional service teams of up to 1,000 people. If you need to schedule more than 1,000 people in one account or are a solo freelancer/consultant, you will probably find a better fit in some of the tools listed below.
[SOLVED!] Start/stop time tracking timer: if you tried Float before October 2023, you might remember that Float didn’t have an in-built timer to help you keep track of time spent. Well, not anymore! With the brand new web timer feature, you can start the timer when you begin work, stop when you finish, and your hours are recorded automatically as time entries.

💰 Pricing

1. Starter. $6 per person per month, billed annually. All the resource scheduling capability you need with unlimited projects and powerful reporting. Best for teams of up to 30 people.

2. Pro. $10 per person per month, billed annually. Everything in Starter, plus built-in time tracking, single sign-on (SSO), and workflow features designed to scale. Best for growing teams of 30+ people.

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, 14 days.

Try the #1 capacity planning tool for popularity and customer satisfaction

We’re not just saying it—1000+ G2 customer reviews agree with us!
Start your 14-day free trial in just a couple of clicks 🔥

Try for free →

2. Resource Guru

🏢 Founded in: 2011
🎯 Primary software category: Resource Management
🏆 G2: 4.7 (200+ reviews); Capterra: 4.6 (450+ 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.