Celoxis vs. Forecast vs. Planview ChangePoint

Celoxis is a great option if you are looking for an affordable, easy to use, easy to integrate project manegement solution. It is very powerful for waterfall project management. I evaluated more than 15 platforms and could not find any with a close evaluation in terms of cost-benefit to Celoxis. Of course there are more powerfull tools, for 10 times the price. So far, for project management, there hasn't been a requirement I haven't been able to solve with some work. It really lacks features for Agile methodologies, even if it provides a Kanban view, so far it doesn't provide and additional agile artifacts. If an organization has already reached a very mature project management practice and needs to improve on program and portfolio management, Celoxis won't provide any useful feature. If the organization has the resources (skills and time mostly) to develop some workflows and customization, it might work but with a limit. Hopefully Celoxis addresses these features in the near future.

Incentivized

Forecast is well suited for tracking schedules, especially if it is only being controlled by a single department. When it comes to using Forecast in a larger ecosystem with more "cooks in the kitchen" it would be helpful to have the software more easily integrated with other software.

Incentivized

Changepoint is basic and would, therefore, work for businesses with uncomplicated requests, pretty straightforward workflows and willingness to work with an unsightly solution. It is basic, from the UI to the search option and the way the information is captured, which can be frustrating and counter-intuitive at times. It is relatively robust (i.e. I have been using it for almost 2 years and have not seen it crash once) but it does log me out when the system has been inactive for about 30 minutes - and I am only notified about being logged out upon clicking the Submit button, meaning many a line of text have been typed more than once!

Incentivized

• Project planning
• Time log
• Efforts analysis vs plan

Incentivized

• Assign and allocate resources.
• Identify lean departments and identify areas to increase headcount.
• Manage agile teams.
• Identify bottlenecks in departments or resourcing.

Incentivized

• Changepoint has significant reporting capabilities, though of course, the data that comes out is only as good as the data that goes in. I enjoy being able to use the standard reports to understand exactly how much a project has cost us and to compare it to how much we are charging. This allows us to more accurately set our prices. Though we have not used the report designer capability, I understand that custom reports can be designed with relative ease.
• Changepoint has a versioning capability for changes made to user profiles in the system manager, which I find particularly helpful. As a non-power user, it is valuable to be able to see what changes I have made to various profiles so that I can troubleshoot a problem down the line.
• Changepoint has significant functionality well beyond the features that we are currently using, and for this reason, I think it is affordable and a good deal. Particularly if your organization is interested in dedicating the time and resources into using all of the features around project planning, resource allocation, etc., the price is well worth the value.

• Support is at times slow to respond.
• Not new user-friendly.
• Not able to pull in closer or zoom the interface.

Incentivized

• Not as intuitive as its companion software, Harvest. This software takes longer to learn when on-boarding new staff. It is also difficult to view time notes without needing to physically open them up. This could be improved by expanding the "on hover" functionality. Personally, having spent as little time in workflow software is really important, as it gives me more time to code.
• Because we use this software to plan schedules, items often fall through the cracks. I would like to see some more sophisticated syncing with not only Harvest but also with Asana.
• Lack of integration with Asana. It would be nice to pull data from forecast and display it in Asana. This would be helpful for understanding how much time I have to spend on a project rather than bounce back and forth between web apps.

Incentivized

• We use Changepoint to manage the IS organization. I would like to see more advancement in order to do benefits management.
• I would like to see a capability where a project manager can build a very detailed work breakdown structure, but only require project resources to charge time and provide a task status at a higher level.

Sometimes the decision to renew boils down to an old adage "if it isn't broken don't fix it". Previous to moving to Changepoint, it was obvious that we needed a better project management tool. Projects we completed on time but the time zone difference between the teams and several iterations of back and forth caused a number of communication issues with projects. The difference is night and day.

It could be more intuitive and user friendly.

I have not needed support for Forecast.

Incentivized

I used an evalaution matrix built with input of several stakeholders in the company. In the end the matrix included 100 features (non of them was price related). The matrix was heavily focused on waterfall project management, agile related features were only 5 out of 100 features. Features were labeled as mandatory, required or optional. Products which lacked a mandatory feature (like providing technical support) were disqualified. Then a price vs features evaluation was made and only the products with the best combination were seleced to continue: Celoxis, ITM Platform and Mission Control. A final technical evaluation was made comparing the full evaluation but also the evaluation of only the 40 required features. Overall, Celoxis was the better evaluated (76% vs 65% of the second place), for the 40 required features, Celoxis got 91% against 78% of number 2. In the end we chose Celoxis even when it had higher licensing cost.

Incentivized

I have not used any other scheduling software other than Forecast. The company selected Forecast because it is used in conjunction with Harvest. The pair of web apps can be used to pull detailed data. This is very important to our agency, and making data-driven decisions is exceptionally important to our agency mission.

Incentivized

Planview Changepoint helps us to understand our key customers enabling us to capitalize on every financial opportunity and helps us to forecast demand against the capacities required for new opportunities, and also it automates and monitors contractual terms and conditions. It gives us visibility into our employees' skills and helps to optimize resource allocation.

Incentivized

• Positive in most cases

Incentivized

• Allow departments to run efficiently.
• Quickly identify whether departments need to hire.
• Easily visualize project gaps in resources.

Incentivized

• Employee efficiency has decreased significantly within our Project MAnagement team. The main causes are lack of logical steps/not user-friendly and the slowness of the entire program.
• Changepoint PSA has greatly improved being able to track budgets for all projects. Before this software, budgets were done manually by hand and cross-referenced with Accounting. Now, we can pull a report out of the system, as long as all parties entered their time and data correctly.