LiquidPlanner Review 2023: Pricing, Features, Pros & Cons

LiquidPlanner is a project and portfolio management software that’s been steadily getting more and more attention in the market. It’s a powerful set of features for planning tasks and projects, allocating workflow resources, and tracking progress.

In this LiquidPlanner review, we’ll break down the pricing plans, and talk a lot about the free plan available from LiquidPlanner. 

We’ll also talk about the essential LiquidPlanner features that are unique to this software’s methodology, as well as look at some of the general project management tools included. 

LiquidPlanner review 2023: Is LiquidPlanner any good?

If you need a Liquidplanner review in a New York minute, then it’s this: LiquidPlanner is a great piece of project management software. It lets you plan and track everything from individual tasks to company-wide portfolios. It also shines in the areas of pricing and ease of use.

LiquidPlanner is designed with intelligent predictive planning that includes tools to measure risk and uncertainty. User reviews are generally very positive, praising its price and ease of use. 

LiquidPlanner has a lot of tough competition out there when it comes to the best project management software, going head to head against systems like Asana, Wrike and Podio. 

Many of these task management solutions include very similar sets of tools, like Gantt charts, time tracking and resource management. But LiquidPlanner stands out for some of its original tools, like predictive scheduling and range estimation. 

The platform was initially released in 2008 as a predictive scheduling tool. The aim was to allow users to have better foresight regarding things like uncertainties and risks. The new LiquidPlanner was dropped in 2011, and this version had even more planning intelligence built into the system.

All in all, it’s quite fair to say that LiquidPlanner is good, if not great, and as we’ll see, the price is right for a lot of companies too. And if your company size is on the smaller side, you might be able to use the free plan. 

That’s not to say that large businesses and enterprise companies might not also find LiquidPlanner’s smart portfolio management a real boon to their business. 

LiquidPlanner pricing plans 

First of all, how much does LiquidPlanner cost? Let’s first review LiquidPlanner prices:

How much does LiquidPlanner cost for nonprofits?

LiquidPlanner offers a free plan, which could be useful to nonprofits and other charity organizations. The vendor also promotes its affiliation with about 400 nonprofits, so if you’re in this category you might consider reaching out to them for bespoke pricing. 

Are there any LiquidPlanner coupon codes or promo discount vouchers?

Much searching has been done for promotions and coupons and vouchers and discounts for LiquidPlanner but it seems there are no current offers available through the vendor. 

You may think you got lucky if you find a LiquidPlanner coupon code through a third-party seller, however, it is strongly advised that you double and triple check directly with LiquidPlanner that this coupon code is legitimate and still valid.

LiquidPlanner free vs paid: what’s the difference?

It’s great news that there is indeed a free version of LiquidPlanner. So, here’s the deal. Only 3 users can be on the free plan. You also have a maximum of 10 projects. Finally, you can have up to 300 tasks. The essentials plan, in comparison, is paid for by the number of members, and you get 50 projects and 5000 tasks.

As for the tools in the free plan, they are all the tools of the essentials plan. These include the main LiquidPlanner signature features like the predictive scheduling, automatic resource leveling, priority-based planning, ranged estimation, integrated time tracking, and smart schedule bars. 

What is not available in the essentials plan include features like permissions and access roles, timesheet reviews, and more of the advanced customization options. 

LiquidPlanner overview: What is LiquidPlanner & What is LiquidPlanner used for?

If you haven’t already had this question answered for you, here we go again. What is LiquidPlanner? It’s an intelligent project management software. And what is LiquidPlanner used for? 

It’s used to plan your projects, predict your timeframes and budgets, minimize uncertainties, and more. LiquidPlanner is also good for teamwork, including features for communication, collaboration and file sharing.

LiquidPlanner is not exactly a CRM, or customer relationship management software. This means it’s not the most ideal platform if all you need is to keep in touch with your contacts and grow your network. 

So why is there a LiquidPlanner review on a CRM website? Because CRM is really part of the larger set of business tools, and LiquidPlanner is a crucial business tool for your work SaaS kit. You can of course integrate LiquidPlanner with CRMs (and more on that below).

Ultimately, you’ll be using LiquidPlanner to break down your projects into tasks, sub tasks and to-do lists; to assign roles, permissions and access to all your team members involved in the project; and for getting great broad overviews as well as granular data detail laid out in beautiful dashboard reports. 

All this to maintain total control over all the moving parts that make up great work projects. 

LiquidPlanner features list 

The main features of LiquidPlanner are:

• Task management

• Predictive scheduling

• Workload and resource management

• Ranged estimations

• Change tracking

• Prioritization

• Time management

• Data and reporting 

• Dashboards and views

• Portfolio management

• Integrations

Task management

Overall, LiquidPlanner is a project management software that obviously must include a range of task management functionality. With LiquidPlanner you can arrange your tasks and set things like dependencies and priority statuses for each one, and make individual task assessments. 

From there it’s easy to edit your tasks and change the status, and arrange for notifications when statuses change. You can quickly import tasks into LiquidPlanner for faster project planning, and you can export your task data like time tracking data and billing information.

Predictive scheduling

As a project management tool, LiquidPlanner takes over some of the estimation and guess work when it comes to scheduling tasks and projects, planning timeframes and setting deadlines. 

As a forecasting and scheduling engine, LiquidPlanner uses “Monte Carlo” simulations across all your portfolio and will tell you how long the work will take and what kind of delays you can expect based on various risk factors. 

You can also influence this feature by adjusting priority levels. 

Workload and resource management

LiquidPlanner offers automatic resource leveling, which is a tool to help manage workloads and do personnel resource allocation for more balanced teamwork. 

This shows you which team members are working on what tasks and who might have too many or too few tasks on their plate. It also analyzes each team member’s availability as new projects and tasks come in so it can automatically create project schedules around their workflows. 

Ranged estimations

With LiquidPlanner, it’s not only about making a solid plan, but being ready for uncertainties and risks. The range estimation tool considers for every job and task a best and worst case scenario to give you a range as to how workflows will proceed, and will display this range in your dashboards.

Change tracking

Sometimes you need to shift gears or change lanes mid-project because of many factors: the client’s wishes, unforeseen supply bottlenecks, staffing shakeups, etc. 

With LiquidPlanner, it's easy to insert any new changes and the platform will take this information and readjust its predictions. It’s also useful to collaborate with team members on changes, including with a Slack integration.

Prioritization

Priority-based project planning is central to project management solutions and especially to the LiquidPlanner platform. You can create a shared portfolio where all stakeholders in a project can communicate and align their projects, tasks and priorities. 

This also helps make sure you have the right employee on the right task. To view priorities, you can choose from a personal dashboard to a general board view, and changing priorities can be done with easy drag and drop functionality.

Time management

Time tracking is one of the key tools in the time management toolkit and LiquidPlanner has got the features to track time throughout the project progress. It’s easy to track progress over durations, mark tasks as complete, or even postpone tasks or extend their timeframes. 

Time management tools also let you automatically translate time to billable hours. There are personalized dashboard views for team members to monitor their time management. You can also arrange for automatic timesheet reviews and exports.

Data and reporting 

LiquidPlanner is great at capturing data in real-time and using it for analysis and for preparing insightful reports on your tasks, projects and portfolios. You can also schedule regular resource workload reports. 

Dashboard insights regularly give you key data with minimal clicking, and you can also customize your reports by adding new properties and custom fields and filters to your data management. 

A custom workspace dashboard can create reports on entire portfolios, and you can also add even more custom dashboard widgets.

Dashboards and views

There are a variety of different dashboard views you can use with LiquidPlanner. The timeline view works like a Gantt chart. Card view is their name for Kanban boards. 

There is a view called the baseline view which is for making comparisons in plans and projects, letting you see how on target you are. Then there’s a status view which is an overview of project and task statuses. 

The workload view shows you how long has elapsed or remains on a task. Meanwhile, the work distribution chart shows your team's schedules and availability. 

Finally, there are more graphics like the overall workload graphic, the total trend graphic and the date drift report.

Portfolio management

When we talk about portfolios, we often mean the total collection of projects in progress, and even sometimes past completed projects and future planned projects. LiquidPlanner helps manage project portfolios, and this is great for large company size operations. Here you get even more views, including boards and grids. 

There is also a powerful and accurate portfolio-wide search function, and a single sign-on feature that’s centrally managed. 

Integrations

As mentioned above, there is a native integration for LiquidPlanner and Slack, the team communication platform. LiquidPlanner also offers integrations with Dropbox and Google Drive. 

If you want further LiquidPlanner integrations, you can use a connector app like Zapier, Workato, Make or Automate.io to connect LiquidPlanner’s functionalities to many other useful tools, like Salesforce for more CRM features, or other project management apps like Wrike or Microsoft Project.

LiquidPlanner pros and cons

If you’d like to know more about the advantages and disadvantages of LiquidPlanner, then just know one thing before proceeding. One person’s pro might be another’s con, and one should always maintain a level of subjective discrimination when deciding what the benefits are of a software, and what are the drawbacks.

LiquidPlanner advantages

When it comes to organizing large-scale projects or whole portfolios, LiquidPlanner is an incredibly powerful tool to help your team pass milestone after milestone and surpass goals. 

For the most part, many of LiquidPlanner’s features get high points for ease of use. This user-friendly aspect is another benefit to LiquidPlanner. Often, when a platform is too complicated, it means some users won’t bother to learn all the tools.

Another LiquidPlanner pro is that this is quite the flexible software for many company sizes, from startups and small businesses right up to enterprise level organizations. This is often something you cannot say about other software which are either better for large or small businesses but not both.

A clear LiquidPlanner advantage is its predictive features. The predictive scheduling and forecasting engine makes project planning much more simple and accurate. This also includes the smart bars which factor in uncertainty and risk as well as the ranged estimations.

Finally, LiquidPlanner offers professional services. This is a service to help new teams with onboarding and rollout of the software, LiquidPlanner experts can also help set up workspaces, ready your data, and train your employees.   

LiquidPlanner disadvantages

The first drawback of LiquidPlanner is that it appears there is no mobile app. This is not to say that you cannot access the platform from your mobile phone, but you’ll be using the regular browsing version, albeit with a responsive screen which will adapt to the small size of your mobile phone. 

Still, it would be nice to have a dedicated mobile app for iPhones and Android devices.

LiquidPlanner complaints & praise (from real LiquidPlanner customer reviews)

The review sources of LiquidPlanner online are generally quite positive if not lacking in some enthusiasm for this task and project planning tool. First of all, users do love that there is a free plan. In fact, pricing forms a big part of their positive reviews, and even the enterprise plan, which they call the premium plan, is fairly priced.

Other review sources which are positive say that LiquidPlanner has a very useful variety of views and boards, each of which brings some special metric or data to the fore. These include the project news and portfolio views, as well as more niche views like member workload and group workload views.

Negative LiquidPlanner review sources are not too vociferous out there and that should be taken as a good sign. Like stated above, the fact that there is no iOS or Android LiquidPlanner app is something that irks some reviews. 

Other user review sources that are less than glowing talk about the lack of native integrations, although if you search hard enough, you’ll find that LiquidPlanner does have an API which you can request, although this won’t work for users who have SSO (single sign-on).

Review of LiquidPlanner.com support

LiquidPlanner’s customer support is also not something they get a whole lot of praise for. What you get with their customer service is a classic LiquidPlanner FAQ with a search function, and this is for their older LiquidPlanner product. 

However, there is also a new support system for the newer LiquidPlanner. This includes a contact form and a phone number for tech support. There are also video tutorials, and a LiquidPlanner Academy.

For further customer support, you are free to peruse their blog, ebooks, and check out their webinars. Finally, there is LiquidPlanner Professional Services as we mentioned earlier. 

Is LiquidPlanner worth it? Our key takeaways

So, to finally conclude things once and for all, is LiquidPlanner worth it? Our final word on the matter is that, Yes, LiquidPlanner is a very useful, affordable and powerful project management solution, regardless if you are a small business or an enterprise.

Now it’s important to mention, LiquidPlanner is hardly the only game in town for project and task planning systems. There are many excellent LiquidPlanner alternatives that you should check out if you have the time and will. 

Surely you’ll be familiar with some of those other vendors. Some might be cheaper, others might offer a wider range of tools. Of course it’s always good to narrow down what your business needs are, before you shop too seriously.

And that’s it folks. We hope this LiquidPlanner review and description of what LiquidPlanner is used for has been enlightening, entertaining and engaging, but never overwhelming. We trust you, dear reader, to know your limits and make the right choice. Ta ta!