Reviews of Mac Project Management Software
Project management is important for individuals as well as companies. I am planning a major medical research project, which I am the primary stakeholder in, and I have discovered that formal project planning is a great advantage, even for minor players like myself. This post forms part of a series on personal project planning.
This post covers reviews of stand-alone project management programs for macs. Coming posts will look at online planning solutions, luddite planning solutions as well as some tips for setting up a personal project plan.
My project
Just to get some context, I have tested all these programs on my personal PhD project plan. The remainder of my project is 14 months long and contains more than 200 discrete outcomes. I am the main resource, as I participate in every experiment. I need a project plan that doesn’t have me doing 7 tasks at once.
GANTT chart 2.07
This is a very basic GANTT chart system, but open source and free. The interface is a bit slow, but it is easy enough to use. I could easily use this program, except that it doesn’t have automatic levelling. As far as I can sort out, I would have to manually shift around tasks to take into account my abilities to only exist in one plane of reality.
Omniplan
This is a lovely project planner - intuitive, easy interface, and it feels nice. It is ten times faster to set up your project with this rather than GANTT. Beautiful. And it also has automatic levelling. The resource section is also very intuitive and easily adaptable to a single person project with equipment being the main resources. I would definitely consider this project management solution. It costs $90 for an educational license, and $149 for a base license. You can get a free single day demo license, which is a great way to get a feel for the product.
Operation
This is promoted as a simple project management solution, and it is simple. It is very simple. There is no support for a timeline at all. Basically, it is a big bunch of linked index cards. That is not what I am looking for in a project planner.
xTimeProject
This one is bizarre. It looks really slick, but it is not at all intuitive. Entering tasks is not simple, with a full dialog box for each task. After five mintues I couldn’t figure out how to promote or demote a task in a heiarchy or how to set dependencies. I have no use for a program that I can’t figure out how to use in a few minutes. Especially not if I have to pay $100 for it!
Intellisys Project Desktop
This is quite functional, but pretty unattractive. It is not very “mac”, but it is pretty usable. I was able to create heirarchial project outlines pretty quickly. It has options to sync over a network, and seems to be set up well for collaborative input - where many project members change what they are working on to update the project. It is free to try, but purchasing costs $160. It just doesn’t work well enough to justify that for a personal project.
PowerCard
This is quite different from the other systems I tested. You brainstorm tasks onto a series of task cards and then link them by dropping them on each other. You rearrange the cards according to your priorities, and the system works out a timeline and GANTT chart for you. This seems an excellent way to plan. However, I found it difficult to link tasks within one milestone with others in another milestone. I have a pretty structured head, and I need to group a bit more than the program allows. I think it lends itself well to an “overall-general-theme” project-plan rather than a “granualr-specific-nitty-gritty” project plan. This isn’t quite right for me. If it works for you, you are in luck, as it only costs $60.
Merlin2
Merlin is lovely. It has all the advantages of Omniplan, and an even better interface. It even has neat little animations to the Gantt chart when you add tasks or change dependencies. However, it is a little more expensive. You can have a good try of this, but you can’t save projects with more than 20 tasks unless you buy a license. It costs $225 for a single license.
Educational planners
I thought that educational solutions might work for me, so I tried Task List 5.2 and Schoolhouse. Both are set up to manage concrete assignments, and would be best used at secondary school level. Task List can manage small projects with a number of steps, and integrates with iCal. I think Task List would be a perfect daily task manager for those studying, even at tertiary level.
Summary
I really liked both Omniplan and Merlin2. Both have excellent interfaces, and are scalable. If I chose to pay for one of these, I could continue to use it for bigger scale projects in the future. In fact, they may be total overkill for a single-person, no-budget project like mine. But I can choose not to use those extra features. And on mac, you are looking at shelling out in the region of $100, which is not a huge commitment if it means you will save days of project planning work, and stress over a 12 month plus time period.
But I still have to look at online planners. More about that next post.
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I had a brief look at Rationalplan. I could not work out how to change the calendar hours for just the morning (i could not delete the afternoon hours) and i managed to crash the application requiring a forced quit. Not a good look. It looks like a ported windows application and the user interface is clunky - also there is no online help. Not a very professional offering… Hi, Just wanted to say thanks for your generosity in taking time to post your reviews. VERY helpful and very much appreciated. People like you restore my faith in the goodness of humanity. Ever review a product called ‘Project X’ - I’m considering purchasing this for a small marketing department. If you have evaluated I would be interested in knowing your comments. Thanks in advance mr links or urls for the various apps you reviewed? thanks for this review page. just what i was looking for. Being in the market for a PM tool, I’ve recently played with many of the applications reviewed here. I too liked Omniplan, but found it lacking in its display and reporting capabilities. I just didn’t connect with Merlin at all. I settled on Project X. It allows you to work in network, timeline, or outline views, and I found them to be fairly intuitive. The network view is similar to the old MacProject interface. It also has a calendar view, which presents your ongoing project activities on a conventional calendar– very useful to me. The documentation is sparse, but the forum is tended by the developers. Best of all, though the retail price is significant ($200), I found retailers on Amazon selling upgradable shrinkwrapped copies for as little as $30. Bought one. I’ve demo’d both Project X and Merlin 2. Both have comparable functionality, but they operate a bit differently. Project X seems designed to be driven via the network view interface. Merlin 2 works better with the activities (Gantt) interface. So, pick what works best for you. Project X has more views. I particularly like the Resources/Calendar view. It offers a good way of tracking weekly resource activity. It is essentially a status report. I also prefer the Network view, because subtasks encapsulate their activity. This leaves the top level model uncluttered. The negative side is that the subtask function will generate an “advisory” alert if two tasks, within a subtask, have the same time line. This alert doesn’t prevent you from creating multiple tasks in parallel. It will just generate an alert. I’ve also noticed that, sometimes, data gets “sticky.” I was adding task and noticed that the same name was being repeated for each task. I had to make several passes to get the names right again. Merlin 2 is a faster. The interface also stays cleaner. I’ve noticed that Project X occasionally fragments vertical lines in the Timeline (Gantt) view. Merlin also imports project files faster. Merlin doesn’t have all of the reports or views that Project X provides. This is not really an issue as these views are nice to have features above and beyond project management. It should noted that Merlin is also faster and appears a bit more reliable. That said, I don’t think you can go wrong with either package. If you like entering data using a Gantt chart/Timeline interface, my recommendation would be to use Merlin 2. If you really like the Network model, pick Project X. Keep in mind that both product offer Gantt and Network interfaces. It is just that each product has a different preference for entering data. take a look @ open project. http://openproj.org/openproj it is open source. i have just downloaded it and will be using it for my development projects. first project i created today was just 20 tasks. i think this is fine for me before i invest $200 if needed on merlin2 or onmniplan. Dear Cris, fist i would like to thank you to share your expertise on this matter, i would like to ask you if you think that Omniplan is more powerful than Merlin. With Merlin i have many problems because ad example i can not give a different time sheet to my resources, i can not export my file on Microsoft Project, and there are may bugs. What about Omniplan. Thanks for your help Dear Cris, Great contribution to knowledge and functionality! I was wondering whether you’ve had a look at SharedPlan http://www.sharedplan.com/products.html which is supposedly used by WGBH Boston ad BBC. It allows work offline, with updating online, and contributions by other users on the same projects. Thank you for your consideration, Keith I hadn’t seen this post and you have looked at some products that I was not aware of. I have done something similar over at http://bit.ly/174Nue Hi Cris, Firstly, I’d like to thank you for this collection of mini reviews. I will be embarking on my final year dissertation for this academic year so a project management software would really help keep things in line. Of the few you recommended what would you choose for an academic dissertation project? Helping me plan out literature reviews, setting milestones for deliverables, etc. Perhaps this is a bit much, but it is possible to link files or scribbles with the tasks, etc? Say I have an on-going literature review — could I link to that file from the task button/Gantt bar? Is there anything that does that or will I need separate software? Cheers, (PS - Sorry if this comment shows up twice… I think the browser flubbed a bit) ISC has just launched PlanningForce for Mac, check it here: Regards, Hey great reviews I must say! I would like to planningforce (http://www.planningforce.com/) into the list which runs both in windows and Mac with an interactive tool bar and comes with an multilingual feature. Supports English, Danish, French. This is a great resource. I just recently purchased my Mac and this was very unsure of which software to purchase. You have made that decision much easier. I am also looking at MindMapping software. Any suggestions? Thanks for doing the leg work checking out project management software. I’m about to start using software after having done “paper and pencil” planning and management for years. I’m sure I’ve wasted lots of time. Do you know about Brain Organizer, a cool APP on the iPhone? I just heard about it. Comments on its site are either “great” or “not so good.” The Brain Organizer is for before you start planning, to get your ideas in better form. I’ll let you guys know after I check it out personally. To ISC, thanks for the info on PlanningForce. I’m going to their website now. Decoded to get Projector by app4mac. There a lot I like, but currently the print export function is totally broken for this product on my machine, so I’m a bit fustrated just doing screen grabs. Grrrrrrr. Thanks for the research and all the useful comments and feedback. I am about to undertake a consultancy project where I will want to do the planning and detailed work on my Mac but will have a requirement to provide reasonably detailed updates to my client who will be using PC’s. Do any of the products meet this requirement for a free Windows reader? Thanks for the quick responses. I’m going to try OpenProj first. It looks like it does all the basics and the requirements in this project are fairly basic. I’ll try creating a document on a Mac and sending it to a PC and let you know how I get on Sending a simple Gantt chart back and forth between a Mac and a PC worked on OpenProj - as it should with an open source product. As I do more complex stuff I will let you know if I encounter any problemsComments
(specifically i want to check out Operation. google couldn’t find it.)
Chupa
http://www.planningforce.com
Thanks again for helping others.Leave a comment
Dear Christine,
I would like to mention our RationalPlan products. It works on Mac, Windows and Linux. We have a Single Project and a Multi Project version at prices $57 and $93 respectively. Even a free Project Viewer is available. You can visit it at:
http://www.rationalplan.com/
There are features that maybe you do not need for personal project management but it is guide oriented and easy to use. If you like Omniplan and Merlin you should take a look at RationalPlan. I would appreciate your feedback very much.
Best wishes,
Lucian