LiquidPlanner Reviews

Liquid Planner provides a real-to-life approach to project management. I love the way that they use a 3-point estimate for likely remaining effort for each task. This rolls up into a very useful, and dynamic estimate of project completion.

Though there are work-arounds, it is sometimes frustrating that task dependencies are tedious to enter.

- Customizable (To a Degree)
- Reporting Capabilities
- Excellent Interface with Our Client Invoicing Application

- Extremely Time Consuming to Set Up & Deploy
- Frequent Software Changes Requires Extra Time to Maintain & Reconfigure
- Expensive Relative to Similar Application Alternatives

I was very happy with the ease of use this product provided compared to some of the tools we used previously. It is built in a contemporary look and feel and is easy to navigate and manipulate data points in order to determine trends and better inform decisions. If you have the time and resources to dedicate to making sure the latest project data is always available, that is, due dates, estimated levels of effort remaining and hours logged are all kept up to date in a real-time basis, this tool has the potential to truly provide a wholistic and accurate view of the workload within an organization, along with any potential risks. The way the data are refreshed using the forecasting algorithms is a great feature which allows project managers to shift tasks around to determine how resources are affected.

Despite the name of "Liquid" Planner, there were some decidedly "unliquid" principals in which the software was built upon which power the accuracy and overall value of the product. If more then 25% of these principals are not known or regularly updated, the entire product grinds to a halt and the value it provides is completely lost. It's not a fault of how the product was built. I never encountered a time where the service/software was down or unavailable and each time I reached out to the support team they were courteous and prompt with their response. Overall, I felt frustrated by the amount of data the tool needs (and how that data need to be structured) in order for the tool to be valuable and viable. More often than not, I felt myself and the team responsible for the tool were spending more time administering the tool itself rather than using the information coming out of the tool to better our projects.

The product is well designed so that it is a relatively low bar to learn how to use it effectively. It is easy for team members to interact with the software and to enter the information according to each users project role. When used as intended, the software does an excellent job providing the necessary views into project status. The software definitely lives up to its name as modifying project plans and priorities is easy and the impacts of such changes are essentially instantly available. The numerous but intuitive ways to manage project subtleties such as available time, delays, etc. make it straightforward to create realistic project schedules.

I do not have any specific negatives with respect to Liquid Planner. Like any software of this class, It does take some training and experience to get the most out of it. My best advice is to spend some time to understand how the designers intended the product to be used use it accordingly. LP has a rich set of features and if used properly will contribute positively to project management.

I like the conversation that LP forces around how much time something will take and the idea that building out a list of smaller to-do's will help you identify how much time a task will take to complete. I like LP so much more than a traditional project management tool.

There is a lack of flexibility when looking at projects and tasks together. In Notion, I am much more able to plan out task due dates across multiple projects and tasks that are in-flight at the same time. LP does not have enough flexibility to really meet the needs of a small team working on lots of things at the same time. It is too siloed.

The thing that I like most about LiquidPlanner is the ability to schedule projects and tasks far out, and the accuracy of the scheduling algorithm related to the work that you should be doing in relation to the deadlines you have.

The thing that I like the least is that the software currently doesn't have as many capabilities for calculations and financial tracking. I wish there was more abilities to track expenses and project costs in relation to the work you have tracked.

As a web development agency, I can tell you the one feature that has prevented me from using another product, that is their task estimating feature. Why nobody else does this is beyond me (full disclosure: a lot of things are beyond me) :)

When setting up a task you can actually estimate the time it will take the same way real people estimate tasks, with a time range. Who in the world ever hits their single estimate time targets all the time? NOBODY. With Liquid Planner you enter a range, 3 - 6 hours, 1-2 hours, etc. THAT IS A LIFESAVER FOR US.

Another concept of theirs called "packages" is also brilliant. There you can take tasks and bundle them up into "folders" that make sense to you, so you can look at your projects

The thing that I dislike the most is there are not many integrations with third party time keepers for tasks and billing programs. Harvest would be an example, as would many others. They have their own time tracker, but to use it you ahve to have the app open. Lose internet, forget about it. Working in a car or on the train without internet? Forget about it.

Also, their mobile app is not really of much value.

LiquidPlanner makes tracking multiple large, complex projects possible and easy (after the initial learning curve).

It provides fully customizable dashboards that can be set up per project or per user (or both) and robust reporting. It also allows you to get a good view of what's coming up in relation to how much bandwidth each user has to manage it, as well as how the team's bandwidth affects the project/task expected completion date.

It just has SO MUCH!!!

It has a fairly steep learning curve. Our team has been using LiquidPlanner for over 4 years and we are still learning various nuances of the platform or better implementations. Also, the UI could use a serious update and it's not at all mobile-friendly (the mobile app is also a joke). But none of that would deter us from using it because it provides so much value that we haven't been able to find in any other system.

LiquidPlanner is a good tool for tracking employee time against tasks and projects. We use this LiquidPlanner for tracking time associated with specific projects and clients.

With any tool, there are some limitations. LiquidPlanner does a decent job of reporting and dashboarding by project. For our organization, reporting and dashboarding by client and/or by month is more important. Unfortunately, there is not a good solution in LiquidPlanner to help us with this. The solutions that exist are clunky and/or partial. LiquidPlanner has the ability to create shared tasks which is a great feature. This allows multiple employees to be on the same task. Unfortunately, schedule timelines and priorities do not calculate well when using shared tasks. It's better for every employee to be on their own task for schedule timelines and priorities to calculate properly.

LiquidPlanner helps us stay organized and keeps all of our team's communications in a centralized place. I like that the scheduling and prioritization of projects is flexible. And I like that we can adjust the number of seats each month as the size of out team and freelance staff changes.

It seems difficult for people to catch on to the UI quickly. Most of our staff took a while to adjust to the way LP works and how to most effectively use the software. It might be worth looking into more user testing to find ways to make the navigation and data entry more intuitive.

It helps to organize the tasks and get people the right information to work on.
It helps to prioritize what needs to happen and forecast how long it takes.
It does a great job of managing hand offs within a team.
It provides more tools than a typical user will ever need. The deeper you go the more value you can get.

It can be difficult to get people to understand that this is not typical planning software.
A more robust tutorial and a better description of what this tool is would help get teams to start faster.

I like sevaral things about Liquid Planner. Here are just a few.

I like the project management in general. I like the range of hours for tasks. This helps improve overall project scheduling.

I like being able to add custom fields to tasks and projects.

I like the ability to do ASAP Tasks.

While great, Liquid Planner is not perfect.

I wish the reports and analytics worked a bit more intuitively. There are several things that I have tried to do that I have not been able to figure out. Some I have been able to resolve with customer support. Others I found were things that are not possible.

Although Liquid Planner is set up great for tracking time for projects it doesn't work well for projects that are firm fixed priced. Most of the projects we work on here are firm fixed priced. I am aware of the baseline feature, but frankly it just isn't very good, nor are the graphs for tracking to plan.

There are a few other things that I'm not remembering at the moment.

Excellent time tracking and scheduling features, bonuses like setting dependencies, and comprehensive analysis and reporting features.

Optimized for large, involved projects and as a result the Task designation isn't as helpful as it might be. Needs richer functionality in Tasks for short projects where it isn't worth setting up a project folder.