Best Resource Management Software

Resource Management Software Reviews

In our search for the best resource management software, we identified 51 popular systems on the market. We narrowed our picks to six reputable vendors based on key features, pricing transparency, reputation, and customer service. To learn more about how we narrowed our search, check our methodology here.

ClickTime – Best Enterprise Resource Management Software

ClickTime helps businesses run more efficiently with tools like time tracking for team members, project management, and resource management. It tracks projects, time, and resources across business sectors and provides customizable reports in one centralized location. Using ClickTime, you will feel empowered through insights into time, resource allocation, and project progress to streamline and make informed future forecasting decisions.

Get Started Visit ClickTime’s website

ClickTime features

• Collaboration tools
• Resource allocation
• Resource forecasting
• Integrations
• Analytics

How ClickTime pricing works

ClickTime has four plans starting at $12 per month per user. While the two lower levels are great for time tracking and other features, resource management starts at the Premier level and costs $27 per user per month for up to 200 users.

The resource management tools specifically include project performance overviews, resource availability, budget indicators, projected versus actual multi-month capacity planning, companywide utilization rates, and under versus over-staffed projects. In addition to resource management tools, the Premier plan provides project insights and premium customer support. The Enterprise level provides fully tailored resource management solutions requiring consultation with a sales representative to unlock pricing.

What markets does ClickTime serve?

Since ClickTime features its resource management system in the top two plans, it’s most suitable for mid-size to enterprise businesses with 200 or more employees, multiple locations, and various projects and resources to manage simultaneously. Advanced billing rates, time off management features, seamless integrations, and administrative tools mean further enhanced efficiency, making it an ideal solution if you seek optimized resource allocation and informed decision-making.

Read our full ClickTime Review.

Connecteam – Best for Managing Team Resources

While not strictly resource management software, Connecteam is a great tool for tracking and managing your teams. Operational forms give you real-time information directly from the field. Auto-reminders and status updates let you provide employees with details, deadlines, and any needed attachments.

Additionally, in Connecteam’s Operations Hub, you can manage tasks and clearly communicate with your team members to ensure tasks are completed on time and effectively. Finally, Connecteam’s HR & Skills Hub lets you upload and manage employee files, certificates, and forms, ensuring you stay compliant and can easily access important information.

Get Started Visit Connecteam’s website

Connecteam features

• Collaboration tools
• Resource (team) allocation
• Resource forecasting (real-time polls to make informed decisions)
• Integrates with leading payroll providers
• Analytics

What markets does Connecteam serve?

Connecteam is best suited for businesses that need to manage teams across multiple locations. It’s designed for small companies and large organizations, letting them schedule, track, and communicate with their teams in real-time and receive feedback straight from the field. Connecteam is even better for teams with 10 or fewer employees, as the free plan gives you access to all its hubs and services for free for life.

Read our full Connecteam Review.

Resource Guru – Best for IT Resource Management

Resource Guru is an all-encompassing resource scheduling software that lets you optimize and schedule human and non-human resources. It can identify and track skills and manage individual availability, allowing you to instantly identify the best person for the project.

Key features include resource scheduling, work management, timesheets, leave management, project scheduling, and equipment management and scheduling. It also offers a meeting room booking system, capacity planning, and project forecasting reports. Individual dashboards are a unique feature that allows employees to see and focus on their specific tasks.

Get Started Visit Resource Guru’s website

Resource Guru features

• Collaboration tools
• Resource allocation
• Resource forecasting
• Integrations
• Analytics

How Resource Guru pricing works

Resource Guru is a thorough, feature-rich resource planning software that offers a 30-day free trial and three plans: Grasshopper, Blackbelt, and Master. While the plans are all packed with features and gain progressively more features as you move up levels, we find there is a lot of fine print to read.

For example, the Grasshopper plan starts at $4.16 per human user monthly, but the fine print states that it costs an additional $2.08 per other resource monthly. As such, you’re paying extra for every resource you schedule. Digging deeper, that also means every resource in the system—not just the ones actively scheduled. You must actively remove non-used resources or risk getting charged for them.

That said, pricing starts off on the low end, and the feature set is impressive. Resource Guru has a lot to offer busy teams that regularly face unexpected tasks.

What markets does Resource Guru serve?

Resource Guru works for many industries, but we especially like it for IT and SaaS teams. IT teams are constantly inundated with unexpected tasks, troubleshooting, and projects. Resource Guru has the precision and accuracy to track your team’s capacity in real-time and reassign and reschedule work immediately.

Paymo – Best Resource Management Software for Small Business

Paymo is an affordable resource management software with all the bells and whistles. It can help small businesses manage their projects and correctly provide them with the necessary resources to efficiently meet objectives and stakeholders’ needs. Initially a time-tracking software, Paymo has evolved to include resource management that helps you visualize team capacity, resource availability, workloads, and project timelines so that you can use your resources in the most efficient way.

Paymo features

• Collaboration tools
• Resource allocation
• Resource forecasting
• Integrations
• Analytics

How Paymo pricing works

Paymo offers a 15-day free trial and four plans. The first is free but limited to five clients and ten projects. The sweet spot is the Business plan, where the resource management tools come into play. Key features include unlimited clients, projects, project templates, Kanban boards, automated reoccurring tasks, profitability projections, scheduling capabilities, and priority customer service for just $16.90 per user monthly.

What markets does Paymo serve?

We like Paymo for small businesses. The software is affordable and has a hearty set of features that make it the most cost-efficient way for small businesses to track, visualize, and allocate resources to meet their project and stakeholder objectives.

Runn — Best Free Resource Management Software

Runn allows you to assign the right people and resources in real time to optimize project efficiency every time. Through resource scheduling, forecast planning, capacity tracking, and project management, you get resource management software that meets your deliverables efficiently. It also offers a robust free plan for small teams.

Runn features

• Collaboration tools
• Resource allocation
• Resource forecasting
• Integrations
• Analytics

How Runn pricing works

Runn has a 14-day free trial and three plans. The initial plan is free for unlimited users, projects, and up to five managed people (managed people being resources scheduled). The Pro plan is $8 monthly per person, and you get onboarding, integrations, and a higher level of customer support. In the Enterprise plan, you get custom onboarding, account concierge, and added account security, but you must also speak to them to get custom pricing.

What markets does Runn serve?

We like Runn’s free plan, which offers the most features of the free plans we have reviewed. There is no limit on users or projects, just on resources scheduled, so if you’ve got the same five resources to put towards each project, this is a great deal for you.

ProjectManager — Best Resource and Project Management Software

ProjectManager is, just as it sounds, a comprehensive cloud-based software that acts as a project management with resource management software to give you agility, accuracy, and insights to accurately plan projects. Key features include planning tools, project resources, team collaboration tools, task lists, reports, metrics, project portfolio management, and automated workflows. One stand-out feature is the ability to allocate human and non-human resources and schedule your remote team’s workload to make the most out of available resources.

ProjectManager features

• Collaboration tools
• Resource allocation
• Resource forecasting
• Integrations
• Analytics

How ProjectManager pricing works

ProjectManager has a 30-day free trial and three plans. The Team plan is reserved for project management, while the Business and Enterprise plans feature resource and project management. For $24 monthly per user, you get the Business plan that includes unlimited users, up to 100 projects, resource management, workloads and time tracking, workflow automation, advanced reporting, integrations, customizations, and live training.

What markets does ProjectManager serve?

ProjectManager is best for those businesses seeking both project management and resource management. With the combined tools, your project manager can see color-coded project views that identify bottlenecks and help them allocate resources to keep your projects moving.

Productive – Best Agency Resource Management Software

Build a proactive agency, not a reactive agency with Productive. Productive helps agencies manage their biggest resource—their team. You can plan out your workloads and capacity management and use a heat map to see where you’re overbooked and underbooked. Use one central dashboard for prospecting, planning, booking, invoicing, and billing. Productive is a complex budgeting and resource planning tool that enables agencies to grow.

Productive features

• Collaboration tools
• Resource allocation
• Resource forecasting
• Integrations
• Analytics

How Productive pricing works

Productive offers a 14-day free trial and four monthly plans starting at $9 per user. Unlike some competitors, resource planning is available right off the bat in the lowest plan—the Essential plan, which includes time tracking tools like timesheets, project and task management features, budgeting, and billable time.

Specific resource planning tools include project and team utilization, real-time forecasting, resource capacity indicators, scheduling, and time management. All tools increase and improve with each plan; most notably, customizations are available in the higher-level plans.

What markets does Productive serve?

Productive is for agencies and professional services, helping them be the most productive they can be to grow. Every tool available on the centralized platform is designed with agencies in mind. In addition to resource management, you can also add on sales, project planning, budgeting, reporting, time tracking, billing, and collaboration tools, all designed for agencies.

Compare the best resource management software side-by-side

What is resource management software?

Resource management software ensures you use your resources efficiently for each job and project. This includes lining up resources such as personnel, material, equipment, and costs and ensuring they’re available in the right location, at the right time, and in the right amount to complete each job. Using resource scheduling software, you can ensure that this is done effectively while saving time and helping you meet your goals and objectives for each project.

Resource management software is especially useful when juggling multiple projects, locations, and teams. It can also help you forecast your needs to be better prepared for each project. Additionally, as technology rapidly increases, resource management has seen a shift, making it vital to business who want to keep up with evolving technologies.

What is an effective resource management system?

While many tools can be considered resource management systems (i.e., Excel spreadsheets, Kanban boards, Google sheets), you likely want something more all-encompassing. An effective resource management system takes all the best parts of these tools and weaves them into one effective platform. This allows you to see your resources, projects, and tasks in progress while breaking down the workload and balance. The ideal resource management tool allows you to visualize your resources, assign them effectively to projects, and plan for future projects you will need them on.

However, this is not a one-size-fits-all category. The ideal resource management software is one curated to meet your specific needs, be it a user-friendly interface or one with high-end collaboration tools. To find the best resource planning system, you first need to identify your most pressing needs and then review the systems that meet them.

What features should I look for in a resource management tool?

There are several key features to look for in resource planning software. To meet your project needs and goals, you should look for resource management software that has the following features:

• Planning tools: Project planning tools such as Gantt charts, Kanban boards, calendars, and timelines can help you organize your projects and time frames.
• Resource demand forecasting: The software you choose should be able to forecast your staff needs, skill sets, equipment needs, and more to help you plan for each project and how many projects you can take on at once. Features like this will likely increase as the resource management software market is expected to grow tremendously.
• Automated resource allocation: This ensures the software automatically predicts and plugs in resources for each project and allows you to drag and drop resources as needed.
• Skill filtering: As you take on projects, your resource management software will allow you to sort team members and locations by skill sets to determine where to assign what projects and needs you may have for an upcoming project.
• Analytics: These help you understand your resource usage and gauge future projects and capacity.

Benefits of resource management software

There are several benefits to using resource management software. These include streamlined projects, visual project overviews, and better forecasting for future projects.

“I can use the dashboard to see workloads and bottlenecks instantly. It prevents overallocation and missed deadlines,” says Yasin Arafat, Founder and CEO of DOPPCALL. “I can analyze, allocate, and execute plans from a single platform.” He also reports that his project efficiency is up 20% through resource management software.

Here are some other ways you can benefit from using resource management software:

• Client satisfaction: Resource planning software lets you give clients clear project schedules, timelines, and projections that keep them informed on your deliverables.
• Improved team communication: As a central resource, teammates can communicate and collaborate more quickly and efficiently on each project.
• Increased accountability: By clearly outlining each project and who is responsible for each task, your team knows their roles and the expectations placed on them.
• Better project performance: Resource scheduling software reduces bottlenecks, ensures that the right resources are available at the right time, and enables your projects to move forward more efficiently.

How much does resource management software cost?

Resource management software pricing ranges from free (Runn and Paymo) to a monthly charge per user. A basic plan costs between $4 and $6 per user monthly (Resource Guru and Paymo, respectively), and on the high end, between $12 and $13 per user per month (ClickTime and ProjectManager).

Some systems also charge per resource. For example, Resource Guru charges a fee per human user or resource and then an additional fee per non-human resource you schedule. We were pleased to find transparent pricing across the category. The following chart further explains our top picks and their pricing.

Applicant tracking systems FAQs

How do you create a resource plan?

A resource plan outlines the resources needed and how they will be utilized for your project. Creating a resource plan is done in a few basic steps:

1. Identify project requirements and the resources needed.
2. Define the amount of each resource you need for the project.
3. Assess resource availability.
4. Schedule resources on the project.
5. Monitor and adjust resource utilization as the project progresses.

What is the best tool for resource management?

Many excellent resource management tools are available, but the best tool depends on your business, budget, requirements, and existing tech deck. No two companies are the same, and the best tool for one person might not be the best for you. Evaluate your needs and consider several options that align with your business. Do your research, take the free trials and demos, test them out, and read the reviews to ultimately decide the best tool for resource management for your business.

Which resource management software is the most user-friendly for small teams?

Several resource planning systems on our list receive high praise for their ease of use. ClickTime and ProjectManager score high with reviewers for smooth and intuitive user interfaces. Resource Guru stands out the most for its usability. It’s designed to be simple, visual, fast, intuitive, and blissfully easy to use. Users agree it does indeed check all those boxes.

Which resource management software offers the best value for small businesses?

In our extensive research, we found that Paymo and Resource Guru offer considerable value to small businesses. Paymo is specifically designed and priced for small businesses so that they get all the value that large enterprises get from this type of software at a more manageable price tag. Resource Guru, while it can get pricey, offers many out-of-the-box features such as individual dashboards, non-human resource scheduling, and more that help small teams stay productive and on track.

How we chose the best Resource Management Software

To identify the best resource management software, we started with a list of 51 systems on the market and identified 15 popular vendors. After a deep dive into each company’s offerings, markets served, brand reputation, and more, we narrowed them down to five to review.

These five vendors were scored on a rating system based on the following criteria:

• Features
• Pricing and transparency
• Customer support
• Brand reputation

Each of the four areas was rated 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent), and each rating makes up 25% of their final score. This information was then collected and verified through interviews, demos, free trials, and vendor and parent company websites.

Our top five picks are well-vetted and verified through our meticulous research and rating system, as well as our editorial team of experts. Rest assured that our guide provides the most up-to-date, accurate, and relevant information to help you make the best selection for your resource management needs.