LiquidPlanner Review

Pros

• Excellent customer service
• Advanced user permissions
• Advanced features

Cons

• Steep learning curve
• Expensive monthly cost
• Outdated UI

LiquidPlanner Overview

LiquidPlanner is a Seattle-based software company with an unusual approach to project management. Unlike most other project management software, LiquidPlanner operates with a distinctive scheduling methodology that concentrates heavily on task prioritization. The creators and developers of LiquidPlanner are extremely proud of their innovative software and with good cause. LiquidPlanner is not your standard project management software. According to the official site:

When push comes to shove, there’s one big way we’re different than all of the other kids on the block. We believe that setting and communicating priorities is the single-most important thing you can do to make your team more effective. When you build your plan around priorities instead of hundreds of hard-coded dates, magic happens. Scheduling multiple projects becomes easier than ever before. People know what to work on. Whenever priorities change, so do your schedules — automatically.

LiquidPlanner, the winner of two CODiE awards in 2016, has steadily gained popularity worldwide. Though it began in relative obscurity, this software is now used by 1,300 companies around the world. LiquidPlanner is the project management software of choice for corporate giants, such as Alaska Airlines, T-Mobile, and Twitter.

Pricing

LiquidPlanner offers a free, full-access, 14-day trial of the software and does not require you to pay anything down or provide a credit card number.

LiquidPlanner no longer lists pricing information on its website. You have to inquire about LiquidPlanner’s pricing for your business. That said, we were able to find some info that implies plans are only available on an annual payment model. If you’re hoping for a monthly payment plan, be sure to inquire about this when you contact LiquidPlanner.

Although LiquidPlanner does not list pricing information online, it does specify which features each of its two pricing plans include. Take a look at these plans below.

Professional Plan

• Comments with tasks
• Time tracking
• iOS and Android apps
• Analytics
• Phone and email support
• API access
• Integrations with Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box
• Unlimited internal dashboards
• 100GB document storage
• 25 virtual members
• 2,000 active tasks
• 100 clients
• 20 custom fields
• 10 external dashboards

Enterprise Plan

LiquidPlanner’s Enterprise Plan includes everything in the Professional Plan, plus:

• Resource workload report
• Expenses
• Single sign-on
• 500GB document storage
• 50 virtual members
• Unlimited active tasks
• Unlimited clients
• 50 custom fields
• Unlimited external dashboards

Cloud-Based Or Locally-Installed

LiquidPlanner is entirely cloud-based and does not require any manual updates.

Hardware & Software Requirements

Because LiquidPlanner is web-based, you only need a computer with a reliable internet connection and an up-to-date web browser to use the software. LiquidPlanner supports the most recent versions of these browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Edge.

LiquidPlanner also offers mobile apps for Android, iPad (iOS 7 and above), and iPhone (iOS 7 and above). LiquidPlanner’s mobile apps allow users to view projects, write comments, view tasks, track time, and more. These mobile apps do not let users access all of the features of the platform, but they are useful for checking on assignments and tracking time.

Specific Size Of Business

LiquidPlanner states that its software is designed for teams of five or more. In fact, you cannot use the software if you have fewer than five team members. I would recommend LiquidPlanner for mid-size to large companies that have a dedicated project manager.

Ease Of Use

LiquidPlanner is not the easiest software to use. Users frequently mention having to overcome an initial learning curve. Fortunately, for the most part, LiquidPlanner is logically set up, with nesting categories and subcategories. In general, your daily operations should run pretty smoothly. However, I have seen a few user comments that mention irritating features, such as the inability to open certain links in a new tab (resulting in frequently having to click the back button to get back into LiquidPlanner). To get an idea of LiquidPlanner’s ease of use, we recommend signing up for a 14-day trial.

Features

LiquidPlanner focuses on automatically organizing tasks based on priority. This sets LiquidPlanner apart from other project management software applications that don’t focus as strongly on automation. Take a look below to see what’s included in LiquidPlanner’s feature set:

• Dashboard: LiquidPlanner’s dashboards allow you to create custom views to visualize data quickly. You can get an overview of select projects or your own scheduled work. The rest of LiquidPlanner’s admin panel is organized with a toolbar at the top of the page. LiquidPlanner utilizes nesting folders, projects, and tasks to organize the software further. We have seen reports that LiquidPlanner is difficult software to learn, but we are happy to see that it is logically organized.

• Project Management: LiquidPlanner goes about project management with a slightly different method than most software. As you might expect, your first step is to create projects, tasks, and subtasks. But unlike most project management software, LiquidPlanner does not require you to set a specific end date for a project. Instead, each time a new task is created, you are asked to enter in a range of the working hours required to complete the task. For example, you might estimate that a job could take anywhere from five to nine actual hours to complete. LiquidPlanner calculates this level of uncertainty into your schedule and then predicts a range of dates on which the project might be finished. This is an awesome feature for so many reasons. When paired with LiquidPlanner’s scheduling features, this predictive scheduling allows you to automatically take into account your team member’s working hours, workload, and scheduled vacations.
• Tasks: You can easily create and assign tasks for each of your projects. Then, each of your tasks can be broken down into subtasks. These subtasks are automatically assigned to the task owner, but you can give one or more checklist items to a coworker (any workspace member, virtual or otherwise). Checklist items, like everything else in LiquidPlanner, are arranged according to priority. Be warned, however, that LiquidPlanner does not schedule times for individual checklist items. Your schedule is calculated based on the number of hours that have been estimated to complete the task as a whole.
• Job Costing: LiquidPlanner automatically calculates the cost of a project based on submitted timesheets. This will help you keep an eye on your profits.
• Resource Management: LiquidPlanner provides a Resource Workload Report, which shows the work currently assigned to each team member and when they’re scheduled to work on it.
• Gantt Charts: LiquidPlanner’s priority-based scheduling model automatically creates Gantt charts for each of your projects. If you need to make changes to these charts, you can set up task dependencies. Tasks that are dependent upon the completion of other projects or tasks are automatically delayed until these other jobs are done. Dependencies always override prioritization.
• Time Tracking: This is a complex feature that lets you both automatically and manually log worked hours. Time tracking reduces the labor of doing payroll and can give your company’s higher-ups a realistic view of how much time a project is eating up.
• Payroll: Although LiquidPlanner does not have any built-in payroll features, you can export timesheet information to your payroll software.
• Messaging: Communicate with your team members using comments within the project management software. Utilize @mentions and tags to organize comments and to notify specific team members.
• Scheduling: LiquidPlanner makes it simple to handle a large and varied workload by scheduling your daily work based on priority. Each time a new task or project is created, you can drag-and-drop it on your screen to whatever position suits it best. Tasks at the top of your personal account are scheduled before other work.
  
• Email Settings: You can customize LiquidPlanner’s email notifications to notify you daily or weekly on a variety of factors, including progress on your projects, new tasks, new comments, and more.
• Reports & Analytics: One of the best features of this software is the wide variety of research and reporting tools that are made available to users. LiquidPlanner provides many ways to process data, from workload reports to histories of task time estimations, project status reports, remaining trend reports, and total trend reports. I think the personal status report, which tells you how many task hours you have left to complete within a specific range of days, is especially useful.
• Card View: LiquidPlanner offers a card view, which allows you to view your projects in the style of a Kanban board. With a Kanban board, you can rearrange tasks and projects visually by dragging them into different columns.

Customer Service & Support

LiquidPlanner requires a significant investment of time and patience when you first begin using the software. Fortunately, the designers seem to be aware of how overwhelmingly complex their software can be, and they provide a wide range of services and tutorials to help people get started. Here’s what LiquidPlanner’s customer support has to offer:

• Phone: You can contact a support representative by phone Monday-Friday from 7 AM to 5 PM (PST).
• Contact Form: Alternatively, you can submit a contact form online, and LiquidPlanner will get back to you via email.
• In-Software Help: You can also use the in-app help button to access the help team.
• Knowledgebase: LiquidPlanner has created a knowledgebase where you can search for answers to common questions.
• Guides: LiquidPlanner has a helpful Getting Started Guide, complete with written articles and tutorial videos.
• Videos: I particularly like the step-by-step video tutorials offered on the LiquidPlanner site. All of these short, instructive films are well-made and address the needs of real consumers. The narration is clear and concise and manages to avoid complicated technical jargon.
• Webinars: If you want an intense, crash-course introduction to this software, you can sign up for one of LiquidPlanner’s free, online webinars. Each webinar is one hour long and concludes with an extensive Q&A session. In general, these live tutorials address LiquidPlanner’s unique scheduling capabilities and demonstrate how to handle multiple projects.
• Developer Resources: LiquidPlanner provides developers with useful resources, such as API documentation and a user forum exclusively for developers.
• Find An Adviser: To deal with problems that are too complex or time-intensive to be addressed by basic customer service, LiquidPlanner provides in-depth private consulting services (if you’re willing to pay for it).
• Blog: The LiquidPlanner blog is regularly updated with new articles focused on project management.
• Social Media: LiquidPlanner has active accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

User Reviews

Negative Reviews & Complaints

While there are plenty of people who love LiquidPlanner, I have also seen some complaints about the software. Here are the complaints we’ve seen most frequently:

• Steep Learning Curve: The most common complaint we’ve seen involves the steep learning curve associated with LiquidPlanner’s complexity. One user griped that it took months for employees to become comfortable with, let alone master the program. Another grumbled that most users at their company simply use the surface features and don’t get close to leveraging LiquidPlanner’s capabilities.
• Expensive: Although LiquidPlanner no longer lists pricing information on its website, it’s clear from user comments that LiquidPlanner is a more expensive software than most. In the past, LiquidPlanner was priced around $40/user/month, so it isn’t shocking that LiquidPlanner is still getting feedback about being too costly.

Positive Reviews & Testimonials

Despite the negatives, LiquidPlanner has attracted a devoted following, earning a respectable 4.2/5 stars on G2 Crowd. Many users appreciate the software’s unique scheduling features and have positive feedback for the software company. Here’s what these positive comments tend to focus on:

• Convenient: Project management users like LiquidPlanner’s automatic scheduling features. The ability to enter estimated work time and then have work scheduled out automatically can be a huge advantage.
• Efficiency Booster: I’ve seen many comments that say LiquidPlanner helps streamline projects, leading to significantly faster completion rates.

Integrations & Add-Ons

LiquidPlanner integrates with Box, Google Drive, Dropbox, Single Sign-On, and Zapier. LiquidPlanner also allows for easy data importation from MS Project of up to 500 tasks at a time. You can also export data from LiquidPlanner timesheets into CSV, XML, and QuickBooks. Finally, there are lots of developer tools if you want to dive into the LiquidPlanner API.

Security

LiquidPlanner meets our standards for data security. LiquidPlanner uses Amazon Web Services, which means your data is stored in SSAE16-audited data centers around the United States. LiquidPlanner stores redundant data in multiple different geographic locations, so your data will be safe even in the event of a disaster. All files are encrypted at rest, and LiquidPlanner performs regular security audits. LiquidPlanner is committed to maintaining a 99.9% uptime record.

Additionally, LiquidPlanner offers features that businesses can use to secure their information. You can take advantage of integrated Single Sign-On for user authentication. You can also assign different member access levels and privileges to different employees.

Final Verdict

LiquidPlanner is one of those products you can’t just ignore. Any time I stumble across a company that takes risks and thinks outside the box, I am forced to sit up and take notice. Sometimes unique ideas are just that — unique. Being unusual does not guarantee practicality or staying power. LiquidPlanner, however, has demonstrated to me that its innovations are more than just novelty. It’s a practical, intuitive, efficient, and usable software.

I’m not saying there aren’t a few significant objections to LiquidPlanner — it’s expensive and a challenge to learn and use. And yes, it is not yet used as widely as other, more mainstream project management software.

But for me, these objections compete with the advantages of using intelligent software that continues to be created, improved, and supported by a skillful team. This software is a time-saver, but more than that, it is a hassle-saver.

Here’s the bottom line: Managers of many employees will love LiquidPlanner, especially if they are currently spending most of their time babysitting a complex schedule. Large businesses could benefit from it, and small businesses should sign up for the free trial to see if the money, time, and manpower saved is greater than the monthly price tag.

The Merchant Maverick Seal of Approval 🏆

LiquidPlanner	Start Trial

After hours of in-depth research and evaluation, we can confidently recommend this brand to our readers. Get started today and see LiquidPlanner for yourself.

The Merchant Maverick Seal of Approval 🏆

LiquidPlanner	Start Trial

After hours of in-depth research and evaluation, we can confidently recommend this brand to our readers. Get started today and see LiquidPlanner for yourself.

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