RationalPlan Reviews & Product Details

RationalPlan is a lightweight and fully featured alternative to Microsoft Project at a fraction of the costs. For our company it was important to get a system which fits into the existing IT budget and allows collaboration throughout the company. Therefore we choose to use RatioinalPlan server which fulfills all our current requirements.

A few years back we had some issues with the upload of projects to the server. However all these issues could be solved after we reported them to the very friendly development team. Sometimes we find a missing feature but there is often a way around it - or we suggest it to the RationalPlan developers (some of them then find their way into the an upcoming release).

We now have a consolidated and therefore efficient and effective planning environment used by all employees at our company.

Value! MS Project is a hugely expensive piece of software. I needed something better than a spreadsheet but couldn't justify Microsoft's juggernaut.

The learning curve. This is the same with whatever software I chose but the documentation was a little lacking (MS Project is well documented with books etc to supplement the manual).

Ongoing planning and scheduling. Spreadsheets weren't good at moving tasks about.

I need a project planning/mgmt tool that is simple to use, fast to learn, and has the basics. Something that allows me to create project timelines, with lag times and other standard constraints and interdependencies. I do not have time to learn the more complex tools, and rationalplan has filled the void for me.

It looks like it's built in Java. Does not use the OS X interface elements, such as the Save dialog box. It works though and it is usable.

I am just trying to manage simple research projects in which I have very few people working on the project, and so just want to get a basic idea of how lag times and other interdependencies will effects when major project phases are likely to complete.