I think you’ll agree that resource management is a tricky puzzle to get right. I guess that’s why you’re looking for recommendations for the best resource management software.
We’ve kicked the tires on the tools out there so you get a head start selecting the best resource management solution for your team. For each solution, you will find a detailed review, pricing, and feature comparison.
On top of that, we answer commonly asked questions about resource management software. And if you are ready to start evaluating solutions check out our resource management software buyers guide.
Resource management software shortlist - 2025
Here are the solutions included in our review of the best resource management software options for 2025. Click the link to jump straight to the review.
Resource management software key features
Resource management involves five main capabilities. Some tools like Kelloo cover all these bases whereas others just focus on one aspect such as resource scheduling. Our guide How To Do Resource Management covers these in more detail.
- Capacity planning: Also called resource forecasting. This helps you understand if you have enough people with the right skills.
- Resource planning: Plan who is working on what projects and when.
- Resource scheduling: Low-level day-to-day scheduling of people.
- Utilization: Utilization tracking helps you spot over-allocated resources or underworked resources.
- Reporting: Reporting is key in resource management and will help you analyze team utilization, capacity, and forecasts.
Resource management software FAQs
Resource management is the practice of planning, tracking, and optimizing the use of your resources. The aim is to match the right resources with the right projects and organize your resources to deliver projects on time. Effective resource management has a multitude of benefits.
Resource management can be a tricky puzzle to solve. Resource management software is designed to help you plan, track, and allocate resources to work. It sometimes gets called resource planning software, capacity planning software, or resource allocation software.
In summary, here are some of the benefits you will get from resource management software:
- Streamline the use of your resources to improve utilization.
- Get a helicopter view of your resources, including skills in demand and future hiring needs.
- Make better decisions about what projects you can take on with the resources you have.
- Be able to evaluate different options for staff and schedule your projects to deliver more on time.
Cloud or on-premises. Do you want a cloud solution or on-premises (installed at your offices). Cloud solutions are more common now and have the advantage of being quick to roll out.
Pricing. Basic cloud offerings can be as little as $5-10 per user per month. However, the feature set will reflect the price. Some vendors don’t list pricing on their website which normally implies $$. However, price should not be your main focus – a good resource management solution will pay for itself many times over.
Ease of use. You will likely spend a lot of time working with the software you select so make sure it is easy to update and work with. Try to avoid tools that require you to micro-manage things.
Free trial available. I am always a little cautious when no free trial is available. Is it because the solution is hard to use or difficult to set up and requires a lot of consulting dollars to get started with?
Paid or free. Decide if you want paid or free resource management software. To be honest, there are very few free options around and what is available is pretty rudimentary. So if you have a zero budget, perhaps try to create a spreadsheet for resource management.
What do you want to plan. Do you want to plan just people or anything? The tools here are designed for human resource management as the scheduling needs for resources are quite different from scheduling things like rooms.
Resource management software comparison
1. Kelloo. Kelloo packs a lot into an intuitive and easy-to-use resource management tool. It is a robust solution that ticks all the boxes when it comes to resource management software.
Resource planning, team scheduling, roadmapping, utilization tracking, and reporting are all covered.
One really useful feature is that you can see how scheduling changes made in the planner impact resources. As you drag to update the schedule, the resource utilization heatmap updates in real-time instantly highlighting any resource issues or conflicts
To help executive teams make decisions on what projects they can realistically initiate and run, the capacity planning features let you evaluate how different mixes of projects, resources, and project timings will impact your resources and deadlines.
Anticipating future resource levels and hiring needs is key for resource managers. This is where the resource forecasting features in Kelloo come to the rescue by letting you report on the skills gap between your current resource pool and your projects.
Other useful features include a backlog that can store work still pending approval, dashboards, finance tracking, product and project roadmaps, and agile resource planning support.
Conclusion: Helps organizations allocate and schedule the right resources to the right projects and ensure they have enough resources to deliver on their plans.
Plans start around $20 per month for 10 resources with unlimited users. View the pricing page here. You can take a free 30 day trial of Kelloo.
Kelloo features
- Resource utilization reporting
- Resource forecasting
- Resource allocation tracking
- Resource scheduling and planning
- Agile and waterfall planning supported
- Set custom working patterns
- Finance tracking
- Roadmaps
- Report builder and custom reports
- Capacity planning
- Assign roles, people or teams to work
- What if analysis to understand impact of changes
- Dashboards
- Project prioritization
- Custom fields
- Import your data
- API
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Plan, forecast and deliver smarter. We help you get the most from your projects and people.
Float falls within the category of resource scheduling tools. So you are not going to find some of the typical resource management features such as capacity planning, scenario planning, and long-range resource forecasting in Float.
What you will find is an easy-to-use staff planning solution that lets you assign tasks in a calendar format and optionally track time using a timesheet. Float also includes reports to help you track resource utilization.
One area I felt was lacking was being able to check how much available time a resource had when scheduling them. I had to open a report to check and then return to the planner to make my updates.
So if you are looking for something to schedule ad-hoc tasks and projects float is certainly worth a look. The interface is very clean and intuitive and I was able to start planning straight away.
Conclusion: Clean interface and very easy to use. The absence of some important resource management features may prevent adoption for enterprise or portfolio resource management users.
Plans start at $5 per user per month going to $10 per user per month if time tracking is included. Resources you add to the account who do not log in will still incur a fee. So costs could quickly stack up.
View their pricing page here. Float offers a free thirty-day trial.
Float features
- Clean easy to use interface
- Custom working patterns
- Optional time tracking
- Report on resource utilization
- Cannot view availability or utilization in the planner
- Resources can only have one rate effective
- Can't assign skills or placeholders to work
Like Float, Resource Guru falls within the category of resource scheduling tools. So features that some folks might need like capacity planning, scenario planning, and long-range resource forecasting are missing from Resource Guru.
However, scheduling resources is a breeze and it is really easy to enter and manage tasks. Things like being able to split tasks or make tasks recurring are a nice bonus.
Similar to Float, reporting was limited. For example, a report showing utilization or availability week by week or month by month would be a must-have report for most resource managers yet is not available in Resource Guru.
Booking clashes are highlighted as you add tasks and give you the option to add them to a waiting list or to accept the utilization issue the clash causes.
Conclusion: Straightforward to use with some nice usability features that make your day easier.
Plans start at $2.50 per user per month going to $6.65 per user per month. Resources you add to the account who do not log in will still incur a fee. So costs could quickly stack up.
View their pricing page here. Resource Guru offers a free 30-day trial.
Resource Guru features
- Intuitive easy to use interface
- Clash management
- Optional time tracking
- Report on resource utilization
- Cannot view availability or utilization in the planner
- No way to assign rates to resources
- Can't assign skills or placeholders to work
Meisterplan is a good consideration for teams that want a lightweight project portfolio and resource management solution which includes capacity planning and what-if analysis.
Whereas many of the resource scheduling tools like Float, Resource Guru, and 10,000ft use calendar views when scheduling work, Meisterplan uses a more familiar Gantt layout.
Similar to how Kelloo works, Meisterplan also uses project priority to optimize resource allocation. Best practice for portfolio resource management is that resources should be allocated to the highest priority projects first, and Meisterplan makes this easy to achieve.
Meisterplan ships with some simple project ranking and scorecard capability which is a nice feature to include.
Conclusion: Priority-driven project resource management for teams who are looking for a little extra from their resource management.
Plans start at $500 per month for 25 resources. View their pricing page here. Meisterplan offers a free trial.
Meisterplan features
- Priority based resource allocation
- Real-time utilization reporting
- Scorecards
- Could get expensive for larger teams
- No native agile support - requires Jira
Tempus Resource is a resource portfolio management tool that aims to help you make the best decisions about which projects you should run using resource capacity as a driving factor in the decisions.
It has a high-level strategic focus and informs organizations of what skills they are lacking and when projects can happen given resource capacity and supply.
It has some nice features around what-if modeling so you can evaluate different resource and planning scenarios.
Conclusion: Well-rounded features including what-if analysis, capacity planning, and resource allocation.
No pricing is available on their website. No free trial is available.
Tempus Resource features
- Capacity planning
- Utilization reporting
- What if modelling
PDWare’s ResourceFirst software puts resource planning at the heart of the portfolio planning process. Similar to Kelloo and Meisterplan it uses project priorities to highlight which projects are not getting the resources they need.
It will help you answer questions such as how will a new project impact your resources, what skills are you short of and how will changes to your resource pool impact your projects.
ResourceFirst also includes tools for scoring and ranking projects along with dashboards and reporting.
Conclusion: Could be worth a deeper look if you are looking for an enterprise resource planning solution.
No pricing is available on their website. No free trial is available.
ResourceFirst features
- Resource planning
- Utilization reporting
- Scenarios
- No pricing on the website
- No free trial
While primarily a simple task management tool, Toggl Plan does have a visual planning feature that may work for smaller teams with straightforward needs.
Conclusion: Feature light simple visual scheduling solution. Best suited to teams with simple resource management needs.
Free for up to five users. Free trial available
Toggl Plan
- Free trial
- Utilization reporting
- Capacity planning
- Free for up to 5 users
- Skills
- Resource management
