PortfolioPlane

Proof, not status.

Compare

Eleven portfolio tools, and where this one loses.

Every competitor cell below was read from the vendor’s own documentation on 2026-08-14 and carries a numbered link to the page it came from. Three of the eight rows go to somebody else, and they are in the table rather than in a paragraph at the end — a comparison a vendor wins clean is a comparison the vendor wrote alone.

The row worth reading first is the one nobody publishes about themselves: how each product decides what color your project is. Five of these eleven compute a number, two of those blend incommensurable inputs, and one ships a switch that forces the answer to green. That row is the whole argument, and there is a longer piece about it.

The capability tableWhere this product losesCheck an evidence receipt

Eight capabilities a PMO actually evaluates

Rows are what a portfolio office is buying. Columns are the ten incumbents this product is measured against, plus this one. Cells say what the product does, in the vendor’s own terms where possible; no cell says a competitor is bad at something, because the reader is better at that judgment than we are.

“Not verified against a vendor page in this pass.” means the research pass found the capability described but could not pin a vendor page to it. It is printed rather than filled in from a neighboring citation, because a table with no gaps in it is a table nobody checked.

Capability by product. Superscripts link to the vendor documentation each claim was read from on 2026-08-14.
CapabilityPortfolioPlanePlanview PortfoliosBroadcom ClaritySciformaServiceNow SPMJira AlignAsanamonday.comSmartsheetWrikeCeloxis
Project health computationWho decides the color, and can you decompose it afterward?There is no health score and no RAG state. Counts are printed beside their denominators — 14 of 40 verified — and never averaged.Manual RAG set by the project manager in status updates, with a fourth gray state meaning not reported.1The manager picks three dimension statuses; the overall gauge sums them at 10, 20 or 30 — green under 40, yellow to 89, red at 90.2Manual RAG on status reports plus an auto-computed Global Score out of 100: weighted Time, Cost and Quality over the sum of the weights.3Manual, or derived from the latest status report, or predicted per dimension by AI Status Reports behind a Now Assist license.4Manual RAG across five dimensions with a typed reason, and no history retained — a point-in-time view.5A person picks on track, at risk or off track; the AI drafts the prose around the choice.6Status is hand-set. A separate daily AI scan of boards and activity flags risks with a severity beside it.730A red, yellow or green ball in a symbols column — set by hand, or by an IF formula the customer writes.8A machine-learning risk model sets it; the manual health color was replaced by the prediction.9Computed daily from projected finish and projected cost — and overridable per project by a setting that assumes the project is on time and on budget.10
Resource capacity and allocationWho is overloaded next month, and did they agree to the work?A member states capacity as hours with an effective date; load is the sum of allocations a named person accepted, printed as hours beside hours. No requisitions, no skills inventory, no leveling, no utilization heat map.Time-phased capacity targets at any level of the organization, demand-versus-capacity balancing, skills profiles and timesheets.11The deepest in this survey: soft and hard booking as separate access rights, a formal requisition workflow, role capacity histograms, skills inventory and native timesheets.1213A request-and-fulfill workflow between manager and resource manager, hard and soft allocation, capacity charts, leveling and three-role timesheet approval.14Resource plans with soft and hard allocations and a resource workspace — with limits the vendor's own guide names: no batch approval, and availability consumed before approval.15Team-level only, in story points or member-weeks. No named-person allocation and no booking model.16Capacity planning allocates people to projects by percent or hours, without assigning them tasks.17Workload visualization on the board rather than an availability model.30Real FTE and hours math — in the separately sold Resource Management product, which the newer Portfolios feature does not support.1819Job roles, daily-capacity work schedules, effort-bearing workload charts, and Bookings: role-level reservations made before tasks exist, at the top tiers.20Not verified against a vendor page in this pass.
Financials: plan, actuals, forecastWhat did we say it would cost, what has it cost, and who says so?Planned amounts and recorded actuals side by side, each actual carrying the document it was copied from, and the signed subtraction between them. No forecast column, no projected cost, no percent complete anywhere on the page.Financial planning, forecast and actuals, agile costing, and an explicit capital-versus-operating split with auditable actual costs.2122Cost plans to approved budget plans to benefit plans, net present value, capital and operating cost separation, and chargebacks across departments.2324Portfolio simulation in a sandbox: which projects can launch and when, under cash, cost and effort budget constraints.25Two funding data models — Investment Funding, or the planning workspace's scenario financials — and a customer picks one, because the two are incompatible.2627Forecasted, estimated and accepted spend against a portfolio funding plan; blended rates or per-person cost centers; capital flags at portfolio and program level.28No budgeting, cost tracking or return-on-investment tracking at all.29Money is a number column somebody adds to a board.30No budget engine in the portfolio feature — sheets the customer builds.19A real engine: planned and actual fees and costs computed from rates, effort and approved time logs.31Estimated, actual and projected cost against budget, with rates and per-project overrides — and no capital-versus-operating split, no chargebacks, no time-phased budget plans.32
Benefits realizationDid the thing we funded produce what we said it would?A benefit is a claim a named person made, with a target and a basis. Its position is the newest measurement recorded against it, with a source and a date. Nothing is a percentage realized, and nothing is summed across units.An Outcomes pillar with an outcome lifecycle from launch to sunset; quantified benefit-versus-actual mechanics are not documented publicly.21Time-phased benefit plans carrying planned, actual and variance for each period.33A module rather than a field: benefits cataloged, attached to projects, with time-distributed targets and current-versus-target-versus-expected tracking.34Benefit plans with actuals at breakdown level.35Not verified against a vendor page in this pass.Goals give alignment; there is no benefit ledger behind them.29No benefits register in the documented portfolio feature set.30No benefits register in the documented portfolio feature set.19No benefits register in the documented budget and portfolio feature set.31Not verified against a vendor page in this pass.
Cross-initiative dependenciesDid the team on the other end agree to this, or is it a line on a diagram?A dependency is a contract: requested by one initiative, accepted by a person answering for the other, both signatures stamped by the database from the session. A request nobody has answered is shown, counted, and held outside every dependency figure.A platform pillar; the AI dependency layer, the Connected Work Graph, was announced in February 2026 and is not evidenced as generally available.37Not verified against a vendor page in this pass.Not verified against a vendor page in this pass.Not verified against a vendor page in this pass.The signature strength of the product: a dependency is a contract between two teams — the requesting team proposes, the responding team accepts or counter-proposes.36Task dependencies with a thirty-per-task cap and no propagation across projects.29A portfolio feature exists; its dependency content was not verified against a vendor page in this pass.30No cross-sheet dependency model in the portfolio feature; the practitioner answer is a cell-link workaround.19Not verified against a vendor page in this pass.Full finish-to-start and its three siblings with lead and lag; an inter-project link needs the predecessor's system identifier typed into an edit form.38
Traceability to code evidenceCan the tool answer “which commit, and did the test run?”A requirement's citations resolve against one pinned commit; a test result binds the requirement at the rung the evidence supports; a skipped test binds nothing and a failing test still binds, with the failure as its outcome. Exports carry a signed receipt anyone can check without an account.Hub synchronizes 60-plus tools bi-directionally, including GitHub and GitLab. Sync state, not a binding to a commit.39The 16.4.2 line ships a server for the Model Context Protocol — driving timesheets from an external assistant.42Not verified against a vendor page in this pass.Not verified against a vendor page in this pass.Not verified against a vendor page in this pass.Native two-way synchronization with Jira; the portfolio object is a project, not a requirement bound to evidence.29Not verified against a vendor page in this pass.Not verified against a vendor page in this pass.Wrike Sync connects development tools including GitLab; the connection carries work items rather than evidence.41Jira and Azure DevOps synchronization is a one-way pull, triggered by hand.40
AI pricing modelDoes the intelligence stop working when the credits run out?No AI product code and no credits. Agent sessions, the sync doors, provenance and the governance trail are in every paid plan, because a trust layer sold as an upgrade is not a trust layer.Copilot reached general availability in the November 2024 release with status summarization, risk flagging and metrics questions; its pricing is not published.43Vaia, user-definable agents, bring-your-own model keys for Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, and a Model Context Protocol server — shipped in the 16.4.x line.42No native AI in the releases searched before the acquisition; the health score is a formula rather than a model.3Generally available and license-gated behind Now Assist and the higher SPM tier.444No native generally available generative AI; the concrete artifact is a read-and-summarize Rovo skill in an early access program.45AI Studio is a credit-metered add-on gated to the higher annual plans.46AI is sold as credits, at roughly a cent each, with minimums by tier.47Smart Assist, AI formulas and AI dashboard generation.48A machine-learning risk model. No agent platform documented.9An assistant called Lex is presented as generally available on the marketing page; no dated release notes were found for it.49
Portfolio tier gatingWhat does the portfolio layer cost on top of the seats?Caps are seats and initiatives, stated before they refuse. The governance layer — the trail, custody, agent sessions, evidence receipts — is not a tier.An enterprise product; integration to other tools is the separately purchased Hub.39An enterprise license; what-if portfolio plans with ranked waterlines are core rather than an add-on.50Sold within the Planview line since the February 2025 acquisition, rebranded ProjectAdvantage.52Portfolio Planning sits in Advanced and Strategic Planning in Prime — two workspaces split by license.27The Strategy Collection is listed at $77,400 a year for 1 to 50 full users; integrated Jira users are free.53Portfolio management sits in Advanced and above.29Portfolio is Enterprise-only, and capped at 200 projects and 20,000 items.30Portfolio depth is the Control Center add-on, or Enterprise.19The real machinery needs Pinnacle or Apex plus the Sync, Analyze and Datahub add-ons.2054Not verified against a vendor page in this pass.

No product in this survey documents binding a requirement to a specific commit and a test execution. That sentence is a finding of ours, drawn from the vendor pages listed at the foot of this page, and it is stated as a finding rather than put in any vendor’s mouth. What every one of them does document is synchronization with a development tool, which is a different claim: sync moves work items, and a work item that moved is not evidence that a requirement was met. The binding ladder is where the difference is spelled out.

Three head-to-heads, at length

A table can hold a fact. It cannot hold an argument, and the argument is where a buying decision is actually made.

PortfolioPlane vs Planview PortfoliosThe market leader instruments the delivery organization you are dismantling. Ours instruments the one you are building.Read it PortfolioPlane vs ServiceNow SPMServiceNow's AI now predicts the status color. Predicting testimony is still testimony.Read it PortfolioPlane vs Jira AlignAlign had the best idea in portfolio management and kept no record of it.Read it

Where this product loses

Not a modesty ritual. Each item below is a capability a competitor ships, a customer will ask for, and this product does not have — and in two cases will not build, for reasons stated.

Resource depth, against Clarity and Sciforma

Clarity holds soft and hard booking as separate access rights, a formal requisition workflow where a manager requests and a resource manager proposes, role capacity histograms and a skills inventory1213. Sciforma holds the same loop with leveling14. PortfolioPlane holds stated capacity and accepted allocations, in hours, and nothing above that. If brokering people across a shared services pool is the PMO’s core job, Clarity is the better product and this is not a close call.

No scenario or what-if planning

Planview publishes a scenario from Investment and Capacity Planning to become the plan of record51; Clarity ranks investments against a waterline50; Sciforma simulates launch dates under budget constraints25. This product has none of it, and the reason is not schedule. A scenario is arithmetic over estimates, and the estimate rows this schema refuses to hold are exactly the inputs a scenario needs. It becomes honest here only if a recorded funding envelope ever exists to compute over.

No timesheets, no labor capitalization

Clarity, Sciforma and Wrike all ship time capture, and Wrike’s budget engine computes cost from rates, effort and approved time logs31. A timesheet engine is a different product with a different buyer and a different compliance surface. This one integrates or concedes, and today it concedes.

No scheduling engine

No critical path, no auto-scheduling, no resource-leveled Gantt. Smartsheet and Wrike own that ground. The timeline here draws dates a person recorded, with gate marks only on dates a closure actually carries; work with no dates is listed beneath the chart rather than given an invented window.

No forecast, anywhere

Celoxis extrapolates final cost from percent complete — fifty percent done at a hundred dollars spent gives two hundred projected — and then colors the result1032. This product prints planned, actual and the signed subtraction between them, and stops. If your steering committee wants a projected landing cost on the page, it is not here.

No SOC 2, and no single sign-on surface today

No SOC 2 Type II, no HITRUST, no FedRAMP authorization, no business associate agreement history and no penetration test summary dated within twelve months. Single sign-on is defined as an entitlement and the surface is not built; provisioning through SCIM is not held either. The security page leads with that list rather than burying it.

One estate of real operating history

This platform’s own first onboarded estate — 22 projects, 119 requirements — is the extent of the operating record. Nobody has agreed to appear as a reference, so no customer is named anywhere on this site, and no logo wall exists. A vendor with eleven columns of competitors and no customers is a vendor you should ask hard questions of.

No connector farm

Planview Hub covers 60-plus tools bi-directionally39. This product reads test results and a repository at a pinned commit, and takes a register in by import. There is no enterprise resource planning connector and no service management connector.

Who should not buy this

Written to be usable in the first ten minutes of an evaluation. If two of these describe you, stop here — the rest of the site will not change the answer.

  • Your delivery produces no machine-readable evidence. No repository this product can read, no test suite that emits results, no continuous integration. The evidence spine is the reason to buy it, and with nothing to read you would be buying a register with its better half switched off.
  • Your PMO’s core job is resource brokering. Requisitions, booking, leveling, a skills marketplace. Clarity and Sciforma are built for exactly that and this is not.
  • You need timesheets for labor capitalization. Different product, different buyer. Keep the one you have.
  • You need a scheduling engine. Critical path, dependencies that reschedule downstream work, resource-leveled plans. Smartsheet, Wrike and Microsoft Project own that.
  • Your executives require one portfolio health number. Not a roadmap item and not a configuration option — the absence is the product. If the review meeting cannot start without a color, this will be a fight every month.
  • Procurement requires an attestation before a pilot. There is no SOC 2 report to send. What can be sent is the measured tenancy posture, the append-only trail export and a signed receipt anyone can verify — and for some third-party risk teams that is not a substitute.
  • You want one tool for portfolio and task execution. This sits above the tracker and consumes it. Two tools, on purpose.
  • You want the AI to write and publish the status report. An agent may draft; a named person accepts, and the counts in the update are frozen at the moment it is posted. Nothing here publishes an assertion nobody signed.

Questions a buyer asks

The same words a person reads here are the words the page publishes as structured data, from one constant, so the two cannot drift.

Does PortfolioPlane have a RAG status or a project health score?
No, and it will not. Five of the products in this comparison compute one: Sciforma blends weighted time, cost and quality into a Global Score out of 100; Clarity sums three manager-picked statuses at 10, 20 and 30 into a green-yellow-red gauge; Celoxis computes RAG daily and ships a per-project setting that assumes the project is on time and on budget. PortfolioPlane prints counts beside their denominators — 14 of 40 requirements verified, 9 of 14 gates signed — and refuses to average them into a color.
How is PortfolioPlane different from Planview or Broadcom Clarity?
Clarity and Planview are deeper portfolio databases. They hold soft and hard resource booking, requisition workflows, chargebacks and scenario planning, and PortfolioPlane holds none of those. What PortfolioPlane holds that they do not is an evidence spine: a requirement's citations resolve against one pinned commit, a test result binds the requirement at the rung the evidence supports, and the export carries a signature anyone can check without an account.
Does PortfolioPlane replace Jira or Azure DevOps?
No. It sits above the tracker and consumes it. There is no sprint, no board column meaning in progress, no velocity, no estimate and no burndown. Jira is genuinely good at work tracking and this product does not try to beat it.
Does PortfolioPlane charge extra for AI features?
No. There is no AI product code and no credit meter. Asana sells AI Studio as a credit-metered add-on on the higher annual plans, monday.com sells AI as credits at roughly a cent each, and ServiceNow gates its AI status reports behind a Now Assist license. Agent sessions, the sync doors, provenance and the governance trail are in every paid plan here, because a trust layer sold as an upgrade is not a trust layer.
Is PortfolioPlane SOC 2 certified?
No. It holds no SOC 2, no HITRUST, no FedRAMP authorization and no business associate agreement history, and the security page states that above the good news rather than below it. What it can show instead is measured rather than attested: tenant isolation enforced by forced row-level security in the database and proved at every release across 29 tables and 145 cases.
Can an AI agent approve or sign anything in PortfolioPlane?
No, and not because a setting forbids it. The columns recording who accepted a binding are foreign keys into the human identity table; an agent has no row there and cannot acquire one. An agent proposes through a hashed, expiring token that structurally cannot write a signature column, and the accepting identity is stamped by the database from the session rather than sent by the client.
What does PortfolioPlane not do that Clarity or Planview does?
Resource requisitions and soft or hard booking, skills inventories, resource leveling, timesheets and labor capitalization, scenario and what-if portfolio planning, critical-path scheduling, cost forecasting from percent complete, and chargebacks across departments. It also holds no SOC 2 report and ships no single sign-on surface today.
Can somebody outside the company check a PortfolioPlane report?
Yes. Deck and trail exports carry an Ed25519-signed receipt over the counts with their denominators, the acceptances and the pinned commit, and anyone can check one at portfolioplane.com/verify in a browser with no account. The check does not call PortfolioPlane: asking this product's server whether this product's receipt is genuine would be asking the defendant.

Check it rather than believe it

Verify an evidence receiptHow the binding ladder worksSecurity and what we do not holdWhat a plan gates

The verifier needs no account and does not call this product. It is the one claim on this page a skeptic can settle in ten seconds.

Sources

Every page below was read on 2026-08-14. The kind of source is stated on each line, because a vendor’s marketing page and a vendor’s technical documentation are not the same evidence and should not be counted as if they were.

  1. 1Planview — Update project status to portfolios (four RAG states, including gray for “not reported”)vendor documentation
  2. 2Broadcom Clarity — Project Status Summary report (dimension statuses summed 10/20/30; green under 40, yellow 40–89, red 90 and above)vendor documentation
  3. 3Sciforma — Project Health Score (weighted Time, Cost and Quality scores, out of 100)vendor documentation
  4. 4ServiceNow — AI Status Reports (RAG predicted per dimension, behind Now Assist)vendor community article
  5. 5Atlassian — A Project Manager Guide to Jira Align, Part 3 (five-dimension manual health, no history retained)vendor community article
  6. 6Asana — Portfolio progress and reportingvendor documentation
  7. 7monday.com — Portfolio management: Risk insightsvendor documentation
  8. 8Smartsheet — Available symbols in a symbols columnvendor documentation
  9. 9Wrike — AI Project Risk Predictionvendor documentation
  10. 10Celoxis — RAG indicators (computed daily; per-project “always assume this project is on time and budget” setting)vendor documentation
  11. 11Planview — Capacity Planning capabilityvendor documentation
  12. 12Broadcom Clarity — Resource management (16.4.1)vendor documentation
  13. 13Broadcom Clarity — Manage requisitionsvendor documentation
  14. 14Sciforma — Allocation request workflowvendor documentation
  15. 15ServiceNow — Resource assignment and capacity planning guidevendor community article
  16. 16Atlassian — Calculate team load widget details, Program Roomvendor documentation
  17. 17Asana — Capacity planningvendor documentation
  18. 18Smartsheet — Resource Management capacity view (FTE and hours)vendor documentation
  19. 19Smartsheet — Portfolios overviewvendor documentation
  20. 20Wrike — Bookings (role-level reservations, top tiers)vendor documentation
  21. 21Planview — Planview Portfolios data sheet (PDF)vendor documentation
  22. 22Planview — CapEx versus OpExvendor documentation
  23. 23Broadcom Clarity — Display capital and operating costsvendor documentation
  24. 24Broadcom Clarity — Financial management (16.1.3)vendor documentation
  25. 25Sciforma — Portfolio simulationvendor documentation
  26. 26ServiceNow — Quick start guide for financial planningvendor community article
  27. 27ServiceNow — Quick start guide for strategic and portfolio planning (Portfolio Planning in Advanced, Strategic Planning in Prime)vendor community article
  28. 28Atlassian — Financials in Jira Alignvendor community article
  29. 29Acuity PPM — Asana for portfolio management (independent assessment: no budgeting, cost tracking or ROI)third-party assessment
  30. 30monday.com — The portfolio solution (Enterprise; 200 projects, 20,000 items)vendor documentation
  31. 31Wrike — Budgeting in Wrike (rates, effort and time logs)vendor documentation
  32. 32Celoxis — Budgeting and costingvendor documentation
  33. 33Broadcom Clarity — Working with benefit plans (planned, actual and variance per period)vendor documentation
  34. 34Sciforma — Attach a benefit to a project and define target valuesvendor documentation
  35. 35ServiceNow — Benefits realization management (community thread)vendor community article
  36. 36Atlassian — Flow of dependency management in Jira Align (a dependency is a contract between two teams)vendor community article
  37. 37Planview — Connected Work Graph, AI dependency intelligence (announced 2026-02-10)vendor newsroom
  38. 38Celoxis — Task dependency in another projectvendor documentation
  39. 39Planview — Hub (60-plus tools, bi-directional sync)vendor documentation
  40. 40Celoxis — Jira and Azure DevOps integration (one-way pull, manually triggered)vendor documentation
  41. 41Wrike — Wrike Sync (including GitLab)vendor documentation
  42. 42Broadcom Clarity — Using Clarity Vaia (agents, bring-your-own LLM keys, MCP server)vendor documentation
  43. 43Planview — Copilot general availability (release of 2024-11-20)vendor newsroom
  44. 44ServiceNow — Now Assist for SPM release notes (Yokohama)vendor documentation
  45. 45Atlassian — Jira Align Rovo skill, Early Access Programvendor community article
  46. 46Asana — AI Studiovendor documentation
  47. 47monday.com — AI feature catalog, with credit pricingvendor documentation
  48. 48Smartsheet — AI toolsvendor documentation
  49. 49Celoxis — AI project management (“Lex”)vendor marketing
  50. 50Broadcom Clarity — Explore alternate portfolio plans (waterlines)vendor documentation
  51. 51Planview — Investment and Capacity Planning: Rank, Analyze, Shift and Balance viewsvendor documentation
  52. 52Planview — acquisition of Sciforma (2025-02-18)vendor newsroom
  53. 53Tability — Jira Align pricing (Strategy Collection, 1–50 full users, $77,400 a year)third-party assessment
  54. 54Hackceleration — Wrike review (tier and add-on sprawl)third-party assessment
  55. 55Broadcom Clarity — Risk score calculation (probability multiplied by impact)vendor documentation
  56. 56Sciforma — Risks management (likelihood multiplied by severity)vendor documentation
  57. 57Wellingtone — The State of Project Management 2026, press release (72% collate reports for half a day or more each month; 44% dissatisfied with PMO reporting)practitioner research
  58. 58Institute of Project Management — RAG status in project managementpractitioner research
  59. 59Cultivated Management — Watermelon reportingpractitioner research
  60. 60Gartner press release, 2026-07-07 — 60% of organizations will run smaller software engineering teams at scale by 2029, up from 15% in 2026analyst press release
  61. 61McKinsey — Rewiring software delivery for the agentic era (the professional's job moves from producing artifacts to supervising the systems that produce them)consultancy research
  62. 62BCG Platinion — The Agentic Software Factory, 2026-03-26 (as few as three engineers run delivery; every stage gate has a human accountable for approval)consultancy research
  63. 63PwC — AI agent governance for workforce use (verified identity, defined role, task-specific permissions, auditable activity records, clear limits on autonomous action)consultancy research
  64. 64Forrester — Agentic software development takes the lead: humans stay accountable, but AI does more of the executionanalyst blog
  65. 65METR — randomized trial: experienced developers were 19% slower with AI tools while believing they were 20% fasterprimary study