#OMNIPLAN VS MERLIN SOFTWARE#
#OMNIPLAN VS MERLIN FREE#

However there is the potential for individuals paying for their software out of their own pocket, to make good savings in parts of their business where total failures don’t have too much impact or risk exposure, and where they have the familiarity with their own IT infrastructure (which may be no more than a laptop, a website, and some cloud servers in Mumbai) to be able to configure, tweak and repair as part of the fun and personal development of being their own boss, instead of major support headache. You pay through the nose, but you sleep well at night. If you’re buying 3000 seats with a corporation’s money, you don’t need the aggro. So – open source = lower accountability = higher risk. If you use all of the features then it’s probably worth it – you have to decide at what level you wish to manage your project(s)! The price is likely to be around the £5-600 mark (and more for the ‘pro’ version). Collaboration is performed via the ‘backstage’ allowing sharing, collaboration and synchronising across multiple projects and users. A useful Timeline function is included which can be used to produce a graphical report on project progress. Scheduling can now be both manually controlled or left to the software to automatically schedule for you. Tasks can be added in the normal way or a copied bullet point (eg from an e-mail) can be pasted into the task list retaining the formatting and hierarchy of the bulleted tasks. Microsoft have brought Project 2010 into line with the rest of the Office family incorporating the ‘love it–hate it’ ribbon task bar. It replicates all of the most useful parts of MS Project at a fraction of the price. The useful report option can be used to generate Milestone/deadline reports and basic financial reports (but not Earned Value as far as I could work out – please correct me if I‘m wrong).Īt around £150ish, this package is very good value and ideal where the use of MS software is not essential. Drag and drop is also possible with dependencies (e.g task ‘obtain hardware’ must precede ‘install hardware’). Resourcing is handled in the Resources view – this is then replicated in the bottom right of the screen.Ī particularly pleasing aspect is the ability to drag and drop a resource onto a task on the Gantt chart. They produce two products, the single use product tested here and a web server version for collaboration and sharing across multiple projects and users.įirst impressions of Merlin are a very attractive UI it is easy to add in tasks and sub-tasks. Merlin, foundered in 2001/2 and are based in Germany. Keep an eye on the Omniplan forum for future developments but for more ambitious PMs, it is probably worthwhile looking at other options.

It seems great for home use or for single projects in small scale organisations. The cheapest of the three, at £100ish, is a neat starter package for minimal cost. Reporting tools are not included and multiple project use is not yet supported. Budget information is limited to tracking if your project and tasks are on budget or not. The critical path can be easily highlighted using a button on the top menu bar. It is possible to add tasks, assign resources and do some basic resource levelling though it doesn’t appear possible to set user-defined parameters for levelling.

mpp file was opened and appearance is good, if minimal. First impressions are of a very crisp, clean interface. Omniplan downloaded and installed without problems. The Omnigroup, founded in Seattle in 1993 offer several products including Omnigraffle, chart drawing software for the Mac. I gave myself around an hour for each package and would love to know if I’ve missed anything.

#OMNIPLAN VS MERLIN FREE#

Please feel free to comment and add your opinions. Below the table is a brief description of each followed by my overall verdict. The table shows a very quick comparison of functions and prices. I was looking for a mature, stable, easy to use, intuitive to learn, good value package.

Omniplan vs merlin