GigaOm Radar for Agile Planning and Portfolio Management (PPM) Solutions v4

The need to adapt to an ever-changing business environment more quickly and easily is a key driver for companies to escalate the adoption of agile processes. Agile planning and portfolio management (PPM) solutions help companies and teams organize and accelerate delivery of products and services. They ensure teams are collaborating and project status is visible to all parties, including team members, leaders, and stakeholders.

This market has matured significantly around the core table stakes functionality. Most tools today have robust collaboration capabilities, solid automation, and processes related to planning of iterations and releases, task and issue management, dashboard reporting, and KPI and OKR tracking. All the solutions we reviewed here have strong functionality across the core agile methodology.

Enterprise-focused vendors are also investing in functionality for financial management, including budgeting, forecasting, and actuals tracking. These functions are found at the feature level as well as at higher epic, portfolio, and enterprise levels and can tie the financials to the strategic business value, objectives, and key results that are linked to their delivery pipeline. These links at all levels help companies prioritize and focus on the highest-value work. They also assist the transition from traditional IT funding of projects to product-based agile funding.

There’s a strengthening focus on version management in these solutions, available through either functionality in the tool or integrations with third-party products. This represents the growing convergence of agile development with development operations (DevOps) solutions. The ability to take advantage of DevOps information within agile planning allows greater visibility into a product’s status and ongoing issues.

Also emerging in these solutions is a focus on using data for predictive analytics and predictive governance. Leveraging historical data, tools are beginning to automate more repetitive tasks. Moreover, they are able to identify issues earlier in the process, which is key to solving them sooner. Value stream management (VSM), which identifies areas for workflow improvement with increased efficiency, elimination of redundant processes, and identification of backlogs, is becoming significant. 

Based on their functionality, some of the solutions we reviewed demonstrate more of an engineering orientation, providing data to improve the life of the developer during the development process. Other solutions focus more on less technical aspects of agile delivery and leadership reporting. These solutions often add financial management to each level of the process to help ensure what’s being delivered has actual business value.

The PPM market has evolved rapidly, with mergers and acquisitions enabling vendors to attain functionality that solutions were lacking previously. This trend is likely to continue.

The solutions we reviewed are available at varying price points: free versions; low-cost solutions priced per user, per month payment for core functionality; and costly platforms consisting of multiple integrated applications providing end-to-end functionality. The more complex solutions often require the assistance of professional services for implementation. Many have add-ons or marketplace options that further enhance the breadth and depth of the solution. 

Most of these solutions are available as cloud-only software as a service (SaaS) models. Very few have on-premises or private cloud deployment options. The companies with on-premises and private cloud offerings tend to focus on highly regulated sectors such as government, medical devices, automotive, and aerospace.

Before selecting an agile PPM tool, organizations need to understand the complexity of their operations and product structure. Tools range from basic applications that support small teams to advanced platforms that bolster entire organizations and multiple enterprise-level initiatives, with varying areas of emphasis that may lean more toward planning and collaboration, engineering, or regulatory control. These are key factors that differentiate PPM solutions, and determining which approach suits your company’s strategic goals will help you make the best choice.

This is our fourth year evaluating the agile PPM space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year. 

This GigaOm Radar report examines 16 of the top agile PPM solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading agile PPM offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

The GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a detailed decision framework for IT and executive leadership assessing enterprise technologies. Each report defines relevant functional and nonfunctional aspects of solutions in a sector. The Key Criteria report informs the GigaOm Radar report, which provides a forward-looking assessment of vendor solutions in the sector.

To help prospective customers find the best fit for their use case and business requirements, we assess how well agile PPM solutions are designed to serve specific target markets and deployment models (Table 1).

For this report, we recognize the following market segments:

• Small-to-medium business (SMB): In this category, we assess solutions on their ability to meet the needs of organizations ranging from small businesses to medium-sized companies. Also assessed are departmental use cases in large enterprises where ease of use and deployment are more important than extensive management functionality, data mobility, and feature set. 

• Large enterprise: Offerings are assessed on their ability to support large and business-critical projects. Optimal solutions in this category have a strong focus on flexibility, performance, data services, and features that improve security and data protection. Scalability is another big differentiator, as is the ability to deploy the same service in different environments.

In addition, we recognize the following deployment models:

• SaaS: These are available only in the cloud. Often designed, deployed, and managed by the service provider, they are available only from that specific provider. The big advantages of this type of solution are the integration with other services offered by the cloud service provider (functions, for example) and its simplicity.

• Private cloud: These solutions are deployed in a private cloud model that is a proprietary environment for a company. This environment belongs to only one entity. These solutions deliver advantages similar to those of public cloud solutions but give a company more control over the environment. This model is often used by companies with specific regulatory needs for their line of business. 

• On-premises: These solutions can be installed on self-managed servers secured within enterprise infrastructure. This approach offers more control over update releases, resource allocation, and customization. Data security is another common priority when selecting this option. Often, these implementations are more costly to deploy and maintain compared to SaaS. While more complex to deploy and manage, some companies want the ability to control all aspects of operating the solution. These solutions are more flexible, and the user usually has more control over the entire stack with regard to resource allocation and tuning. 

Table 1. Vendor Positioning: Target Market and Deployment Model

Table 1 components are evaluated in a binary yes/no manner and do not factor into a vendor’s designation as a Leader, Challenger, or Entrant on the Radar chart (Figure 1). 

“Target market” reflects which use cases each solution is recommended for, not simply whether that group can use it. For example, if an SMB could use a solution but doing so would be cost-prohibitive, that solution would be rated “no” for SMBs.

All solutions included in this Radar report meet the following table stakes—capabilities widely adopted and well implemented in the sector:

• Backlog management

• Iteration and release planning

• Task management

• Agile framework support

• Risk and issue management

• Reporting and dashboards

• Collaboration capabilities

Tables 2, 3, and 4 summarize how each vendor in this research performs in the areas we consider differentiating and critical in this sector. The objective is to give the reader a snapshot of the technical capabilities of available solutions, define the perimeter of the relevant market space, and gauge the potential impact on the business.

• Key features differentiate solutions, highlighting the primary criteria to be considered when evaluating an agile PPM solution.

• Emerging features show how well each vendor implements capabilities that are not yet mainstream but are expected to become more widespread and compelling within the next 12 to 18 months. 

• Business criteria provide insight into the nonfunctional requirements that factor into a purchase decision and determine a solution’s impact on an organization.

These decision criteria are summarized below. More detailed descriptions can be found in the corresponding report, “GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Agile Planning and Portfolio Management (PPM) Solutions.”

Key Features

• Financial management: Financial management functionality ties business value, cost, and priorities together. Tools must manage product-level budgeting and forecasting, allowing for different resource rates, multiple currencies, and external vendor interactions. 

• Version management: Agile delivery is all about managing change, which is facilitated by centralized repositories for keeping track of those changes. Solutions must be able to maintain repositories for code with version control, and they should foster collaboration to allow multiple team members to work on projects simultaneously. 

• Integrations and add-ons: Organizations often have preferences for specific development and ancillary tools and may not want to switch. Agile PPM solutions should include add-ons and integrations with common third-party products.

• Product roadmapping: Agile PPM solutions generally use a roadmap to describe how a product will develop. Organizations adopting an agile mindset must be able to view and interact with such a roadmap, which details the evolution of a product over time. 

• Regulatory compliance: Compliance is a key requirement for certain industries that are highly regulated, and agile PPM solutions should have the functionality to ensure adherence to applicable quality and security standards. The ability to track and report on the way features are developed is important in these industries.

Table 2. Key Features Comparison 

Emerging Features

• Value stream management: VSM focuses on software delivery processes, assessing and improving efficiency (saving money) and effectiveness (adding benefit). VSM tools work using best practices, offering real-time insights to help decision-makers prioritize development goals, identify areas for improvement, and increase innovation speed. 

• Objectives and key results (OKR) management: OKR management is a goal-setting framework that complements project management by aligning team efforts with organizational objectives. In project management, OKRs provide a structured approach to defining clear, measurable goals that drive project success.

• Predictive analytics and predictive governance: Predictive analytics and predictive governance are transformative approaches for IT projects, enabling proactive decision-making and risk management. Predictive analytics uses historical data, statistical models, and machine learning to forecast future outcomes, such as project delays, budget overruns, or resource constraints. Predictive governance complements this forecasting by integrating predictive insights into governance frameworks, ensuring compliance, alignment with organizational goals, and strategic oversight.

Table 3. Emerging Features Comparison 

Business Criteria

• Flexibility: The flexibility of a tool reflects how well it can adapt to different use cases across the organization, allowing users to do things differently without modifying the core functionality, use the tools they prefer, and engage more easily with others. 

• Scalability: Solutions should have the ability to support their expanded use by the overall organization and the increased complexity that comes with evolving environments. This may involve growing numbers of users, additional product streams and reporting layers, and so on, all of which must be managed without constraints or bottlenecks.

• Ease of use: No matter how good a tool is, it won’t be adopted unless it’s intuitive and easy to use. Only minimal time and training should be necessary to learn to use the tool. Setup should be simple and intuitive, as should the UI, making it easy for users to navigate to various features. 

• Security and compliance: Agile PPM solutions must address security and compliance requirements to ensure sensitive data and critical systems are adequately protected. This includes testing for vulnerabilities, applying data encryption and access controls, and complying with specific government and industry regulations. 

• Cost: The cost of an agile PPM solution encompasses multiple factors, both direct and indirect, including licensing, scaling, and integration costs. Moreover, the increasing complexity of the solutions can drive up costs related to implementation, operations, and training and professional services.

Table 4. Business Criteria Comparison

The GigaOm Radar plots vendor solutions across a series of concentric rings with those set closer to the center judged to be of higher overall value. The chart characterizes each vendor on two axes—balancing Maturity versus Innovation and Feature Play versus Platform Play—while providing an arrowhead that projects each solution’s evolution over the coming 12 to 18 months.

Figure 1. GigaOm Radar for Agile PPM

As you can see in Figure 1, this is a very innovative space, with most vendors falling in the Innovation half of the chart. This indicates the prevalence of solutions that may be well established in this market but continue to grow and evolve rapidly through acquisition or organic growth. Many vendors in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant also offer emerging technologies. Overall, most vendors are on the Platform side of the chart, suggesting broader coverage of both software development and business processes.

In this chart, Maturity is defined as the stability of platforms that exhibit somewhat slower change. The vendors in the Maturity half of the chart have had platforms in the agile market for a long time. They continue to be strong players in this market and to build out their functionality. They often augment functionality at a slower pace or through acquisitions.

As a general rule, vendors on the Feature Play side are either heavily engineering-focused and are less business-centric or, alternatively, are business leader-focused with only limited engineering team interest. Still, compared to last year’s Radar report, vendors have increasingly embraced and enhanced the core capabilities of agile PPM.

Outperformers earn that label by having implemented numerous features in the last year and presented a near-term future roadmap that will keep them strong in the agile PPM market by either merging solutions with key technology or launching extensive new features or both.

Vendors in the Leaders circle within the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant focus more on feature breadth and innovation while blending agile solutions with goals and financial management features. These solutions also provide an established suite of agile management modules along with multilevel financial information, OKR reporting, and value stream management. 

Some Leaders in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant have built platforms that center on engineering. They provide agile planning functions along with developer-focused features that support DevOps and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. 

Challengers continue to enhance their respective solutions in support of both agile and engineering objectives and are worth assessing. Sometimes, they don’t offer emerging technology such as financial management, OKRs, or VSM functionality but are likely to add it in the future. In addition, those that offer core agile functionality are often excellent choices for less sophisticated teams or SMBs. They also can act as an add-on to more complex solutions. They can be priced effectively and may be easier to implement. 

Our analysis shows there’s robust tooling in this space for any size company to leverage at every stage of its agile journey. Prospective buyers have a wealth of options to review when choosing an agile PPM tool. IT decision-makers should consider their use case requirements and IT complexity when evaluating solutions to find the best fit for their needs.

In reviewing solutions, it’s important to keep in mind that there are no universal “best” or “worst” offerings; every solution has aspects that might make it a better or worse fit for specific customer requirements. Prospective customers should consider their current and future needs when comparing solutions and vendor roadmaps.

INSIDE THE GIGAOM RADAR

To create the GigaOm Radar graphic, key features, emerging features, and business criteria are scored and weighted. Key features and business criteria receive the highest weighting and have the most impact on vendor positioning on the Radar graphic. Emerging features receive a lower weighting and have a lower impact on vendor positioning on the Radar graphic. The resulting chart is a forward-looking perspective on all the vendors in this report, based on their products’ technical capabilities and roadmaps.

Note that the Radar is technology-focused, and business considerations such as vendor market share, customer share, spend, recency or longevity in the market, and so on are not considered in our evaluations. As such, these factors do not impact scoring and positioning on the Radar graphic.

For more information, please visit our Methodology.

Aha!: Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop

Solution Overview
Aha! offers two core products that focus on agile processes for development: 

Aha! Roadmaps is a complete product management solution. It is built for strategic planning, enabling users to define business objectives and connect them to product decisions. Strategy can be set at both the portfolio and individual product level. Portfolio or program managers can link work to high-level strategy above the products being managed, such as the corporate strategy, and track progress in real time. Whiteboarding was recently added to this product so that teams can move from ideation to planning seamlessly.

Aha! Develop, which is integrated with Aha! Roadmaps, provides the ability to link strategy to delivery. This creates a unified backlog and contains functions that allow users to plan and execute work, including the ability to coordinate and prioritize a backlog of items, plan sprints and iterations, and track work as it progresses. It supports both scrum and kanban workflows, along with sophisticated agile reports, to drive continuous improvement. The tool added incremental functionality focused on the scaled agile framework (SAFe) for companies that need it.

Strategically, Aha! is focused on harnessing the rapid delivery of agile practices grounded in upfront strategic planning. It also continues to deliver innovative new ways to streamline the entire product development process. Notably, it recently launched a new product called Aha! Discovery to help organizations jump-start customer interviews and uncover key product insights. With AI accelerating software creation, product discovery becomes the ultimate differentiator for agile teams.

Aha! is positioned as a Challenger and Fast Mover in the Innovation/Feature Play quadrant of the agile PPM Radar chart.

Strengths
Aha! scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Product roadmapping: The offering allows users to create customizable visual roadmaps, providing a clear overview of goals, timelines, and dependencies. It also facilitates feature prioritization, enabling users to evaluate and rank initiatives based on customer value and business impact.

• Version management: The solution provides version management with integrations to over 25 CI/CD solutions.

• OKR management: Aha! provides tools to set, track, and align objectives and key results across an organization. It allows users to define ambitious yet achievable goals, link them to specific initiatives or tasks, and monitor progress in real time.

Opportunities
Aha! has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Financial management: The solution provides custom worksheets for managing financial data with real-time updates via an API. It also provides an integration with PowerBI to bring product and business performance data together. However, it does not have out-of-the-box financial management.

• Regulatory compliance: The offering has regulatory compliance certifications but does not offer in-depth processes for specific regulated industries. Aha! Roadmaps Enterprise+ includes audit reporting to track roadmap changes so as to meet regulatory requirements.

• Integrations and add-ons: While the tool has over 65 integrations to several third-party applications, it could continue to expand the number of third-party integrations supporting the agile development pipeline.

Purchase Considerations
The solution has tiered pricing that’s cost-effective for companies of all sizes. For larger enterprises, this tool is often used to define the company and product strategy that feeds agile toolsets. Aha! Roadmaps has three tiers: Premium, Enterprise, and Enterprise+. All three plans contain Aha! Ideas Essentials, which has the ability to collect customer and employee feedback and prioritize ideas; Aha! Whiteboards Essentials, which has the ability to create whiteboards for collaboration with templates and custom capabilities; and Aha! Knowledge Essentials, which offers content management with templates, custom documents, and AI.

The Premium and Enterprise tiers include the same functionality, but the Enterprise version includes unlimited viewer and reviewer seats at no additional cost. The Enterprise+ plan includes sophisticated functionality such as team capacity planning, OKRs, automation, custom tables, and custom worksheets—along with concierge-level support. 

In order to conduct project and portfolio management with the integration to Aha! Develop, the Enterprise level is needed. Aha! Develop has two tiers: essentials and advanced. Advanced is needed to work with Aha! Roadmaps. Both monthly and annual plans are available.

While most teams quickly implement Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop with no additional support, Aha! has a team of experts available to facilitate rollout to larger enterprises with complex work streams. Aha!’s team works closely with user teams to configure and implement the solution in four to eight weeks, depending on the complexity of the implementation. Training services are also available. 

Use Cases
Aha! is used across a broad range of industry types and sizes. The focus is on supporting all of the teams involved in the product development lifecycle to help companies deliver greater value, faster. Use cases for Aha! solutions include all types of teams such as IT, marketing, UX, business operations, product management, program management, project management, engineering, and product operations. The solutions can work across all types of industries and provide functionality to manage each phase of product development.

Asana

Solution Overview
Asana is a comprehensive collaborative work management (CWM) platform that connects strategy to execution through its proprietary Work Graph data model, which supports all functions in the platform and was designed to optimize AI capabilities. The platform enables organizations to coordinate work across teams while maintaining clarity and accountability at all levels. 

The platform is designed to be flexible and adaptable, allowing organizations to standardize work management practices while maintaining team-specific workflows. Through continuous innovation in AI, automation, and enterprise capabilities, Asana helps organizations drive better business outcomes as a result of improved coordination and visibility. Extensive collaboration capabilities are built into the product. The Work Graph data model leverages data relationships to provide users with information as they need it, based on their role.

Asana's strategic direction centers on three key pillars that align with its company priorities of customer health, customer acquisition, and customer value. This positions Asana to deliver enhanced value across an enterprise with improved time to value via prebuilt solutions and AI-powered automation, broader organizational adoption through simplified expansion and clear pricing alignment, and stronger enterprise readiness with advanced security and compliance capabilities.

Asana is positioned as a Challenger and Fast Mover in the Innovation/Feature Play quadrant of the agile PPM Radar chart.

Strengths
Asana scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Product roadmapping: The solution provides comprehensive product roadmapping capabilities that enable organizations to plan, track, and visualize their strategic initiatives at multiple levels. It offers flexible end-to-end roadmap visibility through portfolio views, timelines, and custom reporting, allowing teams to track progress from high-level objectives down to individual tasks. 

• Integrations and add-ons: It provides extensive integration capabilities and add-on features to enhance workflow management. The platform offers 300+ prebuilt integrations through the Asana App Marketplace, spanning critical business tools across communication, productivity, development, marketing, and reporting functions.

• OKR management: It offers comprehensive OKR management capabilities that enable organizations to track, align, and execute on strategic objectives. The Goals feature allows companies to create and manage corporate objectives at any level, from company-wide initiatives to team-specific targets. The Goals Strategy Map provides a visual representation of how objectives cascade and connect across the organization.

Opportunities
Asana has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Financial management: While the solution has core financial reporting of budget versus actuals and other reporting features, it has the opportunity to expand the features to include deeper capabilities such as resource management, integrations to key financial solutions, and financial controls.

• Version management: It does not maintain native code repositories with version control capabilities. Instead, it focuses on providing robust work management and collaboration features while integrating seamlessly with industry-leading version control and development tools.

• Predictive analytics and predictive governance: While it currently offers AI-powered analytics and governance capabilities, such as smart workflows that provide proactive insights and recommendations for process improvements, and AI-driven risk detection and reporting for portfolios and goals, it has the opportunity to broaden these capabilities with enhanced predictive capabilities and advanced AI features. There are numerous capabilities in the 2025 roadmap.

Purchase Considerations
From a licensing perspective, Asana provides a tier-based set of plans. The starter level is free, focused on individuals and small teams, and includes basic features to get started. The premium level includes increased functionality for growing teams needing timeline views and custom fields. The business level is for departments requiring portfolios and advanced reporting. The enterprise level has extensive functionality with enhanced security and controls. The enterprise+ level includes advanced-level features with enhanced support and extensive security features for organizations with strict compliance requirements.

Pricing follows a per-seat model with annual or monthly billing options. Volume discounts are available for larger deployments. Organizations can mix different license types to optimize costs, including view-only licenses for stakeholders who need only to monitor progress. Asana also has a number of add-on capabilities for organizations needing added features.

All tiers include self-service implementation support. They also have optional professional services that are recommended for enterprise deployments.

Use Cases
Asana has a broad reach of use cases across many types of industries. It supports these through its flexible, AI-enhanced platform. Asana use cases focus on teams such as IT, HR, marketing, and senior management. It is used for goal management, organizational planning, resource tracking, idea intake, campaign management, and creative production. 

Atlassian: Jira, Align, Focus, Confluence, Loom, and Bitbucket

Solution Overview
Atlassian offers an extensive suite of tools that covers planning, collaboration, operations support management, DevOps, and security. Our assessment focuses on the suite’s functionality for planning and collaboration. These tools can meet the needs of small companies as well as large enterprises. 

Align (formerly Jira Align) offers enterprise-wide planning. Jira is for team-level planning and delivery, connecting projects and data to bring business and software teams together. Confluence and Loom enable collaboration and knowledge management. Bitbucket provides version management. The three main products—Jira, Align, and Confluence—together supply table stakes and key features, providing the enhanced capabilities of an enterprise solution. By itself, Jira provides table stakes-level functionality and can be useful for smaller, less complex companies. 

From a strategic perspective, Atlassian is focused on its System of Work philosophy, which bridges the gap between technology and business teams to maximize team impact. Atlassian is investing heavily in AI, aiming to integrate AI agents into workflows to automate tasks, improve decision-making, and foster creativity. Atlassian recently launched its Teamwork Collection, which it views as the foundation for teamwork.  Teamwork Collection includes Jira, Confluence, Loom, and specific Rovo Agents to help teams plan, deliver, and collaborate on all work, across all teams. 

Atlassian is positioned as a Leader and Fast Mover in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant of the agile PPM Radar chart.

Strengths
Atlassian scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Integrations and add-ons: The solution includes over 3,000 apps and integrations as well as an extensive suite of integrated tools, plus a marketplace of features and integrations to many third-party tools. 

• Product roadmapping: Both Jira and Align offer visual roadmaps that integrate seamlessly with Jira issues, epics, and sprints, providing a single source of truth for product management and engineering teams. Teams can use board views to organize tasks by priority or timeline views to map out initiatives over time. Roadmaps in Jira also support dependency tracking, ensuring teams can identify and address potential bottlenecks.

• OKR management: Align provides clear insight into objectives, key results, and the work necessary for delivering on objectives. The OKR features natively included in Align help teams get aligned, stay aligned, and connect work with value delivery.

Opportunities
Atlassian has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Financial management: The Atlassian Align and Focus applications are designed to help finance teams optimize financial allocations and track budgets. It could broaden its financial tracking and reporting capabilities.

• Regulatory compliance: Banks, insurance companies, security, and brokerage firms use Jira Service Management to deliver AI-powered service experiences while ensuring scalable governance and compliance. The vendor has also achieved FedRAMP Moderate and now offers Gov Cloud. It should consider providing additional industries with regulatory support.

• VSM: While it provides end-to-end visibility to value streams, it could build on these features and enhance tracking metrics. It does offer DORA in its Compass product.

Purchase Considerations
Most Atlassian products are priced in four tiers with increasing functionality. The first tier is free for up to 10 users. The standard, premium, and enterprise tiers each have a monthly or annual subscription option. Depending on the product/functionality mix, a company may be licensing multiple products. Align is slightly different and is sold as a more traditional enterprise software experience that enterprise buyers will find familiar.

Atlassian also has a strong community of users that share ideas. In addition, Atlassian University is available for training.

Use Cases
Atlassian products support a number of key organization functions, such as IT, marketing, design, and operations. Align allows organizations to align work across these functions to OKRs, including tracking and organizing the work, managing risks/dependencies, and optimizing investments.

Broadcom: ValueOps

Solution Overview
ValueOps by Broadcom is an integrated agile PPM, VSM, and portfolio management platform that combines the Clarity, Rally, ConnectALL, and Insights products. The first three are the main components of the solution. Clarity provides business-oriented investment-planning capabilities to organize and track work as defined by the organization, with customizable financial planning and investment objects, roadmap planning, and actionable insights generated from activities across the value stream. Rally supplies the agile project management capabilities to development and delivery teams, with the capabilities they need to plan, track, and measure their work across multiple teams and programs with real-time visibility. ConnectALL integrates third-party tools in the software development and delivery value stream for seamless collaboration, bidirectional information capture and exchange, and automated event triggering.

ValueOps enables organizations to bridge the gap between the business and delivery, providing the alignment, transparency, and visibility required to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the organization. 

ValueOps’s strategic direction continues to move beyond traditional project management to become a versatile platform that supports various organizational functions, including legal, HR, and M&A. This shift is driven by the increasing need for organizations to embrace product-centric approaches and adopt flexible funding models that support continuous value delivery.

ValueOps's goal is to empower PMOs and enterprise transformation offices to become strategic partners by providing them with tools to drive business value and facilitate alignment across the organization. 

Broadcom is positioned as a Leader and Outperformer in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant of the agile PPM Radar chart.

Strengths
Broadcom scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Financial management: The solution provides ledger-grade transaction-based actuals capture combined with fiscal calendar-aware planning and budgeting at all investment levels. The solution’s financial management capabilities are used to manage long-term forecasts, short-term cost plans and budgets, and interface with legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and financial tools. 

• Product roadmapping: The offering provides portfolio management in the form of strategic roadmapping. Robust, lightweight, visual, and collaborative, ValueOps roadmaps include details wherever users have them (objectives, key results, business cases, projects, programs, applications, and so on) but also provide options to engage directly with a business or delivery stakeholder to capture their needs and initiatives with no more detail than what is required on a Post-It note. 

•  VSM: The vendor believes in the convergence of value stream management with agile PPM and has delivered industry-leading integrated capabilities in this area. This includes extensive end-to-end visibility and functionality to support decision-making at all levels in the hierarchy and along the pipeline. 

Broadcom is classified as an Outperformer because of its significant number of newly released features and enhancements to the ValueOps solution. In addition, the company has a strong go-forward roadmap.

Opportunities
Broadcom has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Version management: The solution does not maintain its own repositories for code with version control. However, it does provide the ability to produce reviews and capture the history of work that contributed to the code. It also integrates directly to applications like GitHub via ValueOps ConnectALL and can connect directly to the code repository for consumption.

• Regulatory compliance: While the solution leverages disciplined agile delivery concepts to provide end-to-end traceability from investment to delivery with governance and compliance functionality, it could build additional out-of-the-box features to support specific regulated industries.

• OKR management: It provides capabilities to model business objectives, define OKRs for measuring performance against those objectives, tie objectives to specific execution items, and, through that traceability, provide correlation between initial investment/business objectives and downstream events. It should continue to deepen these capabilities.

Purchase Considerations
All products use the Broadcom PLA licensing model. This can be extended to include many other capabilities from the wider Broadcom software portfolio, including robust tools for NetOps, artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), DevOps, security, virtualization, and mainframe. Many combinations of these capabilities are offered depending on customer requirements. Within this model, customers can implement the ValueOps solution as a whole or choose to switch around among the Rally, Clarity, and ConnectALL solutions at no extra cost and with no further procurement cycles. 

After procurement, customers often use the partner community to aid with implementation, especially to facilitate the culture change even more so than product adoption. Using professional services is not required; customers have been able to get ValueOps established on their own with the right amount of dedicated effort. Customers are afforded all capabilities within the solution and choose their own timing to roll out the various capabilities (roadmapping, backlog management, financials, and so on).

Use Cases
Key use cases for the ValueOps solution include VSM, digital product management, enterprise agile planning (EAP), PPM, strategic portfolio management (SPM), new product development, enterprise architecture (EA) management, and application portfolio management (APM).

Digital.ai: Digital.ai Agility

Solution Overview
The Digital.ai AI-powered DevOps platform bundles a number of products, including Digital.ai Agility, Digital.ai Application Security, Digital.ai Continuous Testing, Digital.ai Release, Digital.ai Deploy, and Digital.ai Intelligence. 

Digital.ai Agility is the agile PPM tool. This product enables organizations to scale agile processes consistently across the enterprise. It includes all the core table stakes functionality and many of the key features such as product roadmapping and integrations. AI-driven analytics are available throughout all platform components. 

The Digital.ai platform encompasses the core Digital.ai Agility functionality blended with DevOps functions like version management and release and deployment management—it scored well on the version management key criterion. 

Agility Sync is the out-of-the-box functionality of the Agility professional and premium editions that enables enterprises to connect to many popular solutions in place at enterprises today. 

Digital.ai focuses on enhancing its capabilities to support enterprise agility and value stream management. The roadmap emphasizes integrating advanced analytics and AI-driven insights to optimize software delivery and align it with business objectives.

Digital.ai is positioned as a Leader and Fast Mover in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant of the agile PPM Radar chart.

Strengths
Digital.ai scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Version management: The solution has native version management with CI/CD pipelines. It also has integrations to key third-party CI/CD pipelines for version management.

• Regulatory compliance: It supports regulated industries by offering tools and features that ensure compliance, security, traceability, release processes, and efficiency.

• VSM: The offering enables organizations to visualize and manage value streams across the entire software development lifecycle, identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies to improve flow. By integrating agile and DevOps practices, it ensures seamless collaboration between teams and provides end-to-end visibility into the delivery process. 

Opportunities
Digital.ai has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Financial Management: The product does not have native financial management features, though it does integrate with Broadcom Clarity to provide this functionality.

• Integrations and add-ons: While Digital.ai Agility has out-of-the-box connectors to other application development tools via marketplace and API capabilities, it could grow the number of prebuilt connectors and integrations to key third-party applications.

• Predictive analytics and predictive governance: While the solution offers AI for predictive issues and for models to enhance governance, it has the opportunity to deepen and enhance the AI features for predictive analytics and governance.

Purchase Considerations
The solution is subscription-based. It has three levels of packaging: essentials, professional, and premium, which offer additional value at each tier. The company offers professional services or technical account managers, depending on customer needs, and support level can vary depending on need.

Digital.ai products are available either as SaaS solutions or as fully self-managed cloud and on-premises solutions. With the SaaS solution, all upgrades, infrastructure, and support are included. There’s an option for upgraded premium support as well. The on-premises version requires an internal team to manage the infrastructure and software, upgrades, and so forth. 

Use Cases
Digital.ai has built a platform that centers around engineering. It provides agile planning functions, VSM, and strong OKR capabilities along with developer-focused features that support DevOps and CI/CD pipelines. Key use cases for Digital.ai Agility include the ability to drive efficiency, manage value flow, optimize program investments, prioritize high-value products to build a revenue-driven software portfolio at scale, enhance developer productivity, optimize pipeline management, maximize capacity to reduce operational costs, and align technology investments with business outcomes. 

GitLab: DevSecOps Platform*

Solution Overview
The developers of GitLab wanted the platform to include not just agile planning functions but engineering-level deployment management, operations, and security as well. GitLab therefore provides a single platform for all DevOps processes, from agile planning to continuous integration, deployment, monitoring, and security. The core product is based on open source technology.

GitLab is a complete open core DevOps platform. It’s available as a self-managed solution, multitenant SaaS solution, or single-tenant SaaS solution (GitLab Dedicated). GitLab self-managed can be hosted on-premises, in a private cloud, or in a public cloud of the customer’s choice. GitLab Dedicated is a fully isolated tenant that is hosted and managed by GitLab in an AWS region of the customer’s choice, providing infrastructure-level isolation and data residency controls for organizations in highly regulated industries that have complex compliance and data residency requirements.

Strategically, GitLab aims to improve tools for planning, tracking, and reporting, enabling organizations to manage complex project portfolios within GitLab's single application framework. Key initiatives include enhancing visibility, reporting, and inter-team workflows to empower users at all levels to align their work with organizational goals. GitLab also plans to invest in features like dependency mapping, timebox tools, and advanced visualization options to support real-time, data-driven decision-making. 

GitLab is positioned as a Challenger and Fast Mover in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant of the agile PPM Radar chart.

Strengths
GitLab scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Version management: While many tools in this space rely on integration with third-party tools to provide version management and CI/CD functions, this solution provides native capabilities with end-to-end functions available in a single tool.

• Regulatory compliance: It provides more compliance features than standard PPM tools in this market do. It has out-of-the-box regulatory features for several industries. It includes compliance controls and credentials that ensure alignment with regulatory frameworks.

• VSM: Its VSM is another key differentiator that includes customizable value stream reports, distribution of work analytics, and identification of bottlenecks.

Opportunities
GitLab has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Financial management: The solution has basic financial capabilities for assessing the financial health of products and projects, information that’s useful in assessing whether a product is aligning with company objectives and producing the expected results. It should include financial information along with technical project information to ensure the value of the work aligns with company objectives.

• Product roadmapping: The roadmap provides a high-level overview of the planned work and progress of epics and milestones in a timeline view (Gantt chart). It could broaden the roadmapping features to match others in this market.

• Integrations and add-ons: While it has a number of third-party integrations, it has the opportunity to extend them with prebuilt integrations to additional third-party applications in the development pipeline.

Purchase Considerations
GitLab has a tiered approach to licensing. The entry level is free and has limits on users, storage, transactions, and features. Premium is ideal for scaling and multiteam coordination. It includes more users, features, and storage than the free version. The ultimate tier is geared toward enterprise organizations, with enhanced security, VSM, and improved license utilization.

Use Cases
GitLab is a development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) platform with agile and VSM capabilities. It has a broad set of use cases supporting engineering development, security, and deployment. For agile PPM in particular, the use cases focus on integrated agile and portfolio planning, streamlining processes, optimizing workflows, traceability and visibility, and gaining insights.

IBM: Strategic Portfolio Management

Solution Overview
IBM Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) is a powerful, flexible enterprise agile PPM solution that powers the ability to scale at the speed of business. It connects strategy to execution holistically, allowing teams to deliver outcomes, value, and across-the-board improvements. Two main tools comprise this platform. 

IBM SPM is a comprehensive agile planning tool that empowers business people and IT teams to adopt agile methodology and scale it across the organization. This solution connects teams with business objectives to ensure alignment and focus on the highest-priority business goals. 

IBM Apptio is a financial management tool that ties financial data to operational data. The tool leverages industry-standard cost categories that facilitate analysis and planning, and it integrates powerful views into planning, budgeting, and forecasting of technology investments. 

While these solutions can be used as standalone products, the integration of IBM SPM with IBM Apptio provides a powerful end-to-end portfolio solution.

IBM SPM's strategic direction focuses on enhancing its capabilities as a strategic portfolio management (SPM) solution to align strategy with execution across enterprises. The platform connects all levels of an organization, from team-level tasks to overarching strategic objectives. IBM aims to improve decision-making by integrating advanced analytics and value stream management, enabling organizations to maximize investment value and optimize workflows.

IBM is positioned as a Challenger and Fast Mover in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant of the agile PPM Radar chart.

Strengths
IBM scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Financial management: The SPM solutions provide a very detailed view of all financial aspects of portfolios. It has the flexibility to allocate and plan for all levels of a portfolio–including project, product, and platform. It has budgeting, forecasting and change management capabilities.

• Product roadmapping: It has extensive end-to-end visibility and functionality that support decision-making at all levels in the hierarchy and along the pipeline. It also has a kanban board and the ability to visualize all aspects of the portfolios. 

• OKR management: It can track corporate goals and objectives and tie OKRs to prioritization of work. The OKRs can also be reviewed on a regular basis by the stakeholders to ensure alignment.

Opportunities
IBM has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Version management: While it does not have native version management, it does have multiple partners that integrate with the platform and provide all CI/CD processes.

• Integrations and add-ons: It offers integrations and add-ons, such as Jira, Azure DevOps, and GitLab. However, it relies on API capabilities for many of the integrations. It has the opportunity to provide additional prebuilt integrations to key third-party solutions.

• Regulatory compliance: It does support disciplined agile delivery concepts for compliance needs and handles cyber-physical capabilities needed by specific industry sectors. It could deepen its regulated industry support with specific templates and processes for regulated industries. 

Purchase Considerations
IBM SPM is licensed as a subscription-based service. IBM SPM supports the definition of various personas, roles, and permissions, allowing organizations to tailor access and functionality to different personas within the enterprise. Full user licenses, also called SPM user licenses, are assigned to users that log in to SPM regularly. Connected user licenses, also called integration user licenses, are assigned to users that primarily use an integrated tool, such as Jira or Azure DevOps. These users do not regularly log in directly to SPM. During periodic prioritization planning events, limited users are given temporary access to SPM that they can use like a virtual whiteboard. 

A free trial of IBM SPM is available. To initiate one, prospective users can complete a request form on the website. 

Engaging professional service providers is not required to implement the solution but is highly recommended to ensure a smooth deployment of IBM SPM and in facilitating user adoption.

Use Cases
IBM Apptio solutions are used across many industries from banking to manufacturing, including the US government agencies. They focus on blending agile solutions with goals and financial management features. The solution has a well-established suite of agile management modules along with financial information and OKR reporting. The focus of the products is on joining IT and financial information to ensure project efforts are aligned with corporate goals and budget anomalies can be identified and reported. The use cases also include project and product management and strategic portfolio management.

Microsoft: Azure DevOps Services and Azure DevOps Server*

Solution Overview
The Microsoft product suite includes both Azure DevOps Services and Azure DevOps Server. Azure DevOps Services is a cloud-based platform that delivers a comprehensive set of tools to support modern DevOps practices. It brings together agile planning with Azure Boards, which offer kanban boards, backlogs, and dashboards to help teams track work efficiently. Continuous integration and delivery are handled through Azure Pipelines, which support any language, platform, or cloud environment. Collaboration is enhanced with Azure Repos, providing unlimited private Git repositories along with advanced file management features. To maintain high-quality releases, Azure Test Plans enables manual testing, including exploratory testing. Additionally, Azure Artifacts offers powerful package management capabilities, allowing teams to create, host, and share packages seamlessly.

Azure DevOps Server is an on-premises version of Azure DevOps. It provides the same set of tools as Azure DevOps Services but is designed for organizations that require their data to remain on-premises due to compliance or security needs.

Strategically, Microsoft is investing in advanced security features, such as GitHub Advanced Security integration, which includes secret scanning, code scanning, and dependency scanning. It aims to streamline CI/CD processes, improve infrastructure-as-code capabilities, and enhance collaboration. Additionally, it is prioritizing predictive monitoring and automation to reduce deployment cycles and bottlenecks.

Microsoft is positioned as a Challenger and Fast Mover in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant of the agile PPM Radar chart.

Strengths
Microsoft scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Version management: The offerings support version control through Azure Repos, which provides Git-based repositories for managing code versions. It provides full CI/CD pipeline functionality integration for Azure DevOps Services and Server solutions,

• Integrations and add-ons: Microsoft Azure Marketplace gives access to more than 1,000 apps and services built by the community. 

• Regulatory compliance: Both solutions can help enforce compliance through Azure Policy integration in pipelines, ensuring resources meet regulatory standards for various industries.

Opportunities
Microsoft has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Financial management: The solutions do not currently support financial management capabilities.

• Product roadmapping: While Microsoft Azure Boards functions have some roadmapping features, the company mainly relies on marketplace integrations to third-party roadmapping solutions. 

• VSM: The offerings do not currently support VSM features. 

Purchase Considerations
Microsoft offers cloud and on-premises versions. Azure DevOps Services is a cloud-based solution that ranges from free to a monthly charge for scaled services. No documentation was found regarding any private cloud offering for Azure DevOps Services. Azure DevOps Server provides a secure on-premises solution containing the same functionality as Azure DevOps Services. A team can get started for free, and a flexible monthly subscription is then available. After 12 months, more free services are bundled with the subscription. Each of the modules can be added separately or bundled together.

Use Cases
Azure DevOps is an engineering-focused suite of modules that can provide idea tracking, planning, development, deployment, and maintenance capabilities for companies in many different industries. The solutions allow teams to break down silos and collaborate across teams. They can help focus teams on continuous learning and enable change through technology.

monday.com: work management, dev

Solution Overview
monday.com is a work operating system (Work OS) with customizable products through which organizations of any size can manage every aspect of their work. Organizations can use the platform to manage everything from software development to marketing and sales. The solution has two modules that enable it to meet the requirements of this report. monday.com work management allows teams to focus on executing tasks, projects, and processes efficiently and achieve shared goals at scale. monday.com dev helps teams manage development from product strategy to launch.

monday.com has a visually engaging and intuitive UI. The product is highly adaptable to suit an organization's agile journey. It provides templates and workflows to get users started. This monday.com platform covers all of the core planning and execution functions of product and project management. 

The solution has a robust collection of workflows, templates, and boards and includes reporting, automation, and integration features. This functionality encourages teams, SMBs, and enterprises to make it their end-to-end solution for management and visibility. 

Strategically, monday.com is focusing on its AI Vision, a strategic initiative built on its robust platform that will focus on three pillars—AI Blocks, Product Power-ups, and the Digital Workforce—to accelerate its mission to democratize the power of software.

monday.com is positioned as a Challenger and Fast Mover in the Innovation/Feature Play quadrant of the agile PPM Radar chart.

Strengths
monday.com scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Product roadmapping: The solution offers product roadmap templates and visualization tools to plan, track, and manage projects. 

• Integrations and add-ons: It integrates with over 200 tools, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, and Salesforce.

• OKR management: It offers dedicated templates and customizable boards for managing OKRs. These tools help teams align their goals, track progress, and ensure transparency. 

Opportunities
monday.com has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Financial management: While monday.com provides tools to track budgets, expenses, and revenue, this requires manual input from users. The company has the opportunity to deepen the financial features and include prebuilt integrations to key financial solutions.

• Version management: Though the offering provides integration with several third-party CI/CD pipeline tools, it does not offer native version management for CI/CD pipeline releases. 

• Regulatory compliance: While the solution complies with some international standards such as GDPR and HIPAA—making it suitable for industries like healthcare, finance, and government—it relies on integrations with compliance-focused tools, such as Theta Lake, to further enhance its capabilities for regulated environments.

Purchase Considerations
monday.com is delivered only as a cloud-based SaaS solution. It has cost-effective tiered pricing, starting with a free version and scaling to an enterprise-level solution. Each level adds enhanced functionality. SMBs that are less complex can take advantage of the solution’s lower-priced tiers with some of the best pricing for these products. Most complex organizations will need the enterprise version. 

Use Cases
monday.com supports a variety of industries. The focus of its solutions is on gaining greater visibility and transparency of the work being done with robust dashboards and project overviews of where initiatives stand, setting goals and objectives to ensure everyone is moving in the same direction with purpose–while staying connected to wider company goals–and providing an intuitive, unified, and easy to adopt solution that empowers small and large teams to manage tasks and projects in one collaborative space.

OpenText: OpenText Project and Portfolio Management, and OpenText Core Software Delivery Platform

Solution Overview
OpenText provides two solutions for planning and portfolio management: Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) and Core Software Delivery Platform (SDP). OpenText PPM drives business value through comprehensive portfolio optimization and management, which ensures projects are on time and on budget and achieve stated goals. Organizations can maximize the use of resources, track costs, and gain insights to handle complex efforts to achieve corporate goals. OpenText Core SDP (formerly ValueEdge) is an integrated platform composed of multiple functional modules with a common user interface, enabling comprehensive software delivery and value stream management capabilities.

The goal is to increase adoption of SPM and agile planning capabilities by providing an enhanced user experience across the entire product and by leveraging AI. OpenText is working with customers to build a what-if analysis capability that adapts to any planning use case, with enhanced scenario planning capabilities, strategy inheritance, and prescriptive analytics-assisted decision-making for portfolio planning optimization. 

In addition, the company aims to enhance integrated predictive and generative AI capabilities to provide real-time insights, automate processes, and improve collaboration across teams. OpenText emphasizes aligning investments with strategic goals through top-down and bottom-up analytics, enabling organizations to maximize value delivery.

OpenText is positioned as a Leader and Fast Mover in the Innovation/Platform quadrant of the agile PPM Radar chart.

Strengths
OpenText scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Regulatory compliance: The solution offers capabilities and prebuilt templates for several highly regulated industries that require end-to-end traceability, change management, and auditability. The platform is designed to provide full history tracking and audit trail capabilities that capture every change made by users or administrators. Add-ons to the platform for regulated industries include variant management and detailed requirements management functionality.  

• Integrations and add-ons: Both OpenText PPM and OpenText Core SDP have extensive out-of-the-box integrations and connectors with other OpenText products and many top products for CI/CD pipelines, testing and planning tools, security, source code management, and other solutions that are part of the delivery lifecycle.

• VSM: The offering integrates agile and DevOps practices to ensure seamless collaboration between teams and provides tools for mapping, analyzing, and optimizing value streams. Advanced analytics and automation features help organizations eliminate waste, increase efficiency, and maintain compliance. 

Opportunities
OpenText has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Version management: While the solution integrates with several key third-party solutions, it does not include a code repository.

• Product roadmapping: OpenText PPM leverages the product portfolio concept and the portfolio’s numerous capabilities for grouping and filtering, various OOB views, and dashboards to provide roadmapping. However, it could continue to deepen and enhance the roadmapping features.

• OKR management: The solution offers an OKR framework tightly aligned with SAFe. It has the opportunity to add prebuilt naming structures that align with core OKR naming standards versus only the SAFe standard.

Purchase Considerations
OpenText has simplified the pricing structure for PPM. For on-premises customers (and customers providing their own public cloud accounts), there are two versions of the bundle SKUs:  power user or casual user. This same model pertains to the SaaS offering, but a "base fee" is added for SaaS customers to cover the cost of providing the service.  Power users get access to all modules and all functionalities. Casual users are limited to functions such as submitting timesheets and processing requests in Demand Management. In addition, the vendor recently added concurrent user SKUs, which have been embraced especially in the context of pandemic changes and fueled the adoption of new product capabilities.

Core SDP is licensed for both cloud (SaaS) and off-cloud (OP), with full flexibility as well. It includes named or concurrent licenses with term/subscription (SaaS/OP) or a perpetual (OP) model. Cloud SDP licensing is sold in a hierarchical, per-persona flexibility mode by which multiple license types can be combined in either named or concurrent types. Off-cloud licensing is sold in editions starting with Pro, aimed at smaller dev and QA teams, and Enterprise, aimed at larger enterprise-level organizations and more advanced teams, with add-ons available for additional capabilities.

Use Cases
OpenText PPM and Core SDP support a wide range of use cases spanning agile planning, strategic portfolio management, financial management, risk and issue management, VSM, and project execution, ensuring alignment with business goals while optimizing workflows. They also include numerous testing, reporting, and analytics use cases.

The solutions support a broad variety of industries as well.

Planisware: Planisware Enterprise

Solution Overview
Planisware Enterprise is a single source code software product that covers all SPM, APM, and PPM capabilities out of the box. The main use cases include product development, digitalization and IT, software development, capital planning, and engineering and professional services support.

Planisware Enterprise is a methodology-agnostic solution that can support all major agile frameworks, including kanban, scrum, lean, and SAFe, in addition to waterfall frameworks. Different teams can leverage different methodologies within the same instance, and this all rolls up to a consolidated agile portfolio. Configurable boards and workflows exist for the major agile methodologies, including portfolio epic boards, program increment (PI) planning boards, kanban boards, scrum sprint boards, and team boards.

From a strategic perspective, Planisware Enterprise will continue evolving to support smarter decision-making, greater agility, and deeper enterprise-wide integration. It is focused on the upcoming AI-powered unified platform that is designed to redefine user interaction by enabling intelligent, agent-driven automation. Built for next-generation workflows, it will allow users to seamlessly interact with applications through voice commands, leveraging agentic AI to execute actions, streamline processes, and enhance productivity.

Planisware Enterprise is positioned as a Leader and Outperformer in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant of the agile PPM Radar chart.

Strengths
Planisware scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Financial management: It includes a full profit and loss engine at different levels, including project, product, or application-based profit and loss models. This cost engine includes a robust rate system to drive costs based on differing resources or contracts. 

• Product roadmapping: The offering includes roadmapping capabilities at the product and portfolio levels, allowing end users to tie their live data and dates into a single view for leadership. This includes being able to tie key strategy data points like OKRs to the execution of the work being done. 

• VSM: The solution provides value stream management at the strategy level, allowing for mapping and budgeting by value stream. At the execution level, the solution tracks key flow metrics to ensure a consistent flow of value throughout the development process. 

Planisware Enterprise is classified as an Outperformer given its numerous releases of new functionality over the past year. In addition, it has a strong go-forward roadmap of new features ahead.

Opportunities
Planisware has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Version management: The solution does not currently provide native code version management, though it does interface with industry standard code version management systems to manage its code repositories.

• Integrations and add-ons: It offers several OOB integrations—such as Jira and Azure DevOps—and provides a no-code interface for admins to configure data mappings. It also supports ODATA and REST for integrations. There is still an opportunity to expand its prebuilt integration capabilities to support additional third-party solutions.

• Regulatory compliance: It logs changes to all data points and allows users to enable audit trails or indicators to track updates on the front end. There is an opportunity to enhance the platform with additional prebuilt capabilities tailored to regulated industries.

Purchase Considerations
The Planisware Enterprise solution is licensed on a per-role, per-seat basis. It comes with six different license types: TimeCard, Team Member, Essential, Premier, Portfolio Manager, and Configuration Studio. Discounts are applied based on the use case and total user count (with a volume discount). Ultimately, the price per user depends on the total number of licenses purchased. While there is no free or community version, Planisware Enterprise offers options to minimize risk exposure for new customers while demonstrating value (through configurability and scalability) of solutions.

Due to the system’s high level of configurability (which is a differentiator), implementing Planisware Enterprise always requires some level of professional services. These options can not only configure the solution but also help customers adopt portfolio management best practices.

Use Cases
Planisware Enterprise supports a broad range of industries. The main use cases include product development, digitalization and IT, software development, capital planning and engineering, and professional services support. The solution focuses on PPM, SPM, professional services automation (PSA), enterprise architecture (EA), EAP, and collaborative work management (CWM).

Planview: Enterprise Agile Planning

Solution Overview
Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning solution provides a scalable enterprise-level lean portfolio management, agile planning, and agile delivery platform that supports organizations from strategy to delivery, no matter where they are on their transformation journey. It enables them to improve time to market, do more with existing teams, and confidently invest in the right priorities to deliver the value that matters most to the business and customers.

The platform is agile framework agnostic, providing options for adoption to customers across all agile maturity levels. It supports a more traditional project management approach, a hybrid mix of work styles, and pure agile work, all in one platform. The solution provides single-pane-of-glass visibility of work components ranging from strategy, planning, funding, and delivery to outcomes. This includes the support for and visualization of financials, planning and funding, scenario planning and trade-off analysis, integrated OKRs, interactive roadmaps, and a persona-based user experience augmented by unique AI capabilities (such as an integrated AI assistant, sentiment analysis, and embedded in-app help).

Strategically, Planview's integrated vision brings together portfolio management, agile planning, and value stream management to enable a highly adaptable operating model that bridges strategy and delivery. This approach serves as the comprehensive management system for organizations on their journey from project to product methodologies.

Planview is positioned as a Leader and Outperformer in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant of the agile PPM Radar chart.

Strengths
Planview scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Financial management: The solution supports end-to-end financial management across software engineering and portfolio management. Funding is defined by time, portfolio, product, capability, and investment type (for multi-investment forecasting). Horizon-based funding is supported through balancing investments into focused groups to better inform decisions and align with strategic themes. Value stream funding is supported with portfolio and associated guardrails to manage funds incrementally.

• Product roadmapping: It offers robust product roadmapping capabilities, allowing customers to define portfolio, value stream, and strategic roadmaps to align overall portfolio themes with products and programs and, ultimately, the iterative or continuous releases of work by delivery teams.

• VSM: The solution provides a unique perspective on bringing together the worlds of strategic portfolio management, business architecture, and value stream management. The connected platform allows customers to combine high-level strategic plans (financials, initiative planning, capacity analysis, OKR progress and health) with live insights from delivery to inform decision-making and improve planning activities.

Planview is classified as an Outperformer because of its extensive release cadence over the past couple of years. In addition, it has a strong go-forward roadmap.

Opportunities
Planview has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Version management: The offering does not have native version management capabilities, though it does integrate seamlessly with code repositories and development-centric tools such as GitHub and the like. 

• Regulatory compliance: The solution is framework agnostic, allowing users to adopt any process and practice involving disciplined agile (DA), disciplined agile delivery (DAD), or others. While it provides basic facilities like access rights, permission controls, process automation, and exception reporting to support a robust regulatory compliance framework, it should consider adding out-of-the- box industry-specific features for regulated industries.

• Predictive analytics and predictive governance: While it includes embedded predictive capabilities within the solution in multiple places, it has the opportunity to continue to build on these features with additional predictive capabilities.

Purchase Considerations
Planview products are available as SaaS solutions for both public and private clouds. In addition, companies can choose to install some portions of the application on-premises.

The Planview solution is sold through named subscription-based licensing. Enterprise licensing agreements are available for customers seeking unlimited user options. Fixed-price implementation and premium support packages, along with optional add-on services, are available, as is a free trial for basic use cases. Professional services are not required to implement the basic solution; however, more advanced use cases require an implementation package.

Use Cases
Planview supports numerous use cases across different industries, including lean portfolio management (LPM), agile program management, agile team delivery, project and program portfolio management, digital product management, SAFe and other agile frameworks, hybrid portfolios and programs, scrum teams, kanban/lean teams, VSM, and flow methodology.

ServiceNow: Strategic Portfolio Management

Solution Overview
ServiceNow’s focus is to provide enterprise visibility, enhanced usability, and effective prioritization. The Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) solution aligns strategy with work effort. This coordination enables planning, tracking, and delivery of value across the organization. The solution leverages the ServiceNow Now Platform, which provides visibility at every step, from idea to operations.

The SPM solution ties together the demands and costs of projects and portfolios for enhanced decision-making and allocation of funding across an enterprise. The scenario planning component has visibility into investments for prioritization. It allows users to project several potential scenarios, then select the best solution to implement. Strategic Portfolio Management is fiscal-calendar-enabled, with multiple currency capabilities as well.

Strategically, ServiceNow SPM continues to emphasize seamless integration across the platform to break down silos and maximize value. Its focus includes iteration-based planning and financials, supporting complex team structures that encompass both kanban and iteration-based teams. In addition, it is expanding the use of generative AI with epic and feature story creation.

ServiceNow is positioned as a Leader and Fast Mover in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant of the agile PPM Radar chart.

Strengths
ServiceNow scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Version management: The solution supports version control through its release management capabilities, ensuring compatibility and tracking changes across updates, and it supports versioning of data objects. 

• Regulatory compliance: Organizations in highly regulated industries will be able to safely and securely apply the power of the cloud, with the solution housed on Azure, which will include the most comprehensive set of compliance offerings. With a secure way to develop, deploy, and manage intelligent solutions, these organizations will be able to accelerate their digital transformation, creating great experiences and unlocking productivity.

• OKR management: ServiceNow Goal Framework provides support for OKRs, and ServiceNow SPM provides tools to set, track, and align goals with business strategies. This enables organizations to establish priorities, measure progress through key results, and maintain alignment across teams.

Opportunities
ServiceNow has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Product roadmapping: While ServiceNow Roadmap Planning provides organizations across every industry with the resources they need to create effective, goal-oriented road maps, it could expand the roadmapping capabilities to support different types of roadmaps.

• Financial management: ServiceNow SPM provides tools for tracking and allocating expenses, enabling organizations to align financial resources with strategic objectives. It has the opportunity to extend its financial management capabilities at all levels of planning and tracking. Additional financial management features are on the 2025 roadmap.

• Predictive analytics and predictive governance: While it leverages AI and machine learning to provide predictive analytics, enabling organizations to forecast trends, identify risks, and make data-driven decisions, it could enhance the predictive capabilities of the solution.

Purchase Considerations
ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management offers two packages and is licensed per user. The standard package includes core agile planning, resource management, and core portfolio planning focused on single teams and small groups of teams. The professional package includes all features of the standard package with added functionality such as strategic portfolio planning, a scaled agile framework, and predictive analytics focused on customers with multiple teams managing complex dependencies.

Various licensing models are used across the ServiceNow Now Platform. The company also offers custom services with its Impact solution, which can accelerate time to value for customers.

ServiceNow is a cloud-based SaaS platform. It has its own data centers, and customer data remains on-platform. Certain customers operate on-premises, self-hosted instances. ServiceNow uses zero trust access, cloud encryption, platform encryption, and column-level encryption enterprise (CLEE) with a ServiceNow Vault architecture. Additionally, the ServiceNow Government Community Cloud provides IL4 and IL5 services.

Use Cases
The solution supports multiple industries and personas for the agile PPM solution across the ServiceNow Now Platform. ServiceNow SPM, including EAP, is being used by customers globally across industries and services.

Smartsheet: The Smartsheet Platform

Solution Overview
Smartsheet is a project management and work management platform based on a spreadsheet approach. Smartsheet for PPM is a flexible, collaborative platform that allows operations leaders to create replicable project management frameworks while empowering project teams to be more nimble, creative, and efficient.

The solution covers all of the table stakes in this report from backlog and task management to iteration and release planning. One of the benefits Smartsheet offers is its ability to share sheets with internal or external team members. Even unlicensed users can still collaborate. This is a cost-effective approach when users have multiple projects simultaneously with many stakeholders that need access.

Strategically, Smartsheet continues to evolve into a platform that doesn’t just respond to needs but anticipates them. As the leader in work management, it is making it easier for teams to move faster, stay aligned, and focus on what really matters. It is developing an intuitive interface, powerful automation, new AI capabilities, and the flexibility to support different types of work and teams while keeping assets and data safe.

Smartsheet is positioned as an Entrant and Fast Mover in the Innovation/Feature Play quadrant of the agile PPM Radar chart.

Strengths
Smartsheet scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Integrations and add-ons: Its integrations enable users to automate routine workflows across tools, provide visibility into work, and connect data across enterprise systems like CRMs, HCMs, and ERPs. Smartsheet has over 100 integrations with business tools such as Slack, Jira, Salesforce, and Tableau.

• Product roadmapping: The solution provides free customizable product roadmap templates for a variety of platforms.

• OKR Management: It provides the ability to report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep teams connected and informed. 

Opportunities
Smartsheet has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Version management: The solution does not natively support version control within CI/CD pipelines, although it can be integrated with tools that specialize in CI/CD processes to enable version control and continuous delivery workflows.

• Financial management: It provides a business budget template with a mix of detailed spreadsheets and graphical data reports. Users can estimate expenses, track actual expenditures, and view variances, all of which are summarized by month and visually represented in charts. It has a prebuilt integration with MS Dynamics 365, and the data shuttle connects with SAP, Acumatica ERP, Sage Intacct, and others. It could expand the prebuilt integrations to financial systems.

• Regulatory compliance: While the offering provides financial institutions a centralized, data-driven platform to manage compliance processes, mitigate risk, and foster a culture of compliance, it could broaden the capabilities to include additional industry groups.

Purchase Considerations
Smartsheet has four tiers of pricing for licensing on a monthly cost-per-user basis. It starts with a free option to learn about the product and progresses to the pro version for up to 10 editors. The recommended solution is the business level for unlimited editors. The enterprise version has the most comprehensive functionality and requires involvement with sales for pricing. There are additional costs for add-ons such as control center, resource management, connectors, and data mesh. Standard support is an add-on for all plans except enterprise. Professional support is also an add-on across all pricing tiers.

Use Cases
Smartsheet is project management software that offers a range of benefits for retail, education organizations, and finance companies, as well as IT PMO departments that must continually manage multiple projects. It is used across a variety of industries. Organizations are typically small to midsize and vary in complexity.

Wrike

Solution Overview
Wrike is a modernized platform for intelligent work management. The solution aligns strategy, planning, and execution along with team communication and visual collaboration. It connects multiple teams, processes, and tools in one platform, enabling organizations to break down silos and align toward shared strategies and objectives. It provides full visibility and traceability of effort and outcomes as work flows through an organization.

Wrike is a single product to which users can add on capabilities, such as Datahub (to bring data from other systems into workflows) or Klaxoon (for visual collaboration). Newly acquired Klaxoon is also sold standalone, with a common user interface on the near-term roadmap. 

Strategically, Wrike’s product vision is to be the best platform to power critical business workflows end to end, at enterprise scale. Wrike aims to be a leading intelligent collaborative work management platform, enabling work to flow seamlessly from ideation to outcomes through multi-modal collaboration, no-code automation, predictive analytics, and AI-assisted decision-making. Its 2025 roadmap is ambitious, focusing on advancing its AI and work intelligence vision, enhancing visual collaboration capabilities, expanding data management, scaling for enterprise needs, enabling federated configuration, and delivering targeted solution packages to better support critical workflows.

Wrike is positioned as a Leader and Fast Mover in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant of the agile PPM Radar chart.

Strengths
Wrike scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Financial management: The solution offers powerful budgeting and financial management features, making it ideal for complex workflows. Project managers can set budgets, manage labor costs and client fees, and track profitability. Seamless integrations with ERPs like NetSuite and QuickBooks ensure Wrike feeds directly into financial reporting systems.

• Integrations and add-ons: Wrike Integrate provides an enterprise-grade no-code/low-code integration engine (powered by Workato), featuring prebuilt connectors and integration recipes for more than 180 apps. Wrike-Klaxoon integration is available, allowing users to capture unstructured data in Klaxoon, automatically create projects in Wrike, and sync updates bidirectionally.

• OKR Management: It delivers an all-new dashboards capability, making performance analysis easier to create and personalize, more visual, more flexible and easier to share. This new capability delivers predesigned and custom dashboards and natively manages OKRs without the purchase of a separate module or product.

Opportunities
Wrike has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Version management: While the solution does not provide native version management features, it does integrate with version management software for code and version control.

• Regulatory compliance: While it can be used for full-cycle compliance-focused projects from setting requirements to evidence exchange during external assessments, it does not specifically provide regulated industry support.  

• VSM: While it is not considered a VSM solution, it does contribute to supporting a value mindset when tracking product and project success. It has the opportunity to expand into VSM features in the future.

Purchase Considerations
Wrike and Klaxoon products, both available as SaaS solutions, can and will continue to be sold standalone, while options are being developed for joint pricing that will include both solutions. There are several editions (Free, tTeam, Business, Enterprise, Pinnacle) with increasing functionality and cost. This tiered pricing model provides a cost-effective way for a smaller, less-complex organization to start. With experience, a company can move to a more advanced level of service with greater functionality. All paid plans include standard support globally. Wrike also has several add-on modules for integration, project syncs, and marketing that are available for users on their Business, Enterprise, and Pinnacle plans.

Use Cases
Wrike can be used by every type of company in any industry vertical, anywhere that work flows. It has developed deep best practices in a select set of key solutions by working with top companies who deliver these workflows. These solutions include Portfolio Management, Marketing Work Management, Product Lifecycle, and Client Service Delivery. It has a deep set of templates and blueprints ready to jump-start organizations who manage these critical workflows. The list of preconfigured solutions continues to grow, and the platform can be easily set up to manage any workflow. 

Zoho: Zoho Projects

Solution Overview
Zoho is a cloud-based software suite that offers business and productivity tools, with project management tools for both waterfall and agile projects. Zoho Projects is a comprehensive project management solution that enables teams to plan, execute, and track projects efficiently. Designed for agile, hybrid, and traditional project management, it integrates planning, collaboration, time tracking, and reporting features. It provides a connected platform for managing project portfolios, ensuring transparency and efficiency across teams and stakeholders.

Zoho Projects is available both as a standalone product and as part of Zoho's ecosystem. It can be used alongside Zoho Sprints for agile project management, Zoho Analytics for advanced reporting, and Zoho Workdrive for document management. The Zoho Projects Plus platform maintains a common user interface across modules and operates on Zoho's secure cloud infrastructure, ensuring seamless integration with other Zoho and third-party applications.

From a strategic perspective, Zoho Projects aims to strengthen its position as a leading PPM tool by enhancing AI capabilities, improving integrations, and expanding its footprint in enterprise project management. The roadmap is aligned with a broader vision of enabling execution excellence for businesses of all sizes. The core feature development is structured around enhancing team collaboration, project governance, automation, insights, and extensibility.

Zoho is positioned as a Challenger and Fast Mover in the Innovation/Feature Play quadrant of the agile PPM Radar chart.

Strengths
Zoho scored well on a number of decision criteria, including:

• Regulatory compliance: The solution supports disciplined agile delivery concepts to meet compliance requirements across regulated industries. The platform is GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA compliant, ensuring that data privacy, security, and audit trail requirements are met for organizations in regulated industries. Zoho Projects maintains a detailed audit trail that logs all changes made to tasks, projects, and user activities. 

• Integrations and add-ons: It offers extensive integrations with third-party tools across CI/CD pipelines, cloud services, quality assurance, bug tracking, and ITSM tools. 

• Financial management: The offering provides comprehensive budgeting and cost-tracking capabilities. Teams can define project-level budgets, set cost constraints, and monitor expenditures in real time.

Opportunities
Zoho has room for improvement in a few decision criteria, including:

• Version management: The solution does not include built-in version control capabilities. However, it provides seamless integrations with external version control systems such as GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket for managing code repositories.

• Product roadmapping: While users can define high-level project objectives, track milestones, and monitor dependencies through custom task views and Gantt charts, the solution does not currently offer a dedicated roadmapping tool, though this capability is on the roadmap.

• OKR management: Although users can define custom goals and KPIs within the system and link them to project milestones and team activities, OKR tracking is not currently available. This feature is on the product roadmap.

Purchase Considerations
Zoho offers tiered pricing for each of its project management solutions. Both start with a free tier for up to three users to get started. Zoho Projects also has a premium plan and an enterprise plan. Each tier has increased functionality. Zoho Sprints also has a starter plan (12 users by default) and an elite plan (up to 100 users). The top plan is the premier plan. 

Zoho also provides free implementation support and offers premium support at a nominal fee.

Use Cases
Zoho caters to various verticals, including IT, financial services, and manufacturing and construction. It supports use cases around planning projects over Gantt, project planning with backlog, iteration and release planning, agile reporting, managing resources, visualizing and tracking projects, collaboration across dispersed teams, agile framework support, tracking time and budget, hybrid project management, issue management, and portfolio management.

The solutions in this Radar reflect a broad spectrum of options for business consumers. All vendors in this market are maturing and adding features on a regular basis—whether they’re positioned in the Maturity or Innovation halves on the Radar chart. In particular, agile PPM solutions are increasingly adding functionality to their products for financial management and DevOps, either through direct features or via integrations with other tools that specialize in these areas. Several vendors are exploring emerging technologies such as VSM, OKRs, predictive analytics, and data governance. Many are also looking at the best ways to leverage generative AI in their solutions.

There are solutions that are user friendly and intuitive and cover the core table stakes functionality—the basics for an agile PPM solution. They make it easy to begin or advance agile ways of working and are often free for the most basic versions, with the ability to eventually scale and pay for more advanced features. While these vendors may not have scored as high as the more comprehensive solutions, they are still solid solutions for less complex organizations–they just have fewer of the bells and whistles–and they can also be more cost-effective.

Some vendors are expanding into the enterprise platform arena with a more holistic platform for their users, adding features or integrating with modules such as financial management and DevOps pipelines. In addition, many are focusing on regulatory compliance and security across various industries to expand their customer base.

Tying in financial management with the ability to forecast and roll up data across a portfolio and/or the enterprise is critical for more complex IT organizations that need to ensure teams are focused on the top-value priorities and that spending is on track.

For 2025 and beyond, the ongoing blending of VSM and DevOps functionality and visibility with agile will be the key to driving increased value to a wide range of businesses. In addition, predictive analytics and predictive governance powered by AI/ML are continuing to grow, which will continue to be reflected in agile PPM tools and related integrations. Generative AI will have an ongoing impact that helps to reduce workloads and augment analysis, summarize activity, create user stories, and validate test scenarios and descriptions.

Purchase decisions concerning PPM tools should focus on the complexity of a company's IT organization and its maturity in the agile space. Newer, less complex organizations can easily benefit from very cost-effective tools without all the extra features. More complex organizations should take a hard look at their requirements and the level of difficulty related to implementing the functionality and/or integrations with DevOps pipelines and existing financial management. 

How easily this agile PPM functionality can be used to bring visibility into processes for teams and leaders is important for large, complex, changing, and agile-mature organizations. Moreover, companies for which regulatory compliance and security are important should seek solutions that can satisfy those requirements. Most solutions offer a cloud-only option. However, those focused on regulatory compliance often offer an on-premises or a private cloud solution as well. 

*Vendors marked with an asterisk did not participate in our research process for the Radar report, and their capsules and scoring were compiled via desk research.

For more information about our research process for Radar reports, please visit our Methodology.

Dana Hernandez is a dynamic, accomplished technology leader focused on the application of technology to business strategy and function. Over the last three decades, she had extensive experience with design and implementation of IT solutions in the areas of Finance, Sales, Marketing, Social Platforms, Revenue Management, Accounting, and all aspects of Airline Cargo, including Warehouse Operations. Most recently, she spearheaded technical teams responsible for implementing and supporting all applications for Global Sales for a major airline, owning the technical and business relationship to help drive strategy to meet business needs.

She has led numerous large, complex transformation efforts, including key system merger efforts consolidating companies onto one platform to benefit both companies, and she's modernized multiple systems onto large ERP platforms to reduce costs, enhance sustainability, and provide more modern functionality to end users.

Throughout her career, Dana leveraged strong analytical and planning skills, combined with the ability to influence others with the common goal of meeting organizational and business objectives. She focused on being a leader in vendor relationships, contract negotiation and management, and resource optimization.

She is also a champion of agile, leading agile transformation efforts across many diverse organizations. This includes heading up major organizational transformations to product taxonomy to better align business with enterprise technology. She is energized by driving organizational culture shifts that include adopting new mindsets and delivery methodologies.

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