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Complete PPM managment tools research

sergio cal

Dear all,

I am looking for an efficient tool for Jira project in order to have clear view of the follwoing :
- Team capacity
- Team budget allocation vs remaining
- Project global cost trackimg by teams
- Capacity planing setup by team

I am seen that there is a lot of candicates like :
- Big picture
- tempo Suite

But have no experience at all on it and have no idea which tool in the market could civer best a full PPM management for every level of PMO and top management view

Thanks for sharing your experience

Regards

Accepted answers

All comments

Harald Heinz

Hi,

both are strong candidates for capacity tracking and resource management, but Tempo provides budget tracking with the "Financial Manager". With BigPicture I know you can show the assigned budget in a box, but nothing else you can do with these numbers afaik.

Another option could be "Activity Timeline" which has its own finance module.

Rest depends on the requirements, accessibility and costs.

sergio cal

Hello @Harald Heinz , how customer is looking for a complete PPM where he can manage cost by team, by project, by ressource and manage ressource to handle in a easy way overload and underloaded ressource

Harald Heinz

Then definetly Tempo Suite or Activity Timeline (BigPicture would be out for cost tracking in this scale).
About the specifics (such as cost by ressource) I suggest o book a demo with both of them and ask if and how their tool can provide this.

Tempo Suite: https://www.tempo.io/demo

Activity Timeline: https://activitytimeline.com/schedule-demo

Joshua Brock _ Seibert Group_ GmbH

Hey @sergio cal and welcome to the Community!

The requirements you're describing (cost tracking by team, project, and resource, plus visual resource load management) map closely to what Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) looks like in a SAFe context. That's a space where there are meaningful differences between the options, so it's worth mapping the customer's situation carefully.

A few clarifying questions worth asking the customer before recommending a tool:

Is the org already on Jira? (If yes, native-Jira tools have a major adoption advantage)
Are they running SAFe or another scaled agile framework? (Influences whether ART-level capacity modeling matters)
Is "cost by resource" about individual timesheet billing, or about team/ART budget allocation? (Very different tools solve these)

If the customer is Jira-first and running SAFe, Agile Hive is worth serious consideration as the PPM layer:

Epic funding & budget tracking — assign budgets to epics and track actual vs. planned spend across the portfolio
Capacity vs. demand modeling — compare team capacity against feature/epic demand per Program Increment, surfacing overload and underload visually
Cost by team and by ART — allocate and track investment across delivery units, not just projects
Full SAFe hierarchy enforced in Jira — Portfolio → Solution → ART → Team, all native Jira issues, no sync required
Lean Portfolio Management without Jira Align costs — avoids the expensive enterprise overhead of Jira Align while staying inside the Jira ecosystem

For pure timesheet/billing-based resource management, Tempo Timesheets or Harvest are better fits. But for the PMO-level "cost by team, capacity vs. demand, portfolio visibility" use case the customer is describing, Agile Hive is purpose-built for it.

A free trial available on the Atlassian Marketplace.

In full disclosure, I work at Seibert Group, the team behind Agile Hive.

Hope this helps and again, welcome!

Joshua
Content Writer and US Representative
Agile Hive & Aura Apps (products of Seibert Group GmbH)

Vahtang Manukyan - Be On Time

Hi @sergio cal

Before you dive deeper into your research, there is a critical distinction you need to make, as it will completely change the types of tools you look for:

You aren't looking for Project Management; you are looking for a Portfolio Management instrument.

Most people make the mistake of searching for 'Project Management' tools to solve these problems. But Project Management is mostly about execution of a single project - tracking tasks, deadlines, and statuses. What you've described - Team Capacity, Budget Allocation, and Global Cost Tracking - is Portfolio Management, which is about governance and resource optimization.

The reason you're struggling to find a perfect fit is that you're looking in the wrong place. Jira is the world's best Project Management tool, but it is not a Portfolio tool out of the box.

Here is the reality of how to solve your four requirements:

1. Team Capacity & Capacity Planning (The Portfolio Layer)
These two items are the core of Portfolio Management. You need a system that manages 'Resources' as a professional asset, not just 'Assignees' on a ticket. We developed Resource Management for Jira specifically to fill this gap. It handles the Portfolio-level capacity and team-based allocation that native Jira lacks.

2. Budget & Global Cost Tracking (The Financial Layer)
This is where most 'PPM' apps fail. Budgeting requires tracking team rates (cost per hour per role), which is financial data that doesn't belong in a task tracker. Most Marketplace tools only track hours, not value. To solve this, you need to map your resource hours (from a tool like ours) to your financial rates.

My Advice:
Stop looking for one 'magic' project tool that does all of this. Instead, build a professional stack: use Jira for the execution, a dedicated resource layer for the portfolio capacity, and your finance tool for the budget.

If you're still in the research phase and want to see how to structure this 'Portfolio' architecture without the manual spreadsheet nightmare, I'm happy to have a quick chat.

You can reach out to me directly

Huwen Arnone [Deiser/Devoteam]

Hi @sergio cal, based on the list fo your needs you're basically looking for a PMO operating layer on top of Jira.

Big Picture and Tempo Suite are strong and solid solution but as much as this one I recommend, and these ones I'm mentioning, depends on the level of maturity of your portfolio and the team.

Based on a modular approach the PMO Collection for Jira you can have capacity planning and allocation by team/individuals and the visibility of workload (Capacity), for budget allocation, plan vs actual, forecast, remaining, and cost classification (Budgety), for portfolio governance (Projectrak), and to bring Jira data outside the tool for audit/BI (Exporter).

This is mostly recommended on Jira Cloud.

Let me know what you think about it!

Alexey Pavlenko _App Developer_

Hi @sergio cal ,

The app I developed - Multi-team Scrum Metrics & Retrospectives - doesn't cover what you outlined, but it might be useful for you in the future for tracking and improving performance of multiple teams.

With it, you can:

Track:
- Data across sprints, months, quarters, half-years or years.
- Several teams (including those ones sharing the same project) at once.
- Velocity, capacity, allocation, completed story points (completed scope), planned (initial, final scopes), added and removed scopes, as well as other metrics. You can even create your own custom metrics using JQL.
- Trends and average metrics across periods.
Conduct Quantifiable retrospectives.
And many more.

3 boards/teams in the same view, 1 period selected for analysis:

3 boards/teams in the same view, all periods are clicked for average metrics and dynamics:

Best regards,
Alexey

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