PDWare Reviews

Pros

PDWare is quite user friendly. As it is easy to use and works efficiently for data entry, filtering, maintaining records and pulling reports.

Cons

Some of the more advanced features like Scenarios could use training videos to make them easier to understand, use properly and know what to watch out for.

Pros

Our relationship with Portfolio Decisionware (PDWare) began in 2019, after an extensive evaluation of multiple portfolio and resource management platforms. From the very start, PDWare stood out for its superb flexibility and exceptional configurability—we were able to adapt it to virtually every use case we envisioned, from capital planning to workforce forecasting, governance workflows, and prioritization models fine-tuned to a GxP biopharmaceutical manufacturing environment. Over the years, PDWare has proven to be far more than a software provider. The team has consistently acted as true technology partners, deeply engaged in our success and always responsive to our evolving needs. Their collaborative mindset and technical depth have enabled us to continuously refine our processes while maintaining data integrity and transparency across our portfolio. Simply put, PDWare combines robust functionality, configurable design, and outstanding customer partnership. It has become a cornerstone of how we plan, prioritize, and manage our capital and non-capital projects. Highly recommended for any organization seeking a system that truly grows with them.

Cons

Honestly, there’s very little to dislike about PDWare. The platform is stable and intuitive once configured, and the support team is exceptional. If anything, the only “challenge” is that PDWare’s breadth and flexibility reward thoughtful upfront design to fully leverage its capabilities. That isn’t a drawback—just a reflection of how customizable the system is. Once structure is in place, it runs smoothly, scales easily, and keeps portfolio, resource, and financial views aligned. In practice, we’ve found it reliable, responsive, and consistently helpful. Overall, PDWare rewards good design thinking and delivers truly lasting value across complex, regulated portfolios for our organization.

Pros

Compared with most PPM tools that say they include resource management, PDWare is the only one I've seen that truly meets the needs of managing resources in a complex project portfolio environment. Also it is very user-friendly, offers strong value for the cost and comes with flexible licensing options. And the customer support team is made up of highly knowledgeable resource management experts.

Cons

In the beginning, the interface and navigation across the different functions can seem a bit complicated. Since the software is so comprehensive, it can feel overwhelming in the beginning but once you learn your way around, it becomes very user friendly. So the best approach is to begin with the basics and gradually expand how you use the tool's features.

Pros

ResourceFirst has completely changed the way we handle resource management and reporting at Mediclinic SA. It gave the business a level of visibility we simply didn't have before and that has made a real difference. On top of the product itself, the support team has been exceptionally professional throughout.

Cons

Setting the platform up manually does take a lot of time although that makes sense given how many functions the system includes. The original QlikView reporting was also hard to work through at the beginning but moving to QlikSense turned out to be a major improvement and has been a real game changer for Senior Management decision making.

Pros

From portfolio planning to resource allocation, PDWare has been a standout tool. It is user-friendly and delivers value right away out of the box, while still offering the depth to grow into a highly customized solution when needed. Also it does a strong job of capturing information and supporting decision making for executive leadership as well as day to day project and resource managers. Functional and project managers can work together in the system to align and balance critical resources across multiple projects. The interface looks polished and feels very familiar too, almost like working in Excel which makes adoption much easier. On top of that the support team is phenomenal as they usually reply within an hour and often within minutes. If customization or special scripting is needed, they are typically quick to handle it and often don't even charge extra. Overall it delivers a lot of value for the money.

Cons

Every now and then, their eagerness to meet customer needs means updates get released that slightly alter minor configurations which can affect how data is viewed or retrieved. But it hasn't been a major issue and no data has ever been lost.

Pros

Right from the start, the system has been simple to work with and the fast response from the team has been something we really appreciate. Plus it helps us evaluate what's needed to complete our projects and track how much time was spent which makes it much easier to make smart business decisions for future work.

Cons

I feel like one area that could still be improved is the look and feel since it isn't always user friendly for our users. The updated version of it is definitely better and we're looking forward to more enhancements especially when it comes to customizing the interface.

Pros

For the price, the functionality is really amazing. Also getting everything up and running was fairly simple and it gave us good visibility into resource usage across the portfolio. Plus the Excel client is especially powerful, particularly for working with built-in macros to analyze data using our own user-defined fields. On the web side, ResourceFirst is user friendly and makes it pretty simple for the team to enter and submit their time. The reporting tools in the web interface are also a big plus, with excellent dashboard features that improve visibility across the organization.

Cons

One tradeoff of working with a relatively small company is that while they can offer a more attractive price, new version releases often come with issues. To their credit, those problems do get resolved quickly but stronger regression testing would make the update process much better.

Pros

It does come with quite a few useful features and there are a lot of things about the software that are nice.

Cons

At the same time, there are plenty of problems with the software and too many parts of it do not function correctly. Technical support from it is inconsistent too as some days we get a response and other days we hear nothing at all. We're preparing for another upgrade and last year's upgrade went terribly with a long list of issues. But we are hoping this one goes better but we already expect there will still be problems.

Pros

Resource management, portfolio and project management are all handled really well and the system is flexible enough to be configured around our specific requirements.

Cons

The software release quality still needs improvement.

Pros

I can easily schedule resources, and one of the standout features is the capacity management functionality. It provides accurate forecasts based on your available data. You have the option to choose between cloud and on-premise solutions.

Cons

One area where it falls short is the lack of a resource allocation workflow, such as requesting resources, matching skill sets, and allocating them accordingly. It seems to be more focused on capacity planning and forecasting rather than resource allocation.