10 Best Project Budget Software to Stay on Track in 2024

 As a project manager, have you ever faced any of these situations? 

• Inaccurate project budget estimates, with small errors adding to the overall budget
• Watch the expenses creep over your projected total budget
• Overspending on certain resources and struggling to find additional funds

If the answer is yes, it’s time to find project budget software to suit your needs. 

Your project budget software must help you manage budgets in good times and during stressful times.  You need to have a solution that helps you correct course when you face unforeseen expenses and cost overruns and adjust accordingly. 

Well, the good news is that we have you covered. We’ve researched what to look for in budget management software, the top 10 tools available, and their features, limitations, and pricing. 

Let’s help you choose a clear winner. 

Summarize this article with AI ClickUp Brain not only saves you precious time by instantly summarizing articles, it also leverages AI to connect your tasks, docs, people, and more, streamlining your workflow like never before. Summarize article

Summarize this article for me please

Want to save even more time? Try ClickUp Brain free

What to Look for in a Project Budget Software? 

Some of the basics that you need to  look for in a project budget management tool include:

• Intuitive interface: You need a  user-friendly interface and seamless navigation to streamline the budgeting process, such as planning and allocating resources, and managing expenses to improve efficiency
• Cross-team collaboration: You need a single source of truth for project teams to collaborate and track budgets 
• Automation: Leverage automation to  streamline your budgeting workflows, assign tasks, and track progress 
• Security: A cloud-based software with robust encryption and compliance with security certifications will  protect sensitive financial data
• Third-party integration: Check if the tool integrates with your existing finance tools and accounting platform. Integration with your backend systems, including accounting and HR systems, provides a two-way flow of information for budget collaborators to have access to the latest data
• Robust reporting:  Manage project budgets and create detailed, customizable reports for stakeholders to deep dive and help in comprehensive financial analysis and informed decision-making
• Budget Templates: Stay ahead of your deliverables with pre-built project budget templates 

Summarize this article with AI ClickUp Brain not only saves you precious time by instantly summarizing articles, it also leverages AI to connect your tasks, docs, people, and more, streamlining your workflow like never before. Summarize article

Summarize this article for me please

Want to save even more time? Try ClickUp Brain free

The 10 Best Project Budget Software to Use in 2024

1. ClickUp 

ClickUp’s project management software tops our list of budget tools used by project managers to track project finance effortlessly. The software offers many features that project managers like you look for, including budget templates, robust collaboration features, and adaptability. 

ClickUp best features

• Track real-time progress for budget allocation and spending with the fully customizable finance dashboards
• Automate recurring actions on a daily or biweekly basis, such as reminders for upcoming payments or billing project resources  with ClickUp tasks

• ClickUp’s detailed Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) template allows you to break down complex projects into more manageable components and supports in mapping out activities in the form of Kanban boards and cost estimates
• ClickUp AI’s assistant for budget planners helps write detailed breakdowns of the project scope project and make day-to-day work plans quickly 
• Perform calculations between numeric, date, and time fields using simple or advanced formulas 
• ClickUp Goals help accurately track budget goals for projects and visualize progress growth across multiple Goals in one view

ClickUp limitations 

• Clickup AI is available only on paid plans 
• Limited ability to track project timeframe 

ClickUp pricing

• Free Forever
• Unlimited: $7/month per user
• Business: $12/month per user
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

ClickUp AI is available on all paid plans for $5 per member per month.

ClickUp ratings and reviews

• G2: 4.7/5 (9000+ reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (3800+ reviews)

2. RodeoDrive

RodeoDrive is a comprehensive project management tool that supports businesses in all project stages, from scoping to pricing. With features such as tracking project goals, project reporting,  resource management, interactive dashboards, and streamlining invoices, it helps team leaders and finance teams stay on top of the entire project cost.

RodeoDrive best features

• Ability to compare budgeted activities and project expenses with actuals in real-time to reduce spending
• Lets you sort projects into phases and invoice them separately based on actuals, retainers, or percentage of completion for better planning and project controls 
• Inbuilt project timeline templates and expense tracking features help budget the project right 

RodeoDrive limitations 

• The platform has bugs as it is in the early phases of development
• Detailed budget reports cannot be downloaded 

RodeoDrive pricing

• Free: $0 per single user per month
• Achiever: $14.99 per user/ per month

RodeoDrive ratings and reviews

•  G2: 4.3/5 (6 reviews)
•  Capterra: 4.7/5 (3 reviews)

3. Adobe Workfront

A collaborative project management platform, Adobe’s Workfront, helps manage budgets, plans, and actual spending. The native capabilities let everyone involved in the budgeting process, from stakeholders, internal teams, vendors, and network teams, manage and track hard and soft costs, fixed expenses, project costs, and resource costs. 

One major problem that marketers, managers, and stakeholders face is the misalignment between a project’s budget and its execution. 

You need real-time visibility into budgeted, forecasted, and actual costs and how they are performing. Course correction is needed whenever the project extends your allocated budget or actual hours. Manually managing this on spreadsheets is error-prone and time-consuming. 

Adobe Workfront best features

• Real-time visibility of the planned, forecasted, and actual budget, with the view of current performance in an easily accessible dashboard 
• Manage and track planned costs, task levels, and resource expenses 
• Integration with Adobe suite of products helps connect project teams to other parts of the business and also attribute revenue impact effectively 

Adobe Workfront limitations 

• The software requires users to be trained before they can use it
• No free trial version 
• Limited customization options in Workfront’s dashboard

Adobe Workfront pricing

• Custom pricing

Adobe Workfront ratings and reviews

•  G2: 4.1/5 (920 reviews)
•  Capterra: 4.4/5 (1391 reviews)

4. Smartsheet

A centralized work management platform, Smartsheet removes the guesswork out of project budgeting. It brings the C-suite and project teams on the same page for planning, tracking, data storage, file sharing, and reporting of project tasks. 

For any new project, you need a central repository that hosts all components of the budget, generates invoices, and allows stakeholders, accountants, and project managers to track budgets diligently and take corrective action when needed. 

Smartsheet best features

• Access budget management tools for creating and tracking budgets by currency, expense type, or unit of currency
• Centralize supporting documents like vendor bids in one location 
• Consolidated key financial metrics on real-time dashboards from multiple sheets into a single view

Smartsheet limitations

• Does not offer automatic global time tracking
• No embedded email support 
• Lacks list view for comprehensive visualization of task levels 

Smartsheet pricing

•  Free: $0 per user per month
•  Pro: $7 per user/ per month
•  Business: $25 per user/ per month
•  Enterprise: Custom Pricing

Smartsheet ratings and reviews

•  G2: 4.4/5 (15065 reviews)
•  Capterra: 4.5/5 (3057 reviews)

5. Harvest

Setting a budget for any project is challenging, but a well-crafted project budget sets the ground for effective tracking. Harvest’s project management software for small businesses makes creating a tracker for both hours and fees easy. 

Get visibility into the project budget used and what remains in real-time to avoid scope creep before it becomes a derailing issue. Expense management information is critical for budget-proofing your future projects more accurately. 

Harvest provides custom reports to view the tasks that take up your team’s time, issue tracking time, and how it impacts the estimated costs to take corrective actions. 

Harvest best features

• Turn timesheet data into real-time visual reports to visualize team efficiency, reduce burnout, and improve productivity 
• Track billable work hours, rollovers and check utilization at a glance and convert billable hours into invoices
• Integration with popular tools such as Trello, Slack, Quickbooks, and Stitch to provide up-to-date data for project management and budget teams

Harvest limitations 

• The software needs extensive support to use in the beginning 
• Does not have access control and permission features 

Harvest pricing 

• Free: $0 per user per month
• Pro: $10.80 per user/ per month

Harvest ratings and reviews

•  G2: 4.3/5 (790 reviews)
•  Capterra: 4.6/5 (572 reviews)

6. Zoho Projects

Project managers across the world know that budgeting is not only about savings but also about control. Zoho expense integration allows you to create a profitability summary dashboard with the status of income and expenses in your project. 

Project managers are involved in controlling finances by creating, tracking, and forecasting budgets, tracking expenses, and analyzing reports. Managing all these tasks on different tools that do not sync with each other makes the monitoring process cumbersome for everyone involved in the project. Gain complete control over every stage of your budgeting process with Zoho Projects. 

This project management software offers real-time monitoring capabilities for budgets, threshold and overrun alerts, and planned vs actual reports. 

Zoho Projects best features

• Manage finances by creating, tracking, and forecasting budgets, billing clients, tracking  fixed and variable expenses, and analyzing reports
• Track your project budget based on the amount allocated or actual hours spent on projects, milestones, and different tasks over customized project dashboards   
• Customized alerts for stakeholders when the budget exceeds the planned threshold

Zoho Projects limitations 

• Does not allow users to create tasks, assign them to team members, and monitor its progress 
• No mobile application 

Zoho Projects pricing

• Free: $0 for three users for upto two projects
• Premium: $4 for unlimited projects, up to 50 users
• Premium: $9 for unlimited projects, no upper limit on users

Zoho Projects ratings and reviews

•   G2: 4.3/5 (382 reviews)
•   Capterra: 4.3/5 (412 reviews)

7. Hubstaff

In large organizations where a team is typically working on multiple projects, you must set budget thresholds for different projects and get alerts in case of overspending. 

Hubstaff workforce management app allows users to set budget limits, get real-time notifications for scope creep and cost overruns, and automate time-tracking for resources. With real-time insights into the expenses, you can ensure you don’t lose track of your budgets.

Hubstaff best features

• Estimate planned costs based on resource management or the number of hours spent on a project 
• With the project-level budgets feature, track the profitability of your projects and understand the cost per project and user
• The project budgets report simplifies budget tracking(in terms of total hours or total actual cost per project) and utilization 

Hubstaff limitations

• Limited options for task management
• Navigation is not intuitive

Hubstaff pricing

• Starter: $4.99 per user per month
• Grow: $7.50 per user per month
• Team: $10 per user per month
• Enterprise: $25 per user per month

Hubstaff ratings and review

• G2: 4.3/5 (431 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.6/5 (1432 reviews)

8. Wrike

Budgeting a project requires stakeholders from multiple teams, such as product, marketing, and project management, often spread across the globe, to work in tandem. 

When your project teams are geographically distributed, you need a project budgeting software that can be customized by currency. To avoid communication delays, it should store all relevant documents in one place.  

Cross-functional teams can access these documents and track progress to avoid follow-ups over email and other asynchronous communication channels. 

Wrike’s project management software helps small and medium businesses, startups, and large enterprises manage budget variance and create a budget plan. 

When actual costs vary from the planned, it helps busy project managers investigate the reasons for the variance. Project managers can then identify strategies to manage the budget effectively by reallocating resources or implementing cost-saving measures. 

Wrike best features 

• Customize the budget with preferred currency settings and set default hourly rates for budget planning 
• Wrike automates task assignment and distributing resources to ensure budgets are met
• Integrations with 400+ applications, such as Salesforce, Hubspot, Bynder, Zoom, and Slack to run advanced analytics

Wrike limitations

• Wrike does not have real-time chat for cross-functional collaboration 
• You cannot send or receive emails directly from Wrike 

Wrike pricing

• Free: $0 per user per month
• Team: $9.80 per user per month
• Business: $24.80 per user per month
• Enterprise: custom pricing
• Pinnacle: custom pricing

Wrike ratings and reviews

• G2: 4.2/5 (3499 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.3/5 (2523 reviews)

9. Birdview PSA

Birdview PSA is an online project management tool with enterprise-grade security. For executives, a comprehensive view of the organization’s performance allows a swift response to market changes. Project managers can track progress, identify bottlenecks, allocate resources, and prioritize tasks to ensure the project stays on track. 

 As a project manager at a professional service organization (PSO), measuring project success is based on completion and delivery to clients. 

What if you delivered the project to the client before the proposed delivery date, but it was over budget by 15%? Would you consider it a win? As per Harvard Business Review research, one in every size project has an average cost overrun of 200% and schedule overrun of 70%. 

Bad things happen when you share this news with your clients, as they have to absorb the extra cost. 

Birdview best features

• Centralized document management to get numbers, timesheets, or project scoping data to create the budget 
• Get all the project communications and collaboration on one platform and invite clients to collaborate with a guest portal
• Birdview’s AI assistant helps speed up project management, resource allocation, and forecasting for effective budget planning

Birdview limitations

• Team management is not intuitive
• Lacks Gantt charts and planning views

Birdview pricing

• Lite: $9 per user per month
• Team: $24 per user per month
• Enterprise: custom pricing

Birdview ratings and reviews

• G2: 4.2/5 (354 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.4/5 (287 reviews)

10. Runrun

For medium-sized businesses where clients hesitate to use more advanced tools, Runrun.it is an easy-to-use project collaboration tool. Understand your project data with interactive views and Gantt charts, and monitor your progress with an intuitive tracker. 

Communicate the success of a project with clients using visual charts instead of lengthy reports. With iOS , web-based,  and  Android apps, teams and clients can collaborate on this platform regardless of their location. 

Runrun best features

• Smart boards help team members and clients track project updates and manage tasks 
• Create budget request forms with pre-built templates 
• Save decision history, attachments, and conversations with internal or external users in  one place for better budget decision-making

Runrun.it limitations

• Limited reporting and analytics features 
• Calendar interface is hard to understand 

Runrun.it pricing

• Free: $0 upto five users
• Business: $8 per user per month
• Enterprise: $25 per user per month

Runrun.it ratings and reviews

• G2: 4.7/5 (1066 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.8/5 (141 reviews)

Ready to Create the Perfect Project Budget? 

As a project manager, you know the inefficiencies of manual or spreadsheet-based budget management. 

Here’s a better way to identify cost-saving opportunities and communicate with your stakeholders in an easy-to-understand format. 

ClickUp’s project budget software makes it easy to create a realistic budget plan, track the risks, and adjust costs as per your business needs to avoid overspending. Bringing all your work over a single dashboard using 100+ integrations with other project management budgeting tools. 

Try ClickUp for free to access different templates, views, and customization options.