Microsoft Project alternative
The Microsoft Project alternative for teams who outgrew scheduling.
Celoxis is where teams move when scheduling stops being the whole job. Keep the planning depth your schedulers work in today, and run portfolios, resources, financials and reporting in one system - cloud or on‑premise.
- Import your existing Microsoft Project plans
- 14-day free trial
- Cloud or on-premise
Familiar planning depth
Keep the planning discipline your PMs rely on
Celoxis follows the Microsoft Project scheduling model closely, so your planners work with the same logic they use today. Nothing here asks you to flatten a complex plan or settle for a Gantt chart that only looks the part.
- 01
All four dependency types
Finish-to-Start, Start-to-Start, Finish-to-Finish and Start-to-Finish, within a project or across projects, with lead and lag to model how work actually overlaps.
- 02
Multiple work calendars
Different working weeks, shifts, holidays and one-off exceptions per project and per resource, so dates reflect when people can really work.
- 03
Multiple resources per task
Assign several people to the same task with individual allocations, and see immediately what those assignments do to effort, availability and workload.
- 04
Automatic scheduling & critical path
Change a duration or a link and the effect flows through the whole schedule, with the critical path showing exactly which tasks control the delivery date.
- 05
Constraints, milestones & hierarchy
Structure plans of any size with summary tasks, milestones, scheduling constraints and a multi-level work breakdown.
- 06
Baselines & progress tracking
Compare the live plan against the approved baseline to see where dates, effort and delivery have moved - and by how much.
Familiar timeline. Expanded view.
The Microsoft Project-style timeline - across multiple projects
Managers get the timeline view they already know, with every project stacked one below another - so phases, hand-offs and milestones line up across the portfolio instead of sitting in separate files.
- Phase
- Dependent phase
- Milestone
At a glance
Celoxis vs Microsoft Project
Both plan and schedule work well. The differences appear in portfolio, resource, financial and reporting depth - and in how many additional products each approach needs to get there.
Planning & scheduling
A mature scheduling engine, and the reason many teams start here.
Interactive web Gantt with dependencies, critical path and drag scheduling.
Baseline capture and comparison are built into the client.
Baselines on every plan, with variance visible at project and portfolio level.
Constraint types, calendars and levelling controls.
Work calendars, constraints, automatic scheduling, split and recurring tasks.
Plan templates saved and reused per project.
Shared project templates with roles, financials and workflow attached.
Portfolio & governance
Portfolio features sit in the cloud PPM plans, configured separately from the desktop client.
Portfolios from the first plan: roll-ups, budgets, health and cross-project scheduling.
Portfolio analysis exists in the PPM tier and needs setup to be usable.
Scoring models, portfolio budgets and what-if scenarios before hours are committed.
Typically built on SharePoint and the Power Platform.
Dynamic intake forms with conditional logic, routing and approvals.
Usually tracked in SharePoint lists or spreadsheets alongside the plan.
RAID logs, automatic RAG health and approval workflows on the plan itself.
Resources & capacity
Enterprise resource pool is a PPM-tier capability with its own administration.
Live capacity, demand and utilization across every project and portfolio.
Generic resources can stand in for roles; skill matching is manual.
Job roles, skills and availability with instant resource-conflict flags.
Timesheet submission belongs to the cloud PPM plans.
Timesheets, approvals and automatic effort roll-up into the same plan.
Project financials
Cost fields on tasks and resources, without a portfolio financial model.
Rate cards, cost rules and forecast against actual on the live plan.
Handled downstream in finance or ERP systems.
Expenses, invoicing, receivables tracking and a free client portal.
Assembled outside the plan from finance data.
Cost, revenue and margin per project, client and portfolio.
Reporting & analytics
Power BI or SharePoint, modelled and maintained separately.
Aggregated dashboards and BI in every plan, including the entry tier.
Report authoring plus a data model someone has to own.
Real-time reports on any field, scheduled to inboxes without exports.
Depends on how consistently each plan is updated and rolled up.
Automatic RAG calculation across the portfolio, no manual status collection.
Platform, deployment & support
Power Automate flows built and governed alongside the plan.
Native workflow and automation rules that follow your own process.
Enterprise custom fields in the PPM tier; new object types need the Power Platform.
Up to 1,000 custom fields, and custom apps for processes the product does not ship with.
Deeply connected across the Microsoft stack.
400+ apps including Microsoft Project, Microsoft 365, Jira, Azure DevOps, QuickBooks, plus REST API.
Cloud subscriptions, with a Windows desktop client for scheduling.
The same product on secure cloud or self-hosted on-premise, browser-based throughout.
Microsoft support plans and implementation partners.
24×5 human support from product experts, with VIP tiers and SLAs.
Microsoft Project capabilities vary by plan and licensing. Compare against your own tenant before deciding - a demo can be run side by side with it.
Compare on your portfolio- Included as standard
- Core strength of the product
- Partial, or needs a higher plan and setup
- Requires additional products
Review-platform comparisons
Here’s what actual buyers are saying
Aggregated from head-to-head comparisons on the platforms enterprise buyers check before shortlisting.
Celoxis has a higher user adoption rate than Microsoft Project
Celoxis has a better quality of support than Microsoft Project
Celoxis has more capabilities at a lower price than Microsoft Project
Celoxis has a faster time to ROI than Microsoft Project
Celoxis is easier to use than Microsoft Project
Celoxis is faster to go live than Microsoft Project
Move without rebuilding
Bring your Microsoft Project plans with you
Import your existing Microsoft Project plans instead of rebuilding them. Tasks, hierarchy, dates, durations, dependencies, milestones and resource assignments come across intact - into a plan the whole organization can work in.
From there, progress is updated in one place, resource managers see capacity across every project, and leaders read live portfolio reporting without waiting for another spreadsheet or status deck.
Bring one representative plan to the demo and see how the move would work on your own schedule.
Where Celoxis fits
Enterprise control, without the enterprise implementation
Every category of tool trades something away. Task tools trade depth, desktop schedulers trade breadth, legacy PPM trades adoption. Celoxis is built for the quadrant where control and usability meet.
Fast, but shallow
- Great for team tasks, boards and collaboration
- Limited capacity, resource and financial visibility
- Struggle to scale across teams and portfolios
Work gets managed. The business does not.
The execution control zone
Execution Control- Scheduling
- Resources
- Financials
- Governance
- Portfolio
- Insights
Enterprise-grade control with team-friendly adoption.
Precise, but isolated
- Excellent single-project scheduling depth
- One plan at a time: no live portfolio or capacity view
- Financials, reporting and intake handled in other tools
Every plan is accurate. The portfolio is still assembled by hand.
Powerful, but painful
- Strong governance, portfolio and financial control
- Heavy administration and long deployment cycles
- Low team adoption slows execution
You pay for control in complexity and change effort.
Only one quadrant gives you enterprise control without slowing the people doing the work.
Celoxis connects portfolio control directly to how work gets done.
Execution OS
This is not generic productivity. This is execution control.
The delivery lifecycle
One system from the first request to the reported outcome
Scheduling is one stage of nine. Celoxis carries the same plan, the same numbers and the same people through all of them, so nothing is re-entered at a handover.
Stage 01 · Demand intake
Every request enters one funnel
Project, change and service requests arrive through dynamic forms with conditional logic, so intake is structured from the first field instead of scattered across email and spreadsheets.
- Dynamic request forms
- Conditional logic
- Automated routing
Go beyond scheduling
The capabilities that appear once you manage a portfolio
Pick a capability to see what it covers and the real Celoxis screen your teams will work in.
Portfolio management
Decide which projects deserve the capacity
Group projects into portfolios, score and rank new demand, set portfolio budgets, and read health across the whole set. Executives see the same numbers the delivery teams are updating, so investment decisions do not wait for a reporting cycle.
Resource management
See capacity before you promise it
One view of demand, availability and utilization across every project. Assign by role, skill and calendar, spot over-allocation as it happens, and answer “can we take this on” with a number rather than an instinct.
Project financials
The money lives on the plan
Rate cards, cost rules, expenses and budgets sit on the same record as the schedule, so forecast against actual updates as work is logged. Approved time and expense become invoices, and receivables stay attached to the project that earned them.
Reporting & analytics
Reports that are read, not rebuilt
Build dashboards and reports on any field in the system, schedule them to the people who need them, and drill from a portfolio number down to the task behind it. No exports, no separate BI model to maintain.
Workflow & customization
Configured to your process, not the other way round
Model your own intake, review and approval stages, automate the routine transitions, and add the fields your governance actually asks for - up to 1,000 of them, with custom apps for processes the product does not ship with.
Collaboration & execution
Where the work is actually done
Task views and Kanban boards for delivery teams, discussions and files on the project record, timesheets for effort, and a free client portal when the work is billable. The plan updates because people worked, not because someone chased them.
AI Project Intelligence
Meet LEX - decisions, earlier
More than an assistant. LEX analyzes your live project data to deliver real-time insight, actionable solutions, and recommendations from plain-English commands.
Customer success stories
Two teams that moved off Microsoft Project
Both planned in Microsoft Project and tracked money and resourcing in spreadsheets. Pick a company to see what the move changed.
The reporting is the best that I've seen and is definitely one of the strongest muscles of Celoxis. Celoxis is truly a powerhouse when it comes to project management, and it is a great tool for planning and organizing project-related efforts.
Michael MilshteinDir. of Engineering & Development, SweetRush
Switching
A switch you can run in phases
Existing plans come across, the Microsoft tools your teams already work in stay connected, and onboarding is guided, not left to your team.
Microsoft Project integration
Your existing plans are the starting point
Bring plans in from Microsoft Project and Excel, keep working alongside Microsoft 365, and connect the rest of your delivery stack through 400+ integrations and the REST API.
- Import plans, tasks and assignments from Microsoft Project or Excel
- Microsoft 365 and Okta single sign-on
- Jira, Azure DevOps and QuickBooks for teams already on them
- REST API, webhooks and Zapier for everything else
MS Project
Excel
Microsoft 365Plans, resources and financials in one platform- 01
Evaluate
Trial with a real plan
Start the 14-day trial with sample data, then import one of your own plans. Judge the platform on work you recognize, not a demo dataset.
- 02
Configure
Match your own process
Set up portfolios, custom fields, security roles, rate cards and approval workflow so governance follows the process you already have.
- 03
Onboard
Get the PMO live first
Guided onboarding and data migration bring the PMO across, with templates and reports in place before the wider rollout.
- 04
Roll out
Add teams in phases
Move portfolio by portfolio, keeping Microsoft Project available for detailed scheduling while the transition runs. Nothing has to move on one date.
Cloud or on-premise. Your choice.
Run Celoxis in our secure managed cloud, or host it on your own servers when data residency and internal governance decide the answer.
Celoxis Cloud
- Enterprise-grade infrastructure, performance & redundancy
- Encryption, automated backups & role-based access
- Done-for-you setup - live in weeks, not quarters
- Always on the latest release, zero maintenance
On-Premise
- Host on your own physical or private-cloud servers
- Full control over data residency & governance
- One-time perpetual license, transferable seats
- Ideal for regulated, defense & security-first environments
Customer proof
Rated by the reviewers enterprise buyers check first
A consistent top ranker across the major software review platforms, and used to run mission-critical portfolios worldwide.
G2
Capterra
Gartner
Celoxis gives us real-time project status without depending on project managers to self-report. That visibility changed how we run our PMO.
Excellent features and genuinely responsive support. The reporting and dashboards give us the depth we need to manage global implementation projects.
Celoxis was built to run real projects. It changed how we work - our decision-making, resourcing, and reporting are all in one place now.
Frequently asked questions
Questions Microsoft Project users ask
01How is Celoxis different from Microsoft Project?
The scheduling model is deliberately similar - dependencies, calendars, constraints, critical path and baselines all behave the way your planners expect. The difference is everything around the schedule. Of the 22 capabilities compared above, Microsoft Project covers 5 in the plan most teams buy; 11 need a higher plan or setup work, and 6 come from other products. In Celoxis all 22 sit in one platform, cloud or on-premise. Licensing varies by tenant, so compare against your own before deciding.
02Can Celoxis handle the same scheduling complexity?
Yes. All four dependency types - Finish-to-Start, Start-to-Start, Finish-to-Finish and Start-to-Finish - with lead and lag, within a project or across projects. Multiple work calendars per project and per resource, scheduling constraints, summary tasks, milestones and a multi-level work breakdown. Change a duration or a link and the whole schedule recalculates, with the critical path showing which tasks control the delivery date. Baselines sit on every plan, and variance is visible at project and portfolio level.
03Can we run multiple projects as a portfolio?
Yes - it's the main reason teams move. Group projects into portfolios, score and rank incoming demand, set portfolio budgets, and read health across the whole set with automatic RAG and what-if scenarios. The timeline stacks projects one below another, so phases, hand-offs and milestones line up across the portfolio instead of sitting in separate files. Executives read the same numbers delivery teams are updating, so investment decisions don't wait for a reporting cycle.
04How does resource planning work across projects?
Resourcing runs off the plan itself, not a spreadsheet beside it. Assign several people to the same task with individual allocations and see what those assignments do to effort, availability and workload. Calendars are per resource as well as per project - working weeks, shifts, holidays and one-off exceptions - so dates reflect when people can really work. Resource managers see capacity across every project, and what-if analysis helps decide which projects get that capacity.
05Can we migrate our existing Microsoft Project plans?
Yes. Import plans from Microsoft Project or Excel - tasks, hierarchy, dates, durations, dependencies, milestones and resource assignments come across intact, so nobody rebuilds a plan by hand. Most teams move in phases: trial with one of your own plans, configure portfolios, fields, roles, rate cards and approvals, bring the PMO across with guided onboarding and data migration, then add teams portfolio by portfolio. Microsoft Project stays available for detailed scheduling while the transition runs. Nothing has to move on one date.
06Does Celoxis cover project budgets and costs?
Yes - budgets through to billing, in the same system as the plan. Track budgets, forecasts and actuals against the work, apply rate cards, and capture time and expenses against tasks so cost and margin update as delivery happens. Billing is a stage in the same lifecycle rather than a separate hand-off, which is where teams usually find leakage between approved work and what gets invoiced.
- ★★★★★4.6/5 on G2
- 500+ organizations, including NASA, Tesla & the Fortune 500
Ready to go beyond scheduling?
Bring the whole portfolio into one platform.
Start a free trial with sample data or one of your own plans, or ask for a demo built around your portfolio and run side by side with what you use today.
- 14-day free trial
- No credit card required
- Import your existing plan
- Cloud or on-premise