Onplana vs ProjectManager.com: Free Tier vs None

ProjectManager.com shows up on the same shortlists Onplana does for an honest reason: both built a real Gantt engine, both handle dependencies properly, and both get recommended in the same "best PM software with scheduling" roundups. The comparison is worth doing carefully rather than waving off, because the two products are closer on raw scheduling mechanics than most Onplana-vs-competitor pages get to say.

The direct answer: Onplana vs ProjectManager.com comes down to access and AI depth once the scheduling features wash out as roughly equivalent. Onplana ships a permanent free plan and puts its full AI suite, chat, plan generation, an agent skill for delegated work, on every tier including Free, limited only by an AI token balance. ProjectManager.com has no free tier, only a 30-day trial, and reserves its AI feature for the Business plan and up. Where ProjectManager.com pulls ahead is Gantt maturity and native .mpp roundtripping; where Onplana pulls ahead is everything past the schedule itself: governance, resource pooling below the top tier, and deployment options.

Why Onplana and ProjectManager.com End Up on the Same Shortlist

Both companies built their product around the schedule, not around a generic task board wearing a Gantt view as one option among many. That shows up as real parity on the mechanics: dependency editing by drag-and-drop, a critical path filter, baselines to track variance, and views that stay in sync with each other because they read from the same underlying data. A PMO evaluator who cares primarily about scheduling fidelity will find both tools competent on the first pass of a feature checklist, which is exactly why the comparison has to go past the checklist to be useful.

What ProjectManager.com Is Built For

ProjectManager.com's core strength is a Gantt chart that auto-updates across task, calendar, sheet, and kanban views from one schedule, with all four dependency types, a critical-path filter, and baseline tracking. Its native .mpp import, with roundtripping back out to Microsoft Project, is a real and useful capability for a team that needs to keep a foot in both tools during a transition. The Business plan adds workload balancing, labor rates, timesheets, a portfolio dashboard, and a RAID log, which covers a reasonable stretch of PMO-level reporting once a team is on the higher tier.

What it does not publish is a formal stage-gate governance workflow: the Business and Enterprise tiers add dashboards, custom permissions, and audit-adjacent features like SSO and account exports, not a multi-reviewer gate pipeline with quorum logic and an approval record. And every plan is SaaS-hosted; ProjectManager.com does not publish a self-hosted or on-premise deployment option for teams that need one.

Where the Two Diverge: Access and AI

The clearest gap is structural, not feature-by-feature. ProjectManager.com's own pricing page offers a 30-day free trial and nothing free beyond it: the account locks at the end of the trial unless a paid plan is purchased. Onplana's Free plan has no expiration, 5 members, 2 projects, and 300 MB of storage, permanently, which changes who can actually try the product before a budget conversation happens.

AI follows the same pattern. ProjectManager.com's AI feature, described on its plan pages as AI Project Insights, project summaries and recommendations, is gated to the Business plan and up. Onplana runs its full AI suite, chat with project context, natural-language task parsing, plan generation, status summaries, and an agent skill an engineer or PM can connect via MCP to do delegated work end to end, on every plan including Free, bounded by an AI token balance rather than a plan wall. Onplana's AI runs on both Claude and Azure OpenAI, managed by Onplana with automatic failover between them; there is no customer-facing provider switch on either product.

The diagram below shows the split as two cards: what each product asks a team to commit to before AI and a resource layer are on the table.

Onplana vs ProjectManager.com: Seven Dimensions Compared

Dimension	Onplana	ProjectManager.com
Free plan	Permanent: 5 members, 2 projects, 300 MB storage	None; 30-day trial only
Task dependencies	FS, SS, FF, SF with lag, every plan	All four types, per vendor's own product marketing
Gantt + critical path	Included on every plan, including Free	Included from the entry Team plan
.mpp import	Native, every plan	Native, with roundtripping
Resource management	Enterprise resource pool from Professional up	Workload and labor rates from Business up
AI features	Full suite (chat, plan generation, agent skill) on every plan	Summary/recommendation feature, Business plan and up
Governance	12-stage gate pipeline on Enterprise	No published stage-gate workflow at any tier
Deployment	SaaS and self-hosted (AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes)	SaaS only

Pricing: Lower Entry Cost vs a Free Path In

Onplana's paid tiers start at Starter, $7 per seat per month, then Professional at $12, Business at $20, and Enterprise at $29, all with 20% off on annual billing. ProjectManager.com's own pricing page puts its Team plan in the mid-teens per user per month and Business in the high twenties, both cheaper than the Onplana tier that matches their AI and resource-management scope once you price Onplana's AI as included rather than an add-on. The gap that does not close at any price point is access: a team that wants to try scheduling software today, without a trial clock running or a credit card on file, has exactly one of these two options.

Which Tool Wins for Which Team

ProjectManager.com wins for teams that have already decided AI and formal governance are not requirements, want the most mature standalone Gantt view on the market, and are comfortable committing to a paid plan after a time-boxed trial. Its .mpp roundtripping is also a genuine advantage for a team that needs to keep working in Microsoft Project alongside the new tool during a transition.

Onplana wins for teams that want to evaluate for real before committing budget, PMOs that need AI grounded in the actual schedule graph rather than a Business-tier summary feature, and any team weighing a resource pool, stage-gate governance, or self-hosted deployment as a requirement rather than a someday feature. Teams specifically migrating off Microsoft Project Online should also read the PM tool evaluation criteria that predict fit better than a feature checklist, and the broader Microsoft Project alternatives landscape for the full shortlist beyond this one comparison.

If you are not sure which side of that line your team falls on, the free PMO Maturity Assessment scores your actual scheduling, governance, and resource needs against where your PMO stands today, which settles the question faster than debating feature rows.

Run the free PMO Maturity Assessment Get a clear read on whether your team's scheduling and governance needs point toward a focused scheduling tool or a fuller PMO platform. About ten minutes, no signup required. → Open the PMO Maturity Assessment