X-Planner

Made as the portable counterpart of Planner, this is a project management application that facilitates a user-friendly environment for creating tasks, assigning resources, monitoring resource usage, and generating charts. It features some intuitive options and configuration settings that should be to your liking.

Thanks to the fact that this is a portable tool, you can save Planner to any part of the hard disk and just click its executable file to launch the app, as well as copy it to a pen drive or other removable storage unit to directly run it on any machine effortlessly and without other installers. Plus, it does not add new entries to the Windows registry, so it doesn't enhance the risk of OS stability issues.

The GUI has a clear-cut look and neatly organized structure that allows you to immediately get started on a project. You can create tasks and indicate the name, milestone, fixed duration, schedule, completion percentile, priority level, resources, predecessors, and notes.

When it comes to resources that you can assign to jobs, it is necessary to edit the name, short name, type, belonging group, email address, and paycheck of a person. Monitoring the resources is possible with the help of a calendar, where you can also zoom in and out. You can manage calendars, generate and study Gantt charts, edit day types (working, non-working), as well as administer project phases.

Undoing and redoing actions is possible, so you can repair any mistakes. Planner also lets you print information, save the project to file to resume it later, as well as export it to HTML or Planner format.

We have not come across any stability issues in our tests, thanks to the fact that Planner did not hang, crash or pop up error messages. It has a good response time and minimal impact on system performance, since it consumes low CPU and memory.

Although Planner is not the richest project manager we have seen in terms of feature set, it delivers simple solutions to creating simple tasks with assigned resources, and it can be used by anyone.