The Best Strategic Planning Software To Help You Achieve Your Business Goals

Strategic planning software is a relatively new category of software that aids organizations in developing, monitoring, and executing strategic plans.

It creates a place your team can go to see all of your company’s big goals come together and learn how it applies to their own day-to-day work. In short, it’s one of the few categories of software that can help you communicate more effectively and get your team pulling in the same direction.

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What Problem Does Strategic Planning Software Solve?

In a nutshell, strategic planning software helps your team get in sync with your business strategy. It helps translate strategy into something a team or an individual can understand and implement on a day-to-day basis.

The best strategic planning software will help your team to set & communicate the company’s strategic initiatives and track progress against those initiatives.

In addition, strategic planning software offers accountability features to keep everyone on your team accountable to their goals.

When to Think About Purchasing Strategic Planning Software

If you’re using multiple excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint slides, post-it notes, or even just a pen and paper to keep track of your strategic plan, it’s time for an upgrade. Having all of your information in one place is key to being able to track progress and make changes as needed. Not to mention, it will save you a ton of time!

If you’re looking to optimize your resource spend (and who isn’t right now), strategic planning software helps you figure out different business strategies and point out spots where you could improve business with fewer resources.

On the other hand, if you’re looking to grow, strategic planning software can help you figure out where the gaps in your strategy may be and where you may want to plan to add future resources.

And finally, if you’re hitting a growth plateau, strategic planning software can help you figure out why you’re not hitting as many of your goals as you would like and create a strategic planning process that will help you to set goals that are achievable, measurable, and have an impact on your overall company goals.

Typical Features of Strategic Planning Software

Some features of strategic planning software include:

• tracking performance data and key performance indicators
• milestone tracking
• progress updates
• strategic roadmap definition
• project management
• inventory planning
• continuous planning and management of strategic initiatives
• resource management
• portfolio management

Project Management Software vs. Strategic Planning Software

Some strategic planning software focuses mostly on strategy while others include project management features that let teams collaborate and report on projects from within the software.

If you already have a project management tool you’re happy with though, you can still use strategic planning software to complement your existing toolset.

In most cases, we’d recommend keeping two separate tools – one strategic planning software tool and one project management tool. Why? Because they’re two different disciplines and having a tool that does everything is great in theory, but often comes up just short in both use cases.

Who Uses Strategic Planning Software?

Business leaders and managers are the most common buyers of strategic planning software.

Typically these folks may be C-level execs, VPs, directors, managers of specific business functions, leaders who participate in the planning processes for business strategies, or those who assign tasks and report on historical data.

End-users of strategic planning software can also include team members, agile teams, project managers, individual contributors, and anyone else who needs to view the strategic plans of an organization (so essentially anyone in an organization).

What to Look for When Buying Strategic Planning Software

When choosing a strategic planning software program, there are a few key things to look for:

• Ease of use: you should be able to easily input data and create reports
• Collaboration features: it should be easy to share your plan with others and get feedback
• Goal tracking: you should be able to track your progress towards achieving your goals
• Flexibility: the best strategic plan software will be flexible and allow you to make changes as needed

Ready to find the strategic planning software that’s best for you?

If you’re looking for the best strategic planning software to help you achieve your business goals, look no further! In this article, we will rank the top five programs and discuss the pros and cons of each.

Strategic planning is essential for any business – without a plan in place, it’s easy to get lost and not reach your full potential. That’s why using a software program to help you create and manage your strategic plan is such a great idea.

Now that you know what to look for, let’s take a look at the best strategic planning software programs on the market.

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The Top 5 Strategic Planning Tools

Cascade

Strategic planning software for large companies

From G2: “Cascade is a strategy execution platform that helps business leaders see faster results from their strategy and respond fearlessly to change. 6000+ teams plan, measure, execute, and, adapt their strategies on Cascade.

6000+ teams plan, measure, execute, and, adapt their strategies on Cascade. We power some of the most ambitious visions on the planet.

Rolling out the COVID vaccine, building the fastest Formula One race car, and fighting the AIDS epidemic are a few of those. “

Pros of Cascade:

• Easy-to-use interface
• Great customer support
• Powerful goal tracking and reporting

Cons of Cascade:

• Can be expensive for smaller companies

Pricing:

$58 per user per month with a minimum of 5 users (minimum cost of $290/month)

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Planview

Best for corporate entities to manage a portfolio of initiatives

From G2: “To help bring your strategy to life, fuel innovation, and drive digital transformation, Planview Enterprise One orchestrates all work and resources dynamically through integrated portfolios across projects, programs, people, products, technology, and capabilities, all within a common user experience.”

Pros of Planview:

• Powerful project management features
• Comprehensive strategic planning tool
• Integrates with other Planview products

Cons of Planview:

• Can be expensive
• Can have a bit of a learning curve
• A piecemeal portfolio of software to choose from can be confusing at first

Pricing:

Depends on your menu of services, but expect plans to start around $29 per user per month, plus possible setup costs

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ClearPoint

Best for companies needing flexible reporting

From G2:

“ClearPoint, the world’s first integrated strategy reporting and execution system, makes it easy to keep everyone in your organization focused on the activities and metrics that matter most in achieving overall organizational goals.

ClearPoint Strategy is a SaaS strategy reporting tool used by leading organizations to automate and streamline their strategy reporting process, including elements such as Business Performance Management and OKR metrics.

ClearPoint integrates and automates the collection of data from all sources, making it faster and easier to report on strategic plan execution. Healthcare networks, credit unions, regional banks, local governments, state agencies, and utilities are just a few examples of organizations improving their strategy reporting process with ClearPoint.”

Pros of ClearPoint:

• Highly customizable reports
• Easy-to-use interface
• Integrates with Salesforce and Microsoft Power BI

Cons of ClearPoint:

• Lacks some features offered by other strategic planning software programs
• Like Planview, can have a bit of a steeper learning curve

Pricing:

Starts at $250/month plus setup fees

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Envisio

Best for organizations who want to keep stakeholders informed

From G2: “Align people, plans and performance data to achieve your goals. Envisio helps you to deliver your plans, align staff with your strategy and manage the expectations of your different stakeholder groups.

Cascade your strategic goals into actions to get total visibility over progress. Use automated reminders, checklists and reports to keep your team on track. Use intuitive management reporting and analytics tools to easily understand performance and communicate results. You can even share your progress via customizable public dashboards.

Envisio is used by hundreds of different types of organizations to manage their strategic and operational plans. It is the #1 strategic planning and performance management solution used by government, with 100+ towns, cities, counties and school districts across North America as customers.”

Pros of Planview:

• Easy to share reports and data with stakeholders
• Automated reporting features
• Good customer support
• Good for government customers

Cons of Planview:

• Can be time-consuming to get set up properly

Pricing:

Not publicly available

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Viewshed

Best for companies who want simple & intuitive strategy software at a low cost

If you’re a small or medium-sized business that wants to help communicate and track your big goal while providing accountability to your team, all in an easy-to-use and affordable package, check out Viewshed.

While Viewshed may not have as elaborate of a feature set as some of the other strategic planning solutions mentioned in this article, it does have a small, dedicated team dead set on making sure you’re happy and building new features with your input. It’s cloud-based and mobile-friendly, too, so you can take it with you on the go.

Plus, it helps you set strategy, track your latest strategic initiative, measure and monitor progress, view employee performance versus goals, collect data, and more. And because pricing is not based on a per-user model, Viewshed is accessible to your whole team – not just the tippy top of your organization.

Pros of Viewshed:

• Low cost
• Easy-to-use interface
• Good customer support
• Customizable branding at no extra cost

Cons of Viewshed:

• Lacks some features offered by other strategic planning software programs

Pricing:

Starts at $19/month. Unlimited users included.

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Wrap-up

As you can see, strategic planning software can be very helpful for teams who are looking to add a little oomph to their strategic planning process.

That’s it for our roundup of some of the most popular strategic planning software. We hope you found this helpful and that you will give one or more of these a try for your business’ strategic planning needs.

If you need help getting started, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

And finally, we want to remind our readers that Viewshed offers a free trial of its software so be sure to check it out. Thanks for reading!

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