Is there a REAL replacement for MS Project?

[hambone79]

I'm working on a 2 year long project that currently has about 180 tasks. The project involves several engineers and we are trying to keep our spending to a minimum by avoiding the purchase of MS Project licenses (it would cost us in the neiborhood of $10,000). Because of this I have been looking at several open source PM programs, but all of them have serious issues. Here is a list of the ones I've tried:

1. GanttProject
2. OpenProj
3. OpenWorkbench

Here are the problems I have had:
1. Critical path is calculated incorrectly.
2. Problems with the tasks suddenly moving forward several days.
3. Problems with earliest start date.
4. Problems with weekends and vacation days being ignored.
5. Various resource management issues.

Does anyone know of any program that is a true replacement for MS Project? In other words, something that can calculate task logic and critical paths correctly?

[fatality_uk]

In a word no. I tried gnome planner http://live.gnome.org/Planner but it had many problems. Engineers don't need a copy Project. They need to know what they are doing, but ultimately the PM has to do the planning. In that case, you should really only need at most two Project licenses for a team of several engineers, one for PM and one possibly for team head.

[juancarlospaco]

Planner ?

[fatality_uk]

Planner ?

I did post a link to planner, at least for the OP to try, but honestly, for day to day work, as much as I don't like saying it, MS Project is still the top app for PM.

[whiskeylover]

dotProject.

Pretty close to the real thing. Its a pain to enter tasks in it though.

[hambone79]

All of the ones listed so far are ok for small project with 20 or so tasks but they seem to crumble when you get to around 60 tasks. I guess we will have to bite the bullet and get MS Project.

[whiskeylover]

You only have to buy licenses for project managers, not for everybody else.

[IoanLucian]

Have you tried RationalPlan? It computes correctly the critical path, it respects calendar working hours, works well for a reasonable number of tasks (hundreds or more), comes with a free viewer and it is much more cheaper than MS Project. But hey it is not free... Check it out at:
http://www.rationalplan.com/

[hambone79]

RationalPlan looks good except for the fact that it doesn't handle PERT charts.

[HermanAB]

Primavera is commonly used for very large projects and is popular in the Oil and Gas industry. It is probably not cheap either, but it is a real alternative!