What is resource booking?
If you're in charge of managing a company's resources, you know that efficient scheduling is critical to keeping your business running smoothly. Whether you're in the consulting industry, manage physical resources like office space, or operate a warehouse, it's essential to have the right tools to manage your resources effectively.
Resource scheduling software can help you optimize your resource allocation and ensure that you're making the most of your available resources. With the right software, you can easily track resource availability in real-time, assign resources to projects based on demand and availability, and manage resource constraints to ensure that your projects are completed on time and within budget.
For consulting agencies, people are often the most critical resource. Resource scheduling software can help you keep track of employee availability and assign the right people to each project. This can help you ensure that your projects are staffed appropriately, and that your team is working at maximum capacity.
For businesses that manage physical resources like co-working spaces or meeting rooms, real-time availability is crucial. Resource scheduling software can help you manage and update availability in real-time, ensuring that you're always able to accommodate your clients' needs.
If you operate a warehouse, managing inventory and equipment is essential to keeping your business running smoothly. Resource scheduling software can help you track inventory levels and schedule maintenance and repairs, ensuring that your equipment is always available when you need it.
No matter the size of your business, resource scheduling software can help you streamline your operations and maximize your resources. From small startups to large enterprises, there's a solution out there that can help you manage your resources more efficiently and effectively.
Why do you need resource booking software?
It's not hard to imagine how laborious and time-consuming it is to juggle resource booking in spreadsheets. As your business grows, resource scheduling becomes more challenging, and simple spreadsheets are no longer sufficient to meet your needs. This is where resource booking software comes in.
With resource booking software, you can automate the process of planning, assigning, and managing resources. Depending on the complexity of your business's needs, you can use simple software to schedule and allocate resources based on their availability, or more advanced software that can help with budget planning, project management, and resource requirements forecasting.
There are many benefits to using resource booking software, including:
- Coordination of team member availability in one central location
- Optimizing the assignment of bookings or projects to resources more efficiently
- Cutting down manual, repetitive work and saving time with automations
- Collaborative booking and planning of resources within the team
- Getting an overview of the team's overall bookings and schedule
To help you find the best resource booking software for your business, we've put together a list of the top 10 tools and their strengths and limitations. With this information, you can compare and select the software that best meets your business needs.
CozyCal
Delightfully Simple Scheduling
CozyCal is a minimalist resource booking and appointment scheduling app that lets you seamlessly schedule resources like team members, meeting rooms, and equipment.
With CozyCal, you can easily add each resource's availability, including resource duration time, padding time, and the number of guests allowed per time slot on a master team booking page. Resources can be auto-assigned to booked customers in a round-robin manner, or customers can select their preferred resource.
Setting up your booking page is a breeze. You can customize intake-forms, accept payments and offer discounts through Stripe, and automate sending white label email notifications for a streamlined resource booking experience.
As the admin, you'll have a bird's eye-view of all resource bookings on one calendar, with the ability to filter to see individual resource's bookings. An intuitive interface allows you to manage each resource's availability flexibly by adding custom work hours or holiday time.
With integrations with Google Calendar, Zoom, and Zapier, you can connect resource booking with other tools to create custom workflows.
What makes CozyCal stand out?
What sets CozyCal apart from other resource booking software is its simplicity and ease of use. CozyCal’s minimalist interface is designed with the non-tech savvy user in mind, making it easy to navigate. You can set up resource booking pages, embed as a plugin on your website, and begin taking bookings within 10 minutes - no code needed.
CozyCal is ideal for service-based small businesses with basic needs for resource booking. Its package booking feature also allows you to sell resource bookings in bulk at a discount, bringing in more revenue and building a following of loyal customers.
What to bear in mind?
However, if you have an extensive list of resources to manage or have complex needs, CozyCal may not be the right fit for you. CozyCal doesn't support project management-related functions, such as project timeline tracking, resource forecasting, or accounting. It also doesn't generate analytical reports on resource utilization.
Who is this resource booking software best suitable for?
CozyCal is best suitable for solopreneurs and service-based small businesses who has basic needs for resource booking. It is a great fit for businesses that want their customers to book resources easily online, while they can manage resource availability flexibly.
Pricing
CozyCal's Pro plan starts at $15/month per resource billed annually, or $20/month per resource billed monthly. The Plaid plan includes all Pro plan features plus white-label features that lets you build a a custom, branded scheduling system. It starts at $25/month per resource billed annually, or $30/month per resource billed monthly.
Teams with over 10 resources can contact CozyCal for team discounts. And with a 10-day trial period with no credit card required, you can try CozyCal risk-free and see how it can streamline your resource scheduling process.
Resource Guru
Blissfully simple resource management software
Resource Guru is a simple resource scheduling software that helps organizations manage their resources, including people, equipment, and locations.
Each team member can personalize their own dashboard, while you as the admin, can plan and manage resources through quick drag-and-drop to ensure no resource is double-booked or over-utilized.
What makes this app stand out?
Resource Guru has a modern design that makes it user-friendly and appealing to the eyes. In addition to resource booking, Resource Guru supports project scheduling, leave management, capacity planning, and project forecasting reports. You can enable it to send daily resource summary emails and keep you updated with the performances of all the resource metrics.
Through Resource Guru’s collaborative scheduling, team members can collaborate on scheduling, with the ability to add comments, notes, and attachments to bookings.
What to bear in mind?
Resource Guru offers no direct integrations with third-party tools. It only has an API with webhooks which requires technical expertise to set up. You might not be able to create custom workflows easily.
Who is this resource booking app best suitable for?
Resource Guru is best suitable for businesses such as creative agencies, consulting firms, and software development companies with complex scheduling needs, where resources are a critical component of project delivery.
Pricing
There is no free plan. The Grasshopper plan (the essentials without reports) is 4.16 per person, per month or $2.08 for each non-human resource. The Blackbelt plan (standard features including reports) is $6.65 per person, per month or $3.33 for each non-human resource. The Master plan (SSO, data imports and phone support) is $10 per person, per month or $5 for each non-human resource.
You can try it out with a 30-day free trial. For more details, see their pricing page.
Float
Assign the best team for the job, every time
Float is a well-designed resource management and scheduling tool that is used by both small and large teams to schedule resources, plan projects and manage resource capacity in one place.
For project management, you can create and assign tasks and make updates in real time. Project timelines and milestones help to link tasks to group projects with precision. It offers a range of customizable views, including Gantt charts and calendar views, which can be tailored to fit the needs of each user. This allows businesses to see their schedules in a way that makes sense to them. As the admin, you can manage your team's availability by setting custom work hours and sync with external calendars.
In addition to resource management functions, you can monitor project budgets and make resource capacity forecast. Analytical reports can be generated for you to monitor real-time progress and compare estimated hours with the actual time taken for assigned resources.
What makes this app stand out?
Float offers integrations with other popular tools such as Google calendar, Slack, Quickbooks, Trello and Asana. You can integrate directly with these apps to build custom workflows for better efficiency.
Float also comes with iOS and Android apps that make resource management easy on mobile devices.
What to bear in mind?
Even if Float can support resource booking for large companies, compared to enterprise-level software, its capacity for customization is rather limited. Float has features that support project planning but it doesn't have the full feature set to replace an ad hoc project management tool.
Who is this resource booking app best suitable for?
Float is best suitable for small to medium sized agencies such as consulting firms, design agencies, architecture firms and IT contractors, who need a simple but powerful tool for resource scheduling, tracking and forecasting.
Pricing
There is no free plan. The Resource Planning plan is $6 per person per month. The Resource planning plus Time Tracking plan is $10 per person per month. You can try Float out with a 30-day free trial. For more details, see Float's pricing page.
Kantata (formerly Mavenlink)
Kantata, or formerly known as Mavenlink and Kimble, is an all-in-one resource management platform that offers a comprehensive suite of features for operational management, resource optimization, business analytics, integration, and workflow automation that enhances resource utilization and boosts operational efficiency.
Built on a resource-centric framework, it empowers service-oriented businesses to consistently assemble top-notch teams while providing real-time insights into project progress concerning timelines and budgets, ensuring smooth, predictable, and profitable project execution.
Kantata also comes with a wide set of products that support resource management, financial management, business intelligence, project management and team collaboration. It also supports integrations with Salesforce, Jira, CRMs, HCMs (Human Capital Management), and a large number of third-party software to build custom systems and processes.
What makes this app stand out?
Kantata provides a comprehensive suite of features that can satisfy complex resource management needs that go beyond just resource booking.
Kantata’s Talent Network assists resource managers to carry out scenario planning, allowing them to anticipate the formation of teams consisting of both internal and external staff, which are tailored for optimal performance in upcoming projects.
The Delivery Analyzer bolsters Kantata's Business Intelligence features by presenting intricate business performance data via integrated Tableau dashboards. This Tableau-driven tool offers valuable insights into project risks, status, and projected performance, building upon the recently released Financial Analyzer and Resourcing Analyzer.
What to bear in mind?
Because of Kantata’s multi-layer feature set, the software's complexity will require some time to set up and the learning curve might be steep for non-technical users.
There are users who mentioned that it is difficult to see who is responsible for a task if multiple people are assigned to it. Others mentioned that collective changes are difficult to make and user interface slows down significantly with more tasks added.
There is no mobile app available.
Who is this resource booking app best suitable for?
Kantata is best suitable for medium to large-sized professional services agencies such as advertising, IT, management consulting firms that have complex needs for resource management.
Pricing
There is no free plan. Maven's paid plan starts at $39 per month.
Monday.com
A platform built for a new way of working
Monday.com is a visual and intuitive project and resource management tool that helps you plan, organize and track resources all in one place. Monday.com's Workload View allows you to have a clear overview of your team's work distribution and know who is under or over capacity so upcoming tasks can be assigned efficiently. You can reassign and make changes to due dates to make sure resources can complete tasks within the set timeframe. It is not only good for human resource management but also can be used to allocate physical resources such as meeting rooms, equipment and delivery vehicles.
Monday.com also provides native integrations with many business apps that span across CRMs, Marketing, Software development and Project management tools.
iOS and Android apps are available for managing resources on the go.
What makes this app stand out?
Monday.com's visual and simplistic interface is easy to use and doesn't need training. It offers a rich set of data visualization formats that enable you to view data as a map, calendar, timeline or Kanban board. Team collaboration can be done easily using drag-and-drop. You can create ideal workflows by searching over 200 ready-made customizable templates that best fit your team's resource booking needs.
What to bear in mind?
Monday.com is a great tool for a business's internal resource booking and management, but it's not the right fit if you want customers to book resources as external parties. There is no widget that can be embedded on your website for resource booking. Resource forecasting and business intelligence reports are not available.
Who is this resource booking app best suitable for?
Monday.com is best suitable for teams of all sizes that want to connect all resource and project management processes, tools and teams on one collaborative platform.
Pricing
The individual plan is free and includes the basic feature set. The Basic plan is $11 per seat per month and includes 5 GB file storage and one dashboard. The Standard plan is $14 per seat per month and includes integrations and 5 boards. Pro plan is $22 per seat per month and includes up to 10 boards. You will need to contact Monday.com for Enterprise plan's pricing. The free trial is 14 days. Find more details on their pricing page.
Runn
Real-time resource management for the modern workforce
Runn is a real-time resource management that supports resource scheduling, capacity planning and financial planning all on one platform.
On one team calendar, you get to view everyone's workload, availability and utilization rates. The staff information help you to distribute tasks efficiently and plan future capacity needs. Employee skills sets can be matched to the right projects. Managers can update project schedules, milestones and resource allocations in real-time.
Runn generates detailed resource and status reports that compare your team's capacity and utilization metrics on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis. Through Runn's API and integrations including WorkflowMax, Clockify, and Harvest, you can sync data with external sources to better run your business.
What makes this app stand out?
On top of resource booking, Runn has comprehensive features for project management, people management, financial forecasting, reporting and timesheets. If you want an all-in-one platform that supports all these business operations but without a steep learning curve, Runn might be the tool for you.
What to bear in mind?
Runn doesn't support booking physical resources such as meeting rooms, venues and equipment.
Who is this resource booking app best suitable for?
Runn is best suitable for small to medium-sized teams in the IT and digital service industry.
Pricing
The Startup plan is free and includes 5 users and unlimited projects. The Pro plan is $10 per person per month. Runn has a free 14-day trial. For more details, view their pricing page.
Hub Planner
Get clear resource management for your office and remote WFH teams
Hub Planner is a resource booking and management tool designed to provide businesses with a modern tool to plan, schedule, track and book human and non-human resources. It has three core functions: resource scheduling, timesheet entry and reporting.
The Resource Scheduler offers an overview of resource availability and utilization that help you to identify scheduling gaps and conflicts. You can plan project budgets, calculate project spend and plan project milestones through simple drag-and-drop on a customizable dashboard.
Timesheets help to compare scheduled time versus reported actual time through interactive graphs and charts. Hub Planner can generate real-time reports that help you analyze all of your team's data including projects, resources, utilization, spend and budgets, so you can make better strategic decisions in future resource planning and forecasting.
What makes this app stand out?
Hub Planner's interactive interface is visual and collaboration-friendly. You can view resource scheduling using an availability heat map that can show you gaps in the production schedule and utilization distribution in one click.
Its Report Builder has over 70 predefined templates and filters that you can use to create custom reports flexibly. Based on your business's needs, optional extensions such as Custom Fields, Unassigned Work, Booking Tasks, Resource Request & Approval Workflow can be added on top of the core plan.
What to bear in mind?
Hub Planner's powerful feature suite might have a steep learning curve and requires time to grasp its full functionality. Users have mentioned that correcting errors and making any edits on the dashboard can be difficult.
Who is this resource booking app best suitable for?
Hub Planner is best suitable for medium sized businesses to enterprises across all industries including marketing, IT services, and consulting that need a customizable tool to handle basic to complex resource booking.
Pricing
There is a 60-day free trial. Hub Planner's Plug & Play plan is $7 per resource per month. Optional extensions require extra payment. The Premium plan is $18 per resource per month, with all extensions included. For more details, see their pricing page.
Saviom
Optimize & Futureproof Your Business
Saviom is a powerful resource booking tool that serves enterprise-level teams with complex needs for resource management including resource scheduling, project planning, capacity planning, reporting, and forecasting.
It has a configurable real-time resource scheduler that gives a bird's eye-view of project and non-project resource allocations across the enterprise. By matching available skillsets with projects, you can deploy resources to improve project delivery and reduce project cost.
On Saviom's platform, resource utilization can be forecasted through multi-dimensional heat maps for resource capacity planning. You can gain insight into project revenue, cost and margins with on a user-friendly, customizable dashboard.
Saviom can be easily integrated with various third-party tools, such as ERP and project management systems, enhancing productivity and collaboration.
What makes this app stand out?
Saviom is highly customizable and has powerful features that satisfy complex resource booking needs at an enterprise level. In-depth analytical reports can be generated by incorporating multi-layered data through Saviom's platform.
In addition to resource management functionality, Saviom has products for project porfolio management and workplace planning that can be customized to meet business's unique needs.
What to bear in mind?
If you are a small business that has basic needs for resource booking, Saviom might not be a good fit for you. It comes with many powerful features that support enterprise-level resource management, not but necessarily tailored to the needs of smaller teams. It will require investment in time and effort to train staff members in using Saviom.
There is no transparent pricing information on Saviom's website. You will need to contact them to learn about pricing.
Who is this resource booking app best suitable for?
Saviom is best suitable for medium to large size firms from industries such as consulting, IT services, engineering hat have complex needs for resource booking and management.
Pricing
Saviom has a licensing model that includes Non-User License, Lite License and Power License. You'll need to contact them to request pricing information.
eResource Scheduler
Resource Globally, Schedule Locally
eResource Scheduler is a resource management and scheduling software that assists organizations in planning, allocating, and tracking resources across projects. The platform offers features such as resource scheduling, project planning, timesheets, reporting, and utilization analysis.
It has a convenient Gantt chart that allows you to quickly get an overview of existing resource schedules and real-time availability. Resource information including roles, certificates, qualifications and preferences can be captured by user-defined fields and configurable forms. You can filter this information to match suitable resources with projects. It has an instant resource overload indicator that keeps track of resource capacity and alerts any resource overbooking.
You can also use eResource Scheduler's Timesheet feature to capture important resource utilization and project information in timesheets. Financial reports can be generated to show insights on planned versus actual budget data for resources and projects.
What makes this app stand out?
eResource Scheduler's dashboard is easy to use and comes with powerful features for resource scheduling and management. Managers can make changes to resources efficiently through the software's drag and drop, resource overload indicator, precise split and copy & paste features. You can configure real-time resource utilization reports by applying different views and filters to extract useful information. It has transparent and affordable pricing for both teams small and large.
What to bear in mind?
Smaller teams might find eResource Scheduler to be complicated and many of their powerful features unnecessary. Compared to other resource booking tools that include full or partial project management capability, it doesn't support project and task management.
Who is this resource booking app best suitable for?
eResource Scheduler is best suitable for medium-sized businesses to enterprises that want customizable dashboards for resource scheduling and management.
Pricing
Scheduling Module (core) is $5 per resource per month. Financial Module (optional) is $4 per resource per month. Timesheet Module (optional) is $5 per resource per month. For more details, see their pricing page.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, the 10 best resource booking software listed above come with strengths and limitations. To choose the right resource booking tool, it is important to identify your business's needs and feature requirements.
If the software's visual representation and ease of use are more important to you than an extensive feature set, a complex enterprise-level tool may not be the right fit. Keep in mind that most of these resource booking software comes with a free trial that you can take advantage of to see if it's the right fit for you.
