StratNav vs Planview: Which Platform Fits?
StratNav vs Planview: compare strategy development with enterprise portfolio governance to choose the right platform for your team’s needs.
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Do you need to develop a credible strategy from evidence, choices and trade-offs? Or do you need to govern investments, resources and programmes across a complex enterprise portfolio? Your answer will usually make the right choice much clearer.
The short answer: StratNav vs Planview
Planview is primarily an enterprise strategic portfolio management platform. It helps large organisations connect strategic initiatives with investments, capacity, programmes, projects and outcomes.
StratNav is designed for consultants, SME leaders, founders and smaller strategy teams. It helps them turn evidence into strategic insights, make explicit choices and connect those choices with goals, measures, initiatives and actions.
In simple terms:
- Choose StratNav when you need to work out what your strategy should be, turn it into focused action, plan initiatives and portfolios using Gantt charts and budgets, and stay on course.
- Choose Planview when you already have a clear strategy and need to govern a substantial portfolio of investments and delivery activity at enterprise scale.
Neither platform is inherently better. They start from different assumptions and serve different kinds of strategic work.
What is the fundamental difference?
Planview’s centre of gravity is portfolio governance. Its Strategic Portfolio Management proposition connects initiatives, investments, capacity and execution within a continuously updated model. Its published capabilities include investment prioritisation, financial and capacity planning, scenario modelling, dependency management, roadmaps and outcome tracking. Planview describes its Strategic Portfolio Management capabilities here.
That becomes valuable when leaders must answer questions such as:
- Which major investments should we fund?
- Do we have sufficient people and money to deliver them?
- What will need to move if priorities change?
- Are our programmes producing the outcomes promised to the board?
StratNav begins earlier in the strategy process. It helps you answer a different set of questions:
- What is changing inside and outside the organisation?
- Which evidence and assumptions matter?
- What do those factors mean for the organisation?
- Where should we compete, and how?
- What will we deliberately choose not to do?
- How will we translate those choices into goals, measures and initiatives?
- How will we plan initiatives and portfolios, including through Gantt charts and budgets that can be overlaid against operating revenues and costs?
- How will we track those through to completion and ensure they do help us achieve our strategic purpose?
- How will we adapt our strategy as cricumstances eveolve and results emerge.
Planview is strongest at governing a complex portfolio of strategic delivery. StratNav is strongest at establishing and maintaining the strategic logic that should govern delivery in the first place.
When Planview may be the better choice
Planview should be taken seriously. It is not simply a project-planning tool or a more elaborate way to produce Gantt charts.
You manage investments and capacity at enterprise scale
Planview supports portfolio-level financial planning, funding, forecasting, demand management and capacity planning. It also allows teams to compare scenarios before changing priorities or allocating resources.
This depth matters when scarce capital and specialist people must be distributed across numerous programmes, products and business units.
You need detailed programme and portfolio governance
Large organisations often need to manage dependencies, milestones, risks, costs and capacity across hundreds or thousands of projects. Planview combines these operational concerns with executive reporting and portfolio analytics.
Its strategic portfolio management page describes capabilities including programme management, resource management, project planning, cost tracking and more than 200 reports and visualisations.
You already have a complex delivery ecosystem
Enterprise teams rarely use one delivery method or system. Some work may be managed through agile tools, while other programmes follow waterfall or hybrid approaches.
Planview says its strategic portfolio management offering includes more than 60 pre-built integrations, connecting systems such as Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub and enterprise resource-planning software. This can help organisations create a portfolio-level view without forcing every team to adopt an identical working method.
You need technology portfolio management
Planview also addresses enterprise architecture, application portfolios, technology capabilities and digital transformation. These needs extend beyond StratNav’s current focus on strategy development and execution. Planview outlines its enterprise architecture capabilities here.
You want AI applied to connected portfolio data
Planview Anvi applies AI across connected work and portfolio information. Planview positions it as a way to identify risks and dependencies, examine performance, assist with resource decisions and produce executive reporting. Read Planview’s description of Anvi.
If your organisation has a central enterprise portfolio management office, formal funding cycles, extensive interdependencies and hundreds of active projects, Planview’s depth may justify the corresponding implementation effort.
When StratNav may be the better choice
StratNav is not trying to replace a mature enterprise portfolio management environment. Its advantage is enabling rigorous, practical strategy work without enterprise-scale overhead.
Many organisations do not begin with a well-evidenced strategy or a settled set of strategic choices. Instead, they have presentations, workshop notes, spreadsheets, reports and competing opinions.
The problem is not yet how to govern a portfolio. It is deciding what belongs in that portfolio, and ensuring that view evolves over time.
You need to turn evidence into strategic choices
StratNav helps you gather and structure evidence, examine internal and external factors and develop strategic insights from them.
You can use established approaches such as SWOT, PESTEL and Five Forces analysis while preserving the connections between evidence, interpretation and decisions. The aim is not to complete frameworks for their own sake. It is to understand what is happening, what it means and what you should do about it.
That includes making explicit trade-offs. A credible strategy should explain not only what you intend to pursue, but also what you will decline, postpone or stop.
You want a living strategy rather than another document
A presentation may record the conclusions of a strategy process while losing much of the reasoning behind them. Months later, people can see the objectives but may no longer understand which assumptions, insights and choices produced them.
StratNav keeps the evidence, insights, choices, goals, KPIs and initiatives in one connected environment. It can also produce Gantt charts for initiative and portfolio planning, alongside initiative and portfolio budgets that can be overlaid against operating revenues and costs. Users can return to the strategy, challenge its assumptions and update it as conditions change.
This helps turn strategy from an occasional planning exercise into an active management system.
You are a consultant delivering strategy work
Consultants need to support good thinking while also delivering a professional and repeatable client experience.
StratNav can provide:
- A structured, evidence-based strategy process
- A shared workspace for collaboration
- AI-assisted analysis and drafting, with human judgement retained
- Connected goals, measures, initiatives and actions
- Gantt charts for initiative and portfolio planning
- Initiative and portfolio budgets overlaid against operating revenues and costs
- Professional, structured outputs
- Continued client access after the initial engagement
- A foundation for reviews, implementation support and follow-on advice
This makes it suitable for consultants and professional-services firms that want to scale their strategy offering without becoming specialists in enterprise portfolio-management configuration.
You need useful results without a major systems programme
A founder, SME leadership team or smaller consultancy may not have the appetite to integrate multiple delivery systems and create extensive governance before producing a useful strategic output.
StratNav is designed to help such teams move from evidence to a focused strategy and practical action plan in days or weeks. That accessibility matters. Strategy already feels like homework to many participants; the platform should reduce friction rather than add to it.
Pricing
Planview does not publish explicit pricing, so you will need to contact it for a quote based on your organisation’s requirements. StratNav publishes its pricing openly, making it easier to assess costs before you begin. View StratNav pricing.
The biggest risk is choosing the wrong category
The real danger is not that either product will fail. It is that you will buy a capable product for the wrong problem.
Choosing Planview when the underlying strategy remains unclear could leave you with a well-governed portfolio built on poorly tested assumptions.
Choosing StratNav when you need enterprise-wide capital allocation, detailed capacity modelling and governance across numerous delivery systems could leave substantial operational needs unmet.
Before comparing feature lists, therefore, ask:
Is our immediate challenge deciding what our strategy should be and how it should evolve, or governing a large portfolio that already exists?
That distinction is more useful than counting dashboards, integrations or AI features.
Could you use StratNav and Planview together?
Potentially. For a growing organisation, the most sensible sequence may be StratNav first and Planview later.
StratNav can help the leadership team establish its evidence, strategic choices, priorities and intended outcomes. A larger portfolio-management platform can then govern the investments and delivery activity required to pursue them once organisational scale and complexity justify it.
The platforms can therefore be viewed as serving different layers of the strategy-to-execution journey rather than always being direct substitutes.
Which platform should you choose?
Choose StratNav if you want to:
- Develop an evidence-backed strategy
- Turn analysis into explicit choices and priorities
- Connect goals, KPIs, initiatives and actions
- Plan initiatives and portfolios using Gantt charts
- Develop initiative and portfolio budgets overlaid against operating revenues and costs
- Collaborate with clients or colleagues
- Maintain a living record of the strategy and its reasoning
- Produce useful results without a heavily engineered enterprise implementation programme
Choose Planview if you need:
- Enterprise investment and portfolio governance
- Financial and capacity planning
- Complex scenario and dependency management
- Oversight of extensive programmes and projects
- Integration across a large delivery-tool ecosystem
- Portfolio-level technology and application management
For the consultants, founders, SME leaders and small strategy teams StratNav serves best, its advantage is straightforward: it helps make strategy understandable, evidence-based and actionable without imposing the cost and operating model of enterprise portfolio-management software.
If that sounds closer to the problem you are trying to solve, schedule a StratNav demo.
We've prepared this comparison on a best endeavours. Things change. If you disagree with anything in this article, please contact us.
