Top 8 project portfolio management software to use in 2025
Whether you’re working on a small project or a months-long project, there are many ways to tackle tasks. Project management is essential to keeping your teams aligned with your long-term goals and on track to meet deadlines. Unfortunately, project management isn’t as simple as mapping out a quick timeline of your project.
Project portfolio management software is a simple solution for organizing and prioritizing projects. These tools enable you to focus on projects that align with your organizational goals. Continue reading to discover the best project portfolio management software options for your business.
What is project portfolio management?
Project portfolio management (PPM) is a strategy for organizing, prioritizing, and coordinating projects to ensure they align with your business’s long-term goals. The goal is to better understand each project's risk-reward by examining its potential return on investment (ROI) and available funds.
This software differs from project management software, which focuses on coordinating individual projects to optimize resources. Project portfolio management software allows you to focus on multiple projects simultaneously to maximize their overall value.
Benefits of project portfolio management software
Using agile project portfolio management software helps you get a clear picture of the projects you’re planning and how they align with your goals. As a result, you can prioritize important projects and ensure you have enough resources. Here are some of the benefits of PPM software:
- Resource allocation: Understanding which projects to prioritize and identifying the necessary resources simplifies resource planning and allocation.
- Decision-making: Getting a clear picture of your upcoming projects helps determine which projects align with your goals so you can focus on moving those projects forward.
- Visibility: PPM software gives you a comprehensive overview of your projects and the potential pros and cons, offering visibility that helps drive decision-making.
- Risk management: You can decide which projects you want to avoid based on cost or potential ROI, making PPM software an excellent risk mitigation tool.
- Real-time collaboration: Project portfolios give everyone a simple overview of your projects, and team members can see project changes in real-time to stay current.
- Strategic alignment: By analyzing your projects and how they align with your goals, you can determine which projects and agile workflows align with your organizational goals.
Key features of project portfolio management software
Various features make project portfolio management software an effective tool for businesses, including:
- Portfolio dashboards: Portfolio dashboards give you a simple overview of your projects to see which projects are in the pipeline and decide what to focus on.
- Collaboration tools: PPM software should allow team members and various teams to work together in real-time. Messaging, document sharing, and tasks are key features to look for in PPM tools.
- Real-time reporting and analytics: Real-time data plays a key role in decision-making. PPM software provides real-time data about projects, so you have the data you need to make crucial decisions.
Top 8 project portfolio management software
The right PPM software can play a key role in understanding project scope and optimizing your resources based on your portfolio of projects. Here are some of our favorite choices for project portfolio management software.
Jira Align: Best overall for project portfolio management
Jira Align is a project management tool that allows you to create a centralized hub where all your teams can stay on the same page with project portfolios and detailed roadmaps. All your work in Jira Align is visible in real-time, allowing everyone to track project progress and collaborate.
Jira Align is also an excellent tool for making decisions based on project portfolio data — from deploying the right team to choosing which project to focus on next.
Jira: Best for project tracking
Jira turns complex projects into easy-to-track tasks. Whether you’re working on a massive project involving several teams or a small, single-team project, Jira helps you organize work into milestones so everything is broken down into achievable steps.
You can also link individual tasks to goals so teams can see how their contributions affect the project as a whole. Jira templates simplify organizing and streamlining projects with powerful tools like Scrum and Kanban boards.
Jira Service Management: Best for service requests
Jira Service Management is designed to unite dev, IT, and business teams to deliver the best service. You can use Jira Service Management to track and manage IT and employee support requests, preventing these issues from delaying your workflows and projects. These service requests can even be integrated into project workflows to simplify tracking service requests and incidents. When you don’t have to worry about backlogged service requests or issues, you can focus on tackling the project(s) in front of you.
Confluence: Best for knowledge sharing and documentation
Confluence offers a simple solution for bringing teams together and ensuring everyone is on the same page. With Confluence, you can create pages and fill them with project details. Members across teams can access these pages to ensure they’re on the same page, which plays a key role in project planning.
Confluence pages can include knowledge base articles, FAQs about a project, team updates, technical specs and design docs, and project documentation. Even better, you can neatly organize that information to make it easy to digest.
Confluence whiteboards: Best for visual brainstorming and collaboration
Think of Confluence whiteboards as a virtual version of the whiteboards we use in real life. Like those whiteboards, Confluence whiteboards are a great tool for visual brainstorming and collaboration. You can use Confluence whiteboards to map out project ideas, brainstorm in real-time, and generate insights that help drive decision-making.
Jira Product Discovery: Best for road mapping and prioritization
Jira Product Discovery is an excellent tool for capturing ideas and creating a project roadmap. You can use Jira Product Discovery to map out product ideas to better understand what you should prioritize based on how it impacts your customers.
Data and customer insights help you prioritize ideas, while custom roadmaps make it easy to keep various teams and stakeholders informed about projects and product development.
Atlas: Best for goal-setting and tracking
Keeping teams aligned with your long-term goals and on the same page can be difficult, but Atlas offers a simple solution. Atlas is a central hub where team members can communicate and ensure they align with organizational goals.
Teams can use Atlas to ensure everyone knows which tasks they’re responsible for and their boundaries. You can also use Atlas to track team progress, giving you a better understanding of what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how it’s going. All Atlas' features and functionality are moving to the Platform, meaning iff you are a current Atlassian customer who owns Jira, Jira Product Discovery, Confluence or Compass, you can join the Early Access Program in the Admin Hub.
Loom: Best for async video communication
With remote work becoming the norm and people working across different time zones, live video chat tools aren’t always effective. Loom offers an alternative to live video chat tools, allowing you to record asynchronous (async) videos that other team members can view on their own time.
Team members can use Loom to record a quick video update or offer feedback on a project, keeping everyone on the same page even if they’re not in the same time zone.
Best practices for project portfolio management in Jira Align
Project portfolio management isn’t as simple as using the right tools — you must use them correctly. Fortunately, we’ve put together some tips to help you make sure you’re getting the most out of Jira Align.
- Ensure every team member knows how to use Jira Align to review your project portfolio.
- Break projects into Epics, Features, Stories, and Tasks to get a clear picture.
- Keep your project portfolio current so everyone is on the same page.
Drive project success with effective portfolio management in Jira Align
Understanding how various projects fit into your overall portfolio and align with your goals helps you prioritize the most critical projects. With tools like Jira Align, you can ensure everyone has access to crucial details about individual projects related to your long-term goals.
Atlassian makes it easy to utilize tools like Jira Align and various templates. You can quickly create Kanban and Scrum boards or use project management templates to get an overview of your projects. Learn more about Jira Align and see how project portfolio management can help you prioritize projects to align with your long-term goals.