GanttAI vs Open Planner Studio

GanttAI is a web tool for specialty contractors and subcontractors who need to locate their work in a general contractor’s construction schedule and understand the effects of revisions. It opens PDF, MPP, XER, XML, and Excel schedules as searchable schedules, identifies activities within a contractor’s scope, and compares revisions across dates, durations, logic, and sequence. Comparisons can be shared through report links that recipients can view without an account. For crew planning, users enter hours by scope and person-day; GanttAI estimates staffing for activities and shows crew peaks against available headcount. Its AI Agent answers schedule questions in plain English and can create look-aheads or summaries as Excel files. The Portfolio plan adds cross-project trade manpower views by day, week, month, quarter, or year. A free trial is available, with one project, two reviews, and one comparison; no card is required. Paid plans start at $250/month for Single, with other plan prices listed separately.

Open Planner Studio is an open-source construction planning tool for buildings, infrastructure and civil works. It provides Gantt charts, automatic critical-path calculation, resource histograms and automatic levelling when resources are overallocated. Schedules use native IFC 4.3; the app imports and exports IFC, CSV, MS Project XML and Primavera P6 XML, and opens MS Project MPP files. Construction calendars can account for holidays, recesses, frost delays, inspections and phasing, with task durations entered in days or hours. Reports export as PDFs at approximately 220 DPI, on paper sizes up to A2, with baseline overlays and status or progress lines. A built-in MCP server allows compatible AI clients to read and edit schedules, with pause, read-only mode, backups and an activity panel. Schedules are stored as IFC files rather than a proprietary closed format. Crash recovery is available, alongside optional periodic saving to a writable project file. The app is marked Available Beta and includes an offline manual in fourteen languages. It runs on Linux, macOS, Windows and the web.