Production planning decides what gets made, in what order, on which resource, before any of it reaches the floor. The dividing line is capacity: most ERP planners assume infinite capacity and hand out dates the plant cannot hit.
This guide ranks finite-capacity schedulers on setup effort, what the real bill looks like, and how easily the model comes back out.
Vendors can pay for visibility on this page. It never changes what an entry
says about a product, including the criticism, and we earn nothing when you click through to a
vendor. How that works.
In short
What production planning software does
Production planning software turns demand and orders into a dated, resource-by-resource schedule, checking machine, material and labour capacity before promising a delivery date to the customer.
Five things, in this order. Feature counts are not among them: they are the least useful
comparison in software, because every vendor ticks every box.
01
Setup effort in production planning software
What the first ninety days of a production planning software rollout cost in hours, not in licence fees. A product that needs a partner engagement before it does anything is a different purchase from one a team configures in an afternoon.
02
What production planning software really costs
What the bill becomes once the modules a normal buyer of production planning software needs are added, and whether you can read that number without a sales conversation.
03
Getting your data out of production planning software
How your own data comes back out, in what format, and whether that export is included in the production planning software contract or billed as a project.
04
Independence from the vendor
Whether you can buy production planning software, run it and leave it on your own terms. This test decides most of the order on this page, and it is why the largest vendors in production planning software often sit below the smaller ones.
05
Who the product is built for
The size and shape of company each production planning software product was actually built for. Most regret in software comes from buying for a company you are not yet.
The fourth test decides most of the order on this page, and it is the reason the largest
production planning software vendors sit below the smaller ones. A product with a published price, an export
that works and no mandatory implementation partner is a product you can leave.
A platform suite that arrives with a quote, a partner and a two-year commitment may well be
the better software and is still the harder decision to reverse. We rank production planning software for the
buyer who has to live with that decision without a procurement department, which is a stated
bias rather than a hidden one.
We do not publish a score out of ten. A number like 8.4 is a judgement dressed as a
measurement, and nobody can check it.
What you can check is on this page: what each production planning tool costs, where the vendor is
established, whether the price is published, and what we think it is bad at. Our full method
is on the how we work page.
S/4HANA manufacturers with in-house or contracted PP/DS expertise
Plants without SAP, or without a planning consultant budget
Country is where the vendor is headquartered or contracts from, which is a
different question from where your data is hosted. Where the two tell different stories, the
entry says so.
Open source finite-capacity planning you can host yourself
Ranked #1 of 12 in Best Production Planning Software in 2026.
Open sourceSelf-hostablePricing on requestEurope
frepple gives you a genuine finite-capacity engine under an open licence, with connectors to common ERPs and a data model you can query yourself. That answers the exit question better than anything else on this list.
It answers nothing else for free. You will spend weeks encoding routings, calendars and constraints, and reading planning documentation written for people who already know the field. Worth it if that person exists in your building.
What stands out
Open source
Self-hostable
ERP connectors
Where it costs you
Modelling and hosting are your problem in the community edition
Very few consultants outside the vendor know the product
Right for
A manufacturer with technical staff who want to own the planning model
Wrong for
A plant with no in-house IT or planning expertise
BelgiumOpen source community edition; paid cloud editions quoted
Visual drag-and-drop scheduling for job shops with published prices
Ranked #2 of 12 in Best Production Planning Software in 2026.
Published pricingEurope
The rare scheduling product with a price on the website and a trial you can start alone. It does one job: take the jobs and their operations, show them on resources, and stop you promising two things to the same machine at once.
That is a large improvement over a spreadsheet and a small fraction of an APS. Growth beyond a single busy shop means outgrowing it, and the vendor is upfront about the ceiling.
What stands out
Published pricing
Job shops
Fast setup
Where it costs you
No material planning and no automatic optimisation
Runs out of room above roughly fifty resources
Right for
A make-to-order job shop replacing a whiteboard or a spreadsheet
Wrong for
Multi-site planning or material-constrained production
Cloud MRP for small manufacturers, with scheduling included
Ranked #3 of 12 in Best Production Planning Software in 2026.
Published pricingEurope
MRPeasy is an ERP wearing a planning label, and for a twenty-person manufacturer that is the right shape: bills of material, stock, purchase orders and a production schedule in one subscription with a published price.
The scheduling itself is forward and backward against workstation capacity, nothing cleverer. Companies with an existing ERP should not be here, because the value depends on MRPeasy owning the master data.
What stands out
Published pricing
Self-serve trial
Small manufacturers
Where it costs you
Scheduling is basic, with no real optimisation
Becomes your ERP, which is a bigger commitment than a scheduler
Right for
A small manufacturer with no ERP that needs stock and schedule together
Wrong for
A company keeping an existing ERP for stock and purchasing
EstoniaPer user per month, published; tiered by module
APS that bolts onto an existing ERP rather than replacing it
Ranked #4 of 12 in Best Production Planning Software in 2026.
Pricing on requestNorth America
The design premise is that your ERP stays and the scheduler sits beside it, which is the situation most buyers in this category are actually in. Sequence-dependent setups, campaign grouping and what-if scenarios are handled competently.
The friction is commercial and cosmetic: everything is quoted, the ERP connector is priced separately, and the planner has to accept a dense screen that rewards familiarity rather than first impressions.
What stands out
ERP connectors
Finite capacity
Scenario comparison
Where it costs you
Connector to the ERP is usually a separate quoted line
Interface looks its age next to newer products
Right for
A mid-market plant adding finite scheduling to an ERP it keeps
Wrong for
Buyers who want a published price and a self-serve trial
Gantt-based scheduling with a long track record in Nordic plants
Ranked #5 of 12 in Best Production Planning Software in 2026.
Self-hostablePricing on requestEurope
Rob-Ex assumes a competent planner and gives them a fast, honest Gantt with drag-and-drop resequencing and clear capacity conflicts. That suits plants where the scheduling knowledge is real and the problem is visibility rather than mathematics.
It will not surprise you with a better sequence, and it does not try. Long ERP integration experience in the region is a genuine advantage; outside it, expect to be one of few customers.
What stands out
Gantt planning
Nordic installed base
ERP integration
Where it costs you
Optimisation is thin; the planner does the thinking
Partner coverage outside northern Europe is limited
Right for
A Nordic or northern European plant with an experienced human planner
Wrong for
Companies wanting the system to optimise without supervision
DenmarkPer named user licence, quoted; on-premise or cloud
Fast scheduling engine with a large Japanese manufacturing base
Ranked #6 of 12 in Best Production Planning Software in 2026.
Pricing on requestAsia-Pacific
Asprova's reputation rests on speed: it will resequence an order book that other engines choke on, and it does so in the time a planner is willing to wait. Japanese automotive and electronics plants have run it for years.
Getting there requires learning a property-driven configuration model that is unlike anything else here, with documentation that shows its translation and a thin European partner bench to lean on.
What stands out
High-speed engine
Perpetual licence
Discrete manufacturing
Where it costs you
Steep configuration model and translated documentation
Few implementation partners in Europe
Right for
High-volume discrete plants with tens of thousands of operations to sequence
Wrong for
A small shop that wants to be scheduling next month
JapanPerpetual licence per seat, quoted; annual maintenance
Planning workbench for SAP shops that want finite capacity
Ranked #7 of 12 in Best Production Planning Software in 2026.
Pricing on requestEurope
ORSOFT works directly on SAP's order and capacity data instead of copying it into a parallel system, which removes the synchronisation problem that sinks bolt-on schedulers.
For a mid-market SAP shop that finds PP/DS too heavy, that is a narrow but real gap to fill. Everything else follows from the niche: no reason to consider it elsewhere, quoted pricing, and a supplier small enough to ask about succession.
What stands out
SAP add-on
Finite capacity
Mid-market
Where it costs you
Pointless outside an SAP landscape
Small vendor, so continuity is a fair question
Right for
SAP manufacturers needing finite scheduling without a second master
Wrong for
Any company that does not run SAP
GermanyQuoted per organisation; licence plus maintenance
Order sequencing and supply planning for high-variant assembly
Ranked #8 of 12 in Best Production Planning Software in 2026.
Pricing on requestEurope
The problem flexis solves is specific: on a line building thousands of configurations, the sequence has to spread the heavy options and the parts have to be called off in exactly that order. Get it wrong and the line stops.
Solving that requires a model of the line, the options and the supply, which means consultants and months. Outside that world the effort has no payback, and the vendor does not pretend otherwise.
What stands out
Variant sequencing
Automotive
Supply synchronisation
Where it costs you
Modelling effort only pays off in high-variant assembly
Every implementation is a consulting project
Right for
Automotive or machinery plants sequencing options on a mixed-model line
Wrong for
Batch or job-shop production with simple product variants
The former Preactor scheduler, now inside the Siemens catalogue
Ranked #9 of 12 in Best Production Planning Software in 2026.
Pricing on requestEurope
The Preactor engine still does the job it did when it was the default answer for mid-market scheduling, and plenty of plants run it happily. What has changed is the buying experience.
Capability is split across editions, the entry level is narrower than long-time users expect, and the relationship runs through a partner whose incentives point at the rest of the Siemens catalogue. Check which edition contains the feature you saw demonstrated.
What stands out
Preactor lineage
Editions
Partner-led
Where it costs you
Editions fragment what used to be one product
Support and pricing both run through partners
Right for
Mid-market plants already buying from Siemens through a partner
Wrong for
A buyer who wants to license and support the tool directly
GermanyQuoted; editions by capability, sold through partners
Constraint-based scheduling for process and discrete plants
Ranked #10 of 12 in Best Production Planning Software in 2026.
Pricing on requestEurope
Ortems models the constraints that make process scheduling hard: shared equipment, changeover and cleaning rules, qualified operators, campaign grouping. Where those are the binding constraints it produces schedules a plant manager recognises.
What comes attached is the Dassault commercial machine, so licences are quoted, the roadmap sits inside a much larger catalogue, and the specialist who configures it is unlikely to be one of your employees.
What stands out
Constraint modelling
Process industry
Dassault stack
Where it costs you
Dassault licensing and upgrade cadence come with the product
Needs a partner for anything beyond the standard model
Right for
Food, chemical or pharmaceutical plants with campaign and cleaning constraints
Wrong for
Small discrete manufacturers with simple machine constraints
Bespoke optimisation modelling sold as a planning product
Ranked #11 of 12 in Best Production Planning Software in 2026.
Pricing on requestEurope
Quintiq is a toolkit for building a planning application, sold to organisations whose problem genuinely has no product: rail crews, steel campaigns, complex multi-plant networks.
When the fit is right the result is something no configurable scheduler could reach. When it is not, you have paid for a bespoke system, in a language your team cannot read, with a change request queue and no exit. Test that fit ruthlessly.
What stands out
Custom optimisation
Large scale
Long projects
Where it costs you
Logic lives in a proprietary language only its consultants maintain
Projects run for quarters before anything goes live
Right for
Large organisations with a planning problem no standard product fits
Wrong for
Anyone whose scheduling problem resembles other companies' problems
NetherlandsQuoted per organisation; implementation-heavy
SAP's own finite scheduler, now embedded in S/4HANA
Ranked #12 of 12 in Best Production Planning Software in 2026.
Pricing on requestEurope
Embedding PP/DS in S/4HANA removed the old middleware and the separate system, which was the main objection to SAP's finite scheduler. The remaining objection is people.
Heuristics, propagation ranges, setup matrices and planning procedures all have to be set by someone who has done it before, and that person bills accordingly. Where that skill is available, one system holding both the ERP and the schedule is hard to argue with.
What stands out
Embedded in S/4HANA
Finite capacity
Consultant-heavy
Where it costs you
Configuration requires a scarce and expensive specialist
Planning board is unfriendly to occasional users
Right for
S/4HANA manufacturers with in-house or contracted PP/DS expertise
Wrong for
Plants without SAP, or without a planning consultant budget
GermanyLicensed within S/4HANA entitlements, quoted
Production planning software turns demand and orders into a dated, resource-by-resource schedule, checking machine, material and labour capacity before promising a delivery date to the customer. The differences that matter are rarely in the feature list, so this is
the order we would work through them.
01
Decide whether you need a published price
2 of the 12 tools here publish what they cost; the other 10 quote per organisation, which means a sales conversation before you can compare anything. If you are buying without a procurement function, start with the ones that publish: Just Plan It, MRPeasy.
02
Work out what the first ninety days cost in time
Licence cost is the number in the contract; setup effort is the number that surprises people. Ask every shortlisted vendor who does the configuration, how long it took the last customer of your size, and what happens if that person leaves halfway.
03
Check the exit before the entry
Ask for an export of your own data in a format you can open, and ask whether it is included or billed as a project. A vendor that hesitates here is telling you what renewal negotiations will feel like in three years.
04
Match the tool to the size you are, not the size you plan to be
Most regret in this category comes from buying for a headcount that never arrived. The entry-level products here are not worse; they are aimed at a different company.
05
Decide how much the jurisdiction matters
These 12 vendors are established in 8 countries across 3 regions (Europe 10, North America 1, Asia-Pacific 1). Where a vendor is established decides which government can compel access to what it holds, which is a different question from where the servers are. For most buyers that is a factor, not a veto.
06
Consider whether you want the source
1 of these are open source, which means you can host them yourself and read what they do with your data. That control is real, and so is the maintenance it hands you.
Finite or infinite capacity: the only question that matters first
Nearly every ERP ships a planner, and nearly every one of them assumes infinite capacity. It takes the demand, applies the lead time and produces a date, without ever asking whether the machine is free. That is why the plant quietly keeps a spreadsheet, and why buyers arrive at this page. A finite-capacity scheduler does the opposite: it loads each operation onto a real resource, in a real sequence, and tells you the date that falls out.
The dates are less flattering and more true. Every product ranked here is finite capacity, but they differ in what they count as a constraint: Just Plan It counts machines, DELMIA Ortems counts tanks, cleaning cycles and operator certificates, and flexis counts the option mix on an assembly line.
Write down your top three constraints before any demo, and rank them.
Ask the vendor to model constraint number one during the trial, on your data.
Check whether your current ERP planner is infinite capacity. Most are.
Master data decides whether the schedule is believed
A scheduler is a calculator sitting on top of routings, setup times and calendars. If the routing says forty minutes and the job takes ninety, the tool will produce a confident, wrong plan, and the supervisor will stop looking at it within a fortnight. This is the real work of an APS project and no vendor can do it for you.
MRPeasy makes the point by accident: it holds the routings itself, so companies with no clean master data at least have one place to build it. Where the data already lives in an ERP, as with ORSOFT or SAP PP/DS, the audit is unavoidable. Budget weeks for measuring setup times before the software arrives, not after.
Sample twenty routings and compare them with what the floor actually reports.
Decide who owns setup times after go-live, by name.
Ask the vendor what the tool does when a routing is missing a resource.
Who reschedules, and how often
The plan is wrong the moment a machine breaks. What matters is how long it takes to produce the next one and who is allowed to. Asprova exists because reoptimising a very large order book in seconds is a different product from redrawing a Gantt by hand, and Rob-Ex exists because a good planner with a mouse often beats an algorithm nobody trusts.
Neither is the right answer in general. Ask how many orders you carry, how often reality moves, and whether your planner wants to approve the sequence or receive it. Then ask what an automatic reschedule does to the jobs already released to the floor, because a plan that reshuffles work in progress every morning will be ignored.
Time a full reschedule on your own order volume during the trial.
Ask whether released orders can be frozen, and how the freeze is expressed.
Decide whether the planner approves the sequence or the system publishes it.
What you can walk away with
An APS model is months of encoded knowledge about how your plant actually works, and most of it lives in the vendor's format. Ask early what an export contains: the routings and calendars usually come back, the constraint rules and optimisation weights usually do not. frepple is ranked first partly for this reason, since the model sits in a database you can read and the source is open.
DELMIA Quintiq sits at the other end, with logic written in a proprietary language that only its own consultants maintain. Between those two, the practical question is whether the rules were configured or coded, because configured rules can be listed on a page and rebuilt elsewhere.
Request a sample export of a full model, not a screenshot of one.
Ask which parts of the logic are configuration and which are custom code.
Get the hourly rate for a change request written into the contract.
What goes wrong most often when buying production planning software
Assuming the ERP planner already does this. Check whether it loads finite capacity; most do not, and that is why the spreadsheet exists.
Buying optimisation before the routings are accurate. A faster algorithm on wrong data produces wrong plans faster.
Scheduling to the minute when the floor reports once a shift. The plan can only be as fine as the feedback that corrects it.
Letting the vendor's consultant own the model. When the contract ends, the knowledge about how your plant works leaves with them.
07
Frequently asked questions
11 answers
What is the best production planning in 2026?
frepple leads our ranking of 12. The only planner here you can run without asking anybody's permission, and the community edition is a real finite-capacity engine rather than a crippled demo.
The cost moves to you: modelling routings, calendars and constraints is a project, the documentation assumes you understand planning theory, and the pool of consultants who know it is small.
How did you rank these production planning tools?
On what separates products after the demo: how much setup the first ninety days take, what the price becomes once the modules a normal buyer needs are added, how your data comes back out, whether you can buy and leave it without a partner engagement, and who the product is genuinely for.
That fourth test is why the large platform suites usually sit lower here than their market share would suggest. Not on feature counts, and not on a score we invented.
Which production planning tools publish their pricing?
2 of the 12, with the pricing model each one publishes:
Just Plan It: Per planner per month, published.
MRPeasy: Per user per month, published; tiered by module.
The other 10 quote per organisation.
Is there a free production planning tool?
None of the tools here offer a usable free tier, which is itself a signal about who this category is sold to.
Which production planning tools are open source?
frepple. Open source means you can read what the product does with your data and run it yourself. It does not mean the hosted edition is free.
Which production planning tools can you host yourself?
frepple, Rob-Ex. The other 10 are sold as a hosted service only, which means the question of where your data sits is answered by the vendor, not by you.
Where are these production planning vendors established?
In 8 countries across 3 regions: Europe 10, North America 1, Asia-Pacific 1.
frepple is established in Belgium.
Just Plan It is established in Germany.
MRPeasy is established in Estonia.
PlanetTogether is established in the United States.
Rob-Ex is established in Denmark.
Asprova is established in Japan.
ORSOFT is established in Germany.
flexis is established in Germany.
Siemens Opcenter APS is established in Germany.
DELMIA Ortems is established in France.
DELMIA Quintiq is established in the Netherlands.
SAP PP/DS is established in Germany.
Establishment decides whose courts and whose disclosure laws apply, which is a separate question from where the data is hosted.
What should you use instead of frepple?
Just Plan It and MRPeasy are the next two on this page.
Just Plan It is for a make-to-order job shop replacing a whiteboard or a spreadsheet; MRPeasy is for a small manufacturer with no ERP that needs stock and schedule together. All 12 are ranked here with what each one is bad at.
Who should not buy frepple?
A plant with no in-house IT or planning expertise. Modelling and hosting are your problem in the community edition.
Do you get paid for these rankings?
Vendors can pay for visibility, which affects where and how prominently a product appears. It does not change a word of what the entry says about that product, including the criticism, and it cannot buy inclusion for something that does not belong in the category.
We take no commission when you click through to a vendor and we do not know whether you bought anything. The full arrangement is on our disclosure page.
How often is this production planning guide updated?
Whenever the facts move: a price change, an acquisition, a product that stops being maintained. The published and updated dates at the top of the page are real, and a review means someone went back to the vendor documentation rather than bumping a date.
These 12 products are the ones we judged worth ranking in production planning. If yours belongs here and is missing, tell us what it does and who it is for, and we will look at it. Inclusion is an editorial call and it is not for sale — but nobody gets considered for a list they were never put in front of.
People land on this page with a shortlist to make, not a browsing habit to feed. That is a narrower audience than a banner reaches and a far more decided one.
Written by us, about you
We describe the product in our own words, say who it suits and say who it does not. A vendor never writes the entry and never sees it before it goes up.
A correction costs nothing
If a fact about your product is wrong here, tell us and we fix it, whether or not there is any money between us. That offer is older than any commercial arrangement on this site.
Placement is separate, and disclosed
Where a product sits in the ranking can be paid for, and the notice above the list says so on every page. What the entry says about the product is not for sale at any price.
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