A Primavera P6 alternative the whole project team can open

Why teams look for a P6 alternative

The reasons we hear are consistent. The schedule lives on one planner's machine. Site engineers send progress by spreadsheet and the planner types it in. The sponsor sees a PDF that is a week old. Risk analysis needs another product, and so does a dashboard. None of that is a fault in the scheduling engine; it is the cost of a specialist desktop tool.

Critova takes the opposite trade. The engine is a real CPM, and everyone on the project can open it: planners edit the schedule, contributors update progress from a phone, and sponsors read dashboards built on the same numbers.

What the scheduling engine does

• Forward and backward pass over working-day calendars, with holidays per country.
• Finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish and start-to-finish links, with positive and negative lags.
• Date constraints, total float, free float and the longest path.
• Unlimited baselines and a Gantt with the data-date line.
• The fourteen DCMA checks, with every failing activity listed.
• Earned value and earned schedule: CPI, SPI, SPI(t), the EAC family and TCPI.
• Monte Carlo schedule risk with triangular or PERT durations, risk events, Latin Hypercube sampling and a fixed seed.

Every result states its method, so a reviewer can check it. See scheduling, cost and earned value and risk.

Critova and Primavera P6 side by side

Bringing a schedule from P6

Export the project from P6 as XER or P6 XML and drop the file into Critova. The preview shows what was read and any warnings before a project is created. Activities, WBS, relationships with their lags, and calendars come across, and the critical path is recalculated on import.

Check three things after import: the finish date against P6, the number of critical activities, and any activity the preview flagged. Small differences usually come from calendar exceptions or from scheduling options such as retained logic.

When to keep P6

Keep P6 if your contract requires native XER submissions every period, if you level resources across a large programme, or if your schedules run to hundreds of thousands of activities. Critova exports to Excel and CSV, not to XER, and resource leveling is on the roadmap, not in the product.

Many teams run both for a while: the contract schedule stays in P6, and Critova carries the internal projects, the portfolio view and the reporting that the rest of the company reads.

Microsoft, Project Online, Microsoft Project, Planner, Oracle, Primavera and P6 are trademarks of their owners. Critova is an independent product and is not affiliated with them.