Meisterplan gives you unlimited free users and then charges for every employee who can be scheduled — so your bill is set by how many people your organization has, not by how many people use the software. PPM Express is one flat published price for unlimited users and unlimited resources, live in 15 business days, on terms your procurement team can verify.
Meisterplan publishes its prices, and the model is unusual: users are free and unlimited, while the meter runs on planned resources — every employee or full-time equivalent that can be scheduled in the system, whether or not they ever log in. Meisterplan Pro lists at $19,200 a year for 100 resources, $80,700 for 500, and $147,540 for 1,000. Pro and Premium also carry a mandatory one-time onboarding fee of $6,300, $10,500 or $19,999. So a six-person PMO planning 1,000 engineers pays $147,540 a year for six people’s worth of usage.
Meisterplan is a focused, well-built capacity and scenario planner — that’s not the argument. The argument is the unit: pricing keyed to headcount rather than usage means the cost of planning your organization rises every time your organization grows, and there is nothing your PMO can do about it. PPM Express charges one flat price for the portfolio, however many people are in it.
*Meisterplan Pro list prices for the published resource packages, verified from meisterplan.com on 3 September 2026, on annual billing. Meisterplan licenses by planned resource — every employee or FTE that can be scheduled — not by user; users are free and unlimited on all editions. Figures exclude the mandatory one-time onboarding fee on Pro and Premium, listed at $6,300 (Essential), $10,500 (Standard) and $19,999 (Comprehensive), and exclude the monthly-billing surcharge. Packages above 1,000 resources are quote-only. Meisterplan Basic is cheaper but has no onboarding requirement and a narrower feature set; Premium at 1,000 resources lists at $162,365.
At 1,000 planned resources, Meisterplan Pro lists at $147,540 a year against $25,000 flat for PPM Express — plus $6,300 to $19,999 of mandatory onboarding in year one. Break-even is around 130 resources. Below that Meisterplan is genuinely cheaper, and we’d rather you knew that from us than found it out afterwards. Above it, the gap only widens as your organization hires.
Meisterplan does capacity and scenario planning well, and stops roughly there: portfolio financials, automated status reporting, delivery-tool integration and executive dashboards are either thin or absent, so most customers run it alongside something else. PPM Express covers the whole portfolio layer in one place — and prices it once, not per person in your org chart. The full capability comparison is on our PPM Express vs Meisterplan page.
What you’re leaving: a planner priced by how many people your company employs.
What you’re switching to: live resource utilization across the whole portfolio — with unlimited users and unlimited resources at no extra cost.
Executive dashboards and automated status reports, resource capacity planning, what-if scenario funding, AI access from Claude, ChatGPT, or Microsoft Copilot — included in one flat plan, with native connectors for Jira, Azure DevOps, Planner, and Project so delivery teams keep working where they work.
Also worth reading: PPM Express vs Meisterplan · the full Switch terms · switching from Celoxis
The Switch isn’t a leap — it’s a handover. During your Deferred Billing period you run PPM Express and Meisterplan side by side at no extra cost, rebuild your scenarios and capacity model at your own pace, and retire Meisterplan when your contract ends — at any point within 12 months of signing.
And to be clear about what the parallel period is: a handover, not a permanent operating model. PPM Express doesn’t maintain a native Meisterplan connector, so running both forever would mean maintaining resource and portfolio data in two places by hand. When the transition ends, PPM Express becomes the system of record and Meisterplan is retired.
These terms are identical for every qualified customer. Your procurement team can verify that no one got a better deal — because no one did. Try asking that of a quote-only vendor.
Within 15 business days of kickoff, your executive portfolio view is live: integrations connected, dashboard populated, first status report generated. We agree the checklist with you at kickoff, so “done” isn’t our opinion — it’s a list. Miss it, and you owe us nothing. Compare that with an implementation program measured in quarters.
Any time in the first 12 months: pro-rata refund of the unused months, and our engineers export all of your data in open formats, free. Not “here’s a CSV button, good luck” — assisted, complete, usable.
We can make the second promise because migration engineering is what this team did for a decade before building PPM Express. Moving portfolio data between systems is our core competency, in both directions. Vendors who make leaving impossible are telling you something about their product. So are we.
Connect read-only access — we populate a working PPM Express tenant with your actual projects and resources. Evaluate the real thing, not a demo built to impress you.
No negotiation cycle, no procurement marathon — the terms above are the deal. Billing waits for your Meisterplan renewal date; access doesn’t.
Fixed-fee implementation against an agreed checklist. Run PPM Express in parallel for as long as your deferral lasts — by the time Meisterplan calls about renewal, the switch already happened.
The Switch — including Deferred Billing — is for organizations retiring Meisterplan: you’re replacing an active contract and committing to end Meisterplan use within 12 months of signing. We’ll ask for a redacted renewal notice or invoice showing the vendor and end date; amounts can be blacked out. Starting from scratch with no incumbent? You don’t need the Switch — you need our standard published plans. The full terms, and switch offers for every other platform, are on the Switch page.
Deferred Billing, guarantees, migration and published pricing.
Because the meter isn’t your team — it’s your resource pool. Every employee or FTE that can be scheduled counts toward your package, so hiring anywhere in the organization moves you toward the next tier, even if nobody new ever opens Meisterplan. Teams don’t count, and people with past exit dates don’t, but active planned resources do. That is the single biggest reason organizations at 500-plus resources call us.
Portfolios, projects, tasks, dates, assignments, resources, roles and financial structure. We map your Meisterplan resource pool, roles and scenario data to a PPM Express portfolio model during implementation, and the go-live checklist includes verifying the migrated data with you. Migration engineering has been this team’s core work for over a decade.
You sign a 24-month agreement now at today’s locked price, and billing starts on your Meisterplan contract end date — up to 12 months out. Between signing and that date you have full product access at no charge, so you can run both systems in parallel and move at your own pace. In return, you commit to retiring Meisterplan within those 12 months — that commitment is what unlocks the Switch terms.
You pay nothing — the implementation fee and your first invoice are waived, and we return your data. The checklist is agreed in writing at kickoff, and the clock starts when we receive system access, so both sides know exactly what “day 15” means.
No. There is no resource meter and no user meter. $25,000 a year covers unlimited users and unlimited planned resources, so you can model your whole organization — every employee, every role, every FTE — without the number changing. That is the whole difference in one sentence: Meisterplan’s price is driven by a number you can’t control, ours isn’t.
You tell us. We refund the unused months pro-rata and our engineers export your complete data set in open formats, at no cost, with assistance until it’s usable in whatever comes next. It’s in the agreement, not a blog post.
At small resource counts, no — and we’d rather say so. Basic at 100 resources is $14,400 a year, well under our $25,000, and it carries no mandatory onboarding fee. Basic at 1,000 resources is $110,400. Break-even against Basic is around 175 resources; against Pro it’s around 130. Below those numbers Meisterplan is the cheaper licence; above them the gap grows every year, and Basic’s feature set is narrower than what most PMOs at that scale need.
The opposite — mid-contract is exactly when Deferred Billing matters. Evaluate now with your real data, sign at locked pricing, and let billing wait for your renewal date. Waiting until the renewal quarter is how organizations end up signing another term — and another resource package — under deadline pressure.
That’s not a configuration we sell. PPM Express has native connectors for Jira, Azure DevOps, Planner, Project, Smartsheet, and monday.com — Meisterplan isn’t one of them, so a permanent two-system setup would mean maintaining resource and portfolio data in both by hand. The parallel period exists to de-risk the handover. And if you conclude Meisterplan should stay, that’s what the year-one exit guarantee is for: pro-rata refund, free assisted export, no questions asked. If you’re comparing other published-price platforms at the same time, see the switch terms for Celoxis.
See your own portfolio and resource pool in PPM Express this week. If the numbers and the product don’t make the case on their own, keep what you have — the trial tenant deletes itself and nobody calls you twice.
Meisterplan list prices as published on meisterplan.com on 3 September 2026, annual billing, for the published resource packages; excludes the mandatory one-time onboarding fee on Pro and Premium and the monthly-billing surcharge. Packages above 1,000 resources are quote-only. Meisterplan is a trademark of itdesign GmbH; PPM Express is not affiliated with Meisterplan.
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