P3 vs. Primavera

Dear Paula,

P3 is short for Primavera Project Planner. In planning & scheduling context, it is but one.

P = Primavera
P = Project
P = Planner
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P+P+P = P3, I would suppose.

I don’t & won’t speak for other planners/schedulers, but having used other planning/scheduling programs before, for me Primavera (P3) is better.

Best regards,

Rey

Paula,

Unfortunately, you asked the question correctly; it is a question of P3 versus Primavera. Primavera sells a lot of schedule software packages. The mainstay is P3 (Primavera Project Planner.) This software has been around since the DOS days of 1975 and was re-written for Windows around 1995 (or there abounts.) Primavera also still sells SureTrak, a low-cost alternative. P3 is only written using 16-bit software but is still the ‘work horse’ of the construction industry.

Then Primavera came out with a 32-bit software named “Primavera for the Enterprise” somewhere around 2000. It wasn’t useable until Version 3.5 (somewhere around 2003.) Primavera Marketing went crazy over the next years (a condition that has not improved) and named this same software, “P3 Enterprise,” P3e, “P3 for Engineering and Construction,” “P3e/c,” “Project Manager,” “PM,” and now “Primavera Version 5,” and “P5.” If that wasn’t enough, for the past couple of years, they have been using the above names but at the same time insisting that the software product should only be called, “Primavera.” It appears that they want to be just like SAP, whose name of the company is also the name of the software.

Oh, just in case you followed all of that, Primavera also recently released the exact same P5 software in a low-cost version called “Contractor” that can only handle 700 activities. People didn’t like that so much, so Primavera is coming out with another exact copy of P5 with a limit of 2000 activities called “Contractor 1000.”

See – creativity isn’t always such a good think. I hope that this has cleared it all up now. They are all for sale at roughly the following prices (USA):

P3 - $4,000
SureTrak - $400
P5 - $4,000
Contractor - $400
Contractor 1000 - $1,000

P.S. – I do not work for Primavera or any of their affiliates, so your mileage may vary. Good luck!

Ronald,

Thank you for your such detailed response. That has cleared it all up for me.

Paula

Hello Ronald,

Is Contractor 1000 already available? Is the limit of activities the mainly diference btw Contractor and Contractor 1000?

Regards.

Marico,

Actually, I have just discovered that the final, official name of Contractor 1000 is actually, ’Contractor Deluxe.’ Those Primavera Marketers are really wizards at changing names! I bet that they legally change their childrens names every five years just to keep them current.

This is a P3 forum, so why not continue this Contractor discussion at http://www.planningplanet.com/forum/forum_post.asp?Cat=8&Top=24336?