GETSEVEN vs Primavera P6: an honest comparison for planners, consultants and PMOs

Who each product is for

Primavera P6 is the scheduling tool of record on large capital projects. Oracle sells it in two forms: P6 Professional, the Windows client a planner builds and maintains a schedule in, and P6 EPPM, the enterprise edition that adds a web client, portfolio views, Team Member statusing and a database shared by many users. Oracle also offers Oracle Primavera Cloud, a separate subscription product its own migration guide describes as offering enhancements over P6.

P6 is the right choice when the contract names it, when the organisation already runs an EPPM database that dozens of planners and hundreds of statusing users depend on, or when the weekly cycle relies on resource levelling, Global Change and Reflections.

GETSEVEN is for the planner, consultant, project team or PMO that needs the analysis around the schedule as much as the schedule itself: DCMA checks before a submission, a P80 date for a board, a windows analysis for an extension-of-time claim, an estimate that becomes the budget, and a monthly report that reads the live numbers. It runs in the browser, is priced per named seat in Australian dollars, and includes every module in every plan. It reads and writes P6’s XER format, so most of its users still have a P6 licence somewhere in the chain.

What Primavera P6 does that GETSEVEN does not

These are not gaps we intend to argue around. Each is a reason a team stays on P6, and each is true of GETSEVEN as shipped today.

• Resource levelling. P6 levels resources across one or many projects, forward or backward, with priorities and a limit on how far an activity may be delayed within its float. GETSEVEN measures demand against capacity per resource and shows where people are over-allocated, but automatic resource levelling is not currently available in any module.
• Global Change. P6’s if-then-else engine applies a rule to every activity, resource or expense a filter selects. GETSEVEN has multi-select bulk delete, move and copy, fill down, formula columns and a strict Excel round trip, but no rule-based bulk-edit engine.
• Reflections. In P6 you copy a project as a reflection, work on it, then merge selected activities back into the source. GETSEVEN’s what-if sandbox is also non-destructive, and a scenario can be saved, turned into a baseline or promoted to a new project, but there is no activity-by-activity merge back into the live schedule.
• The wider Oracle ecosystem. A P6 EPPM licence includes P6 Professional, Team Member Web, Team Member for iOS and Android and email statusing, so field staff can status their own activities. Around it sit Primavera Risk Analysis, P6 Analytics, Unifier, Aconex and Oracle Primavera Cloud, and a web services layer that integrators build against. GETSEVEN has no mobile app, no timesheet or team-member statusing (progress is entered by the planner, imported from a file or derived from the plan), and no documented public integration API.
• Decades of training and certified users. Primavera has been scheduling capital projects since the 1980s and Oracle has owned it since 2008. Your next planner will arrive knowing P6, there are courses and trainers in every city, and a tribunal has seen P6 output before. Nobody holds a GETSEVEN certificate.
• The contract that names P6. Many owner scheduling specifications require the programme to be prepared in P6 and submitted as XER. If yours does, you need P6, and GETSEVEN can only sit beside it.
• EPPM portfolio depth. P6 EPPM carries an enterprise project structure and an organisational breakdown structure with security profiles, portfolio dashboards, activity-code dictionaries, user-defined fields and a multi-user database with check-in and check-out. GETSEVEN has an EPS tree, five roles with per-module permissions and a multi-project workspace, but its portfolio layer is a register with branch-level counts and a read-only timeline, not a cross-project CPM roll-up. It has no activity-code dictionaries, and a plain custom column is a scratch value that is not saved (formula columns are computed).

Smaller things worth knowing before a demo: float on a schedule that mixes calendars is approximated on the project default calendar; the Monte Carlo samples activities independently, with no correlation between them; DCMA results are held in the browser rather than the database, so there is no run history; and binary .mpp files are not readable, only MS Project XML.

What GETSEVEN includes that P6 licenses separately or leaves to other tools

In the P6 world, most of what follows is a second product, a partner tool or a spreadsheet. In GETSEVEN each one reads the same project model the Gantt edits, and every plan includes every module.

• Monte Carlo schedule risk. Oracle sells quantitative schedule risk as Primavera Risk Analysis, a separate product, and within Oracle Primavera Cloud. GETSEVEN’s Monte Carlo re-runs its own CPM engine every iteration over three-point durations and register risks, reports a criticality index per activity, and applies a chosen confidence level back as a rescheduled plan.
• DCMA 14-point assessment. P6 has no built-in 14-point check; teams buy a schedule-quality tool or keep a spreadsheet of filters. GETSEVEN runs all fourteen on the live schedule or on an uploaded XER without importing it, with editable thresholds and a list of offending activities per check. Our DCMA explainer walks through each metric.
• Forensic delay analysis. Delay Digger compares your own saved updates window by window, splits finish movement into progress and revision with the AACE 29R-03 half-step method, verifies but-for impact with a reschedule, runs the four recognised methods from its Methods tab, and keeps a delay-events register in the database.
• Critical-path crash. An exact minimum cut over the critical sub-network gives the cheapest way to buy each day, the full time-cost curve, the least-cost point and the date the critical path moves to another chain.
• AACE-class estimating. Class 5 to Class 1 estimates with rate build-ups, the full markup ladder, revisions, an approval that locks, and a push that turns line items into cost assignments without duplicating them on a second run.
• Cost and earned value. A cost dashboard that reconciles cost assignments, resource assignments and activity fixed cost without double-counting, with earned value measured from activity progress against the baselined window. It is an EV measurement, not a full ANSI/EIA-748 system, and commitments are not tracked.
• 4D planning. Link an IFC model element by element to the live activities, scrub the timeline, colour by build status or baseline slip, and record the playback as a video. IFC is the only model format.
• Reports. A block document for the monthly pack in which the S-curve, the cost table, the risk matrix and the DCMA scorecard are bound to the modules that hold them and re-read at the report’s own status date. Issuing freezes a numbered revision with its PDF.
• An AI builder with an approval gate. From a scope statement the assistant drafts the WBS, activities with production-rate durations, logic, resource and cost assignments and risks, and AI Check reviews the module you are in against the whole project. Nothing is written until you approve it. It runs on your own model-provider key and sends project data to that provider, so an administrator can hide it role by role.

Line of Balance, S-curves built from dates alone, time-phasing, a resource capacity histogram, a document register with share links and the Excel round trip are in the same licence.

Using both together

The common pattern is not a switch but a pairing: P6 stays the contractual system of record and GETSEVEN does the analysis and reporting around it.

The XER round trip

When you import an XER, GETSEVEN carries activities, relationships with leads and lags, the WBS, all eight constraint types, calendars including shift and holiday calendars, resources and rates, cost assignments, financial periods and the data date, and it keeps the verbatim source file on the project record. An export is reconstructed from that file with your changes applied: dates, actuals, progress, status, remaining duration, constraints, relationship type and lag including links you added or removed, and the data date. Every table the application does not model, user-defined fields, cost accounts and financial periods among them, goes back byte for byte, so P6 re-opens the file with only the intended changes. The path is regression-tested against real Primavera P6 exports, and the XER explainer describes the format itself.

Analysis without importing

DCMA Checks, Delay Digger and Time-Phase all read an uploaded XER directly, so you can assess a contractor’s monthly submission, compare it with last month’s, or phase its cost without bringing it into your workspace. The schedule of record never leaves P6.

Feature comparison

Read strictly. Yes means the product does it as shipped. Via add-on or partner means it is done in that product’s ecosystem with a separately licensed Oracle product or a third-party tool. Not available means it does not exist in the product. P6 entries cover P6 Professional and P6 EPPM as Oracle documents them.

How the pricing models differ

GETSEVEN

One price per named user per month, in Australian dollars, billed annually, with every module in every plan:

• Solo: $175 per user per month, billed as $2,100 a year, one seat.
• Team: $165 per user per month, billed as $1,980 a year per seat, for 3 to 25 people with a three-seat minimum. Adds the shared library, roles and per-module permissions.
• Enterprise: from $249 per user per month, billed annually on invoice with purchase orders and net-30 terms, 25-seat minimum. Adds SAML or OIDC single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, an audit log of administrative actions and the option of your own database server.

There is no monthly option, no separate risk, DCMA or delay-analysis licence, and nothing to buy for a second module. Project data can be exported to XER, MSPDI or Excel at any time, so nothing is locked in. The pricing page has the full plan table.

Primavera P6

Oracle’s licensing documentation distinguishes the on-premises P6 programs, P6 Professional and P6 EPPM, from the P6 EPPM Cloud Service. The on-premises programs follow Oracle’s usual model: a licence per application user, with annual software update licence and support paid on top, which is what keeps you on supported releases. The cloud service is a subscription. In either case, quantitative schedule risk (Primavera Risk Analysis), analytics (P6 Analytics) and automated access by users who reach P6 only through third-party integrations (the P6 Peripheral Access licence) are separate line items, and Oracle Primavera Cloud is its own subscription.

We have not quoted a P6 price. The only figures we found were on reseller and consultancy pages, not on an Oracle page or Oracle’s published price list, and a reseller figure is not what you will pay. Ask Oracle or a partner for a quote that covers the edition, the support or subscription term, and any risk or analytics products you need, then compare it with a seat count here.

Who should not switch

• Your contract or your client’s scheduling specification names P6 and requires XER submissions produced by it. Keep P6, and add GETSEVEN only if the analysis is worth a second tool.
• You level resources as part of the weekly cycle. GETSEVEN will show you the over-allocation and leave it to you to resolve.
• Your planners live in Global Change and Reflections.
• Field staff status their own activities through Team Member or a mobile app.
• Integrators push and pull P6 data through its web services, and you need the same from any replacement.
• You need EPPM’s organisational breakdown structure, security profiles and portfolio dashboards across hundreds of projects.
• Your risk analysis depends on correlated drivers. GETSEVEN’s simulation samples activities independently.

Conversely, a consultant, a small team or a PMO that buys P6 Professional for the schedule and then reaches for separate tools for risk, DCMA, delay analysis and reporting is the case GETSEVEN was built for.

How an evaluation or a migration works

There is no self-serve free trial. The evaluation is a demo on your own schedule: book a time and send an XER beforehand. We import it, run the DCMA 14-point assessment on it and open it on the call, so you judge the round trip and the analysis on a schedule you know rather than on a sample.

Solo and Team are self-service: register, pay by card, billed annually, and start. Enterprise is sales-led, with the tier, seat count and rollout agreed before the workspace is set up, and the security conversation about single sign-on, SCIM and your own database server had with a person rather than a checkout page.

A migration is an import. Each project comes across from its XER with logic, WBS, constraints, calendars, resources, costs and data date intact, and you capture a baseline once it is open. Keep P6 for as long as a contract needs it, and export to XER when a submission is due. Anything you build in GETSEVEN can leave it the same way, and that stays true after a subscription ends.

Questions