Free PRINCE2© software

PRINCE2 as a methodology to learn and apply early on can be quite daunting due to its complexity and weight of documentation. Quite a few companies have now tried to launch software to help users through this difficult period and almost all fail. The most common reasons being:

• Not free - usually free is said but trial is meant to trap users into having to buy the products in question once all the data has been entered
• Too complex - users have to learn the software before they can learn the methodology
• Not Authentic - to avoid paying royalties organisations redraft guidance and redraw diagrams so they differ from what is actually in the PRINCE2 manual and therefore what is examined!

Only one piece of PRINCE2 software satisfies these tests by being completely free, simple to use and containing Authentic materials under licence and that is PROJECT in a box Community Edition. You can register and download it from this website and share it with whoever you want.

Other free Project Management software

There are many hundreds of free project management products on the market, to save you time hunting through them here are some of our favourites:

OpenProj - this fully featured personal planning and resource management system provides a real alternative to Microsoft Project for managing midsized projects.  Completely free you just need to register. It can take MS projects as an input and can be used in partnership with PROJECT in a box as an input source of task, time and resource to the reporting engine.

Afinion Free MS Project viewer - This is a great little package, it lets you view but not edit or print an MS Project .mpp file.  The perfect tool if you have purchased a single copy of MS Project but then can’t share your produced plans with your colleagues.

Gantt Project - This is an excellent free planning tool that covers all the basics, if you want to produce a simple gantt chart to communicate your project with resources, tasks, dates etc then this is perfect for you.

All these three free planning tools are file based and work perfectly with Community edition so you can get your PRINCE2 project up and running without spending anything.