These are not competing products. They answer different questions, and buying one while expecting the other is the most expensive mistake in this category — usually discovered nine months in, when someone asks for a forecast.
Project management software runs the doing. Drawings, requests for information, submittals, site records, subcontractor coordination, defects. It answers what needs doing, by whom, and has it been done?
Project controls software runs the knowing. Baselines, earned value, float, risk exposure, forecast completion and cost. It answers where does this end up, and what changes that?
Most contractors past a few million dollars of work need both. Almost nobody needs two of the same one.
| Project management | Project controls | |
|---|---|---|
| The question | What needs doing, and has it been done? | Where does this end up, and what changes that? |
| Built around | Documents, tasks, people, correspondence | Baselines, progress, cost, risk, forecasts |
| Time horizon | Today, this week | This month, this quarter, completion |
| Who lives in it | Site team, project managers, subcontractors | Commercial managers, controls staff, directors |
| Measures | Throughput — what moved, what is outstanding | Variance — plan against actual, and what it implies |
| The output | Coordination | A defensible position on time and cost |
| Where it strains | Asked to forecast completion or final cost | Asked to run day-to-day site coordination |
| Bought by | Operations | Commercial, finance, the board |
Scheduling tools — Primavera P6, Microsoft Project, Asta Powerproject — sit inside the controls column but only cover the time dimension of it. See P6 vs MS Project for that comparison.
Worth saying clearly, because the rest of this page is about a boundary and boundaries get read as criticism.
None of this is trivial and none of it is what a controls tool does.
The platform goes in, the site runs better, and eighteen months later the board asks for a forecast at completion. It is not there, because it was never that kind of tool. The usual conclusion is that "the software doesn't do what we were promised" — when what actually happened is that a category was mistaken for a feature.
A programme in P6 is one input to controls, not the whole of it. Cost, risk and the report still have to come from somewhere, and where they usually come from is a spreadsheet rebuilt by hand each month by the person who can least afford the time.
Controls software gets asked why subcontractors are not logging in daily. They are not supposed to. A controls tool is read by a handful of people who make decisions — measuring it by daily active users is measuring the wrong thing, and it leads to buying the tool with the busiest interface rather than the most accurate answer.
You can coordinate without a platform. You still cannot forecast without controls — and if the project is worth more than the business can absorb losing, the controls half is the one that protects you.
Both. Coordination stops working at the point where nobody holds the whole picture in their head, and controls becomes urgent at the same point for the same reason.
The most common position in Australian construction, and the spreadsheet is the part to fix. It is not a coordination problem — see Excel vs project controls software.
Controls, and quickly. That request is not about coordination and will not be satisfied by screenshots of a task board.
Aegis is project controls software, and only that. It does not manage drawings, it does not handle requests for information, it does not run your site diary, and it is not trying to become the place your subcontractors log in each morning.
It reads what your existing tools already export — a P6 .xer, an MS Project XML, Excel or CSV — and produces earned value against real cost, float and critical path movement, a quantified risk position against contingency, a probabilistic forecast, and a written monthly assessment where every rating traces back to the number that produced it.
It does not replace Procore, P6 or Microsoft Project. What it genuinely displaces is the home-made half of the job: the status spreadsheet, the cost tracker, the risk workbook and the monthly pack somebody assembles by hand. That is a real saving and an honest one.
Project management gets the work done; project controls tells you where the work ends up. One is organised around documents and tasks, the other around baselines, cost, risk and forecasts.
It is construction project management software and very good at it. It is not built as a controls engine — using it as one usually means someone is exporting into a spreadsheet to do earned value and forecasting by hand.
Depends what is going wrong. Work missed or built from superseded drawings is a coordination problem. Work getting done while nobody can say when it finishes is a controls problem, and no coordination platform will answer it.
No. Scheduling is one of four inputs. Earned value needs cost reconciled against progress, and a forecast needs risk quantified against contingency. P6 does the time dimension very well and leaves the other three to you.
No. It reads their exports. What it replaces is the spreadsheet layer people build around them.
Aegis reads the exports you already produce and turns them into earned value, a quantified risk position, a probabilistic forecast and a written assessment — with every rating traceable to the number behind it.
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