Features

Features

Open Planner Studio is a complete construction-planning application. Its core planning, editing, reporting and project-file workflows are available in both the desktop app and browser. Platform-specific features and limitations are called out below, including the desktop-only MCP bridge and automatic updates.

Scheduling

• Critical Path Method (CPM) — automatic calculation of early/late start and finish dates, total and free float, and the critical path.
• Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) — a hierarchical task structure with collapsible summary tasks.
• Relations — Finish-Start, Start-Start, Finish-Finish and Start-Finish dependencies, each with a lag or lead in work days; relations can attach to milestones as well as ordinary tasks (not to summary tasks, which are flagged as no effect if a loaded file already has one).
• Constraints — start/finish constraints (such as Start No Earlier Than) for permits, deliveries and fixed dates.
• Milestones — start, finish and mandatory inspection milestones.
• Baselines & progress — capture baselines and track progress against them.

Calendars

• Work calendars — configurable working days, start and finish times, breaks, holidays, the construction industry's collective holiday, and inspection moments.
• Resource calendars — per-resource availability.
• Hour-level planning — day- and hour-based task durations, with minute-accurate calendar resolution; mixed day/hour schedules are an explicit user choice.

Resources

• Resource libraries — resources and calendars live in a shared, organization-wide library that multiple projects draw from; a project shows what it actually uses, with per-item provenance (from the library, project-only, or orphaned) and a library/project view toggle. See Resource libraries in the manual.
• Assignments — assign resources to tasks, with time-phased max-units availability.
• Histogram & leveling — a resource histogram plus automatic leveling options, including leveling priority per task and leveling within slack only.
• Occupancy overview — for multiple open projects drawing from the same library, a cross-document view of where each resource is booked and where the combined booking exceeds company capacity. See Occupancy overview in the manual.

Views & editing

• Interactive Gantt chart — a Canvas timeline paired with an accessible DOM task grid: drag & drop (including reordering or reparenting tasks by dragging their row vertically), zoom, a compressed working-days axis, week numbers and day names in the header, dependency arrows and hit-testing.
• Table view — a spreadsheet-style editor over the same model: one click selects a cell; use F2, Enter or typing to edit it. Arrow keys and Tab/Shift+Tab navigate cells, while Alt+Left and Alt+Right outdent and indent tasks.
• Context menus — right-click tasks for quick actions.
• Office-style ribbon — tabs for Start, Planning, Resources, View, Settings, Table, IFC, Report and (once enabled) AI, plus a Backstage file menu. Relation actions are available from the task groups instead of a separate Relations tab.
• Multi-document — work on several projects at once and switch between them.

IFC & interoperability

• IFC 4.3 native — projects are saved and opened as IFC (buildingSMART); there is no separate project format.
• 4D BIM ready — link the schedule to an IFC building model.
• Import/export — CSV, Microsoft Project XML and Primavera P6 XML adapters, plus read-only opening of native Microsoft Project .mpp files (save the result as IFC).

AI assistant (MCP)

• Model Context Protocol server — turn on AI mode and the app becomes an MCP server: an AI assistant connects to the project you have open, reads it and edits it live, with every change visible immediately and undoable with Ctrl+Z.
• Broad tool coverage — reading, scheduling, resource/calendar/baseline setup and document management, close to forty tools in total, all prefixed planner_.
• Batch scripting — an assistant can submit a whole sequence of steps as one script, which lands in your undo history as a single step.
• Safety controls — pause, read-only mode, automatic per-document backup before the first change, and an activity log of every call. The resource library and a few app-wide settings stay out of reach entirely.
• Desktop only, off by default — the bridge runs in the desktop shell; it can optionally start automatically with the app.

Reporting

• Live print preview — configurable report options right in the ribbon, including report font size, repeating the header on every page, and spreading the timeline over multiple pages; your choices are remembered between sessions.
• Vector PDF export — stays crisp at any zoom level and keeps text selectable and searchable, for Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and Persian text; Chinese/Japanese/Korean text is vector when a font extension is installed and otherwise falls back to a raster image.

Platform & experience

• Desktop & browser — Windows, macOS and Linux desktop builds (Tauri 2) plus a full-featured browser version.
• System-aware appearance — optionally follow the operating system or browser light/dark colour scheme, including live changes while the app remains open; High Contrast stays an explicit choice.
• Auto-save & crash recovery — recovery snapshots are written about every ten seconds and can restore open work after an unexpected close. For an existing saved IFC file, you can separately opt in to writing changed work back to that same file on the same interval.
• Automatic updates — the desktop app updates itself where the install type supports it, and shows a one-off "you've just been updated" summary the first time you reopen it afterwards.
• 14 languages — Nederlands, English, Français, Deutsch, Español, 中文, Italiano, Português, Polski, Türkçe, العربية, 日本語, 한국어 and فارسی, including right-to-left layout for Arabic and Persian. The in-app manual has its own language picker, independent of the interface language, with a warning when a translation is behind the English source.
• Extensible — a frontend extension system for importers, ribbon buttons, PDF fonts and more. See Extensions Authoring.