5 best strategic planning tools for tech teams

So you’re trying to put your strategic plan together to present to the board. That’s already a complex task, and it’s made more so when stakeholder calendars are booked solid and data is siloed in different tools and databases. 

Fortunately, the right strategic planning tools can make life a lot easier. You see, the bulk of strategic planning happens before you ever get in a meeting room. That’s why you need an integrated tech stack so you can pull data from various sources, stay organized, and gather insights asynchronously to discuss with the team in real time. 

In this post, we’ll dissect five of the best strategic planning tools and explain how they work, what they offer, and who they’re suitable for. 

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5 strategic planning tools 

Let’s take a look at five strategic planning tools to suit a variety of use cases. 

1. Switchboard

Switchboard is an online team collaboration tool that lets you work side by side with multiple stakeholders to define strategic goals and priorities. It’s also a powerful project collaboration tool you can use to implement and measure initiatives on long-running projects. 

In Switchboard, you can prepare for and facilitate your strategic planning session by setting up interactive rooms to share ideas and materials, gather feedback, and make decisions asynchronously or in real time. The expansive canvas in each room gives you space to visually organize and share applications, files, and documents, like your SWOT analysis, mission statement, vision statement, or long-term goals. You can work in the room by yourself or flip on video when you meet for planning sessions. 

Switchboard is the best platform for sharing and discussing work as all your scenario planning, strategic alignment, and collaboration tools work inside the room with no need for integrations. Whether you're planning strategic initiatives, tracking metrics, or updating action plans, Switchboard brings people, applications, and conversations together in one place. The result? You can get more done before the strategic planning session, have a more productive meeting, and immediately start translating plans into action—all without leaving the room. 

Key features 

• Expansive canvas to add browser-based apps, websites, PDFs, and images
• Switchboard AI, which can answer questions and generate summaries of room activity
• Multiplayer browsers that support any website or web-based application, so you can work side-by-side on anything—without sharing screens 
• Room recording so people can catch up on meetings or leave video notes for each other 
• Sections to organize content
• Presentation mode, to get people to focus on your view
• Built-in whiteboard and whiteboarding tools including sticky notes, shapes, notepads
• Apps including timer, voting, polls, icebreaker generator, and open questions
• Comment threads on any image, video, or sticky note in a room so you can communicate in context 
• Audio and video conferencing 
• In-room chat
• In-app support
• Up to 200 rooms for projects, meetings, and more
• Up to 500 members and unlimited meeting guests
• Up to 300 GB storage per workspace
• App for macOS

Pricing 

• Free: Includes limited features like free online meeting tools, rooms, and members (ideal for individuals and very small businesses).
• Pro: $15 member/month for up to 200 rooms and 500 members; plus Switchboard AI and additional storage.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing.

When you sign up for free, you get access to all Pro features during your trial. After that, you can choose to keep your Pro plan or move to the free plan with limited features, rooms, and members. 

Best for 

Switchboard is ideal for highly collaborative teams that want to plan and collaborate more efficiently from one central space and have fewer, but more productive, meetings. 

2. Cascade

‍Cascade centralizes strategy planning and execution by pulling siloed metrics, initiatives, and investments together from multiple tools and sources. This saves time on manual data collection and provides a single source of truth that you can use to connect business data to initiatives, track and visualize performance, and accelerate decision-making. Cascade also lets you break initiatives down into milestones, track and report on KPIS, and demonstrate how the team’s work connects to strategic goals. 

Key features 

• Metrics connections and library 
• Alignment maps 
• Strategic plans and relationships 
• Timeline view 
• Risk visualizations  
• Out-of-the-box or custom strategic planning frameworks 
• Custom dashboards and reports 
• Integrations with popular workflow, collaboration, and data management tools 

Pricing 

• Free: Unlimited plans and metrics for up to 4 users. 
• Essentials: Custom priced 
• Enterprise+: Custom priced 

Best for 

Cascade is ideal for strategic planners, executives, and project managers who need to connect strategy to tangible outcomes. The free plan has no time limit, so small teams can try it out for as long as they need before deciding if it’s suitable for them. 

3. Trello

Trello is a project management tool that allows you to break your strategic plan down into specific deliverables by visually organizing component tasks into workflows. This makes it easy to explain the steps and actions each department will take to reach your business goals. Dashboard views also let you track progress toward strategic objectives and see how much of the team’s day-to-day work contributes to achieving them. This lets you adjust workloads, priorities, or timelines as necessary to stay on track. 

Key features 

• Unlimited boards and workspace commands 
• Unlimited cards to visually represent tasks and ideas  
• Workflows for different purposes 
• Task assignee and due dates 
• Calendar, timeline, table, dashboard, and map views (Premium and above) 
• Unlimited file storage (250 MB per file on paid plans) 
• Custom backgrounds and stickers 
• Unlimited activity log 
• Workspace templates 
• Advanced checklists 
• Saved searches 
• Simple Data export 
• Invite guests to multiple boards (on Enterprise) 
• Unlimited integrations per board 
• iOS and Android mobile app 

Pricing 

• Free: Limited features for individuals or teams 
• Standard: $5/month per user
• Premium: $10/month per user 
• Enterprise: $17.50/month per user, starting at 50 users. Discounts available for teams of 300+ users. 

Best for 

Trello is ideal for teams of any size that need a project management tool to visualize, organize, and track the steps they’ll need to take to achieve their strategic objectives.  

4. Hive

‍Hive is a project management platform that lets you define objectives, set milestones, and assign individual and team tasks and goals. Then, you can monitor and visualize progress against benchmarks in a centralized dashboard and pull data from other systems for reporting. Its strategic planning template also lets you map out the planning process and break projects into phases, so you can clearly see each step along the way to achieving your organizational goals.  

Key features 

• Templates, including projects and strategic planning template 
• Wide range of project views, from Kanbans to Gantt charts to calendars 
• Workflows, pages, and forms  
• Task assignation and tracking, with due dates, dependencies, and prioritization  
• Goal tracking 
• Time tracking and timesheets 
• Project mapping 
• Dashboards and reporting 
• Video conferencing 
• AI assistant (paid plans) 

Pricing 

• Free for up to 10 users with limited features and functionality 
• Strater: $5/month per user 
• Teams: $12/month per user 
• Enterprise: Custom priced 

Best for 

Leaders, strategic planners, and project managers who need visibility over project workflows and tasks to monitor alignment with strategic plans.

5. ClearPoint Strategy

‍ClearPoint Strategy is an AI-driven strategic planning platform that’s designed to let you develop data-driven, industry-specific plans and turn them into actionable results. Use it to plan, align goals, and track progress and KPIs in real time. You can also assign tasks, collaborate with team members, and pull data from a variety of sources to deliver understandable insights to decision makers. 

Key features  

• Strategy maps, strategic planning models, and frameworks 
• Cascade planning 
• Progress, OKR (objectives and key results), and KPI tracking 
• Workflows
• Workspaces 
• MS Teams integration with push notifications 
• @mentions and chat for collaborative discussions 
• Automated notifications and reminders 
• Customizable dashboards, data visualizations, and reports 
• Integration with Excel and other data sources 

Pricing 

Custom priced according to team size. 

Best for 

ClearPoint Strategy is ideal for mid-market to enterprise organizations that want a powerful, AI-driven tool to create and execute industry-specific strategic plans that fit their business model.  

How do I choose a planning tool?  

Here are a few things to think about when choosing a strategic planning tool:

• Integrates with your other tools so you can reduce unproductive context switching and pull siloed data from a variety of sources 
• Collaboration and project management features so you can gather insights from stakeholders, track team progress, and communicate without leaving the platform   
• AI and automations to surface hidden insights and streamline repetitive or manual tasks 
• Customizable data visualization, dashboards, and reporting so you–and decision-makers–can easily present and understand complex data  
• Intuitive, user-friendly interface that’s easy to navigate, even for non-technical stakeholders 
• Fits your budget so it’s scalable as your team grows 
• Offers support and training during onboarding and beyond 

Strategic planning tools: Join the dots between planning and strategy execution

When it comes to strategic planning, the right tools can streamline the process of gathering and analyzing insights by connecting your data sources, tools, and teams. This saves time, gives you visibility across your organization, and lets you plan, execute, and track strategy all in one place. 

A lot of strategic planning happens before you ever get in a meeting room. That means you need an integrated–but not bloated–tech stack so you can stay organized and collaborate with your teams and stakeholders—in and in between meetings. 

Some tools that fit the bill include Cascade, ClearPoint Strategy, Hive, and Trello. But when you use Switchboard as the base of your tech stack, there’s no need to choose between it and other strategic planning tools: they all work inside your dedicated planning rooms. In Switchboard, you can work in real time or asynchronously, connect with stakeholders, and visualize data in any tool you choose—all in one central space. Best of all, everything stays right where you left it, so you’re all set up for the strategic planning meeting.  

Plan and execute strategy faster. 
Switchboard unites all your tools, teams, and stakeholders in dedicated rooms—so everything you need is right at your fingertips. 
Sign up free