20 Best Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Tools in 2024

The best product lifecycle management (PLM) tools allow businesses to handle the management of all the steps and processes in a given product’s lifecycle. Typically, a product or service starts from initial design that continues through testing, planning, manufacturing, selling, support, updating, and eventually, to its obsolescence and withdrawal from the market.

Without PLM software, these are often difficult to do across geographic locations and branches, different product launch dates, different product models and updates, country-specific regulations, local branding, and various other factors. Choosing the right PLM tool is, therefore, essential in managing your product portfolio efficiently.

The best PLM platforms have many things in common, but you may be looking for specific industry applications or components that are in line with yours. So a list of the best PLM tools would be necessary to narrow down your choices. The following is a list of 20 of the best product lifecycle management (PLM) tools in 2022.

According to recent data and forecasts, the global product lifecycle management (PLM) software market by end-users will maintain its market share ratio through 2027. About 62% of end-users are in the industrial equipment industry, followed by the automotive (19%), electronics (12%), aerospace and defense (4%) industries, and the rest are from all other industries, as shown in the chart below:

These indicate a very stable market and a deep reliance on PLM software by virtually every company involved in manufacturing complex products.

This article presents a PLM tools comparison to help you decide which platforms best suit your requirements.

Best Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Tools in 2022

1. monday.com

monday.com is a cloud-based multifunctional and highly-configurable platform that can handle PLM well. Its main strength is its high degree of configurability to perform all other management aspects of your business, including project management, employee tracking, scheduling, CRM, video production, ad campaign management, and many more.

Its intuitive dashboards show you real-time events in your entire product lines’ development, sales, distribution, and planning. This makes decision-making more accurate and quicker, allowing you to adjust your product offerings and distribution as the market changes.

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monday.com offers a free trial. Its other plans include the Individual package, which is free, the Basic package at $8/seat/month, the Standard package at $10/seat/month, the Pro package at $16/seat/month, and the quote-based Enterprise package.

2. SAP PLM

SAP PLM is a PLM application that is part of the SAP Business Suite, and its main strength is its tight integration with all other apps in this suite, making it part of a complete solution for your business.

It has a module that does bill of materials (BOM) development for all your product raw materials and parts, which are usually obtained from various suppliers.

Project portfolio management is useful for strategic planning and allows you to track all projects and their lifecycle management from the same interface and across your entire enterprise.

Program and project management are all integrated into one cohesive platform so you know what is going on in all projects and with all of your products.

A perennial contender for the top spot in any PLM tools list, SAP PLM allows for fast collaborative development of all your products. This is especially useful when you have teams of engineers and/or specialists who have their own experiences and valuable input in product design, including customer feedback.

Design and manufacturing synchronization is great to have in order to quickly test prototypes and launch product updates.

Product compliance with ISO standards and safety regulations is easy to do on this platform, and you can easily see if your products are meeting specifications. These include safety data sheets and dangerous goods management.

SAP PLM has a free trial and a quote-based plan depending on your needs.

3. Siemens Teamcenter PLM

Siemens Teamcenter PLM is an adaptable and modern PLM platform. One of its strengths is design and simulation management, which allows you to conduct digital experiments on your product configurations, decreasing prototyping costs, and accelerating product improvement.
You can centralize all document and content management, helpful for tracking changes and creating user manuals and knowledge-based articles about your products.

Design capabilities include a multi-CAD environment and tight integration with other commercial PLM platforms, allowing for much flexibility in data sharing. Siemens Teamcenter PLM’s document and content management helps create manuals, 2D and 3D specifications, and technical manuals in a centralized and easy manner across your organization.

BOM management and requirements management allow you to control your materials and parts, and supplier integration makes information and contacts easy to access. Additionally, service lifecycle management is also available to complement your product lifecycle management.

Manufacturing process management helps you manage product manufacturing cost and efficiency, including continuous improvements and change management. Quality management with CAPA (corrective and preventive actions) allows your company to implement quality control or improvements both virtually and physically.

Siemens Teamcenter PLM’s product cost management can be performed by setting your own conditions and constraints at all planning and implementation stages. Environmental compliance and product sustainability targets are incorporated into the platform, including compliance with regulatory laws worldwide and control of product material composition and sourcing.

As a complete platform, it includes schedule management, project collaboration, budgeting and financial planning, and asset management. It is easier to use and enables rapid deployment.

Siemens Teamcenter PLM has a free trial and a quote-based plan depending on your needs.

4. Autodesk Vault

Autodesk Vault is a powerful product data management (PDM) software application and is part of the Autodesk Vault family of products. It is tightly integrated with many other Autodesk products, including the industry-standard AutoCAD set of computer-aided design tools. Direct CAD integration allows for quick 3D design, modeling, and prototyping of products, the main strength of this family of products.

All data is centralized, enabling easy collaboration, concurrent design, and data standardization. Complementary, multi-site scalability allows more people to join and collaborate, facilitating more robust and exhaustive prototype and product testing.

Support for AnyCAD allows your engineers to directly use models from other CAD software in their native formats without the need for converting them, which may introduce incompatibilities and errors. Data reuse is also possible.

BOM management and raw material workflows allow you to track and control your project’s materials and supplies. If there are any changes in your product design or manufacturing specs, automated engineering change orders and revision control take care of those.

Overall project management and reporting are easy to implement and easy administration and configuration are features of the software, including visual data management for Inventor. Document management for non-CAD users is also very convenient. Product life cycle management is easy and intuitive due to the platform’s unified item and file lifecycle engine.

Autodesk Vault has a free trial and several packages—the Vault Workgroup at $335/year, the Vault Professional at $770/year, and the Vault Office at $195/year.

5. PTC Creo PLM

PTC Creo PLM is a PLM application that includes Creo View, part of the PTC suite of products. It has 3D CAD/CAM/CAE modeling capabilities as well as excellent rendering tools. Aside from these, it also has good 2d drawing and text and image editing tools for all your design and documentation needs. In addition, it has reliable compatibility with third-party design tools.

Its interface, commands, and menus are highly-customizable to facilitate your company’s workflows and processes.

BOM management helps manage your supplies and materials across engineering, supply chain, manufacturing, and sales and service areas, ensuring cost-effectiveness and efficiency. It also allows you to avoid duplicate parts and promote greater reuse of parts. The system also enables collaboration with your suppliers to save on time and cost.

Automated change and configuration management coordinates changes enterprise-wide, saving on time and tracking changes in your product development and life cycle, including complex product variants and configurations.

On the security side, the software gives peace of mind in keeping your data safe. Secure collaboration is performed by managing IP protection through eDRM (enterprise digital rights management).

Manufacturing process management integrates building and manufacturing from any location, with engineering and manufacturing having seamless communication. This enables collaborative design and maintenance of complex systems, also facilitated by its multi-CAD and product data management system

PTC Creo PLM has a free trial plan and the PTC Creo Parametric Plan, which comes for $2,200 per individual subscription.

6. Infor PLM Discrete

Infor PLM Discrete is a product life cycle management program that is designed for use in discrete manufacturing, or the production of finished products that can be counted or are countable.

It has product management tools and cost management tools, allowing for cost and time savings. Change management and revision management allow you to track product development changes and manufacturing adjustments.

Workflow and routine management and communication management tools also help keep everyone on the same page and aware of all steps.

Compatibility with CAD tools allows you to shape your products from design to modifications through subsequent variants and product models. Customizable interface and work areas make working with the software very convenient and intuitive.

Secure data storage is implemented using role-based security, which is essential to your company’s data security. ERP integration, along with seamless integration with data management and design tools, allows you to exchange data from enterprise sources across your whole organization.

Infor PLM Discrete has a free trial and a quote-based plan depending on your needs.

7. Infor PLM Optiva

Infor PLM Optiva or Infor PLM for Process (Optiva) is a cloud-based PLM that specifically caters to manufacturers in the food and beverage, chemical, and life science industries.

Project management and resource management are efficiently handled by this platform, and ERP integration allows you to access data throughout your company and to integrate these data with your PLM activities, saving time and money. Across your organization, communication management is implemented within this software platform, keeping everyone on the same page at all times.

Data management is done through the processes of data collection, analysis, visualization, and data storage and transfer. Workflow management, including BOM, scheduling, activities, etc. is important and, is, therefore, implemented as part of the software platform.

Product management and product formula management are crucial to the said industries as they produce mostly foodstuff, drugs, or important chemicals. Tracking product changes, manufacturing changes and regulatory compliance is essential for the survival of these industries, and Infor PLM Optiva is designed specifically to do this.

Infor PLM Optiva has a free trial and a quote-based plan that is available from the vendor.

8. Oracle Agile PLM

Oracle Agile PLM, also known as Oracle Fusion Cloud PLM, is a cloud-based set of PLM software solutions for all industries. Portfolio management and product record management are very important tools of this platform, being the central tools of PLM.

Product lifecycle analytics—from design to testing, manufacturing, sales, and end of life—is always active and allows your company to efficiently plan product launches and final withdrawal from the market.

Pedigree and serialization management of your products and product variants help your company design product updates and diversify your portfolio with more offerings. Keeping track of these and managing them well is what the software excels at.

Product collaboration with remote teams is also improved. For example, engineering collaboration is made possible because of its cloud-based servers, so location becomes irrelevant. In addition, global product network optimization makes collaborations and product development more efficient and cost-effective. The software allows you to use mobile apps to access their cloud service, allowing for the flexibility of remote work using mobile devices,

Regulatory compliance and governance are also included in the software modules to make sure your products meet quality and regulatory standards. Customer needs management also gets customer feedback for incorporation into product improvement and development.

Oracle Agile PLM has a free trial and a quote-based plan available from the vendor.

9. PTC Windchill

PTC Windchill is PTC’s enterprise PLM software that is based on task-based apps.

Product management is handled by this platform rather superbly. As part of quality and reliability management, it is important to be able to handle product configuration and change management in order to obtain the best possible product and profit margins, and the software handles these quite well.

The platform can also handle supplier management and outsourcing management so your raw materials and product parts are always available or ready for ordering to prevent manufacturing delays.

Collaboration management among all your engineering and product development teams is handled smoothly, enabling your employees to work and collaborate locally or remotely.

Customer experience and feedback management is a very valuable tool that helps you improve your product design and introduce improvements or new models to the market based on customer preferences.

Data visualization and analysis are superb, allowing you to gather actionable insights for better product development. And to save your company money, cost estimation and analysis can be done at all stages of the product lifecycle.

PTC Windchill has a free trial and several packages—the PTC PLM Standard, the PTC PLM Premium, and the PTC PLM Enterprise, which are all quote-based.

10. Upchain PLM

Upchain PLM, now part of Autodesk Fusion 360 Manage, is a cloud-based PDM and PLM software platform that helps connect people, processes, and data. Built-in project management templates and CAD software plugins give you a head start in designing and customizing your own projects.

It has a very powerful 2D/3D CAD viewer with markup capabilities, which is the main strength of Autodesk, known for its industry-standard AutoCAD software. Cloud-based data and process management make product management more efficient and speed up product development.

Since there is a single data master source for all your product data, it is easy to compare new data for accuracy and for changes. You can set your own customized change management processes with full revision control.

BOM management helps you manage all your product’s material and parts requirements. Project dashboards with KPIs allow you to visually monitor what is going on in all your company activities in real time, saving time and money in reacting to potential problems.

API integrations allow you to use other platforms alongside Upchain PLM and to connect to your own ERP systems for data exchange and curation. With this software, it is easy to comply with ISO standards.

Upchain PLM has a free trial and several pricing packages—the Participant at $20/user/month, the Team at $50/user/month, and the Professional, which is quote-based.

11. Dassault ENOVIA

Dassault ENOVIA is a famous industrial PLM platform mainly used for large-scale engineering and manufacturing. It takes a centralized design management and product planning approach.

BOM management helps you track all materials and product parts, reducing waste and costs. Design management, including high-tech design management, helps in designing your products. Through collaborations, global product development can be done.

When changes need to be done to the product design or manufacturing process, product configuration and change management will address them by tracking changes and implementing new ones. Program management and product planning help you take control of all product development throughout the product lifecycle, ensuring efficiency, reducing waste costs, and resulting in better products. IP classification and management help you protect your intellectual property rights and data.

Quality and compliance checking can be done in the software platform and is automatically done following the parameters or constraints you set. Strategic customer relationships can be formed and used for customer feedback analysis for product and service improvements. Strategic supplier relationships are also easy to do with the tight system integration of ERP with Dassault ENOVIA and its BOM management module.

Dassault ENOVIA has a free trial and a quote-based plan based on your needs.

12. Roadmunk

Roadmunk is a product management tool that uses a visual approach to handle PLM called roadmapping.

To save time, Roadmunk offers ready-to-use templates that you can use right away or customize to your liking or branding strategies. Quick create and launch functionalities allow you to work immediately.

Collaboration options can be set within the platform and allow for team collaborations from any location safely and securely via private cloud. Filters, file permissions, multiple views, and sharing options can be set in the software and user assignments easily controlled, making administration easy to do and more efficient.

Milestone setting and task prioritization are important to use in your product planning, making it more efficient and clearer. Stakeholder feedback management is also part of this system, allowing for valuable input on how to improve your product, manufacturing process, or services. Two-way JIRA sync ensures that your data is always up to date, accurate, and in sync across all applications that you use, allowing for more accurate real-tine data processing and visualization.

Roadmunk has a free trial and several packages, which are the Starter Plan at $19 per month, the Business Plan at $49 per month, and the Professional Plan, which is quote-based.

13. Electronic Work Instructions

Electronic Work Instructions is software from the company Dozuki. It is a documentation and document standardization and optimization system, and not exactly enterprise software. Strictly, it is not a full PLM platform, but it has some of its functionalities.

The platform uses procedure templates as standard formats by default. Its interface is specifically designed for creating procedures.

Approval workflows enable more control by requiring changes to be reviewed and approved by managers and/or teams. Custom or automated approval workflows help track and approve updated versions of instructions.

The software allows you to include how-to videos on how to complete any procedure, using simple visual instructions instead of complex concepts. Videos can be embedded at any step to provide highly focused instruction.

It also allows you to control every change, enabling rollbacks to previous versions. Change history of any documented procedure may be viewed and commented on and can be reversed if mistakes or better options are found. Suggestions for process improvements can be directly input by workers within any step of work instruction.

The system can also automatically collect data such as work order numbers, quality check values, or supervisor sign-offs electronically. Data export from Dozuki or via API to your external systems can be done easily. The system also enables automated retraining of workers when standards or employee roles change, making skill tracking and monitoring of your entire workforce’s competency easy and accurate.

Electronic Work Instructions has a free trial and the Electronic Work Instructions plan costs $299/month.

14. Serena Business Manager

Serena Business Manager, now part of Micro Focus and known as Solutions Business Manager (SBM), is a process management and workflow automation platform for IT and development operations. Thus, it is more of an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform than strictly a PLM. It has also been applied to employee lifecycle management for HR management.

Serena Business Manager enables automated deployment and promotion of operations, saving time. Work order management controls task assignments to a group or group member and creates an audit trail of completion.

Regarding security vulnerabilities, the software helps track issues and enforce mitigating actions. Its computer security incident response plan coordinates responses to IT security issues.

Contractor management manages the lifecycle of contracts with your company which is enforceable and auditable and is entirely digital, eliminating manual work.

It also allows for the creation and maintenance of your own Intellectual Property database to securely and accurately store all IP-related information.

Issue and defect management is a good feature to have, enabling your company to manage product issues and defects with built-in incident and change requirements management, and with close integration with other commercial software specializing in this area. Test case management allows quality assurance teams to manage and perform test runs that are monitored with live status reports.

Serena Business Manager has a free trial plan, and details can be found on its official website.

15. Autodesk Fusion Lifecycle

Autodesk Fusion Lifecycle, now known as Fusion 360 Manage with Upchain, is an industry-standard, enterprise-level PLM system.

Its cloud-based data and process management capabilities help your company to do better and more efficient collaborations across your company and speed up product development across different teams, suppliers, and customers.

A centralized database means having a single source of truth for all your latest product data, eliminating inaccuracies and confusion as everyone sees the latest and most updated information and will use only that in their work.

Increased process integration allows you to do more with your data, and lets everyone access the data they need. Task management and quality management are also easy to do with this software, allowing for increased efficiency and quality control.

Product data management is centralized and easy to do, allowing for complete and accurate lifecycle control of all your products. The platform’s BOM view helps you plan out your raw materials and parts for manufacturing and distribution of your products.

Change management can help you track all revisions and changes done in the product design, manufacturing, or deployment and sales stages. This is also helpful if you want to issue new updates or new models of your products. Also, this will help you manage new product introductions.

Autodesk Fusion Lifecycle has a free trial. It sells the Pro plan for $75/user/month, the Enterprise plan at $150/user/month.

16. Deltek Costpoint

Deltek Costpoint is a PLM platform solution that specifically caters to managing project lifecycles for government contractors. It can also be used by small to large businesses due to its flexibility and scalability. The software supports government contractors’ compliance requirements, reducing issues and problems regarding non-compliance with government or regulatory agency regulations.

The platform offers comprehensive project and accounting management solutions, with centralized projects that can be managed easily.

You can control costs easily in this platform. It allows you to automate time and expense processing, and helps you create a clear audit trail. Costs, planning tools, and time and expense management are all conveniently integrated. For your manufacturing needs, end-to-end project management can be set to automate processes along with sending you real-time information.

Business Intelligence(BI) and Smart AI modules enable you to do quick and accurate forecasting and resource planning throughout the project lifecycle. There are dashboards and reports that come ready for use, but these are all customizable to whatever your requirements are. These are all done in real time and you can use drill down techniques for more details on what is happening in your business.

You can also perform centralized contract lifecycle management and use automated processes and app integration. On the manpower side, projects, costs and people are all managed through their talent management suite. Additionally, subcontractor management is essential for the most protection, so this feature is a very important aspect of your workflow. It also has a mobile and cloud-based app to help your workers work remotely.

Deltek Costpoint has a free trial package and several pricing tiers—the Front Office Suite at $30/user per month, the Back Office Suite at $30/user per month, the Full Suite at $46/user per month and the Accelerated Launch Package, which is quote-based.

17. ProdPad

ProdPad is a product management, roadmapping, and management platform. It has PLM features that are part of the system to include marketing and customer feedback and other features. integration with your CRM platform allows quick data imports to create reports and perform data analysis. Collaboration within teams in your company is facilitated well by this platform.

Project and creator tracking include Intuitive dashboards that allow monitoring of projects and key metrics. Analytics and reporting capabilities allow real-time accurate and data-driven decision-making. Tracking and solving product backlogs are easy to do and help minimize losses due to inventory or supply problems.

The platform allows you to create user stories to further enhance your product line documentation and advertising. Commenting can be done at any stage to generate more ideas and improvements. Mockups for trial runs are easy to do, and they save time and money by testing first. Automated notifications and email digests are convenient ways to keep everyone informed of developments or announcements. Drag and drop customization of user interfaces and software modules gives ease of use to your users.

Idea ranking for planning is a great tool as you map out your future. Roadmapping allows you to generate long-term plans for your entire product and service lines, giving you more long-term prospects. Of course, these plans can be changed as the situation warrants, allowing your business more flexibility.

ProdPad has a free trial and four different packages—the Basic Plan at $39 per month, the Plus Plan at $59 per month, the Premium Plan at $299 per month and the Unlimited Plan at $2499 per month.

18. Elbats MES

Elbats MES is a platform that combines manufacturing execution software and product lifecycle management tools. It has an excellent set of management software applications, including its own PLM modules.

Electronic document management (EDM) handles all aspects of documentation and data handling related to company documents. Your products’ complete data history is made available by this platform, allowing you to quickly track changes and review issues.

Sales and purchasing management are integrated with research and development management throughout the products’ life cycle, allowing you to make better sales and marketing decisions and action plans. Repair is also integral to the product lifecycle, so repair management is also part of these functionalities.

The platform allows rapid process development and full work-in-process coordination for production and quality management. On the manufacturing side, planning, tracking, and monitoring process completion ensure efficient product manufacturing and testing. It starts with raw material monitoring and grading and critical component and source tracking, followed by predictive maintenance management and delivery control and management.

Elbats MES has a free trial and a quote-based plan based on your requirements.

19. Lectra Fashion PLM

Lectra Fashion PLM, also known as Kubix Link, is a PLM platform that is quite unique in that it specifically caters to the fashion industry. This industry has clothes design, clothes making, clothes manufacturing, and clothes selling as their main activities. These are highly-specialized activities, and Lectra Fashion PLM handles them well.

Their platform has a centralized server that contains the official company data source, so every stakeholder in your company and supply chain will have access to the most up-to-date and common source. Your company’s product data management and product development process are made easier with this centralized data scheme.

Collection planning for fashion lines is easy with this software, from materials sourcing to materials development, which would all vary depending on the season and fashion themes. Pre-production development involves everything before actual manufacturing and sales distribution, and this preparatory stage takes a lot of time and effort. Lectra takes care of these quite easily and automates tasks and processes that can be automated.

Specific to the fashion industry is critical handling of color management, color matching, and color schemes, which are essential to the quality of fashion designs. Creative design is also handled well in terms of data management of your fashion ideas.

Calendar management helps you plan out schedules of product manufacturing and product launch, which are typically during seasonal fashion shows with venue-driven schedules. The typical product life cycle lasts only for a specific season for collections, and typically longer for retail wear and RTW clothes and apparel.

Lectra Fashion PLM has a free trial and a quote-based plan based on your needs.

20. Uservoice

Uservoice is a product feedback management platform and not a full PLM suite by itself. UserVoice is unique in this list as it is a solution for product feedback for B2B SaaS products. It is not a full PLM, although it has some features in common with standard PLM software platforms.

It has good feedback analytics and customer satisfaction analytics functions which allow you to analyze all of your customer feedback in-depth and produce actionable insights. Feedback forums can be set up to encourage customers to give valuable feedback on your services and products, which will help your company improve them. Several types of moderation can be programmed into your own system processes.

These software functionalities can be embedded (embeddable widgets) directly in your web or mobile app, enabling easy access to customer feedback on any device and remotely. It also includes iOS & Android SDKs so you can develop your own extensions in these mobile phone platforms.

Security on this platform is pretty high with single sign on (SSO), SSL encryption, and domain aliasing as standard features.

Uservoice has a free trial and a quote-based plan based on your needs.

These are some of the best product lifecycle management (PLM) tools today.

PLM Platforms – Towards Smart Factories and Industry 4.0

The global manufacturing industry as a whole has so far been a mix of manual work and automation, but companies are increasingly pivoting towards a total digital transformation of their business. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, 4IR, or Industry 4.0 is the new digital-based framework for sustainable manufacturing in the future. The best product lifecycle management (PLM) tools are essential in this transformation.

Smart factories are the ideal manufacturing factories to be aspired for by manufacturers. The emerging technologies that support this development have been around for some time, but their integration as one whole unit of a digital-based framework have only recently increased.

These include the Internet of things (IoT), machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), big data analytics, digital simulations, digital twinning, blockchain technology, robotics, augmented reality, virtual reality, etc. Rapid advancements in these technologies only underscore the need to be digitally enabled as a company to welcome Industry 4.0.

By Nestor Gilbert

Nestor Gilbert is a senior B2B and SaaS analyst and a core contributor at FinancesOnline for over 5 years. With his experience in software development and extensive knowledge of SaaS management, he writes mostly about emerging B2B technologies and their impact on the current business landscape. However, he also provides in-depth reviews on a wide range of software solutions to help businesses find suitable options for them. Through his work, he aims to help companies develop a more tech-forward approach to their operations and overcome their SaaS-related challenges.