As of September 2026 there is no current Gartner Magic Quadrant for Project and Portfolio Management. Gartner published the last one on May 21, 2019, and then split the market it covered into two separate Magic Quadrants: Adaptive Project Management and Reporting (APMR), which is about how teams plan, deliver, and report on work, and Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), which is about how executives connect strategy to funded execution. SPM debuted in April 2021 and APMR followed in 2022. If you came here looking for a PPM Magic Quadrant to build a vendor shortlist from, one of those two reports is what you actually want, and which one depends entirely on the problem you are buying for.
That distinction is not a technicality. Buyers routinely download an APMR reprint, see a familiar collaborative work management vendor sitting in the Leaders quadrant, and conclude it will run their portfolio governance. It will not. The two reports describe genuinely different markets that happen to share a lot of vocabulary. This guide covers what happened to the PPM Magic Quadrant, what each successor report evaluates, how to tell which one applies to you, and how to read any Magic Quadrant without letting it make a decision it was never designed to make.
| Report | Status | What it evaluates | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Magic Quadrant for Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) | Retired. Last published May 21, 2019 | The old combined PPM market | Nobody. It no longer exists. |
| Magic Quadrant for Adaptive Project Management and Reporting (APMR) | Current. First published 2022 | Planning, delivering, and reporting on work across predictive, agile, and hybrid methods | Delivery organizations and PMOs reporting across many teams |
| Magic Quadrant for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) | Current. First published April 2021 | Connecting strategy to funded execution: investment scenarios, funding, capacity, benefits | Executive teams, enterprise PMOs, strategy functions |
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Key takeaways
- The Magic Quadrant for Project and Portfolio Management was last published on May 21, 2019. Gartner no longer produces it.
- It was replaced by two Magic Quadrants: Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), first published in April 2021, and Adaptive Project Management and Reporting (APMR), first published in 2022.
- In the 2026 editions, Planview and Planisware announced APMR Leader placements, and Planview announced an SPM Leader placement.
- APMR covers delivery and reporting at the team and project level. SPM covers strategy, funding, and portfolio decisions at the enterprise level.
- Read APMR if you are buying a tool for the people doing the work. Read SPM if you are buying a tool for the people deciding which work gets funded.
- A Magic Quadrant ranks vendors on Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. It contains no pricing, no fit assessment for your organization, and no shortlist.
PPM tools named in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrants
The PPM tools most often cited from Gartner's current research are the vendors that announced placements in the two successor reports. In the Adaptive Project Management and Reporting Magic Quadrant published in August 2026, Planview and Planisware each announced a Leader placement for a fifth consecutive year. In the Strategic Portfolio Management Magic Quadrant published on June 11, 2026, Planview announced a Leader placement for a fifth consecutive year as well.
The table collects the placements vendors have announced for the latest editions, plus the 2025 edition where a vendor's 2026 announcement was not found. It is built from vendor press releases, so it only shows vendors that chose to publicize their position. A vendor placed as a Niche Player rarely issues a release, which is why this is a starting point for reading the licensed reprint and not a copy of the quadrant.
| Report | Edition | Vendor | Placement the vendor announced | Announced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| APMR | August 2026 | Planview | Leader, fifth consecutive year | August 6, 2026 |
| APMR | August 2026 | Planisware (Orchestra) | Leader, fifth consecutive year | August 4, 2026 |
| APMR | August 2026 | Wrike | Visionary, fourth consecutive year | August 6, 2026 |
| APMR | August 2026 | Triskell Software | Included for the first time | 2026 |
| APMR | September 2025 | monday.com | Leader, fourth consecutive year | September 23, 2025 |
| SPM | June 2026 | Planview | Leader, fifth consecutive year | June 16, 2026 |
| SPM | June 2026 | Shibumi | Included, sixth consecutive year | June 29, 2026 |
| SPM | June 2026 | Cora Systems | Included | June 2026 |
| SPM | 2025 | Broadcom (Clarity) | Leader, second consecutive year | August 11, 2025 |
| SPM | 2025 | Bizzdesign | Leader | 2025 |
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Two things stand out. Planview is the only vendor in this table to announce Leader placements in both 2026 reports, which fits a product line that spans delivery tools and enterprise portfolio planning. And the SPM field is small enough that being included is a signal on its own: a vendor in a nine-vendor quadrant has been judged a serious option for enterprise portfolio funding decisions. Placements are an input to a shortlist rather than the shortlist itself, and the named platforms are matched to buyer situations in best PPM software by buyer situation.
If one of these names is already on your shortlist, the linked vendor names in the table go to our buyer pages, which cover what each platform costs, who it suits and the alternatives worth pricing against it. A placement tells you a vendor is credible; it does not tell you whether your PMO needs an enterprise suite at all, and the cheapest way to find out is to score your own portfolio before the first demo.
Is there a Gartner Magic Quadrant for project portfolio management?
No. Gartner retired the Magic Quadrant for Project and Portfolio Management after the May 2019 edition. The research that replaced it is split across two Magic Quadrants, Adaptive Project Management and Reporting and Strategic Portfolio Management, plus companion Critical Capabilities reports and Peer Insights reviews. Searching for a current PPM Magic Quadrant returns 2019 reprints and vendor pages that quietly omit the date.
This matters more than a naming change usually would, because the split reflected a real shift in what organizations were buying. By the late 2010s the old PPM category had stretched to cover two audiences that wanted opposite things. Delivery teams wanted lightweight planning and rollup reporting that people would actually use. Executives wanted funding scenarios, capacity models, and a line from corporate strategy to the work in flight. One quadrant could not honestly rank a vendor against both.
What happened to the PPM Magic Quadrant?
Gartner discontinued it and reorganized the coverage. The table below shows the timeline, with the dates that are publicly verifiable from Gartner document listings and vendor announcements.
| Report | Status | Key dates |
|---|---|---|
| Magic Quadrant for Project and Portfolio Management | Discontinued | Final edition published May 21, 2019 |
| Magic Quadrant for Adaptive Project Management and Reporting (APMR) | Active | First edition 2022; most recent edition published August 2026, evaluating ten vendors |
| Magic Quadrant for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) | Active | First edition April 2021; most recent edition published June 11, 2026, evaluating nine vendors |
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Between 2019 and 2021 there was a gap in which Gartner covered the space through Market Guides rather than Magic Quadrants. That is a normal pattern: Gartner uses a Market Guide when a market is shifting too fast, or is too immature or fragmented, for a quadrant ranking to be meaningful. SPM arriving in 2021 and APMR following in 2022 was the signal that both halves of the old PPM market had settled into shapes worth ranking separately.
What is the Magic Quadrant for Adaptive Project Management and Reporting?
The APMR Magic Quadrant evaluates tools that support how work actually gets planned, executed, and reported, across a mix of predictive, agile, and hybrid delivery methods. Gartner's framing centers on adaptability: the ability to keep planning and reporting useful when scope, method, and team structure keep changing underneath them. Its natural buyer is a delivery organization or a PMO that has to report on many teams working in different ways.
This is the report where you find the vendors whose names delivery teams recognize. Placements move every edition, so treat any list as perishable, but in the edition published in August 2026, which evaluates ten vendors, Planview and Planisware each announced a Leader placement for a fifth consecutive year, and monday.com announced a Leader placement for a fourth consecutive year in the 2025 edition. Announcements like those come from the vendors themselves, not from Gartner, and a vendor will always announce the flattering half of the picture. Read the reprint, not the press release.
What is the Magic Quadrant for Strategic Portfolio Management?
The SPM Magic Quadrant evaluates platforms that connect strategy to execution: modeling investment scenarios, allocating and reallocating funding, managing capacity against strategic outcomes, and tracking whether funded work is delivering the benefits it promised. Its buyer is an executive team, an enterprise PMO, or a strategy function, not a delivery team.
The most recent edition was published on June 11, 2026 and evaluates nine vendors, almost the same size as the ten-vendor APMR field, so the difference between the two reports lies in who buys and what the platform decides rather than in how crowded the market is. Few vendors have announced Leader placements in it. The inaugural edition, published in April 2021, placed no vendor in the Leaders quadrant. Planview has announced a Leader placement in every edition since 2022, including June 2026, and in the 2025 edition both Broadcom (for Clarity) and Bizzdesign publicly announced Leader placements, Broadcom for a second consecutive year. If your problem is that leadership cannot see which initiatives are funded and whether they are paying back, this is the report that maps your market. The discipline behind it is covered in our guide to the project portfolio management process.
Should you read the APMR or the SPM Magic Quadrant?
Answer one question and the choice is obvious: are you buying a tool for the people doing the work, or for the people deciding which work gets funded? Almost every bad PPM purchase I have seen came from an organization that answered "both" and bought a tool built for the other half.
| Adaptive Project Management and Reporting | Strategic Portfolio Management | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary buyer | PMO, delivery lead, head of engineering or operations | Executive team, enterprise PMO, strategy or finance function |
| Core question | How is the work going, across teams and methods? | Are we funding the right work, and is it paying back? |
| Typical capabilities | Planning, task and schedule management, time tracking, status rollup, cross-team reporting | Scenario modeling, investment and funding allocation, capacity against strategy, benefits tracking |
| Unit of interest | The project and the team | The investment and the portfolio |
| Field size | Ten vendors in the August 2026 edition | Nine vendors in the June 2026 edition |
| Read it when | Status reporting is manual and inconsistent across teams | Leadership cannot say what is funded, what it costs, or what it returned |
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Plenty of organizations genuinely need both, and the larger vendors sell into both quadrants. That is fine, but sequence it. Fix the layer that is failing first. If your executives cannot get a trustworthy portfolio view because project data never arrives, no amount of scenario modeling will help, and the fix starts with PMO reporting, not with a strategy platform.
How to read a Magic Quadrant without being misled
A Magic Quadrant plots vendors on two axes and drops them into four boxes. The vertical axis is Ability to Execute, which is roughly how well the vendor delivers today: product quality, viability, sales execution, customer experience, support. The horizontal axis is Completeness of Vision, which is roughly how well the vendor understands where the market is going and whether its roadmap and strategy match.
| Quadrant | What it means | Consider it when |
|---|---|---|
| Leaders | Execute well today and are positioned well for tomorrow | You want a broad, safe platform and can afford it |
| Challengers | Execute well today, less compelling vision | Your needs are conventional and unlikely to change fast |
| Visionaries | Strong direction, less proven delivery at scale | You want a specific emerging capability and can absorb some risk |
| Niche Players | Focused on a segment or narrower capability set | Your requirement is the exact segment they specialize in |
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The most expensive mistake a buyer makes with a Magic Quadrant is treating the upper right corner as a ranking. It is not a ranking. A Niche Player that is built for your industry, your delivery model, and your size will beat a Leader that has to be configured into pretending it understands you. Gartner says this itself, and buyers ignore it every year.
What a Magic Quadrant will not tell you
It contains no pricing, because vendors negotiate and Gartner does not publish deal terms. It contains no assessment of fit for your organization, because inclusion criteria are about vendor scale and market presence, not about whether a tool suits a 40 person PMO. It is a snapshot of a moment, so a report even a year old may misdescribe a product that has since been acquired, renamed, or rebuilt. And vendors that do not meet the inclusion thresholds are simply absent, which regularly excludes strong tools serving mid-market buyers.
Two companion sources are more useful than the quadrant image and get read far less. Critical Capabilities scores the same vendors against specific use cases, which is much closer to the question you are actually asking. Peer Insights carries verified customer reviews, where the complaints about implementation cost and support responsiveness live. The quadrant tells you who is big. Those two tell you what it is like to own the thing.
The six analyst sources that rank PPM vendors, and what each one measures
A Magic Quadrant is one of six vendor evaluations buyers in this market routinely cite, and the other five answer different questions. The quadrant tells you which vendors are large and well positioned. Critical Capabilities tells you which one fits a named use case. Peer Insights, the Forrester Wave, the IDC MarketScape, and the G2 Grid each weight customer evidence differently. Reading a second source costs an afternoon and catches most bad shortlists.
The comparison below is the part buyers usually have to assemble for themselves. The axes matter far more than the picture, because two reports can place the same vendor in opposite corners simply because one is scoring a three year strategy and the other is scoring what current customers said this quarter.
| Source | What the axes measure | Band names | How a vendor gets included | Read it for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gartner Magic Quadrant | Ability to Execute against Completeness of Vision | Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, Niche Players | Gartner inclusion criteria, weighted toward vendor scale and market presence | Who the established vendors are |
| Gartner Critical Capabilities | Weighted product scores against named use cases | No quadrant. Scored per use case | Generally the vendor set from the matching Magic Quadrant | Which vendor fits your specific use case |
| Gartner Peer Insights, Voice of the Customer | Overall Experience against User Interest and Adoption | Customers' Choice distinction | 20 or more eligible published reviews in an 18 month window | What owning the product is actually like |
| Forrester Wave | Current Offering against Strategy, with a customer feedback signal | Leader, Strong Performer, Contender | Forrester selects the field. Vendors supply a questionnaire, a demo, and reference customers | Published per criterion scores you can reweight yourself |
| IDC MarketScape | Capabilities against Strategies | Leaders, Major Players, Contenders, Participants | IDC selection. Circle size shows market share | A second opinion with market share visible on the chart |
| G2 Grid | Satisfaction against Market Presence | Leaders, High Performers, Contenders, Niche | Enough verified user reviews in the category | Mid-market tools the analyst firms exclude |
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Two of these are more useful than their profile suggests. The Forrester Wave publishes its criteria, its weights, and every vendor's per criterion score, which means you can rebuild the ranking using your own weights. That is the single most valuable thing any of these reports lets a buyer do, and almost nobody does it. The G2 Grid earns its ten minutes for the opposite reason: it is not gated by vendor size, so the smaller specialists that never clear a Magic Quadrant inclusion threshold appear there. For a 40 person PMO, that is frequently where the right answer has been hiding.
Where the sources disagree is more informative than where they agree. A vendor high on vision and low on customer satisfaction is telling you the roadmap has run ahead of the product. A vendor that reviews well but appears in no quadrant at all is usually a specialist worth a demo. And a vendor that sits in the Leaders box of every report is telling you it is large, which you already knew, and nothing about whether it suits you.
How to check a vendor's analyst claim before it reaches your shortlist
Most claims in this space are technically true and selectively framed. Vendors announce the flattering half of a placement, cite reports covering a market they are not selling you, and quote editions that are several years old. None of that is dishonest, and all of it will distort a shortlist if nobody checks. These are the checks that take five minutes each.
| The claim you will see | What it can conceal | How to check it |
|---|---|---|
| "Named a Leader by Gartner" | Which Magic Quadrant. APMR and SPM are different markets with different buyers | Get the exact report title. If it is not the market you are buying for, the placement says nothing about your problem |
| "A Leader in the Magic Quadrant for PPM" | That the report was retired after May 2019 | Check the publication date. Any PPM Magic Quadrant is dated 2019 or earlier |
| "Recognized by Gartner" | It may be a Market Guide listing or a passing mention rather than a ranking | A ranking names a quadrant or gives a score. "Recognized" usually means neither |
| "Top rated by customers" | The review sample, the source, and the time window | Ask which platform and how many reviews. Peer Insights requires 20 or more in 18 months |
| "Highest score for [use case]" | A Critical Capabilities score for one use case, which may not be yours | Ask which use case was scored, then read the row for the use case you are buying for |
| "A Leader three years running" | The product may have been acquired, renamed, or rebuilt inside those three years | Confirm the entity evaluated is the same product you would be signing for |
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The short version: get the report title, the publication date, and the name of the market it evaluates. A vendor that cannot supply all three is offering decoration rather than evidence. Once a claim survives those checks the analyst research has done its job, and the actual evaluation begins.
How to build a PPM shortlist without a PPM Magic Quadrant
The analyst reports are an input, not a process. A shortlist that survives contact with procurement is built in this order.
- Write down the decisions the tool must improve. Not features. Decisions: which projects we fund, whether we have the people, whether the work paid back. If you cannot name three, you are not ready to buy.
- Pick your quadrant. Delivery and reporting pain points send you to APMR. Funding and strategy pain points send you to SPM.
- Take the whole quadrant, not the Leaders box. Filter it by your size, industry, and integration requirements before you filter it by position.
- Read the Critical Capabilities report for your use case and drop any vendor that scores poorly on the one thing you are buying for.
- Demo against your own data. Bring a real portfolio, a real capacity conflict, and a real stalled project. Generic demos flatter every tool equally.
- Price the total cost. Implementation, integration, administration, and the internal time to keep data current usually exceed the license in year one.
For what these platforms do, how the main ones differ, and which capabilities matter in practice, our guide to project portfolio management software and PPM tools goes vendor by vendor. And before you shortlist anything, be honest about whether the process the tool is supposed to support actually exists yet. Software will report on portfolio prioritization beautifully. It will not do it for you.
Common questions about the PPM Magic Quadrant
Does Gartner still publish a PPM Magic Quadrant?
No. Gartner published the final Magic Quadrant for Project and Portfolio Management on May 21, 2019 and discontinued the report. The coverage moved into two active Magic Quadrants, Adaptive Project Management and Reporting, first published in 2022, and Strategic Portfolio Management, first published in 2021. Any PPM Magic Quadrant you find today is a 2019 or earlier reprint.
What is the difference between PPM and strategic portfolio management?
PPM traditionally covers selecting, planning, and tracking a portfolio of projects, with the project as the unit of management. Strategic portfolio management works one level up, treating investments and outcomes as the unit and connecting corporate strategy to funding, capacity, and delivered benefits. SPM assumes projects are one of several ways an organization delivers strategy.
Who are the Leaders in the Adaptive Project Management and Reporting Magic Quadrant?
Placements change with every edition, so any list ages quickly. In the August 2026 edition, Planview and Planisware each announced a Leader placement for a fifth consecutive year, and monday.com announced one for a fourth consecutive year in the 2025 edition. If those two are the names on your own shortlist, the head to head on Planview vs Planisware covers how they differ in architecture and industry fit rather than in quadrant position. Those announcements come from the vendors, not Gartner, so verify against the current licensed reprint rather than a press release before you shortlist anyone.
Can I download the Gartner PPM Magic Quadrant for free?
Not from Gartner, which sells its research. Vendors named in a Magic Quadrant routinely license reprint rights and offer the full report free behind an email form. That is legitimate and the report text is unaltered, but you are giving a named vendor your contact details, and the accompanying landing page will frame the findings in that vendor's favor.
What is the Gartner Magic Quadrant for PPM tools?
It was the report that ranked project and portfolio management software vendors on Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision, last published in 2019. Buyers searching for it today should read the Adaptive Project Management and Reporting Magic Quadrant if they are evaluating delivery and reporting tools, or the Strategic Portfolio Management Magic Quadrant if they are evaluating enterprise funding and strategy platforms.
Is this the same as the application portfolio management Magic Quadrant?
No. There is no Gartner Magic Quadrant for application portfolio management either, and it is a different discipline from this one. APM is the inventory of software an organization runs, owned by enterprise architecture rather than the PMO. Gartner covers it as a Peer Insights review market and judges APM capability inside the Enterprise Architecture Tools and SaaS Management Platforms Magic Quadrants. If that is the report you came for, the vendor placements and the analyst source map are on our application portfolio management tools vs PPM software comparison, which is the page that answers it in full. Everything below this line is about project and portfolio management.
Is the Magic Quadrant the same as the Forrester Wave?
They serve the same purpose and differ in method. A Magic Quadrant plots vendors on Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision and sorts them into four quadrants. A Forrester Wave scores vendors against a published, weighted criteria list and shows both the weights and each vendor's score per criterion, which lets you reweight the ranking for your own priorities. Note that the Wave changed for evaluations beginning on or after July 1, 2024: the graphic moved from four bands to three, Leader, Strong Performer, and Contender, and a customer feedback signal replaced market presence on the chart. Reading both a Wave and a Magic Quadrant is a cheap way to see which conclusions hold up across two methods.
The report was never the decision
The PPM Magic Quadrant disappeared because the market it described stopped being one market. That is a useful thing to know before you spend a quarter evaluating software, and it explains why so many PPM shortlists contain tools that could never have solved the same problem. Work out whether your failure is in delivery or in funding, read the quadrant that covers it, then ignore the picture and read the criteria.
The organizations that buy well are the ones that already know what decision they are trying to improve. If yours does not yet have a repeatable way to select and fund work, that gap will outlive any vendor choice. Start with project portfolio governance and the portfolio metrics you will hold the new tool accountable to, and the software decision gets considerably easier.