Buildrun vs Primavera P6

Why This Comparison Matters

Primavera P6 has been the scheduling standard in Indian construction for over two decades. For large infrastructure projects, government contracts, and EPC firms, P6's CPM engine is unmatched in depth and flexibility.

P6 was designed as a planning tool - built for schedulers and planners creating and maintaining complex project schedules. It excels at this. Where teams often face challenges is in the gap between the planner's schedule and the site engineer's reality - a gap that exists regardless of which planning tool you use.

This gap - between what the schedule says and what is actually happening on site right now - is what Buildrun was designed to close.

The Scheduling Depth vs. Real-Time Data Trade-Off

Primavera P6 offers the most powerful CPM scheduling engine in the market. Advanced features like multiple calendars per activity, relationship lag and lead times, activity code structures, and resource-driven scheduling give planners fine-grained control over complex project schedules.

Buildrun's scheduling engine covers core CPM needs but doesn't match P6's depth in advanced scheduling techniques. What it prioritises differently is connecting the schedule to the construction site in real time.

When a site engineer marks a task as delayed on Buildrun's mobile app at 10 AM, the schedule recalculates all downstream dependencies in under 2 seconds. The project manager sees the impact on the dashboard immediately. In P6, the same delay requires the planner to update the activity status, re-run the scheduler, and distribute the updated schedule - a process that typically happens weekly.

For Indian developers running residential and commercial projects, the question isn't "which tool has more scheduling features?" but "which tool gives me an accurate schedule right now?"

Site Adoption: The Make-or-Break Factor

The Autodesk-Deloitte Digital Transformation study (2024) found that 48% of Indian construction firms cite the skills gap as a key barrier to technology adoption. Primavera P6's learning curve is a known challenge - it's a professional tool that requires professional training.

On most Indian projects using P6, the planner is the only person who interacts with the software. Site engineers report progress on paper or WhatsApp. The planner translates that information into P6. This translation introduces delays and interpretation errors.

Buildrun takes a different approach: the site engineer is the primary user. The interface is designed for one-tap task updates from a mobile phone on a construction site - not for building complex schedule logic at a desk. This means the person closest to the work inputs the data, eliminating the planner-as-bottleneck problem.

The trade-off is real: Buildrun can't match P6's scheduling sophistication for complex infrastructure projects with thousands of activities and intricate resource constraints. But for residential and commercial projects where the bottleneck is data freshness rather than scheduling complexity, the trade-off favours real-time site data.

When to Choose Primavera P6

Primavera P6 is the right choice when: the project is a large infrastructure or industrial project with complex resource dependencies, the organisation has trained P6 planners and established P6 workflows, the primary need is schedule planning and analysis rather than real-time site management, and the project requires integration with Oracle's ERP ecosystem.

When to Choose Buildrun

Buildrun is the right choice when: the project is a residential or commercial development where site-to-schedule data flow is the primary challenge, the team needs site engineers to directly input progress rather than relying on a planner intermediary, RERA compliance tracking is needed with India-specific regulatory workflows, and the priority is reducing the gap between site reality and management visibility.