Clarity is a strategic portfolio management (SPM) platform developed by Broadcom that helps large organizations plan, fund, and track their projects, products, and teams in one place. It connects high-level business strategy to the actual work being done, giving leaders visibility into how money, people, and time are being spent across an entire portfolio of investments. You may also see it referred to as Clarity PPM (Project and Portfolio Management), its earlier branding.
What Clarity Actually Does
At its core, Clarity is designed to answer a deceptively hard question for big organizations: are we spending our money and people on the right things? When a company runs hundreds of projects and products simultaneously, it’s easy to lose track of how individual efforts connect to broader goals. Clarity provides a single platform where executives can see the full picture and make data-driven decisions about where to invest.
The platform covers several interconnected functions. It manages the full lifecycle of investments, from capturing an initial idea through project execution. It handles financial planning, letting teams build budgets, track costs, and forecast spending across all initiatives. It also manages resource allocation, helping organizations assign people to the work that matters most and avoid overloading teams. And it provides visual roadmaps that map strategic objectives to specific projects and timelines, so stakeholders can see how individual investments contribute to larger business goals.
Clarity also supports what Broadcom calls “custom investments,” meaning administrators can create and configure new types of investment objects beyond standard projects. This flexibility lets organizations model their work however it makes sense for their business, whether that means tracking products, programs, services, or something else entirely. You can nest multiple value streams under each investment with direct links to resources, work items, and financial data.
Key Features
- Financial management: Detailed budgeting, cost tracking, and financial forecasting for every initiative in the portfolio. Cost plans connect directly to outcomes so organizations can measure actual business benefits.
- Resource and staffing optimization: Tools for aligning people with strategic priorities across the entire portfolio, balancing capacity, and avoiding conflicts between competing projects.
- Strategic roadmaps: Drag-and-drop visual timelines that map strategy to objectives, showing how projects and products are performing against the plan.
- Workforce planning: Both long-term strategic planning and short-term operational planning, connecting organizational objectives with detailed execution activities.
- Automated timesheets: Time tracking that integrates with team delivery systems, capturing actual effort without requiring manual data entry.
- Hierarchies: Multi-dimensional relationships between organizational components, giving visibility into how investments connect and contribute to overall strategy.
Who Uses Clarity
Clarity is built for enterprise organizations, not small teams or startups. It’s the kind of platform a company adopts when it has enough projects, people, and budget lines that managing them in spreadsheets or basic project tools becomes unworkable. The software is designed around distinct roles that reflect how large organizations actually operate.
CIOs and portfolio managers use Clarity to make funding and headcount decisions across the portfolio. Project managers rely on it for planning, executing, and monitoring their individual projects. Resource managers use it to allocate team members across multiple projects without overbooking anyone. Financial managers handle budgeting, cash flow projections, and investment financing decisions. Product managers often own the platform from a technical perspective for their organization. And individual contributors like developers, engineers, and architects interact with it as team members, logging time and updating task status.
Deployment and Licensing
Clarity is available as a cloud-hosted SaaS product and as an on-premise installation. The SaaS version comes with a production environment and at least one sandbox environment for testing and development. Organizations subscribing with 500 or more users get an additional sandbox. Every deployment starts with 40 GB of storage, with additional storage added in 20 GB increments for each set of 500 users beyond the first 500.
Licensing is per-user, with three tiers based on how much access someone needs. Full Function users get complete access to all features. Restricted users can view data, run reports, participate in discussions, track time, approve project status, and submit ideas, but can’t access the full toolset. View Only users can view data, run reports, and participate in idea workflows. View Only users are sold in packs of 100. Broadcom does not publish standard pricing publicly, so organizations typically work with Broadcom’s sales team or an authorized partner to get a quote based on their user count and deployment preferences.
How Clarity Fits in the Market
Clarity competes in the strategic portfolio management space alongside tools like Planview, ServiceNow SPM, and Microsoft Project for the web. What distinguishes Clarity is its depth in financial management and resource optimization, areas where lighter project management tools like Jira, Asana, or Monday.com aren’t designed to operate. Those tools excel at managing work within a single team, while Clarity is built to manage work across an entire enterprise, tying budgets, people, and strategy together at the portfolio level.
If you’re evaluating Clarity, the key question is whether your organization has outgrown simpler tools. Companies that need to coordinate dozens or hundreds of simultaneous initiatives, allocate shared resources across competing priorities, and connect project-level spending to strategic outcomes are the ones that get the most value from a platform like this.