P6 Professional Standalone Can’t Run Schedule Comparison

Two Different Products Named “P6”

P6 Professional is the desktop application most schedulers actually build and maintain schedules in day to day -- installed locally, working against its own local database or a lightweight shared one. P6 EPPM (Enterprise Project Portfolio Management) is a separate, web-based, server-hosted deployment aimed at portfolio-level program management across many projects at once. They share a great deal of underlying schedule logic and can read the same .xer files, but they are licensed, deployed, and feature-equipped differently.

Structured schedule comparison reporting lives on the EPPM/web side of that split. The standalone desktop edition most working schedulers actually have installed does not include a built-in tool for producing a structured diff between two schedule versions.

Why This Actually Matters

This gap shows up constantly in practice: a general contractor emails a subcontractor two monthly .xer updates and asks “what changed?” The subcontractor opens both in P6 Professional -- the only P6 license they have -- and finds no built-in way to answer that question beyond opening both schedules and eyeballing them side by side, which doesn’t scale past a handful of activities. The same gap affects claims consultants, smaller specialty contractors, and owner’s reps who receive .xer exports but were never issued EPPM access.

The practical workarounds -- exporting both schedules to Excel and manually cross-referencing rows, or requesting access to someone else’s EPPM instance just to run one comparison -- are exactly the kind of friction a tool that only needs the raw .xer files themselves is built to remove.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who typically only has P6 Professional standalone, not EPPM?

Smaller general contractors, subcontractors, and independent scheduling consultants most often run the standalone desktop edition -- EPPM's web-based, server-hosted deployment is more common on the owner/large-program side, where the infrastructure and licensing cost make more sense.

Can I just open two .xer files in P6 Professional side by side and compare visually?

You can open two projects and look at them side by side, but that only shows you two separate schedules on screen -- it doesn't produce a structured diff of what specifically changed between them (which activities moved, which relationships were added or removed, which dates shifted), which is the actual output a comparison is meant to produce.

Does exporting to Excel and comparing manually work as a substitute?

It's the common workaround, but it's slow and error-prone at real schedule sizes -- manually cross-referencing a few thousand rows across two exports to spot every changed date, relationship, and float value is exactly the kind of task a purpose-built comparison tool exists to replace.