Planon does not need a defence. It is mature, deeply featured, and well documented. It runs significant slices of European facilities management and has a partner ecosystem most challengers would envy. The argument here is not that Planon is bad. It is that "Planon is the safe choice" is a claim worth examining honestly when the platform is being evaluated for a UK organisation in 2026, and that the comparison gets more interesting once you do.
What Planon does well
Three things stand out. The first is breadth: the standard product covers asset management, work order processing, lease administration, space and move management, sustainability reporting, and a connector ecosystem that integrates with most BMS, IoT, and ERP platforms you might encounter. If your requirement list reads like a CAFM checklist, Planon ticks it.
The second is verticalisation. Planon ships pre-configured workspaces for corporate real estate, healthcare, higher education, and others. If your operation maps closely to one of those, the time-to-value is good.
The third is reference customer count. Planon has a long list of large European deployments. For a procurement team writing a risk-averse RFP, that is reassuring.
Where it shows its age
Configuration is a partner activity. Planon is configurable on paper but in practice most non-trivial changes go through a certified Planon partner. That is fine if you have the budget and the relationship; it is less fine if you are an in-house team that wants to add a new asset class on Tuesday and have it live by Friday.
The interface is functional rather than modern. Recent releases have improved this, but the underlying information architecture still reflects two decades of accretion. New users need training. Existing users have learned the shortcuts and stopped noticing the friction.
AI is a roadmap conversation. Planon has announced AI capabilities, and they are credible, but they are arriving at the pace of an enterprise vendor, not a startup. If you want AI classification of incoming requests as a default rather than an upsell, you will be waiting.
GOV.UK alignment is not native. Planon is a Dutch product serving a global market. GOV.UK One Login, Notify, the Service Manual, ATRS records: these are achievable through integration or custom build, not part of the standard product. For UK public sector buyers that gap matters more than it used to.
What Jarsis does differently
Jarsis was built around three premises. The first is that configuration should be done by the customer, not a partner. The Entity Designer lets a competent admin add fields, modify business objects, and change form behaviour without raising a ticket. The same applies to workflows and notifications.
The second is that AI is part of the platform, not a feature tier. Inbound classification, document metadata extraction, and engineer-facing assistance are core to how the platform processes work, with full transparency records generated automatically against the UK government's Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard.
The third is GOV.UK alignment. One Login and Notify integrations are part of the Professional tier. WCAG 2.2 AA is the default. The data residency story is UK-only by default. For UK public sector buyers, that is procurement-ready out of the box rather than a six-month integration.
Honest trade-offs
Planon ships more out-of-the-box workflows than Jarsis. If your evaluation rewards a platform that has a pre-built workflow for every situation, Planon will score higher. The Jarsis answer is that pre-built workflows are usually pre-built for someone else's organisation, and that configurable from-scratch is faster than tweaking somebody else's assumptions. Reasonable people can disagree.
Planon's lease administration and IFRS 16 audit trail are deeper. If your portfolio runs on commercial leases and you are doing serious lease accounting, that is a real advantage Planon has.
Planon's reference customer count is bigger. Jarsis is a younger platform with a younger track record. For a procurement panel scoring risk, that asymmetry has to be accounted for honestly. The question is what mitigation the vendor offers and whether that mitigation is credible.
Total cost of ownership
Planon does not publish list prices. Real-world deployments we have seen run from the high tens of thousands per year for simpler deployments to several hundred thousand per year for multi-site corporate or public sector estates, plus implementation costs that often equal or exceed the first year's licence.
Jarsis lists Starter from £30,000 per year, Professional from £85,000, and Enterprise from £200,000. Implementation is proportional. The bigger TCO difference is operational: when a configuration change does not need a partner SOW, you save across the lifetime of the deployment, not just at year one.
A decision framework
Choose Planon if your portfolio is heavy on commercial lease accounting, you have an established Planon partner relationship that works for you, your team has the budget to run change requests through that partner, and your requirements look like a corporate real estate deployment rather than a UK public sector or FM provider one.
Choose Jarsis if you want to configure the platform yourself, AI is a hard requirement rather than a roadmap promise, GOV.UK alignment matters, and you are tired of paying enterprise prices for capabilities your team cannot actually exercise.
See the platform end-to-end
Book a 30-minute demo. We will run through the same use cases your Planon evaluation is testing, and you can judge on your own scoring framework.