Resources›Comparisons›Epoch SRA vs Full Monte: an honest comparison

Epoch SRA vs Full Monte: an honest comparison

By the Epoch SRA team·Published 5 August 2026·Corrections: contact@epochsra.com

Capabilities as of August 2026, based on published documentation. Corrections welcome at contact@epochsra.com.

Monte Carlo is the easy part. The schedule is the hard part. Every serious schedule risk tool has the first; the differences that matter live in the second – how faithfully a tool reads your plan, and what it does when it can't.

If you're evaluating schedule risk analysis for Microsoft Project schedules, Barbecana's Full Monte is probably on your list. It should be – it's a mature, well-regarded tool. Here's where each of us is stronger, stated plainly.

Where Full Monte is stronger

It runs inside Microsoft Project itself, so if your team lives in MSP and never leaves, the workflow is native. It has years of production history, and it supports a broader set of scheduling constructs today – including SS/FF/SF relationships, which our importer currently reports as untranslated rather than simulating. If your network leans heavily on those link types, Full Monte handles them now and we don't yet.

Where Epoch SRA is stronger

We run in Excel – which is where risk registers, cost sheets, and management reporting actually live. Your existing register imports from any layout by selecting the range; likelihood and severity map to priors that are field-calibrated against historical program schedules, and every percentile in our output is labelled with its provenance: field-calibrated or model estimate.

Our import is deliberately conservative. Whatever it cannot faithfully translate from your MSPDI file – a summary-task link, a date constraint, a manually scheduled plan – it reports by name instead of silently approximating. On the first real program we imported, that report was worth more than the simulation: it showed the plan was a drawing of a network, not a network.

And risk sensitivity is measured from the simulation itself, not inferred from the network: on our demo program, the largest single mover of the P80 finish sits at 19% criticality – invisible to a critical-path review.

The philosophical difference

Full Monte extends Microsoft Project. Epoch SRA treats your schedule as an input and your Excel workbook as the workspace – schedule, register, events, and results in one file, computed entirely on your machine. There is no cloud component and no telemetry. For export-controlled or competitively sensitive programs, that is the difference between adopting a tool and not being allowed to.

Pricing

Full Monte lists at $1,195 per perpetual license including the first year of maintenance, then $299/year to renew. Epoch SRA is €119/month, €990/year, or €1,300 perpetual plus €350/year maintenance – with a 7-day full-featured trial requiring no signup and no card.

How to decide in one afternoon

Export your real schedule to XML, import it into Epoch SRA's trial, and read the import report before you look at a single percentile – it will tell you more about your schedule than most reviews do. Then run Compute and compare the tornado against your register's likelihood × severity ranking. If they match, your intuition is calibrated. In our experience, they don't.