Abstract The NASA’s InSight mission will place a lander on Mars in November 2018. During the first 90 days after landing on Mars, InSight will deploy two primary instruments on the surface: a seismometer and a heat probe. InSight will be operated daily at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) during this time with a strict tactical timeline of 10 h. To support this rapid turnaround, significant automation is being developed to decrease human effort and increase operational efficiency. During tactical operations, science planning on InSight will be performed using the JPL APGen planning software, along with a novel Graphical User Interface (GUI) developed specifically for InSight, SPImaster. Every JPL mission invariably develops its own software for surface operations. This results in missions with smaller development budgets, such as the Phoenix lander mission, developing or utilizing operations software which is difficult to work with, resulting in issues during the lifetime of the mission. Fortunately, InSight has taken a more multi-mission approach in the development of the operations software and has been able to create software with all of the necessary features found on larger Flagship missions, at a fraction of the cost. The project has been able to do this by investing in multi-mission software tools and sharing code with other missions, such as the Europa Clipper project. Building off of the lessons learned from the Phoenix lander, Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), and Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions, InSight developed a multi-mission system design, from which both small and large projects can learn. This paper, which derives material from a paper the authors delivered at the SpaceOps 2018 conference (Ridenhour et al. in 2018 SpaceOps Conference, SpaceOps Conferences (AIAA 2018-2552), 2018 [1]), describes the InSight planning software and compares its use to planning software developed for the MSL, MER, and Phoenix missions. All included figures are reproduced here with the permission of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the publishers of the transactions of SpaceOps.