Compare
Projectous vs Kitchen.co
You can say exactly what you charged last month. You cannot say what it cost you to deliver.
Why choose Projectous over Kitchen.co
- It tracks the time, so it can tell you what a project cost you and not only what you charged for it.
- Contracts with budgets you can watch being used up, including retainers, rather than invoices you send and hope about.
- Fixed-price work carries its own margin — the price minus what the worker is paid — with no timer involved at all.
- The hours and the margin are in the same records the portal shows, so what the client sees and what the job cost you are never two systems.
What Kitchen.co is genuinely good at
- The client portal is the centre of the product rather than a feature bolted onto a task tool — conversations, docs, tasks and boards all live inside it.
- A free plan that already includes the invoicing and the portal, capped at two internal users. We have no free tier.
- Proper white-labelling on the paid plan — custom domain, custom email domain, unbranded emails. Projectous has none of that.
- A one-off lifetime price, which nobody else on this list offers.
Side by side
| Capability | Projectous | Kitchen.co |
|---|---|---|
| Works for client work on day one | Yes | Yes |
| Tells you what needs attention | Prioritisation and the Today tab on every plan; stale detection from the Team plan up | No |
| Drafts your standup from what actually happened | Yes | No |
| File storage that will not stop you | No | 2GB on Free, 500GB on the paid plan |
| Timeline or Gantt view | No | No |
| Work your team can claim, rather than be given | Yes | No |
| Notices client emails you have not answered | Yes | No |
| Helps the person doing the work, not the person watching | Yes | No |
| Time tracking | Yes | No |
| Invoice from the tracked time | Yes | Invoices and quotes, but not from tracked time |
| Whether a project made money | Basic profitability reports on every plan; per-project margin tracking from the Team plan up | No |
| Hourly, fixed-price, at-cost and retainer | Yes | No |
| Fixed payouts to the freelancer doing it | Yes | No |
| The client can be in the work with you | From the Team plan up — the Solo plan has no client access. No separate portal either: clients are invited into the app and invoices are shared links | Yes |
| Internal and client conversation on the same task | Yes | No |
| Team chat with channels and direct messages | Yes | Conversations in the portal, with the client in them |
| Encrypted vault for client credentials | Yes | No |
| Priced per team, with free clients | Yes | No |
Amber means it exists behind a plan, an add-on or a caveat, and the row says which. Checked 2026-08-24 against Kitchen.co’s own pricing and documentation.
What you came to compare
Pick the argument you actually care about. They are different questions and they have different answers.
Their home ground, and the comparison worth being straight about.
What the client gets
Projectous
No portal — the client is invited into the work itself, sees the tasks, is in the conversation, and gets invoices as links they can open and pay. The task carries an internal thread and a client-facing one. That is a different arrangement from theirs, not a smaller one, and if a branded place to log in is what you want then theirs is better.
Kitchen.co
A portal with conversations, tasks and boards, docs, and invoices, included on every plan including the free one. It is what the product is built around.
Checked 2026-08-22, here.
Whose brand it wears
Projectous
Your logo. There is no custom domain and no unbranded email — a client can tell they are in Projectous.
Kitchen.co
Yours, properly. Custom domain, custom email domain, unbranded emails and advanced branding on the Agency White-label plan at $29 per internal user per month. This one is not close.
Checked 2026-08-22, here.
How it is priced
Projectous
Per team, as a subscription. No lifetime option.
Kitchen.co
Per internal user at $29 a month, with a free plan capped at two internal users, and a lifetime purchase at $299 for five users or $599 for unlimited. Clients are not internal users.
Checked 2026-08-22, here.
What each one costs
Not the reason to switch, and not something you should have to go looking for either.
Projectous
Per team
One subscription covers a band of people rather than a price per head. Client and guest access starts on the Team plan — the Solo plan has none — and from there guests are free and uncapped.
Hiring does not change the bill until you cross a band. Checked against the live plans on 2026-08-24.
See the current plansKitchen.co
Per internal user, or once
- Free$0 — max 2 internal users
- Agency White-label$29 / internal user / mo
- Lifetime$299 once — 5 internal users
- Lifetime$599 once — unlimited internal users
- Clients are not internal users, so they do not count.
- A one-off lifetime price, which nobody else on this list offers.
- No time tracking at any price, which is the whole of our argument on this page.
Checked 2026-08-24 against their pricing page.
Where we will not go
Projectous exists to help people coordinate work with more clarity, trust and humanity.
Which means some things are permanently off the table, whatever a feature comparison says.
No screenshot monitoring
Nobody works better because software is watching their screen.
No keyboard activity scoring
Movement is not effort, and measuring it teaches people to move.
No public shaming dashboards
A league table changes behaviour. Never in the direction you wanted.
No manufactured urgency
If something is not actually on fire, we are not going to tell you it is.
Billing fine, but no idea if it was worth it?
Try it against a real project of yours and see whether it tells you something your current stack does not.