Compare
Projectous vs Productive.io
Productive looks like the right tool and the wrong size.
Why choose Projectous over Productive.io
- The money side is on the smallest plan rather than two tiers up.
- Per team, not per seat, and from the Team plan up a client never counts as one.
- A client-facing side to every task, so the internal conversation and the client conversation are the same piece of work.
- Fixed payouts per task for freelancers, not just cost rates for staff.
What Productive.io is genuinely good at
- A proper agency system — time, budgets, profitability, resource planning and forecasting, built as one thing rather than assembled.
- Resource planning and capacity are on every plan, and ours does not exist.
- Scenario planning and revenue forecasting at the top end, which we have nothing comparable to.
- If you are an established agency with someone whose job is running the numbers, this is a serious product and we would rather say so.
Side by side
| Capability | Projectous | Productive.io |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | Reports and dashboards you go and read |
| Drafts your standup from what actually happened | Yes | No |
| File storage that will not stop you | No | Not published in a form we could confirm |
| Timeline or Gantt view | No | Yes |
| 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 | Yes |
| Invoice from the tracked time | Yes | Professional plan, $25/user/mo |
| Whether a project made money | Basic profitability reports on every plan; per-project margin tracking from the Team plan up | Professional plan, $25/user/mo |
| Hourly, fixed-price, at-cost and retainer | Yes | Yes |
| Fixed payouts to the freelancer doing it | Yes | Cost rates per person, not a payout per job |
| 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 | Client access to budgets from Professional |
| Internal and client conversation on the same task | Yes | No |
| Team chat with channels and direct messages | Yes | No |
| 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 Productive.io’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.
Setup, and how much of the tool you have to assemble before the team can use it.
Where the conversation lives
Projectous
On the work, and split. Every task carries an internal thread and a client-facing one, so the argument about the estimate and the answer to the client are the same task and different rooms. Project rooms and direct messages sit alongside.
Productive.io
Comments and discussions attached to work items, which is the normal shape. There is no client-facing side to a thread, so anything you would not want the client reading happens somewhere else.
Paying the people doing the work
Projectous
Hourly, fixed-price, at-cost and retainer contracts, and a fixed payout per task for the person doing it, approved before it counts. The margin is the difference and it needs no timer.
Productive.io
Cost rates per person, which is the standard way to model it and works well when your people are salaried. It is a worse fit when half the work goes to freelancers on a per-job price.
Client credentials
Projectous
An encrypted vault inside the project, locked on your device before it reaches us.
Productive.io
Not something it does. Those live wherever they live now.
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 plansProductive.io
Per seat
- EssentialSee their pricing page
- Professional$25 / user / mo
- UltimateContact sales
- Invoicing and profitability reporting both start at Professional.
- Client access to budgets also starts at Professional.
- Their page showed a monthly figure below the annual one for Essential, which we could not reconcile — so it is not quoted here.
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.
Also weighing something else?
Want the same thing without assembling it?
Try it against a real project of yours and see whether it tells you something your current stack does not.