Teams that plan by estimates or bill by the hour need time in the same place as the work. Smartsheet's pricing page does not list time tracking as a feature of any plan on its own; it describes time and expense tracking as part of Resource Management, an add-on for Business and Enterprise. That is a reasonable design for a resource-planning team, and an extra purchase for a team that only wants to know how long its tasks took. Here is what to weigh.
1. What Smartsheet Offers
Resource Management is listed as an add-on for Business, Enterprise and Advanced Work Management, not available on Pro, with no published price; the page directs you to request a demo and says it includes time and expense tracking to improve project estimates. Business itself, from $19 per member a month on yearly pricing, adds workload tracking, and Enterprise adds portfolios and scenario planning. For a team that does real resource planning across many projects, the add-on is designed for that job.
2. The Cost for a Team That Just Needs Hours
For a small team that only needs to log hours against tasks, the route is a Business plan for every member plus an add-on priced by quote. A 5-person team on Pro cannot add it at all. That is the case where a tool with time tracking built into every plan is simpler and cheaper, and where the comparison should be made on the full price, not the plan price.
3. How Time Works in Kavanah
Kavanah's time tracker is on every plan, including the free Starter plan. You can start and stop a timer on a task, or log an entry afterwards in decimal hours, such as 0.3 for 18 minutes, and split an entry that covered two pieces of work. An entry can be marked billable with an hourly rate, taken from the entry, the project's default or the client's default, and a workspace can turn on a rounding policy, for example up to the nearest tenth of an hour; it is off unless you turn it on, because it changes what clients are charged. If you connect ClearBooks, billable time can become a draft invoice.
4. Using Hours to Plan
Logged time is only useful if it feeds back into planning. Kavanah's sprint planner compares each person's estimates with the hours they actually logged and says what fits in the sprint at the median and at the 90th percentile, and team capacity is set in hours per week. The point is not surveillance; it is that the next estimate is calibrated by the last one.
5. Which Fits Your Team
If you run portfolio-wide resource planning with scenario modelling, Smartsheet's Enterprise plan with Resource Management is built for it, and Kavanah's capacity planning is simpler. If you need hours logged against tasks, billable rates and estimates that improve, built-in time tracking avoids an add-on: Kavanah Basic is $3 a seat a month ($2 billed yearly), and time tracking comes with it.
Time tracking is cheap to want and expensive to bolt on. For the full comparison of Kavanah, Smartsheet, monday work management and Asana, including where each puts time tracking, see our Smartsheet alternative page.
