Comparison

Hourglass vs Birdview PSA

Birdview (formerly Easy Projects) is a broad project portfolio and PSA platform — task boards, portfolio management, resource forecasting and, notably, its own client-facing guest portal with unlimited free guest users. It's a genuinely capable, self-serve product, not an enterprise-only sale.

Hourglass covers a narrower, more focused slice of that: time tracking, budgets, resourcing, client visibility and invoicing, built specifically around UK billing (VAT, GBP) and native Xero sync, without the wider portfolio-management surface a small firm may not need.

Try Hourglass free

Birdview PSA

A full project portfolio management and PSA platform: task boards, portfolio-level reporting, resource planning with AI-powered capacity forecasting, time tracking, billing, and a built-in client portal with free unlimited guest users. Priced in USD from around $13.50 per user per month.

Hourglass

Time tracking, resourcing, budgets, invoicing and a client portal in one focused platform, priced in GBP from free. Built specifically for UK billing — VAT on every invoice, native Xero sync — rather than as a US/Canadian-built platform with UK pricing added on.

Feature comparison

To be direct about it: Birdview does have a client portal, and it's a genuine one — guest users, file sharing, task-level collaboration. The real differences are UK billing specifics and how much broader platform comes with it.

FeatureHourglassBirdview
Time tracking
Client-facing portal
Resource / capacity planning
Invoice generation
Budget tracking with RAG health scoresBasic
Native Xero invoice sync
VAT as a standard invoice field
Published, self-serve pricing
Free trial available
Entry price pointFree, or £12/user/moFrom $13.50/user/mo
UK-operated, GBP pricing

Birdview pricing and feature details per publicly listed plans and product pages, 2026.

When to choose Hourglass over Birdview

You bill in GBP and want VAT handled as a standard invoice field, not a workaround

You want native Xero sync rather than a generic accounting export

You want time, budgets, resourcing, invoicing and client visibility — without a broader portfolio/PPM feature set you won’t use

You want UK-operated support in your own time zone

You’re a small-to-mid firm that wants to be set up and logging time the same day, without configuring a wider platform first

If you need broader project portfolio management across many concurrent programmes, or AI-driven capacity forecasting across a large resource pool, Birdview's wider platform may be the better fit.