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
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
Built in the UK

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.