Hubstaff Tasks

The collaboration apps landscape is vast. Some apps foster communication. Others offer some kind of twist on project management software. It can be difficult to pin down their correct sub-classification. Hubstaff Tasks is one of these apps. Is it a project management app? Technically speaking, it is. Is it a kanban board app? Yes, it's that, too. What it's really best for, however, is managing tasks and workflows among teams of people who already use the company's namesake time-tracking and employee monitoring software, Hubstaff. So you use Hubstaff Tasks to manage the nitty-gritty work, and you integrate it with Hubstaff for time-tracking and other team productivity features.

It's a good app with an attractive price if you already use Hubstaff or are considering it. If you're not considering Hubstaff, but need a workflow management tool, Asana is our Editors' Choice. If you're looking for more traditional project management software, we have three Editors' Choices: Zoho Projects for teams on a budget, Teamwork Projects for getting up and running quickly, and LiquidPlanner for very complex project management needs.

Hubstaff Tasks Pricing

Hubstaff Tasks offers two tiers of service: Free and Premium ($5 per person per month or $48 per person per year). Both plans include unlimited users, kanban boards, custom labels, due dates, time estimates, checklists, project templates, and other core features.

The Free plan limits you to ten projects and 100MB of storage per person. Premium plans gives you an increase in storage to 5GB per person, and you get unlimited projects. You can get a two-week trial of the Premium plan.

Compared with other team-focused task management apps, the price for Hubstaff Tasks is low. For example, Editors' Choice Asana costs a lot more for its paid account at $13.49 per person per month. With Asana, however, teams of 15 or fewer people can get a discount. Trello charges more, too, starting at $12.50 per person per month. Wrike doesn't have a monthly payment option, but it's annual plans start at $588 for five people, which is the minimum. After that, each additional team member tacks on just about $119 extra per year (equivalent to a little less than $10 per person per month).

The highly capable to-do app Todoist charges a rate much closer to Hubstaff Tasks'. Todoist's collaborative Business account runs $6 per person per month. For my taste, Todoist is more user-friendly, with natural language input and an interface that's self-explanatory. Hubstaff has a more involved setup. Todoist doesn't use kanban, though, and Hubstaff Tasks does.

Getting Started

To get Hubstaff Tasks, all you need is an email address to create an account. During a fairly routine setup process, the app asks for your company name. You must have one. Even if you intend to use Hubstaff Tasks for personal use, you need to create a company.

Once your organization is established, you can start creating projects, which house your tasks. You also can invite people to join you and assign them to projects. Each person has a role for each project. The options are viewer, who can work on the project; collaborator, who can create and manage tasks; and manager, who can edit, archive, and restore the project as well as link it to Hubstaff's productivity and time-management software.

To create projects, you can use a blank kanban space or templates. Templates include Project Management, A/B Testing, Expense Tracking, Hiring, New Hire Onboarding, Sales CRM, Social Media Content, Event Planning, Performance Review, IT Support, and several others. You can also choose templates that don't have as much of a theme to them, such as Standard kanban template or To-Do List.

Hubstaff Tasks gives you a dashboard where you can see all the projects you've created or joined. You can make folders to organize your projects as well.

Features

Within each project, task cards are where you find all the detail of what must be done. Each card gets a title, which is generally the name of the task. You can also add a description, comments, attachments, a checklist, labels (not dissimilar from tags), a due date, time estimate, assignees, and followers. If you connect the project to Hubstaff, an area called Work Logs shows time tracked on each task.

Attachment added to a task card showing images appear in thumbnail when you open the card, although you can't see the image when you look at the kanban board itself. In Trello, you can see the images, which breathes life into boards with visuals.

Although Hubstaff Tasks positions itself more as a task-management and workflow-management tool than a kanban board, there are a few kanban features that I expected to find but didn't. Chief among them is the ability to create custom fields. The development team behind Hubstaff Tasks clearly knows people use kanban boards for a wide range of purposes. That's why there are so many templates. But to truly customize the system to your needs, you should be able to make a custom field or two on the cards. Many best-in-class kanban apps allow you to make custom fields. Asana, Trello, Wrike, LeanKit, Zenkit, and Taiga all do.

Also missing are work-in-progress (WIP) limits and swimlanes, otherwise known as the ability to sort cards into rows as well as column. A representative from Hubstaff said, however, that an upcoming feature called Epics will help with task grouping; and an update to the Timeline feature will add the ability to sort tasks by assignee, which is close to swimlanes.

One unique aspect of Hubstaff Tasks is that you can opt into using sprints, which you might do if your team uses an agile method. When you select Sprints, you get a second dashboard of sorts that shows an overview of progress on each sprint.

Integrations

The primary integration for Hubstaff Tasks—as mentioned—is with the time-tracking and team productivity tool Hubstaff. Hubstaff can then connect with other business software, such as Jira, FreshBooks, Salesforce, and Zendesk. Hubstaff Tasks does not on its own connect with any of these other apps.

You can, however, import data from a Trello or Pivotal Tracker account to make the switch from either of those apps to Hubstaff Tasks easier.

At this time, Hubstaff Tasks does not have an open API for customers, so you cannot build your own integrations.

A Good Task-Management App for Hubstaff

I have a hard time imagining anyone picking up Hubstaff Tasks unless they already have a Hubstaff account. It's not a tasks-management system that would draw you in on its own. It does offer some good advantages to anyone who already uses Hubstaff, creating a tight integration between time-management and task-management.

If you're seeking a task-management system for a team and don't already use Hubstaff, some apps to consider are Asana and Todoist; both are Editors' Choices. We like Asana for managing complex workflows. Todoist really shines as the very best to-do list app you'll ever find, and it has a business-grade account, too.

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Further Reading

• Business Choice Awards 2018: Project Management and Online Collaboration Tools
• Wrike vs. LiquidPlanner: Project Management Pugilism
• Zoho Projects vs. Wrike: Project Management Pound-for-Pound
• 7 Ways to Simplify Project Management in Teamwork Projects
• Basecamp vs. Wrike: Battle of the Project Management Apps