Top-3 Cost&Budget Tracking Apps for Jira

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💸 How much do your projects in Jira cost? Managers, stakeholders – everyone wants to keep the finger on the pulse and make some adjustments if needed. If you hear that question often, it’s time to find the most convenient way to track your budget. As Jira has no natively-built option to calculate issues/projects’ costs, let's overview top Jira budget tracking apps.

Some time ago, our SaaSJet team faced the problem of accounting for development costs and was looking for ways to systematize it. So, hopefully, our experience will be helpful for everyone who has a similar issue.

What is Cost Tracker in Jira?

Jira cost tracking apps generally aim to monitor your business's financial performance. So, you can manage your spending for specific tasks, persons, and departments and determine your project costs. 

Cost tracking helps to:

• Set rates for employees
• Add direct company budget
• Calculate salaries of employees
• Make expense reports
• Monitor generated income

With that info, your project planning using Jira will reach a new level. You will discover which tasks are fruitless and take a lot of money to optimise the roadmap of your future projects. Ready to find your perfect budget-tracking tool? Let's look at what options are available.

Add-ons for tracking expenses in Jira

There are several budget and cost tracking apps on the Atlassian Marketplace. While making a decision is challenging, we'll present a brief outline below and a comparison table for your convenience at the bottom. 

🟡 Cost Tracker by Tempo

Cost Tracker by Tempo is the largest app available in the Atlassian Marketplace. Visualization works great, and you can clearly see the flow of expenses. Available options:

• Manage budget allocation with real-time tracking of milestones, labour costs, billable non-billable time, CAPEX vs OPEX, and income. 
• Visualize your data on the graph and compare overall prices and expenses to your estimated budget 
• Share your financial information securely with colleagues and important stakeholders.

Price: Free trial / 1 USD per user (average)

No free version for up to 10 users

*This add-on works only with time logged into Tempo Timesheets, so you have to install both apps if you want to track your project costs in Jira. This means that for a team of 10 people, the cost of using these two add-ons will be at least $20 per month ($240/year). If you have 20 users: Tempo Timesheet is $76 + Tempo Cost Tracker is $40 = $116 per month avg. ($1450/year avg.).

⚪ HawkBudget - Easy budgeting and cost monitoring by Harness Ltd

Straightforward and simple way to track budgets and expenditures. HawkBudget doesn’t require expensive or complex time-tracking software to track your team's time. Available features:

• Set employees’ rates based on time logged via Jira built-in time tracking option and get automatic budgeting.
• Users can add their expenses, for example, trips or dinners. Each user can only see their own spending. Only the administrators have access to everyone's spending. 
• Customize your currency and number format.

Price: Free trial / 0,5 USD per user (average)

No free version for up to 10 users.

🟢 Cost Tracker for Jira Cloud by SaaSJet

This Jira cost tracking tool was released relatively recently and is actively developing. 

In general, the company and project costs are calculated as follows:

Jira project costs = Personnel worklogs * Salary rates + Direct expenses

What options you will get:

• Set people hourly rates and keep historical records of how they are changing. 
• Get the report of worklog costs where you can monitor and track direct spending (both one-time and ongoing).
• Besides reports in the add-on, you can see costs for a single task with a specially designed issue widget.

Price: Free trial / 1,5 USD per user (average)

Free for up to 10 users.

Comparison table of Jira apps for Cost Tracking

	Cost Tracker by Tempo	Cost Tracker for Jira Cloud	HawkBudget - Easy budgeting and cost monitoring
Set hourly rate	✅	✅	✅
History of hourly rate	✅	✅	❌
Managing expenses	✅	✅	✅
Recurring expenses	✅	✅	❌
Get reports	✅	✅	✅
Free trial	✅	✅	✅
Free up to 10 users	❌	✅	❌
Price per user (average)	2$	1,5$	0,5$
Hosting options	Cloud	Cloud	Cloud

Takeaway

All the apps mentioned in the article are good options if you need to track team or project finances in Jira. It’s your priority to choose what will work best for you. All add-ons have free trials so that you can test the most effective and reasonable solution. 

We would love to have you on our Cost Tracker for Jira Cloud  team. If we take the price-quality ratio, then this is exactly the golden middle that will allow you to track costs efficiently and not hit the company's wallet hard. Also, the SaaSJet team is announcing many exciting features in the future for this app, so stay tuned 😉

[Kyriakos Tsourapas]

Hi, thank you so much for selecting our add-on HawkBudget for your comparison! 

I just wanted to clarify that we do support expenses, as you also stated in your description, but you marked it as non-available in the comparison table.

Also, the history of rates is a planned feature.

It's great that we all work towards providing valuable tools to the JIRA community, helping JIRA retain its position as the top choice for project management.

[Iryna Komarnitska_SaaSJet_]

Hi @Kyriakos Tsourapas 

Thank you for your comment. We apologize for the error. I have already corrected the comparison table:)