Which Product Do I Need? | Timebars Ltd.

Three products, one codebase, one database. They are not three tools that pass work to each other — they are three views of the same records, which is why adding the second one later costs you nothing.

Most organisations start with one. Here is how to tell which.

Start from what is going wrong

"We keep committing people who are already committed." You need Timebars. Drag-and-drop allocation across multiple projects, working-day arithmetic rather than calendar days, and overallocation visible before you promise the work rather than after.

"The board says one thing and the schedule says another." You need Agilebars. A Kanban board and a timescale that are two views of the same data, so moving a card to Done and marking a task complete are the same act. Burndown charts come out of the plan rather than out of a separate spreadsheet.

"Projects keep starting and nobody decided they should." You need Costbars. Score projects against criteria you define, see which rise to the top, level the demand they create, and make the start/stop decision with numbers instead of volume.

Start from your job title

How the three fit together

If you eventually run all three, the sequence is:

1. Decide with Costbars. List the candidates, define your criteria, score them, and pick what starts.
2. Resource with Timebars. The approved projects are already there. Add real schedules and named people, and find the overallocation before it happens.
3. Execute with Agilebars. The same projects again, now as sprint backlogs, with burndown that comes out of the plan.

Nothing is exported or re-keyed between those steps, because all three work the same five levels of the same hierarchy:

{{figure:hierarchy-levels}}

Two things follow from that picture, and they matter when you are choosing.

Adding a product later is a setting, not a migration. Start with one; the others read the same records whenever you switch them on.

Agilebars has no allocation level. It shows Projects and Tasks, which is right for a sprint team but means it cannot on its own tell you whether the people in that sprint are also committed elsewhere. If that question matters to you, you want Timebars alongside it — see agile and waterfall against one resource pool.

What the sequence is really protecting is the data collected at approval — the charter, the scores, the estimate and the resource plan — which in most organisations is lost the moment a project leaves the PPM system. See the data you lose between approval and delivery.

What you get regardless of which you pick

Every product ships with the same platform underneath: risks, issues and change requests; supply and demand grids; reports and graphs; personal and enterprise dashboards; spreadsheet-driven configuration; two-way OpenProject sync; and Ask AI for help and for drafting projects and business cases.

There are no feature tiers to compare and nothing to bolt on later.

Still not sure?

Open all three and spend twenty minutes in each — they run in the browser with nothing to install. Or read the case for running all three, which lays out where the boundaries between them actually fall.