Comparison: Hubstaff and Lattice

Business leaders know that tracking performance is crucial to improving it. While the concept is straightforward, the process isn’t.

That is why teams use tools like Hubstaff and Lattice. Improved workflows will likely follow whichever you choose — but which caters to your team’s unique needs? How exactly are you supposed to use each one?

Let’s discuss.

What is Hubstaff?

Hubstaff is a workforce management suite that enables teams to make the most of their time with powerful productivity, reporting, and analytics features.

Using Hubstaff is easy: start the timer and work. Hubstaff uses tracked time to automatically generate timesheets, Insights, and 20+ reports. You can also create and send invoices and pay teams on their preferred platform right from the app. 

What is Lattice?

Lattice is a cloud-based employee performance management system. It offers several employee engagement features that help you understand how your employees are performing and identify areas for development.

With Lattice, you can access people-centric metrics such as engagement levels and individual goals. This information can help you better understand each employee beyond their basic output.

Let's take a quick side-by-side look at these apps:

Now that you've seen Hubstaff and Lattice at a glance, we'll delve into the specifics. We'll start with Hubstaff — a workforce management suite for in-office, remote, and hybrid teams. Hubstaff's versatile feature set makes it a multi-industry powerhouse for teams of all sizes. Let's get started.

Track the exact time spent on each task and project with Hubstaff’s accurate and intuitive time tracker. See which types of work are using up your team’s hours so you can make informed scheduling and budget costing decisions.

In addition to time tracking, Hubstaff tells you the story behind your team’s work. With app & URL tracking and activity monitoring features, you can uncover time-consuming or potentially distracting tasks. This way, you can explore these trends and guide your team in the right direction.

You’ll never have to worry about productivity truly stagnating. Customizable idle time-out settings ensure your team is actively working when they’re clocked in.

Hubstaff is amazing not only for managers but also for employees who want to understand their work habits. You can even take it a step further with the Insights add-on. You can use it to:

• Track performance trends

• Categorize productive and unproductive apps

• See productivity benchmarks set by other users in your industry.
  

Set project budgets and never worry about overspending with Hubstaff. The app’s project cost management features will notify you when you are close to hitting pre-defined limits. You can also see how these adjustments affect hours, spending, and more in real time from your dashboard.

With Hubstaff’s powerful invoicing features, you can set rates based on hours, project, or user. Then generate automatic line items, add custom branding, and email your invoices right from the Hubstaff app.

Hubstaff makes paying employees simple. You can schedule weekly, bi-weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly payments so you don’t miss them. Hubstaff will calculate the payment amount from your employees’ pay rates and total hours worked. You can also send fixed amounts manually.

You can pay your employees on a wide array of platforms right from the app. Integrations with popular platforms like Gusto, Wise, and PayPal make Hubstaff one of the most flexible payroll options.

Unlike Hubstaff, Lattice is a full-fledged performance management and People Ops suite designed to help teams improve employee engagement. Help everyone on your team reach their full potential with these employee development features:

Performance management tools

Lattice makes it possible to gauge employee performance via well-executed reviews and feedback features. The app adapts to your needs by providing periodic, project-based, or automated reviews. Easily schedule 1:1s and share your review notes with employees for transparency.

Goal tracking

Lattice’s Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) serve as milestones that allow you to track tangible growth results. OKRs are integrated into check-ins and status updates — so employees don’t have to disrupt their workflow to document their progress.

Employee development tools

Define job responsibilities and set expectations with each team member so you can guide them along their ideal career path. If you’re new to coaching and career development, Lattice also offers growth plan templates to give managers the tools they need to help their employees succeed.

Employee engagement tools

Lattice is designed to identify and understand employee engagement — not make generalizations based on output. It tracks engagement scores over time and presents actionable, research-driven suggestions to boost each individual’s engagement. Lattice also has onboarding and exit surveys so that you can stay on top from day one.

People analytics

Get to know your employees on a deeper level. Explore demographic data like age groups, gender, or ethnicity to ensure your company is a diverse, psychologically safe, and inspiring place to work. One of Lattice’s standout features is sentiment analysis, which parses comments and factors them in when calculating response scores. 

Compensation

Lattice lets you design bonuses and other incentivization systems around reliable performance data. Connect performance ratings and raise guidelines to eliminate subjective computations and empower team members to do their best work.

Pricing

Hubstaff

Hubstaff offers four pricing plans: Free, Starter, Pro, and Enterprise.

• Free: $0 for one user only. Includes time tracking, timesheets, basic productivity features, limited reports, and limited payments.

• Starter: $7 per user/month. Includes all reports, one integration, idle timeout, and more.

• Pro: $10 per user/month. Includes complete productivity features, unlimited teams, payroll, invoicing, project budgets, scheduling, and more.

• Enterprise: Custom pricing. Includes the Insights add-on, HIPAA and SOC-2 Type II compliance, VIP support, and more.

Hubstaff also offers three optional add-ons: Insights, Tasks, and data retention.

• Insights: $2 per user/month. Includes work-time classification, focus time statistics, industry benchmarks, and more.

• Tasks: $3 per user/month. An Agile project management platform with Kanban features, Sprints, custom workflows, and daily Stand-ups. 

• Data retention: $2 per user/month. Extends data retention within Hubstaff from three to six years. Great for larger teams with strict compliance standards. 

Lattice

Lattice’s pricing model begins with Performance Management and OKRs features, with the Engagement, Grow, and Compensation as optional individual add-ons. It doesn’t offer a free plan.

• Performance Management + OKRs & Goals: $11 per user/month. Includes performance reviews, training, comment sentiment analysis, goals and OKR analytics, OKR tracking and management, and more.

• Engagement: $4 per user/month. Includes employee engagement surveys, automated pulse surveys, onboarding and exit surveys, and more.

• Grow: $4 per user/month. Includes growth plans, individual development plans, career tracks, 1:1 and Performance Management integration, and more.

• Compensation: $6 per user/month. Includes compensation reviews, raise guidance based on performance data, budget and spend tracking, promotion handling, and more.

You can subscribe to the Performance Management or OKRs & Goals feature sets individually for $8 per user/month, but you will have to get in touch with their sales team. Lattice also offers special pricing for enterprises with large volume purchases.

While Hubstaff and Lattice have multiple similarities on paper, they have drastically different use cases.

When choosing between the two, it’s important to ask questions about your unique needs:

• Is your business workflow disorganized? Are team members struggling to meet deadlines too frequently? Choose Hubstaff.

• Do you feel that employee engagement in your company is declining? Are new hires finding it difficult to ease into the team? Go with Lattice.

Determining where you fit these two categories will go a long way. And with the information we’ve provided, making the right decision won’t be as difficult as you thought.