A project dashboard you build, not one you are given
Every plan opens on a dashboard already. What this adds is the arranging: pick the cards that answer your question, drop them where you want them, and pin a saved report straight onto the board. Live numbers, read from the same data the underlying pages read.
A dashboard is on Free. The builder is Professional.
What is free here, and what is not
- A dashboard, on Free. Portfolio health if you manage, My Work if you deliver. It is the screen you land on.
- The report builder, on Free. Columns, grouping and charts across every project, with share links that need no login.
- Building your own, on Professional. The 23 card types, drag and drop, and pinning a saved report as a card.
If the default view already answers your question, you do not need the builder. That is a strange thing for this page to say and it is true, so it is better said here than discovered after an upgrade.
A project manager dashboard, not a template
The reason most dashboards go unread is that somebody else decided what was on them. A delivery lead wants overdue work and the health grid. A finance manager wants budget burn and billable mix. A scrum lead wants sprint progress and nothing else. One layout cannot serve all three, and a compromise serves none of them.
So each person builds their own. Cards come in six groups, and the catalogue shows every card with its tier on it rather than hiding the ones you cannot use.
What goes on a project tracking dashboard
23 card types in six groups. 18 of them on Professional; the other 5 need Enterprise and are marked as such below.
Personal
My tasks, overdue, upcoming deadlines, activity feed. What one person owes this week.
Projects & sprints
Stats cards, the project health grid, data freshness, the milestone timeline, sprint progress.
Analytics
Task status charts, team utilisation, budget burn, goal progress, a cross-project table.
Reports
Any saved report, pinned onto the board as a live card.
Governance
The proposal pipeline, gate scores, criteria and the scorecard. Enterprise.
Compliance
Project compliance, billable utilisation, billable mix, revenue at risk. The last of those is Enterprise.
KPI cards, and which ones earn their space
A dashboard with fourteen cards on it is a dashboard nobody reads. The useful test is whether a number would change what you do this week. Percentage complete rarely does. Overdue count, budget burn against elapsed time, and the tasks that control the finish date usually do.
Two cards are worth knowing about because they answer a question the others cannot. The health grid derives its own status rather than asking anybody to set one, so it cannot be gamed by a green light somebody forgot to change. And data freshness lists the projects whose work has gone untouched, worst first, which is how a quietly dead project stops looking fine.
Some cards are manager-only by role, independently of your plan, because a utilisation chart of the whole team is not for everyone.
Save a report, then pin it as a card
The card set is fixed; your reports are not. So the escape hatch from any fixed card list is the report builder: choose the columns, the grouping and the chart, save it, and pin it on the dashboard as a live card that refreshes with everything else.
The builder itself is on Free, so you can produce the report and share it by link without paying anything. Pinning it onto a board you arranged is the part that needs Professional.
See the rest of the reporting surfacePlanning dashboards, and the honest limit of one
A planning dashboard is useful for the shape of the work: what is due, what is committed beyond capacity, which milestones are near. It is not where you plan. Moving a date, wiring a dependency or reflowing forty tasks happens on the Gantt, because that is the surface with the scheduling engine behind it.
So treat the dashboard as the place you notice something and the plan as the place you fix it. A card that pretended to be an editor would be a worse version of both.
The Gantt and the critical pathQuestions people ask
Do I need a paid plan to get a dashboard?
No. Every plan including Free opens on a dashboard: portfolio health if you manage, My Work if you deliver. What Professional adds is BUILDING your own, arranging the cards you want rather than the ones we chose. If the default view already answers your question, you do not need the builder.
How many card types are there?
23 in total, of which 18 are available on Professional. The other 5 need Enterprise: the four governance cards, which need the governance feature, and revenue at risk, which needs audit logs. They are shown in the catalogue with the tier on them rather than hidden, so you can see what you are not buying.
Can I put a report on a dashboard?
Yes, and the report builder itself is on every plan including Free. Build a cross-project report, save it, then pin it as a card. Pinning is part of the builder, so the report is free and the pinning is Professional.
Can different people see different dashboards?
Each person builds their own, so a delivery lead and a finance manager are not fighting over one layout. Some cards are manager-only by role, independently of plan, because a utilisation chart of the whole team is not for everyone. Role-based templates that an admin pushes to a group are a separate Enterprise feature.
Do the numbers update, or is it a snapshot?
They are live. Every card reads the same data the underlying page reads, so a dashboard and the project it describes cannot disagree. The activity feed drops its polling when it is embedded on a page rather than a dashboard, which keeps a busy board from hammering the API.
Open the default one first
Start free, look at the dashboard you get, and upgrade only if you want to rearrange it. That way round is cheaper for you, and it is the one we would pick.
Start free