Kiantu Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

TLDR

Kiantu is a work intelligence tool that tracks work sessions in plain language, infers the project and goal, splits deep focus from reactive interruptions, and reports where your week actually went. It is free for up to 10 people. Promising but young. Best for: small teams avoiding timesheets. Price: Free, then $12/person/mo. Rating: 6.6/10.

What is Kiantu?

Kiantu is a work-tracking application that tries to answer a question most time trackers cannot: where did my week actually go, and how much of it was real focused work versus reacting to other people. Instead of a stopwatch or a timesheet grid, you describe what you are doing in plain language, and Kiantu infers the project, the goal, and a time estimate. At the end of the week it hands back a plain-language summary of where your time went and what to change.

It is built by Alvaro, a solo bootstrapped founder in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the company deliberately stays small and only claims features that actually ship. That restraint is admirable and rare. The core idea, a focus-versus-reactive split rather than raw hours, is genuinely useful for knowledge workers who feel busy but cannot say why. The catch is that this is early, one-person software competing against tools with years of polish, so you are betting on an idea and a founder more than a proven platform.

What Are Kiantu’s Key Features?

Plain-language session tracking

You log work by typing what you are doing in normal words, and Kiantu infers the project, goal, and time estimate rather than making you pick from dropdowns or start a timer. This lowers the friction that kills most time-tracking habits. The tradeoff is accuracy: inference can misattribute a session, so you will occasionally correct what it guessed. For people who never stick with manual timers, though, a system that meets you where you are is a real advantage. You can jot a line like fixed the billing bug and reviewed two PRs, and Kiantu will do the work of turning that into a tracked session with an estimated duration. It removes the tiny moments of friction that, across a week, are exactly why most people abandon time tracking entirely.

Focus versus reactive split

This is the differentiator. Kiantu automatically categorizes work as intentional deep focus or reactive interruption, so your weekly view is not just hours logged but the quality of that time. Seeing that 60 percent of your week was reactive is the kind of insight that actually changes behavior, and it is something raw hour trackers rarely surface. It reframes productivity as protecting focus rather than filling a timesheet. Over a few weeks the pattern is what matters: if every Tuesday collapses into meetings and Slack, the report makes that visible in a way a raw hours-per-project chart never would, and gives you something concrete to renegotiate with your team.

Team dashboards without timesheets

For teams, Kiantu rolls sessions up by person, project, and goal without asking anyone to fill out a formal timesheet. Managers get a picture of where effort is going, and there are privacy controls: sessions can be marked Busy to hide details from teammates. That privacy switch is a smart nod to the surveillance concerns that make employees resent traditional tracking tools.

Integrations, agents, and weekly reports

Kiantu correlates activity from GitHub, Google Calendar, Outlook, Jira, Slack, and messaging platforms to inform its inferences, and it exposes MCP and REST APIs so AI agents can open and close sessions and log their costs alongside human work. Every Sunday it generates a plain-language weekly report with actionable recommendations. The agent-cost tracking is a forward-looking touch as more teams put AI into their workflows, since it lets you see what an autonomous agent actually spent and produced next to the humans on the same project. The integrations also mean Kiantu can pre-fill much of your session data from calendar events and code commits, so the plain-language logging becomes a light edit rather than writing from scratch.

How Much Does Kiantu Cost?

Kiantu is free for up to 10 people with no credit card required, which is unusually generous. Many small teams could run on the free tier indefinitely. Past 10 people, it costs $12 per person per month, and that paid tier is essentially the same product scaled to larger teams with full dashboards and reporting.

That $12 per seat sits right in line with the category. RescueTime runs about $12 a month for its automatic focus tracking, Timely starts around $11 per user per month, and Toggl Track is roughly $9 per user per month for teams after its free plan. Kiantu is not undercutting anyone on price, so the decision comes down to whether its focus-versus-reactive angle and plain-language logging are worth more to you than the deeper feature sets and track records of the incumbents.

The honest framing: the free tier is a genuine reason to try it, but at $12 a seat you are paying incumbent prices for a much younger product. That is a fair deal only if the specific insights Kiantu produces map to a problem your team actually has. A team drowning in meetings and context-switching will get more from it than one that already tracks hours cleanly and just wants tidy invoices.

Who is Kiantu Best For?

Use Kiantu if you are a solo worker or small team who wants to understand focus versus reactive time without the drudgery of timesheets, and you like the idea of describing work in plain language. It suits reflective knowledge workers, small agencies, and teams that already use tools like GitHub and Calendar that Kiantu can read from. If you are experimenting with AI agents in your workflow, the agent-cost tracking is a nice bonus.

Skip Kiantu if you need billable-hours precision for client invoicing, court-defensible timesheets, or the deep reporting and integrations of a mature suite. Because tracking is inference-based, it is not the tool for exact, auditable time capture. And because it is young and solo-built, risk-averse teams that need vendor stability, guaranteed uptime, and formal support agreements should wait for it to mature before betting a core workflow on it. A single founder can move fast, but there is real key-person risk in trusting your team’s tracking to a one-person shop.

Best Kiantu Alternatives

RescueTime

RescueTime is the veteran of automatic focus tracking, running quietly in the background to score your time and flag distractions, at about $12 a month. It has years of refinement and a large user base Kiantu cannot match yet. It is more about individual focus scoring than plain-language team dashboards, so choose RescueTime if you want a proven personal productivity tracker over a newer team-oriented take.

Timely

Timely uses AI to automatically draft timesheets from your activity, starting around $11 per user per month. It is aimed at teams and agencies that bill by the hour and want accurate records with minimal manual entry. It overlaps with Kiantu’s automation goal but leans toward billing accuracy rather than focus-versus-reactive insight. Pick Timely if client billing is the point; pick Kiantu if understanding your attention is.

Toggl Track

Toggl Track is the flexible, well-loved manual tracker, free to start and about $9 per user per month for teams. It is simple, reliable, and integrates everywhere, but it puts the logging work on you and does not infer focus quality. Choose Toggl if you want a proven, straightforward timer with strong reporting; choose Kiantu if manual timers never stick for you.

Final Verdict: Is Kiantu Worth It?

We dug into Kiantu and liked the thinking behind it. The focus-versus-reactive split, plain-language logging, and no-timesheet team dashboards address a real gap in how most tools measure work, and the founder’s discipline about only claiming shipped features earns trust. The free tier for up to 10 people is generous enough that trying it costs you nothing but time, and the plain-language logging means onboarding a teammate takes minutes rather than a training session.

The 6.6 rating reflects promise weighed against risk. This is a young, solo-built product with little independent validation, an inference model that will sometimes guess wrong, and a narrower feature set than the established alternatives it prices alongside at $12 a seat. That combination makes it hard to recommend as a paid team rollout right now. Our take: start on the free plan, see whether the weekly focus insights actually change how you work, and only upgrade to the paid seats once you are genuinely convinced it earns its keep. As an idea it is worth watching closely, and the free tier makes that easy; as a paid commitment across a whole team, it still has to prove itself against tougher, more established competition.