Assistant for Basecamp vs Tracked (TrackedHQ): Which Basecamp Add-on Fits Your Team?
Both tools exist because of the same gap: Basecamp keeps its interface deliberately simple, and some teams need labels, boards, and fields on top of it. Tracked got there first with labels, estimates, and kanban boards. Assistant for Basecamp goes wider: custom fields on four item types, boards that group by any field, automations, and one-click transcription for Basecamp’s voice notes.
We build Assistant, so read this knowing that. It’s still written to be the comparison we’d want if we were the ones paying: exact prices, real limits on both sides, and a clear “pick Tracked if” section, because for some teams that’s the correct answer.
The short version
Pick Tracked if you need one board showing every project at once, your team uses Firefox, or you have under 10 people and labels plus estimates cover your needs.
Pick Assistant if your team sends voice notes and you want to transcribe them; you need real fields (priority, client, version, dates) on to-dos, cards, messages, or documents; you want boards that update fields when you drag; you want rules that run your process automatically; or you have 10+ people and per-seat pricing stopped making sense.
What each tool is
Tracked is a browser extension for Chrome, Brave, and Firefox, plus a web dashboard. It adds three things to Basecamp: kanban boards (per project, per person, and one account-wide board), colored labels on to-dos, and effort estimates. $3/user/mo with a $9/mo minimum, $60/mo for unlimited users, 30-day trial.
Assistant for Basecamp is a Chrome extension that overlays Basecamp with a Kanban board for Basecamp per project, a custom-field system (tags, statuses, single/multi-select, text, number, date), automations, a Docs & Files grid view, card-table duplication, and unread highlighting. Flat $29/mo or $290/yr for unlimited users, 7-day trial without a card. Details on the pricing page.
Both are overlays: your data stays in Basecamp, and neither is a separate app your team has to adopt.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Tracked | Assistant for Basecamp |
|---|---|---|
| Voice note transcription | one click, posted as a comment | |
| Summary and action items from a note | on longer notes | |
| Boards on to-do lists | ||
| Boards on card tables | ||
| Account-wide board (all projects) | (per project) | |
| Group board by field values | status, priority, any select field | |
| Drag updates the underlying field | with audit comment | |
| Due-date board filters | overdue, due today, due this week | |
| Labels/tags | Labels on to-dos | Tags on to-dos, cards, messages, docs |
| Statuses, selects, text, number, date fields | ||
| Estimates | Built-in | Via a number field |
| Per-project field control | enable/disable per project | |
| Automations | event and field-change triggers | |
| Docs & Files grid | ||
| Duplicate a whole card table | with every card, comment and attachment | |
| Copy or move a single column between tables | into an existing column or a new one | |
| Copy or move into a different project | with a project picker | |
| Resumable bulk job | pause, resume, survives a tab close | |
| One-click copy-link icon | ||
| Unread highlighting | ||
| Campfire notifications | ||
| Browsers | Chrome, Brave, Firefox + dashboard | Chrome |
| Trial | 30 days | 7 days, no card |
| Price | $3/user/mo, $9 min, $60 unlimited | $29/mo flat, unlimited users |
Voice notes: the one gap Tracked doesn’t touch
Basecamp 5 put a microphone in every composer, and people use it, because talking is faster than typing. The problem lands on the receiving end. A two-minute voice note takes two minutes to consume, can’t be skimmed, can’t be quoted in a reply, can’t be read in a meeting, and Basecamp’s search cannot see a word of it. Three weeks later, when you know the client said something about the discount but not where, that note may as well be a locked box.
Tracked does not address this. Neither does Basecamp. It’s the one row in the table above where the comparison isn’t “more or less” but “yes or no.”
Assistant adds a Transcribe button under every voice note. Click it and a few seconds later the transcript is posted as a comment on the thread, which is the part that matters. It isn’t held inside the extension where only subscribers see it: teammates without Assistant read the same comment, on any device, and Basecamp’s own search finally indexes what was said. Longer notes come back with a one-line summary and the concrete asks pulled out.
A few details that decide whether this is useful or a gimmick:
- It works on anyone’s notes, including ones recorded months before you installed anything.
- The language is detected automatically, so a note in Urdu or French comes back in the language it was spoken in.
- Each note is transcribed once for the whole workspace, however many people open it, so a busy thread doesn’t burn your quota repeatedly.
- Transcripts stay editable, and the summary regenerates from your corrections.
- 6,000 minutes a month are included in the flat price. The audio itself is never stored on our servers; it’s read for the seconds transcription takes and discarded.
Campfires and Pings have no comment system, so those transcripts show inside Assistant’s player rather than as a comment. That’s the one place the “everyone reads it” promise doesn’t fully hold.
Boards: one wide view vs deeper per-project views
Tracked’s standout is the account-wide board: every project’s to-dos in one kanban. If your Monday starts with “where is everything across all clients”, Tracked answers that in one screen, and Assistant currently doesn’t; our boards are per project, with a picker to jump between them.
Inside a project, the depth reverses. Assistant turns any to-do list or card table into a board (your lists become the columns, so there’s nothing to set up), lets you group it by any select-type field so a Status board and a Priority board are two clicks apart, filters by assignee, tag, status, field values, or due dates, and treats a drag as data: drop a card in “Under QA” and the status field changes, with a comment on the item recording who moved it. On Tracked, boards visualize; changing anything else stays manual. The kanban help doc covers setup.
Labels vs fields
This is the structural difference. Tracked’s labels are one flat list doing every job: priority, type, client, and stage all become labels, and filtering “high-priority bugs for Acme” means your team invented and remembered three label conventions.
Assistant models those as separate fields: a Priority single-select, a Category select, a Client field, a Version field, each with its own colors and options, each filterable and groupable on the board, each visible on the item’s page. Fields apply to to-dos, card-table cards, messages, and documents, so a message thread can carry “Status: Approved” and a document can carry “Version: Final”. Admins decide who can add new options, and each project can switch individual fields off entirely. Here’s how custom fields work, with details in the custom fields doc.
If your complexity genuinely fits one label list, Tracked’s simplicity is a feature, not a gap.
Automations
Assistant has them; Tracked doesn’t. Rules combine a trigger (a Basecamp event like to-do completed or comment posted, or one of your fields changing) with actions: set a field, assign people, complete a to-do, post a comment. “When Status changes to Ready for QA, assign the QA lead and comment the checklist” runs itself at 2am. This is the category difference between a board that shows state and a system that enforces process.
One honest caveat: these react to what happens inside Basecamp, not to inbound webhooks from outside tools, so they don’t replace Zapier for cross-app work. See how to automate Basecamp without Zapier and the automations doc.
Pricing math
| Team size | Tracked | Assistant | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 users | $9/mo | $29/mo | Tracked |
| 5 users | $15/mo | $29/mo | Tracked |
| 10 users | $30/mo | $29/mo | Break-even |
| 15 users | $45/mo | $29/mo | Assistant |
| 20+ users | $60/mo (unlimited tier) | $29/mo | Assistant, at half |
Tracked’s pricing was verified against trackedhq.com on 2026-08-02; ours is on the pricing page. Either can change independently, and the break-even point moves with them.
Annual on Assistant ($290/yr) works out to $24.17/mo. Tracked’s billing scales with headcount; Assistant’s doesn’t move when you add contractors, clients, or new hires. One admin pays, and everyone on the Basecamp account is covered. Full breakdown on the pricing page and the billing doc.
Where Tracked is simply better
Being direct about it: the account-wide cross-project board (Assistant has no equivalent), Firefox and Brave support plus a touch-friendly web dashboard (Assistant is Chrome-only, inside Basecamp), a 30-day trial against our 7, and lower cost below 10 users. If two or more of those describe your team, buy Tracked.
Where Assistant is simply better
The same directness the other way. Tracked has no answer to any of these:
- Voice note transcription. Basecamp 5 records voice notes and neither Basecamp nor Tracked turns them into text. Assistant transcribes any note in one click, posts the transcript as a comment the whole thread can read and search, and pulls out a summary and action items on longer ones. 6,000 minutes a month are included.
- Fields beyond labels. Status, priority, version, category, plus text, number, and date fields, on to-dos, cards, messages, and documents. Tracked has labels and estimates, on to-dos only.
- A board that writes back. Group by any select field and drag a card between columns to set that field, with an audit comment on the item. Tracked’s board moves cards; it doesn’t update data.
- Automations. Rules that fire on Basecamp events and field changes, so triage and handoffs run without anyone remembering to do them.
- Boards on card tables, not just to-do lists.
- Bulk card-table surgery. Copy a whole table, or copy or move a single column into another table, in the same project or a different one, carrying every card with its comments and attachments. It runs as a resumable background job you can pause and come back to.
- Docs & Files grid, unread highlighting, and Campfire notifications, none of which have a Tracked equivalent.
Pick Assistant if two or more of those matter to you. They’re the reason the flat price holds at any headcount: you’re buying a wider tool, not a cheaper seat.
Switching from Tracked
There’s no automated migration today. The manual path most teams take: recreate labels as tags or a status field (the field manager adds options with colors in minutes), add a number field for estimates, then open the Kanban on your busiest project and set values as you triage; the board makes untagged items obvious. Both trials can run simultaneously on the same Basecamp account, so you can compare with your real data before either bill starts.
FAQ
Do they work at the same time? Yes. Both are overlays and don’t conflict. Running both during a trial is the fastest way to decide.
Does either change my Basecamp data? Labels, fields, and board configurations live in each tool’s own database, keyed to your Basecamp items. Your to-dos and projects stay untouched either way. Assistant writes to Basecamp only when you act: completing a to-do from the board, posting an audit comment.
Which works with the current Basecamp? Assistant is built for the current Basecamp interface. Tracked states support for Basecamp 3/4; check their site for current-version details.
Is there a per-seat plan on Assistant? No. $29/mo flat, or $290/yr, unlimited users, 7-day trial with no card.
See the wider field of options in Tracked Alternatives for Basecamp, start with the getting started guide, or install from the Chrome Web Store and run the 7-day trial against a real project before you decide.