What is CapacityLens?
CapacityLens is a helicopter view of your agency's capacity: who's working on what, who's free, and when. You add your people and your projects, drag out allocations on a week-by-week calendar, and the answers — utilisation, over-capacity days, who's free next week — appear without a report to run.
It is self-hosted and open source (AGPL), and it is built for small agencies and studios running their weekly resourcing meeting, not for large enterprises running portfolio management.
What it does
The whole product is one screen: the schedule. It shows people grouped by discipline, with allocation bars, live utilisation percentages, and time off — holiday, sick, unpaid — all on the same canvas, zoomable from one to eight weeks. Work hangs off a simple clients → projects → activities shape, with a built-in "Internal" client for the non-billable stuff. Full undo/redo and filtering by person, discipline, client, project or activity come with it.
Everything past that core view is a switch you flip when your team actually needs it — placeholders for roles you haven't hired yet, external resources for studios you hand work to, offline access for a read-only snapshot on the train, company login when you outgrow passwords. Turning a switch off never deletes data; it comes back when you flip it again.
Who it's for
CapacityLens is for the person who runs the Monday or Friday resourcing meeting at a small agency or studio — usually an office manager, a producer, or a founder — and for the freelancers and contractors on their books, who may never sign in at all. It assumes a team small enough that one screen can hold everyone, and a planning style measured in days and weeks, not billable minutes.
What it deliberately doesn't do
CapacityLens is deliberately not:
- a budgeting or billing system
- a timesheet
- an hour-by-hour calendar
- a project-management suite
- a CRM
- a mobile-first app
Those boundaries are on purpose, not missing features. The fastest way to stay small is to refuse the wrong ones. If you need those tools, CapacityLens is built to sit happily beside them and stick to the one question it answers best: who's busy, who's free, and when.
The scaling ladder
You never migrate to a "bigger edition" of CapacityLens — you flip the next switch when you get there. The same product runs at every size on this ladder:
| Stage | What changes |
|---|---|
| Just you, evaluating | Try the demo — one command, in-memory sample data, nothing installed beyond a copy of the code from GitHub. |
| Your team, trusted network | Real persistence, no sign-in wall. Backups on by default. |
| Real sign-ins | Choose how to install CapacityLens with password sign-in: one Owner, invite links, four nested roles enforced on the server. |
| Company-grade identity | Company login (single sign-on) against your identity provider, with optional required multi-factor sign-in. |
| More than one company | Each company fully isolated — memberships, roles and data checked per company on every request. |
What's next
Try the demo to see the schedule in your browser in about two minutes, with no installation.