Time tracking looks like the simplest thing a company buys. It is a timer, a list of entries and a report. If that were all it was, the choice would come down to which timer you liked the look of.
It is not all it is. What you are actually choosing between is everything that happens to an hour after it is logged — whose approval it needs, which invoice or payslip it ends up on, how much of the working day the software is watching, and who is allowed to look at the result. And what decides the quote is something simpler still, which is where this guide starts: how the vendor counts the people you are buying for.
This guide is built from prices read off the vendors’ own pricing pages, with the page, the date it was read and the vendor’s exact wording recorded against each one, so the pricing statements below can be checked rather than trusted.
Advice last reviewed 2026-08-03.
Measured from the prices we hold, at the moment this page loaded.
This category sells one verb to several completely different buyers. One is billing: an agency or a practice needs defensible hours attached to a client, a project and a rate, because those hours become an invoice somebody may dispute. One is payroll and attendance: a company needs to know who worked, when, and whether it owes overtime. One is measurement: a manager wants to see where the working day actually goes. And one is personal: an individual wants to know why the week disappeared.
Those jobs need different things out the other end — an invoice line, a payroll figure, a management chart, a personal report — and on a comparison page the features that produce them tend to carry the same names. A feature list cannot settle this for you, which is why it is worth settling before you read one.
So write down the sentence you want to be able to say at the end of a month, in your own words, before you look at anything. "Send an invoice for exactly the billable hours on this client" and "prove to an auditor who was on shift" are different sentences, and they lead to different shortlists.
In a per-seat market the quote is a multiplication and you supply the multiplier. What makes that awkward here is that a time tracker is bought so a report is complete, and a report is only complete if everyone whose hours belong in it has a seat. The people who need seats are therefore defined by the report, not by who wants the software.
That is where the expensive mistake sits. The seat count creeps outward from the team you had in mind to everyone whose time might one day need to appear somewhere, and a seat for someone who logs an entry a month costs what a seat costs.
Work the number out yourself before the first demo, in two versions: the people whose hours you genuinely cannot do without, and the people it would merely be nice to see. Then ask each vendor what the second group costs, because that is the question the pricing page does not answer.
A pricing page leads with a starting rate, and the entry tier may not be the one that does what you need. Check where the capability you settled on in the first section actually sits, because if it is a tier or two up, the rate you quoted to your finance director is not the rate you will pay.
So do the comparison the other way round. Take the report you wrote down, find the lowest tier at each vendor that can actually produce it, and compare those against each other. A rate you cannot buy is not a price.
Then multiply properly. The tier premium is per seat too, so a small difference in rate is a large difference in bill once it is multiplied by everyone you decided must be tracked.
Software sold under the heading of time tracking may also offer to do something quite different: take screenshots, sample which application is in the foreground, count keyboard and mouse activity, detect idleness, and score how productive it believes somebody was being. Treat any of that as a separate purchase with separate consequences, and decide on it explicitly rather than inheriting it with the plan.
If you are buying any of it, find out what your obligations are where your people actually sit before you switch it on. Employee monitoring is regulated differently across jurisdictions and some regimes require notice or consultation first. None of that is the vendor’s problem to solve for you, and if you have staff in more than one country the answer may differ per person, so this is a question for whoever advises you on employment law rather than for a sales engineer.
There is a second cost that no contract mentions, and it is worth thinking about even though we cannot measure it for you: monitoring changes what the tool means to the people it watches, and that can change how they use it. A useful test is whether you would be comfortable explaining a given feature to the team it records. If not, resolve that before you buy it rather than after.
If a vendor will not put a number in front of you, resist reading a motive into it. The product may genuinely be configured per customer, the price may depend on volume, or they may simply prefer to learn your budget first — and from the outside those are indistinguishable. We do not guess between them either: the pricing section above says how much of this category we were able to read off vendor pages, and says nothing about why the rest is missing, because our data cannot tell us.
Treat it as a process problem instead. Go into those conversations with a floor and a ceiling already in hand: price the tiers that are published first, from everyone who publishes them, and only then take the calls that require one. You will be negotiating against a shape of the market rather than against your own uncertainty.
When you do get a quote, get it in writing with the assumptions attached. A number without a seat count, a tier and a term is not a quote, it is an opening position.
The demo will show you an hour being logged. That is the easy part. Ask instead to be walked through one hour from the moment somebody starts a timer to the moment it becomes money — through approval, through rounding, through the rate that gets applied to it, and out into whatever system pays or bills.
Three things on that journey are worth pinning down while somebody from the vendor is on the call. How time is rounded, because a rounding rule changes what you invoice without anyone deciding to. Whether tracked time becomes billable time automatically or by a manual step somebody has to remember. And exactly which fields the export to your accounting or payroll system carries — an integration that sends hours but not rates, or rates but not projects, leaves the invoice to be rebuilt by hand every month.
Ask what happens when the journey goes wrong, too. Somebody will forget to stop a timer, and somebody will submit a week of time to the wrong client. Whether that is a two-click correction with an audit trail, or a support ticket, is a thing you can find out for free before you buy.
Everything above is downstream of one thing: somebody has to enter the time. A time tracker can be excellent and the purchase can still fail completely, because a report assembled from data nobody entered is not a report. That is not a claim about any product — it is what the category is.
So do not trial it with the people who chose it. Trial it with the person who thinks it is a waste of their day, on their real work, for a full week including the messy Friday. Count how many entries they had to fix on Monday morning, and how many they simply never made.
Check the surfaces they will actually use, not the ones in the demo. If the work happens on a phone, in a van, on a shop floor or offline, the desktop timer is not the product being bought. And check what the software does when somebody forgets — whether recovering a lost afternoon is a guess or a reconstruction.
Timesheets are the evidence behind invoices you have already sent and wages you have already paid. That makes them records you may need long after you stop paying for the software that holds them — for a client dispute, an audit, or an employment claim.
So ask what an export actually produces, before you sign rather than after. "You can export your data" covers everything from a complete set of entries with their projects, clients, rates, approvals and edit history, to a spreadsheet of totals with none of the structure that made them meaningful.
Ask about the monitoring data separately, if you bought any. Screenshots and activity records are the part most likely to be retained on terms you did not read, and the part you are least likely to want retained.
Every product below has a page you can open. The figure beside it is the lowest plan price we hold for that product, printed only where we have established what the amount means.
| Product | Vendor | Starting price | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|
| ClockifyTime tracking with a 5-user free plan, and paid tiers for billing and scheduling. | CAKE.com Inc. | $4.99/user/mo | — |
Starting price is the lowest plan price we hold for each product, shown only where we have established what the figure means. It is not by itself a claim that we read that figure from the vendor’s own pricing page — where we have, the pricing section above says how much of this category it covers, and each product’s own page records the page, the moment it was read and the vendor’s wording.