Billing and Time Tracking Software: 9 Compared

I build software for small businesses, and if another founder asked me how to choose a billing and time tracking tool, I would tell them to compare the bills, not the pricing pages. This comparison does that for nine tools, and works out what eight of them cost at three team sizes.

For most of this category's history the buying question was simple: pick a per-seat price you can live with and check that the invoice template looks professional. Two pricing changes broke that, and both of them open a gap between the number on the pricing page and the number on the bill.

One major vendor was acquired and, in early 2026, restructured its pricing to charge usage fees on top of the seat rate, so a renewal can rise without a single seat being added. Another raised its per-employee fee by 25 percent at the entry tier by early July 2026.

Neither change is hidden, but neither shows up in a side-by-side comparison of advertised starting prices, which is how most of these tools get compared. This page covers what those changes mean if you are buying now, along with what the category does and where client billing stops being a valid payroll record.

What the category actually covers

The defining capability is not the timer. It is that a tracked hour carries a billable rate and a client attached to it, so an invoice can be generated from the time record rather than reconstructed from it.

The last row is where the cheap tools and the expensive ones diverge. Tracking hours and sending an invoice is close to a commodity, available free on the smallest plans. What the higher tiers charge for is knowing whether a given client is actually profitable once you count the unbillable time around their work, and for many small firms that is the only feature worth paying for.

Project time management: budgets, estimates, and resourcing

Project time management is the layer above the timer: hours attached to a project that carries an agreed budget, so the tool can tell you how much of that budget is gone before the client does. Capture is the input. The comparison against the budget is the point.

Three capabilities separate this from a stopwatch with a client field. Estimates set against tasks, so actuals can be measured against what you quoted. Budget alerts that fire at a threshold rather than at the overrun. And resource scheduling, which shows who is already committed to which work instead of only reporting what happened after the fact.

Among the nine below, three go furthest here: Everhour, which ties budgets and estimates to the task inside your project system; Paymo, which adds resource scheduling on its top Pro tier; and BigTime, which treats project financials as the product rather than a report. Harvest keeps profitability reporting at its higher tier.

Client billing is not a payroll record

Client billing records and payroll records are constantly treated as the same thing, including by buyers who assume that because they are tracking hours they have satisfied their obligations as an employer. They have not.

The legal duty is specific. According to the Department of Labor's recordkeeping fact sheet, the Fair Labor Standards Act requires an employer to record the hours worked each day and each workweek for every non-exempt employee, meaning anyone entitled to overtime pay. A client timesheet that leaves out unbillable time does not meet that duty.

The practical consequence is that a firm with salaried exempt professionals can often run on billing tracking alone, while a firm with non-exempt hourly staff needs a record of actual hours worked that satisfies statutory recordkeeping.

When one timesheet has to pay staff and bill clients

Some firms need a single hour to do two jobs: pay the person who worked it and bill the client who bought it. Staffing and recruiting agencies call this pay and bill, and it is the requirement this category handles least consistently, because most of these products were built to produce an invoice and stop there.

The Payroll Link column in the comparison table below shows the honest split. QuickBooks Time pushes hours into QuickBooks payroll and the ledger without an export step, and Hubstaff includes payroll features rather than a CSV download. The other seven expect somebody to carry approved hours into a payroll system, which is tolerable monthly and tiresome weekly.

If your margin lives in the gap between a pay rate and a bill rate, as it does in staffing, none of these tools models that on its own. An invoice and payroll workflow assembled from a general time tracker keeps the two rates in separate places, so agencies at real volume end up on a dedicated staffing platform instead.

Two pricing changes worth knowing before you buy

The two changes are Harvest's shift to usage charges layered over its seat price and a higher per-employee fee at QuickBooks Time. Both change what you will actually pay, each in a different way.

Harvest moved to seat plus usage

Harvest, now owned by Bending Spoons, restructured its pricing model in early 2026. The current arrangement pairs a per-seat plan fee with usage-based charges calculated from account activity: invoices sent, plus active projects, clients, and tasks. Harvest bills each paid plan either as Flex, with those usage charges, or as Unlimited at a fixed price, and its free tier covers one seat and two projects.

QuickBooks Time raised its per-employee fee

By early July 2026, QuickBooks Time had raised its per-employee monthly fee by $2 on both the Premium and Elite plans, with the $20 and $40 base fees unchanged. At the entry tier that moves the per-employee charge from $8 to $10, a 25 percent increase, applied on top of a base fee and on top of the QuickBooks Online subscription the product requires.

For a 25-person business the increase alone is roughly $600 a year. The product remains a reasonable choice for a firm whose books already live in QuickBooks, since the integration removes an export step, but at the new rate the value calculation has changed.

9 billing and time tracking products compared

The nine tools below span free plans to enterprise platforms. They were chosen because they cover the realistic range for small and growing firms, not because they are the most advertised.

Clockify

Clockify is the cheapest established paid option in the category. Basic, at $3.99 per user per month on annual billing, adds billable rates; Standard at $5.49 adds invoicing and approvals; and Pro at $7.99 adds scheduling, expenses, and profitability reports. By April 21, 2026, Clockify's own pricing page showed the free plan capped at five users, with billable rates moved to paid tiers.

For a firm of five or fewer that only needs hours captured against projects and builds invoices elsewhere, the free plan can still be a permanent answer. A team that bills from rates inside the tool starts at Basic.

Toggl

Toggl, formerly Toggl Track, is built around speed of capture, with an interface widely regarded as the cleanest in the category. It has a free plan for up to three users, and paid plans start at $9 per user per month on annual billing.

If people at your firm skip tracking because tracking is annoying, Toggl addresses that cause more directly than a feature-richer tool would. The trade-off is the other half of the job: invoicing is comparatively limited (a PDF built from a report rather than a billing workflow), so firms that need billing depth typically pair it with something else or choose differently.

Harvest

Harvest is a mature product with two decades of history, a well-regarded invoicing workflow, and wide integrations. It costs $9 per seat per month on Teams and $14 on Enterprise with annual billing. If the requirement is tracked hours becoming a clean client invoice with minimum friction, the workflow is among the best in the category.

The caveat is the pricing structure described above rather than the product. Model your actual project, client, and invoice volume before committing, and ask specifically about the fixed-price Unlimited billing option if predictability matters more than optimizing the monthly rate.

Paymo

Paymo is a project-based work platform with time tracking and invoicing built in. The Solo plan costs $5.90 a month for a single user. Teams start on Plus at $10.90 per user per month on annual billing, which includes project profitability, and Pro at $16.90 adds resource scheduling and timesheet approvals.

For a small agency or studio that wants project management and billing in the same tool rather than two subscriptions, Paymo hits a useful middle point.

Everhour

Everhour is designed to embed inside project management tools rather than replace them, with native integrations into Asana, Jira, Trello, ClickUp, and others. Its free plan covers up to five users but leaves the integrations out, and the Team plan costs $8.50 per user per month on annual billing with a five-seat minimum.

For a team whose work already lives in one of those project tools, tracking from inside the task is far more likely to stick than asking people to open a second app.

Hubstaff

Hubstaff is aimed at distributed teams where the client or the employer wants verification alongside the hours, with screenshots, activity levels, and GPS available depending on tier. Pricing starts around $4.99 per user per month with a two-seat minimum. For agencies billing clients who expect proof of work, this is the category answer, and for teams who would find monitoring intrusive it is the wrong one.

QuickBooks Time

QuickBooks Time, formerly TSheets, is Intuit's time product, priced at a base fee plus a per-employee charge, and it requires a QuickBooks Online subscription. The argument for it is integration: hours reach payroll and the general ledger without an export, which for a firm already committed to QuickBooks removes a genuine friction point.

The argument against is cost. A $20 base fee plus $10 per employee, the rates in place by early July 2026, puts a 25-person team at $270 a month before the QuickBooks Online subscription.

BigTime

BigTime is a professional services automation platform rather than a time tracker: it covers time, billing, expenses, and project portfolio management, and sells resource management as an add-on module. Pricing starts at $20 per user per month on the Essentials plan. For a consultancy or firm where project profitability and resourcing have become real management problems, the platform and its add-ons buy capability the cheaper tools genuinely lack.

FreshBooks

FreshBooks is an invoicing and accounting product with time tracking attached, rather than the reverse. The Lite plan lists at $23 a month, or $248.40 a year on yearly billing, which works out to $20.70 a month. It lets you invoice up to five clients and charges $11 a month for each additional team member.

For a solo consultant whose actual need is to invoice clients, and who tracks hours as an input to that, FreshBooks covers both jobs in one subscription where the team-first tools cover only one.

Time management software for accountants

Accounting firms shop this category for a reason the other buyers do not share: the work arrives in a wave. Utilization, the share of available hours that end up billable, is not a smooth line in a certified public accountant (CPA) practice. The useful report is not how many hours were billable overall but whose capacity busy season consumed, and how much of it was written off.

Three things to check before buying for a practice. Hours have to attach to an engagement rather than a generic project, because one client can run a return, a review, and advisory work at three different rates. Write-offs have to be visible, since the gap between hours worked and hours billed is what a partner manages. And rates have to be settable per person, not only per client.

Of the nine here, a firm billing by engagement is usually choosing between Harvest and BigTime, with Clockify as the low-cost option when the invoice is produced in your accounting software anyway. Practice management suites bundle time and billing too, so if you already run one, the integration question comes before the feature comparison.

What each product costs at 10, 25, and 50 users

Nearly everything here prices per user, which makes the arithmetic simple and the growth curve steep. Apart from the QuickBooks Time base fee, there is no flat charge to spread across the team, so headcount multiplies the bill directly. FreshBooks is left out of the table because it is priced for solo operators, as a flat plan plus a charge for each added team member.

The spread at 50 users is roughly $800 a month between the cheapest paid option and the most expensive, which is a real budget difference for a firm of that size. Clockify Basic, at $3.99 per user, sets the floor for the whole table, so every other row has to justify its premium with a feature that floor lacks and you actually cannot do without.

How to choose billing and time tracking software

Five questions settle most of this choice: whether invoices have to leave the tool, whether your people are exempt or non-exempt, which vendors changed their pricing, where the work already lives, and whether you need profitability reporting.

Before you choose

FirstHR covers the people side of a professional services firm: onboarding, signed paperwork, training, and the employee file. Billable hours and client invoices come from the products above, and a firm shopping for time and billing should buy one of them.

What all nine share is an assumption: the person tracking time is already an employee or contractor in good standing with an account already set up for them. In a professional services firm that assumption carries weight, because billable staff are the product, and every new one arrives with paperwork that no billing tool touches.

Two of those rows run on federal rules. The employer must complete Section 2 of Form I-9 within three business days of the employee's first day of work, according to the Handbook for Employers from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Form W-4 tells the employer how much federal income tax to withhold from each paycheck.

None of that paperwork is produced by a time and billing tool, and in a firm without a dedicated HR person it typically lands on an operations lead alongside everything else.

FirstHR covers that layer: onboarding workflows with task deadlines, e-signature on offer letters and acknowledgments, document management with an expiry date on each document, training modules with completion records, an org chart, and employee self-service, at a flat $98 a month for up to 10 people or $198 for 11 to 50. We sit alongside your billing tool rather than replacing it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is billing and time tracking software?

Software that records hours spent on client work and turns them into an invoice. What separates it from a plain timer is that each tracked hour carries a client and a billable rate, so the bill comes from the time record instead of being rebuilt by hand.

What is the difference between billing time tracking and payroll time tracking?

Billing tracking asks what a client should be charged and protects revenue. Payroll tracking asks what an employee is owed and satisfies a legal recordkeeping obligation. Unbillable time shows the gap: excluded from the invoice, still paid, still counted toward overtime.

How much does billing and time tracking software cost?

From free plans for the smallest teams to roughly $20 per user per month, with most credible team options between about $4 and $11. Because pricing is mostly per user, cost scales close to linearly with headcount. Two vendors changed their pricing in ways that make the advertised rate misleading.

Why did Harvest pricing change?

In early 2026 Harvest, now owned by Bending Spoons, began pairing its per-seat fee with usage charges for invoices, projects, clients, and tasks. A fixed-price Unlimited option exists alongside the usage-based Flex billing, and the free tier stops at a single seat and two projects.

Is free billing and time tracking software good enough?

For time capture on a small team, often yes: Clockify's free plan takes up to five users and Toggl's up to three. Limits usually appear at billable rates and invoicing rather than tracking, so the test is whether invoices must leave the tool or merely be informed by it.

What is accounting time tracking software?

Usually it means time tracking used by accounting and CPA firms to bill their own clients, not accounting software with a timer. An accounting practice bills much like a law firm or agency, so the same category applies.

Do these tools handle rounding and billing increments?

Most support rounding rules, and they should be configured deliberately. Client work is usually billed in six- or fifteen-minute increments. Rounding that works for client billing is limited by wage and hour rules once it sets employee pay, so the two need separate configuration.

Should a small firm pick a specialist or an all-in-one platform?

A specialist is cheaper and faster to adopt if tracking and invoicing are the only broken parts. A platform makes sense if resourcing and project profitability also need solving. Buying a platform to fix a tracking problem tends to fail because only one module gets used.

Do billing tools track employee onboarding or HR records?

No. Every tool here assumes the person tracking time is already onboarded, with an account set up. Hiring paperwork, signed agreements, policy acknowledgments, and the employee file sit outside these platforms.