Employee Time Tracking Software: 12 Compared
Employee time tracking software compared: all-in annual cost at 10 employees, monitoring vs tracking, and when an HR suite beats a point tool.
Four genuinely different products are sold as employee time tracking software. This comparison covers twelve options a US small business can realistically buy, sorted into the four groups they belong to, with all-in annual cost at 10 employees and the base fees most tables leave out. I build HR software for small businesses, and none of the twelve is mine.
Those four kinds of product are not variations on a theme. A timer built around project codes, a mobile clock-in bolted to a shift schedule, a surveillance tool that screenshots your team every ten minutes, and a module inside a payroll platform solve different problems for different companies, yet most comparison pages rank them in a single list as though they were interchangeable.
The distinction that matters most is the one nobody draws: some of these tools track hours and some monitor people. Screenshots, keystroke activity scoring, and application logs are a different category with different consequences, including written notice obligations in several states. Deciding which side of that line you want narrows the market before you compare a single price.
What this category actually contains
Every product here records hours. What differs is everything built around that, and the four groups below suit four different kinds of buyer. Read the group labels first: they will save you more time than any feature list.
| Group | Built around | Who it suits | Who it does not |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standalone trackers | A timer and project or client codes | Salaried desk teams billing or costing their hours | Hourly staff clocking in at a site |
| Deskless platforms | A mobile clock-in tied to a shift schedule | Restaurants, retail, field crews, clinics | Consultants tracking hours against clients |
| Monitoring-first tools | Activity scoring, screenshots, application logs | Distributed teams where output is genuinely unverifiable | Almost every small business, for reasons below |
| Inside payroll or HR | Hours flowing straight into a pay run | Companies whose payroll handoff is the actual problem | Teams happy with their current payroll process |
Most buying mistakes in this category are group mistakes rather than product mistakes. A restaurant adopting a project timer and a consultancy adopting a shift platform both end up with software nobody opens, and in both cases the product itself was fine.
Timekeeping software, time and attendance, timesheet software: the same thing?
Broadly yes, and the label usually says where a product came from rather than what it does. Timekeeping software and time and attendance lean toward hourly and shift teams, timesheet software leans toward projects and approvals, and employee time tracking is the umbrella all three are sold under. Judge by the group above, not the name.
What the label never changes is the record you have to produce. Whatever you buy should show hours worked each day and total hours each workweek for every non-exempt employee, and hold them long enough: the Department of Labor requires payroll records for three years and the time cards behind them for two. Check the export and the retention window before you buy.
Tracking hours versus monitoring people
Tracking hours tells you when someone worked; monitoring people tells you what they did while working. Two of the tools here are built around watching what employees do, not recording when they worked, and that is a different purchase with different consequences. It is the first thing to settle, ahead of price, and most comparisons skip it.
Clockify sits on the line between the two. It is a tracker first, but its Pro tier now sells the same capability as an optional monitoring agent, which is exactly how monitoring arrives inside a tool bought for timekeeping.
| Capability | What it captures | Who does it | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time tracking | When someone started and stopped work, and against what | Clockify, Toggl, Harvest, Connecteam, Homebase, When I Work, Deputy | No special notice obligation beyond ordinary employment practice |
| Location capture | Where the clock in happened, by GPS or geofence | Connecteam, Homebase, Deputy, QuickBooks Time, Hubstaff, and Clockify on its Pro tier | Reasonable for field work; disclose it, and expect questions if it runs off shift |
| Identity verification | Photo or face capture at the punch to stop buddy punching | Connecteam, Homebase, Buddy-punch controls across deskless tools | Biometric capture is separately regulated in some states; check before enabling |
| Activity monitoring | Keyboard and mouse activity scored as a productivity percentage | Hubstaff, Time Doctor, and Clockify on its Pro tier | This is electronic monitoring, not timekeeping |
| Screenshots | Periodic captures of the employee screen | Hubstaff, Time Doctor, and Clockify on its Pro tier | Electronic monitoring; several states require written notice |
| App and site tracking | Which applications and websites were open during work time | Hubstaff, Time Doctor, and Clockify on its Pro tier | Electronic monitoring; notice obligations apply the same way |
The practical argument against monitoring at small scale is separate from the legal one. At that size you already know who is working, and installing software that scores their keyboard activity communicates something you probably do not intend.
Monitoring genuinely earns its place with a distributed contractor workforce billing hourly against a client, and even there the notice and policy work is part of the cost. If you want it, buy it deliberately rather than discovering the feature exists after rollout.
12 employee time tracking tools at a glance
The table below groups products by category and shows entry price, free plans, and the three capabilities that genuinely differ. The last column is worth a second look before you shortlist anything.
| Product | Category | Entry price | Free plan | Mobile clock in | Scheduling | Screenshots |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clockify | Standalone tracker | $3.99/user | Optional on Pro | |||
| Toggl | Standalone tracker | $9/user | ||||
| Harvest | Standalone tracker | About $9/user | ||||
| Connecteam | Deskless platform | $29 flat/hub | ||||
| Homebase | Deskless platform | Per location | ||||
| When I Work | Deskless platform | $2.50/user | ||||
| Deputy | Deskless platform | From $5/user | ||||
| Hubstaff | Monitoring-first | From $4.99/user | ||||
| Time Doctor | Monitoring-first | From $6.67/user | ||||
| QuickBooks Time | Inside payroll | $20 base plus $10/user | ||||
| Gusto | Inside payroll | Bundled in Plus | ||||
| Rippling | Inside HR platform | Module on a platform |
How we evaluated these tools
We evaluated for a US small business at one or two locations, where whoever approves hours also does several other jobs. Four tests, applied identically to all twelve.
Standalone trackers for desk-based work
Built around a timer and project codes. These suit salaried teams who need to know where hours went rather than whether someone showed up.
Clockify is the cheapest credible option here for a desk-based team. At about $479 a year for 10 people, it costs a third of what QuickBooks Time does for the same headcount. As a workforce tool for hourly staff, though, it is thinner than the deskless platforms below.
Clockify’s paid ladder is sensibly built. Basic adds administrative controls like bulk editing and kiosk mode. Standard adds approvals, time off, and invoicing. Pro adds project scheduling, GPS, and an optional monitoring agent that captures screenshots, app and website use, and keyboard and mouse activity.
Two things to check before you rely on the cheap end. The free plan is capped at 5 users and its reports cover a one-month range at most, so it is an evaluation path rather than a way to run a team. And approvals sit on Standard rather than Basic, which matters if you are buying software because hours arrive disputed.
Toggl has the best tracking experience in this comparison and takes an explicit position against surveillance, which is worth something if you want hours recorded without the cultural cost. The timer is fast, the browser extension works inside dozens of tools, project budgets are genuinely useful, and reporting is pleasant enough that people actually use it.
It is also more than double Clockify per seat for a broadly comparable job in payroll terms. At 10 employees that is roughly $1,080 against $479, and the difference buys polish and project budgeting rather than anything a payroll process needs.
Toggl has no shift scheduling, no GPS, and no attendance layer, so an hourly team is served badly. Buy it if hours become invoices; skip it if hours become paychecks.
One naming note before you sign up. Many listings still call this product Toggl Track. Toggl now sells time tracking under a single Toggl brand that also covers capacity management and project planning, and its pricing page says Toggl Track remains available and supported for existing users.
Harvest combines time tracking with invoicing and expense capture, which for a services firm removes an entire second tool. Track hours against a client, turn them into an invoice, attach expenses, and chase payment from one place. For an agency or consultancy that currently exports timesheets into accounting software, that consolidation is the reason to pay a premium per seat.
The free plan is one user and two projects, as tight as any here alongside Hubstaff’s single owner seat, so it is an evaluation path rather than a starting point. For hourly staff and shift work, Harvest is entirely the wrong shape.
Harvest is now owned by Bending Spoons, and its Teams and Enterprise plans bill extra invoices, projects, clients, and tasks by usage on top of seats. Confirm the total against a current quote before you commit.
Hourly and deskless platforms
Built around a mobile clock-in tied to a schedule. For a restaurant, shop, clinic, or field crew, this group fits the shape of the problem and the group above does not.
Connecteam is the strongest all-round answer for this audience. The free plan opens every hub to up to 10 users, which covers a small hourly team’s clock and schedule, though payroll integration waits for a paid tier.
Connecteam Basic at $29 a month flat covers 30 users, with GPS clock-ins included rather than gated. At 10 employees that is under $3 a seat, which no per-user tool here approaches, and the mobile app is built for staff without a company email address.
The structure to understand is per hub. Time tracking and scheduling live in Operations; team messaging is Communications; training and HR is a third hub. Wanting two hubs means paying twice, so $29 becomes $58 and the flat-fee advantage narrows. Above 30 users, additional seats are charged per person by tier.
Connecteam is also a workforce platform rather than a time tracker, so a salaried desk team adopts a great deal it will never open.
Homebase gives a single-site business the core shift tools for nothing up to 10 employees: a weekly schedule, a time clock, timesheets, and team messaging on the free Basic plan. Above that ceiling the paid tiers charge per location rather than per person, so a shop that grows from 12 staff to 30 pays the same $30 a month on Essentials.
The free plan has limits worth knowing before you rely on it. Basic stores timesheets for only 90 days, far short of the two years federal rules require you to keep time cards, so export them regularly. Shift trading, overtime and break settings, and location-based clock-in on the mobile app all start on Essentials.
The model inverts across multiple sites, and sharply. Five locations on Essentials costs $150 a month and ten on Plus costs $700, because you pay the full location fee repeatedly regardless of how few people work at each.
Homebase’s HR features and deeper feature set also sit on the higher tiers, so the entry price does not describe the product a growing business ends up wanting.
When I Work has the lowest per-user headline rate here and a genuinely good scheduling product: shift swaps, availability management, and coverage alerts work the way managers expect them to. For a shift business where the weekly schedule is the real work, it is competitive with anything on this page.
Two corrections before budgeting. It has no permanent free plan; sources claiming a free tier for up to 75 users are out of date. And the plan cards on its pricing page sell time and attendance as a paid add-on on top of the scheduling plan, so the $2.50 headline may not include the capability you came to this page for.
The add-on price appears only once you flip the switch. Every plan on the pricing page carries a toggle labeled Add Time Tracking and Attendance, and switching it on moves Essentials from $2.50 to $4 per user a month, Pro from $5 to $7, and Premium from $8 to $10.
At 10 users on Essentials, that is $480 a year rather than the $300 the headline implies. The same pricing page also runs an FAQ that prices plans from $2.50 a user for a single location and $5 for several, with time and attendance included in every plan. The page contradicts itself, so confirm the total at checkout.
Deputy is the most capable shift platform here on the parts that carry legal risk (break compliance and overtime rule handling), and it adds labor cost forecasting against sales.
For a restaurant group or a clinic where meal break rules and predictive scheduling laws apply, that depth is precisely what you are paying for, and the cheaper tools only approximate it.
For a simpler business it is more product than the problem needs. At 10 employees Core is about $780 a year against $348 on Connecteam Basic, and the difference only pays back if somebody is using the compliance and forecasting features weekly.
Deputy has no free plan at any tier, and HR and analytics are separately priced, so a full configuration costs meaningfully more than the entry rate.
Monitoring-first tools
These two are built around observing work rather than recording hours. They belong in this comparison because they are sold under the same name, and they sit in their own group because buying one by accident is the most consequential mistake available in this category.
Hubstaff is well built for the case it targets: a distributed team of hourly contractors where the client or the employer needs evidence attached to billed hours. Screenshots, activity levels, GPS for field staff, and automated payments to contractors based on tracked time all work reliably, and the reporting is genuinely good.
For a small company with employees you see every day, it solves a problem you do not have and creates one you did not. The monitoring features are the product rather than a setting. Enabling them puts you inside state notice requirements in New York, Connecticut, and Delaware, and the effect on a small team is difficult to reverse once introduced.
Hubstaff’s permanent free plan holds a single seat, taken by the account owner, so it cannot track a team. A team evaluation runs on the 14-day trial and then pays from the 2-seat minimum.
Time Doctor goes further than Hubstaff on the analytics side: application and website tracking, inactivity alerts and idle-time tracking, and workforce productivity reporting aimed at managers of large remote teams. If you run a business process outsourcing (BPO) firm or an enterprise-scale distributed operation where output genuinely cannot be observed, it does what it says.
There is no free plan and no small-team case that survives scrutiny. At 10 employees you are paying about $800 a year for surveillance infrastructure in a company small enough to manage by conversation, plus the notice and policy work that comes with it. It is included here so you recognize what it is when it appears in a listicle next to a clock-in app.
Time tracking inside payroll or HR
The last group answers a different question. Instead of asking which time tracker is best, it asks whether you should buy one separately at all, given that the hours have to reach payroll and that journey is where most of the errors happen.
Formerly TSheets, QuickBooks Time exists to close one gap completely: approved hours land in QuickBooks payroll with no export, no file, and no reconciliation. For a business already running QuickBooks, that removes the step where time data most often goes wrong, and GPS, geofencing, and job costing are mature.
The cost is the highest genuine time-tracking figure on this page. The $20 monthly base fee is $240 a year before anyone clocks in, and the per-employee rate of $10 comes on top of it.
At 10 employees, QuickBooks Time lands near $1,440 a year against $479 for Clockify Basic, and that is before the QuickBooks Online subscription it requires. The premium is worth paying if payroll reconciliation is currently costing you hours every pay run, and hard to justify if it is not.
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Gusto is payroll software with time tracking included at the Plus tier rather than a time tracker with payroll attached, and the distinction shapes the decision entirely. Hours tracked here become paid hours with no handoff, tax filing is automated across all 50 states, and pricing is published, which is rare among payroll providers.
The row in the cost table below is included for scale and is not a like-for-like comparison. At about $2,400 a year for 10 employees you are buying payroll, benefits administration, and HR tooling, of which time tracking is one component.
If you need payroll anyway, the marginal cost of Gusto’s time tracking is effectively zero, and it is the cheapest option on the page. If you already have payroll you are happy with, it is by far the most expensive way to track hours.
Rippling is the deepest consolidation option here, connecting time tracking to payroll, benefits, device management, and app provisioning on one employee record. For a company that already wants that stack, adding time tracking is a checkbox rather than a procurement exercise, and the data consistency across modules is genuinely better than an integration achieves.
The structural point is that time tracking is not purchasable on its own. It is a module bought alongside the required Rippling Platform, and Rippling prices the module itself only by quote, so evaluating it means evaluating the whole thing, with no published module rate to set against the standalone options for a company that only wanted to record hours.
Its pricing page is a form that asks which services you need and promises a custom quote back. The starting price Rippling does publish, $8 per user per month plus a $40 monthly base fee on its small-business page, is tied in its FAQ to payroll, with time and attendance named among the products that add to the final cost.
All-in annual cost at 10 employees
Here is the whole field priced for one company with ten employees at one location, on annual billing. Base fees get a separate column because they reorder the results.
| Option | Base fee | Per user | Annual at 10 employees | What you are actually buying |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Connecteam Free | None | Free to 10 users | $0 | All hubs within the cap; no payroll integration |
| Homebase Free | None | Free, one location | $0 | Up to 10 employees at a single site |
| Connecteam Basic | None | $29 flat per hub | $348 | Covers 30 users in one hub; a second hub doubles it |
| Clockify Basic | None | $3.99 per user | $479 | Approvals and invoicing sit a tier higher on Standard |
| When I Work Essentials | None | $4 with time toggle on | $480 | Plan cards sell timekeeping as a toggle; the FAQ says it is included at $2.50 |
| Hubstaff Starter | None | $4.99 per seat | $599 | Includes activity monitoring you may not want |
| Deputy Core | None | $6.50 per user | $780 | HR and analytics are separately priced add-ons |
| Time Doctor Basic | None | $6.67 per user | $800 | No free plan; monitoring is the core product |
| Toggl Starter | None | $9 per user | $1,080 | Priced for billable project work rather than payroll hours |
| Harvest Teams | None | $9 per seat | $1,080 | Time plus invoicing and expenses |
| QuickBooks Time Premium | $20/month | $10 per user | $1,440 | Also requires a QuickBooks Online subscription |
| Gusto Plus | $80/month | $12 per employee | $2,400 | This is full payroll and HR, not a time tracker |
Three things fall out of it. Two options cost nothing at this headcount, and both are permanent plans rather than trials. The base fee on QuickBooks Time adds $240 a year before a single hour is recorded, which is half of what a full year of Clockify Basic costs.
The third is that the ordering is not the ordering of headline rates. When I Work advertises $2.50 a user, but its plan cards land at $480 once timekeeping is switched on. Hubstaff lists $7 a seat on monthly billing but $4.99 on annual terms, which puts it below Deputy rather than beside Time Doctor.
The verdict by team type
A single ranking assumes every small business has the same problem. The table below gives the verdict for eight common team types instead, with what usually fits each one and what to avoid.
| Your situation | What usually fits | What to avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly staff, one location, 10 or fewer | Homebase free, or Connecteam free, which covers all three hubs | Per-user tools; you are paying for something free covers |
| Hourly staff, 10 to 30, one or two sites | Connecteam Basic at $29 flat per hub | Per-location pricing across several small sites |
| Shift work with break and overtime rules | Deputy, despite costing double Connecteam | Project timers, which approximate compliance rules badly |
| Salaried desk team tracking project hours | Clockify Basic, or Toggl if hours become invoices | Deskless platforms; most of the product goes unused |
| Remote salaried team across time zones | Clockify or Toggl, on one workweek boundary for everyone | Monitoring tools bought as a substitute for management |
| Already on QuickBooks payroll | QuickBooks Time, if reconciliation currently costs you hours | It, if payroll already works; the premium buys nothing |
| Buying payroll anyway | Gusto Plus, where time tracking is effectively free | Buying payroll purely to get time tracking |
| Distributed contractors billing clients hourly | Hubstaff, with a written monitoring policy in place | Enabling monitoring features without notice where required |
In short, a single-site team of 10 or fewer is served by a free plan, and the products that market hardest in this category are often priced for a later stage of growth. Both free ceilings sit at 10 people, so the first real budget decision usually arrives with the eleventh hire.
What an overtime app has to get right
An overtime app is a time tracker that flags the hours before they cost you rather than reporting them after. The three things worth checking are an alert as someone approaches the weekly threshold, a workweek boundary you set rather than inherit, and a timesheet that splits regular from overtime hours before it reaches payroll.
The harder part is the pay rate, not the hours. Federal overtime is computed on the regular rate, the hourly figure the overtime premium is based on.
The Department of Labor is explicit that nondiscretionary bonuses (ones promised in advance, such as for attendance or production) belong in that rate, so a tool that only totals hours has done half the job. Where a state adds a daily threshold, weekly totals alone will underpay.
Time tracking software for remote employees
Any of the desk-based trackers here does the job. For remote salaried staff, Clockify at about $479 a year for 10 people and Toggl at about $1,080 both produce a payroll-ready total from a browser or a desktop timer, with no clock, kiosk, or geofence involved.
Remote does not mean monitoring, whatever the marketing in this category implies. The one case where the monitoring group has a genuine argument is contractors billing a client by the hour, where activity evidence sits behind an invoice. For salaried employees you speak to every day, screenshots buy nothing that their output does not already tell you.
Two mechanics are worth settling before rollout. Fix one workweek boundary and one time zone for everybody, because hours logged in local time split shifts across days and quietly change weekly totals. And check the rules in each state where someone works before enabling a monitoring feature, since a distributed team can bring more than one state into play.
Before you choose
FirstHR does not currently track time: it has no clock-in, no timesheet, and no scheduling, so for those you need one of the twelve tools above. What it does is the employment record around them: an HR platform for US small and growing teams, at a flat $98 to $198 a month.
That record is onboarding, employee files, e-signature, and document management in one place. It is the layer a time tracker never touches, which is why buying one rarely settles the paperwork question underneath it.
One connection is worth naming before you buy. If you adopt a monitoring-capable tool, the notice and acknowledgment obligations described above are onboarding paperwork: a policy the new hire has to receive and sign, stored somewhere you can produce it. Whichever tracker you pick, decide where that acknowledgment lives before the first person is monitored rather than after.
How to choose employee time tracking software
Five questions settle this, and the first two eliminate most of the market before you open a trial.
A closing note on sequencing: run one full pay period through your two finalists before committing to an annual plan. Most of these are free or on trial long enough to allow it, and a real cycle surfaces what a feature list cannot, particularly whether your staff actually clock in without being chased.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is employee time tracking software?
Software that logs when employees start and stop work, adds up the hours for each day and workweek, and gives you a record to run payroll from.
The category covers four genuinely different products: standalone timers, deskless platforms combining mobile clock-in with scheduling, monitoring tools that also capture screenshots, and modules inside payroll or HR systems. They are not interchangeable, and choosing the right group matters more than choosing the right product within it.
How much does employee time tracking software cost?
At 10 employees on one site, from nothing to about $2,400 a year. Connecteam and Homebase both cost nothing at that headcount, while the top of the range is Gusto Plus, which includes full payroll and HR.
Among the paid options, Connecteam Basic is $348, Clockify Basic about $479, and When I Work Essentials $480 with time and attendance switched on (or $300 if its pricing FAQ holds). Hubstaff Starter is about $599, Deputy Core about $780, Time Doctor Basic about $800, Toggl and Harvest about $1,080, and QuickBooks Time Premium about $1,440 including its base fee.
What is the difference between time tracking and employee monitoring?
Time tracking answers how long someone worked. Monitoring answers what they did while working, through screenshots, activity scoring, and application logs. Hubstaff and Time Doctor are built around the second; most tools here are built around the first, and Clockify sells the second as an optional agent on its Pro tier.
The distinction matters legally, because several states require written notice before electronic monitoring, and practically, because it changes the relationship with your team.
Do I have to tell employees they are being monitored?
In several states, in writing. New York has required notice on hiring, an employee acknowledgment, and a conspicuous posting since May 2022, at a maximum of $500 for a first offense, $1,000 for a second, and $3,000 for a third and each one after.
Connecticut’s Labor Commissioner can impose the same three maximums, and a conspicuous posting counts as the notice there. Delaware asks for either a daily electronic notice or a single acknowledged one, at $100 a violation. The obligation attaches to the feature, not the vendor.
Is there free employee time tracking software?
Yes. Connecteam is free across all its hubs up to 10 users, and Homebase is free for up to 10 employees at one location, the two genuinely useful free plans here. Clockify runs a permanent free plan for 5 users with reports limited to a one-month range, and Toggl is free up to 3 users.
Hubstaff’s free plan is a single seat for the account owner, so a team starts on its trial. Deputy, Time Doctor, and When I Work have no permanent free plan despite frequent listing among free options.
Should time tracking be part of my payroll system or a separate tool?
It depends on whether the payroll handoff is where your process breaks. If approved hours already flow correctly, a standalone tool is far better value: about $479 a year on Clockify Basic against $1,440 on QuickBooks Time at 10 employees. If hours are retyped or reconciled every pay run, buying time tracking inside payroll removes that step and usually pays for itself.
How do small businesses track employee hours without software?
Legally, however they want. The Department of Labor permits any timekeeping method, including a time clock, a timekeeper, or workers writing their own hours.
What is required is the record: hours worked each day and each workweek for non-exempt staff, with payroll records kept three years and time cards two. A spreadsheet satisfies that until hours are disputed, at which point a record made at the time is much stronger than one reconstructed later.
Does time tracking software calculate overtime?
Most total hours reliably and fewer apply overtime rules correctly. Federal overtime is based on hours over 40 in a fixed recurring workweek, but several states add daily thresholds and other rules, and a tool reporting weekly totals only leaves that to you or to payroll.
Confirm the workweek boundary in the software matches the one you use for pay, since a mismatch produces totals that look right and pay wrong.
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