Free Time Tracking Apps for Small Business Compared

When I look at a free tool for my own company, the first thing I check is where free stops and paying starts. The phrase free time tracking app hides a lot of variation.

Whether you call it a free timesheet app, a timekeeping tool, or a time card system, the free tiers behave very differently: some are genuinely free for your whole team forever, others cap the free plan at a handful of users and quietly move invoicing behind a paywall, and a few reserve free for a single person, which works as a demo rather than a team plan. For a small business, the difference decides whether you pay nothing at 15 employees or more than $100 a month.

This guide compares eleven free and low-cost employee time tracking apps for small businesses. You get the free-plan limits vendors tend to bury, the real monthly cost at 15 employees once a team outgrows free, and an honest read on which free tier fits which kind of team, whether you need a simple solo timer, a mobile clock-in for a field crew, or free employee time tracking software for a growing office. It also covers where time tracking sits in the wider people-operations stack a small business has to run.

Free tiers in this category have also been shrinking. Toggl has pulled its free tier down to three people. Clockify, long the default for unlimited free users, now stops free at five. A comparison written before these changes would send you to the wrong tool. Other free plans are narrower than the label suggests: Hubstaff's covers only the account owner's own seat, so tracking even one employee means a paid plan.

Quick verdict by team type

The right free time tracking app depends less on features than on the shape of your team. Four common cases:

For a growing small business that wants a free tool it will not outgrow, TimeCamp and Jibble win, because both allow unlimited free users while most rivals cap the free tier at five or fewer. For an hourly or deskless team that needs mobile clock-in and location proof, Jibble and Connecteam have the strongest free offerings, with GPS clock-in at no cost, while Homebase suits a single-site hourly team.

For a small desk team tracking project time, Clockify is simple, clean, and free up to five users, while Toggl stops free at three. For a solo consultant who bills by the hour, Harvest still leads on time-to-invoice, even though its free plan is really a demo.

11 free time tracking apps compared

The table covers nine tools with a free tier, one of them free only for the account owner, plus two paid tools that small hourly teams often shortlist alongside the free options. The free user limit column is the one to read first.

The tools in depth

TimeCamp

The strongest genuinely free option for a growing team, because it allows unlimited free users where almost every rival caps the free tier. The free plan covers time tracking, unlimited projects, and GPS location tracking, with automatic tracking by keyword, while the kiosk and geofencing are reserved for the Enterprise plan.

TimeCamp puts invoicing and deeper reporting on paid tiers that start at $3.99 per user on annual billing, or $5.49 month-to-month. A team that only needs to record hours can stay free at any size, which is rare in this category.

Jibble

The best free tool for hourly and deskless teams, with unlimited free users and mobile clock-in that includes GPS and facial recognition at no cost. Built for people who are not at a desk, it covers timesheets, kiosk mode, and offline punching. Deeper features sit on paid tiers that Jibble no longer prices publicly, so ask for a quote rather than budgeting from a list. For a small field or shift team that needs to prove presence on site without paying, little else matches it.

Clockify

Long the default free tracker, and still excellent for a team of five or fewer, but its free plan is now capped at five users where it once allowed unlimited ones. The free tier covers the timer, projects, timesheets, and PDF export for up to five people, while the kiosk, billable rates, invoicing, and Excel export sit on paid plans starting at $3.99 per seat on annual billing. For a small desk team it is clean and capable; past five users, the economics change.

Connecteam

The best free choice for a small deskless field team, with a free plan for up to 10 users that includes the full feature set across time clock, scheduling, and communication. GPS location stamps, geofencing, and a kiosk station that lets several people clock in on one shared device are part of the free offering, which suits construction, cleaning, and field crews. Above 10 users it moves to paid hubs at a flat $29 monthly for up to 30, priced per hub, so multiple hubs mean multiple fees.

Homebase

The best free option for a single-site hourly team, with a free tier covering one location and up to 10 employees, including basic scheduling, a time clock, and point-of-sale integration. Paid tiers start at $24 per location per month on annual billing, and onboarding, HR, and compliance tools sit in the top plan. Because pricing is per location rather than per user, a busy single site with a full roster pays one flat fee, but each extra location is a separate charge.

Toggl

The best pick for the simplest possible tracking, with a one-click timer that a solo user or tiny team can start in seconds. The free plan now covers only three users, and paid tiers begin at $9 per user on annual billing for billable rates and team features.

Toggl has no GPS and no native invoicing: its own billing page tells you to export hours as CSV or PDF and drop them into the invoicing tool you already use. That makes it a focused desk-based time tracker rather than a full workforce tool, which is exactly its appeal for the right team.

A naming note: many listings still call this product Toggl Track. Toggl now sells time tracking under the single Toggl name, and its pricing page says Toggl Track remains available and supported for existing users.

Harvest

Best for a solo consultant who bills by the hour, because time-to-invoice is its strength, but its free plan is effectively a demo: one seat and two projects. On top of the $9 per seat Teams plan it now meters usage, billing extra invoices, projects, clients, and tasks as your team consumes them, which is the change to watch. For a single freelancer it remains a clean choice; for a team, price it carefully. Harvest is now owned by Bending Spoons. Because the usage fees move with activity, confirm the total against a current quote before a team commits.

Everhour

Aimed at small project teams that live inside a project-management tool, with a free plan for up to five users but no native integrations on free, which undercuts its main selling point. Paid Team pricing is $8.50 per user with a five-seat minimum, so a micro-team pays for five seats whether or not it has them. For a project team already committed to a supported PM tool it fits well; for anyone else the minimum and the thin free tier weaken the case.

Hubstaff

Built around activity monitoring, and free only for the account owner: the permanent Free plan has one seat, taken by whoever creates the organization, so tracking even one employee means a paid plan after a 14-day trial. Paid plans run from $4.99 per user on annual billing for Starter up to $25 for Enterprise, with a two-seat minimum. Client invoices come with every plan, while full payments and payroll start on Team at $10 per user, where GPS is also sold as an add-on.

For an owner who wants detailed productivity data, or a remote team comfortable with monitoring, Hubstaff is capable. Its help center also describes Small Business Essentials, a special offer some new small teams see at signup: a flat $144 a year for three paid seats plus the owner. It stays on this page because small teams still shortlist it beside the free options, but a team that needs a free tier should look elsewhere on this list.

When I Work

Not free, but small hourly teams often shortlist it, so it is here for completeness. It is scheduling-first, with time tracking added on, starting around $2.50 per user monthly plus a time-and-attendance add-on. Its strength is fast, mobile-friendly scheduling that staff adopt quickly, which makes it a common first paid purchase for a team moving off paper. If you need a free plan, it is not the tool; if you need cheap scheduling with a clock, it is a strong option.

Deputy

Also not free, but shortlisted by compliance-conscious hourly teams, so it is included for completeness. It is scheduling and attendance with strong labor-law handling, priced from $5 per user on Lite to $9 on Pro, with a $30 minimum monthly spend and a free trial rather than a free plan. For a business in a state with prescriptive break rules it earns its cost, but a small team wanting a free tool should look elsewhere on this page.

The free-plan limits vendors bury

A free plan is only free if it covers your team size and the features you actually use. Those limits are where the real decision gets made, and most listicles skip them.

Read this table before the feature list, because a cap you will hit in three months is more expensive than a missing feature you can work around. The pattern is consistent: the tools built for freelancers and project teams tend to cap free at a handful of users and move billing features to paid.

The tools built for hourly and deskless workforces tend to go the other way, with more generous free clock-in but less depth on invoicing and reporting. Neither is wrong, but they answer different questions.

What you actually pay at 15 employees

Fifteen people is the honest test of a free time tracking app, because it is past the point where several free plans stop.

The spread is the whole story. TimeCamp and Jibble stay free at 15, and Homebase and Connecteam sit near $24 to $29 because their pricing does not scale per user. The per-user tools climb into the $60 to $135 range for the same 15 people.

The tools with the tightest free limits are the ones that force that climb: Clockify and Everhour at five users, Toggl at three, and Hubstaff, whose free plan covers only the account owner. This is why the cheapest tool at five users is frequently a different product from the cheapest at fifteen, and why headcount, not the free label, should drive the choice.

Deskless and field teams vs desk teams

After headcount, the other fork is where your team works, because it changes which free tier is even relevant. A desk-based team tracking hours against clients and projects wants a project timer with reporting: TimeCamp, Toggl, and Clockify are built for this, with one-click timers and clean project breakdowns.

A deskless, hourly, or field team needs mobile clock-in and often location proof that someone was on site, which is a different feature set. Jibble and Connecteam offer this on their free tiers, with GPS and kiosk clock-in. Homebase's free tier covers clock-in on tablets, computers, and POS devices at one site, and keeps location-based mobile clock-in for its paid Essentials plan.

Buying a project timer for a field crew, or a field clock for a billable-hours agency, is the most common way a small business ends up fighting its own tool.

Remote and work from home teams

A time tracker for remote workers needs a different shortlist than a field crew, because there is no site to prove presence at. What matters is a timer that runs where the work already happens, in a browser tab or a desktop app, and a weekly total per person you can reconcile without chasing anyone.

For free remote employee time tracking, the unlimited-user plans win again: TimeCamp and Jibble cover a distributed team at no cost and run in a browser as well as on a phone. For a very small remote desk team, Toggl and Clockify are the easiest to adopt, because the timer is one click and there is nothing to install, though Toggl stops free at three people and Clockify at five.

The screenshot question comes up on every remote shortlist. Hubstaff builds its product around activity capture, and a monitoring-led tool changes how a remote team works more than any feature list suggests. Ask what decision the screenshots would actually change before switching them on, because a tracker people resent produces worse data than one they trust.

There is a compliance reason to track remote hours properly, not only a management one. Department of Labor guidance on teleworking employees says an employer has to exercise reasonable diligence to learn about unscheduled hours, and that offering a reasonable reporting procedure and paying all reported time satisfies that duty (Field Assistance Bulletin 2020-5).

That matters because work you did not request, but allowed, still counts as hours worked and has to be paid (DOL Fact Sheet 22). A free tracker your remote staff can open and log time in is the simplest reporting procedure you can give them, which is a better argument for adopting one than surveillance is.

Simple, mobile, or scheduling-first

Beyond team size and where people work, three specific needs come up often enough to call out directly, because each points to a different set of tools.

If you want the simplest possible time tracker, something a solo owner or a tiny team can start in seconds with no learning curve, Toggl and Clockify are the quickest to pick up: one button to start, one to stop, and a clean weekly view. For an easy free timekeeping app that a non-technical team will actually use, simplicity beats feature depth every time, so resist the tool with the longest list.

If you need mobile time tracking, where staff clock in from a phone rather than a desktop, Jibble, Connecteam, and Homebase are built mobile-first, with apps designed for people who are not at a computer. On Homebase, though, location-based mobile clock-in sits on the paid Essentials plan, so Jibble and Connecteam are the free picks for a crew clocking in from the field.

A desktop-first timer bolted onto a phone rarely gets used by a field team, so a genuine mobile time tracking app matters more than it sounds.

If you need scheduling and time tracking together, one app that both builds the shift and records the clock-in, Connecteam, Homebase, When I Work, and Deputy combine the two, where the project timers do not. For an hourly team, pairing the schedule and the timesheet in one place removes a whole category of reconciliation, which is why a scheduling-and-time-tracking app is often the right call over a standalone free timer.

Overtime, automation, and the reports you get

Free tiers differ less on the timer than on what happens to the hours afterward. Overtime calculation, automatic tracking, project rates, exports, and which apps you can install are where a free plan either finishes the job or quietly hands it back to you.

Does a free plan track overtime?

Most free tiers record hours; far fewer calculate overtime for you. Federal law requires overtime at one and one-half times the regular rate for hours over 40 in a workweek (U.S. Department of Labor), so the question worth asking is whether the tool flags the forty-first hour by itself.

The scheduling-led tools, Connecteam, Homebase, and Deputy, handle overtime and other hourly pay rules most directly, because they were built around shifts. The project timers report hours cleanly and leave the calculation to payroll, which is fine as long as someone is checking. State rules can be stricter than the federal one, so confirm yours before trusting any total.

Automatic timesheets and AI tracking

Automatic time tracking means the tool builds the timesheet without anyone starting a timer, usually by recording which app or site is in front of you and turning that into a draft you approve. It fixes the real failure of manual tracking, which is people reconstructing a week from memory on Friday.

Automation alone does not separate the free tiers. TimeCamp includes keyword-based automatic tracking free, and the free plans of Clockify and Toggl also record app and website activity for you to turn into entries. AI suggestions are where a bill appears: TimeCamp charges for its AI Time Tracker by token usage, which it estimates at about $6 per user a month.

Project, client, and job time tracking

If you track time against projects, clients, or jobs rather than shifts, check where billable rates sit. Clockify keeps billable rates and invoicing on paid tiers, Everhour drops native integrations on free, and Harvest free stops at two projects. TimeCamp, Toggl, and Clockify all allow projects on free, which covers a consultant or agency that needs hours split by client.

Reports, exports, and the payroll handoff

The report you will use most is the dull one: hours by person, by day, for a pay period. Check that export before you standardize on a tool, because CSV and Excel export is a common paywall, Clockify being the example on this page.

Federal recordkeeping rules expect payroll records kept three years, and the wage-computation records behind them, time cards included, kept two years (DOL Fact Sheet 21). A free plan that locks export behind a paid tier makes that harder than it needs to be, and the hours usually have to reach payroll anyway.

Desktop, mobile, browser, and offline

Nearly every tool here is cloud-based, so the web app is the product and everything else is a client. Clockify ships desktop apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux plus browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Toggl has Windows and macOS desktop apps, a browser extension, and iOS and Android apps.

Install the desktop app when you want idle detection and a timer that survives a closed tab, and use the mobile app when staff clock in away from a computer. Offline capture matters on sites with no signal, where Jibble includes offline punching free. If hours must flow into another system, check integrations and API access on the free tier specifically.

How long each takes to set up

One advantage every tool here shares over enterprise workforce platforms is speed to start.

The simplest trackers, Toggl, Clockify, and Jibble, take minutes: sign up, add the team, start the timer, with adoption the only real variable. The tools that layer on scheduling and pay rules, Connecteam, Homebase, and Deputy, take a little longer to configure shifts, roles, and overtime rules, but remain self-serve within a day or two.

None of these tools require an implementation project or a vendor call, which is a genuine benefit for a small business without dedicated IT or HR. The main risk is not setup but adoption: a tracker only works if the team actually clocks in, so the tool your staff will use beats the one with the longest feature list.

Where time tracking fits in the HR stack

A time tracker solves one slice of running a team: the hours. For a small business without a dedicated HR person, it is worth being clear about what it does not touch, because that is usually the larger workload.

Tracking hours sits at one end of an employee's time with you. Before any hours are logged, a new hire has to be recruited, offered, and onboarded, with a signed offer, an I-9 the employer must complete within three business days of the hire, a W-4, and any required training and acknowledgments.

The records side runs in parallel. Someone has to manage employee records, documents and their expiry, policy acknowledgments, and self-service so staff can update their own details. A free time tracking app does none of that, and for a small team those tasks recur with every hire and land on an owner or office manager between everything else.

FirstHR is not a time tracking tool and does not belong in the comparison above. What it covers is the rest of that stack: onboarding with deadline tracking, e-signature on the I-9, W-4, and offer letters, and training with completion records.

Two more pieces sit alongside that. Document management carries retention and expiry tracking, and an employee records system with self-service lets staff keep their own details current, at a flat $98 per month for 10 active team seats and $198 for 50.

The honest split for a small business is simple: pick a free time tracker from this page for the hours, and use a dedicated HR platform for the onboarding, documents, and records around them.

How to choose a free time tracking app

Work through five questions, in this order. Headcount and where your team works narrow the list fastest; invoicing, payroll, and the HR work around the hours decide between whatever is left.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best free time tracking app for a small business?

It depends on your team. For a small business wanting a genuinely free tool as it grows, TimeCamp and Jibble stand out because both allow unlimited free users. For an hourly or deskless team, Jibble and Connecteam have the strongest free clock-in and GPS, and Homebase is free at a single site. For a handful of people at a desk, Clockify is free to five users and Toggl to three.

Which free time tracking apps allow unlimited users?

The two clearest are TimeCamp and Jibble, both free for a whole small team with paid gates at invoicing and advanced features rather than a user cap. Many well-known tools do not work that way: Clockify and Everhour stop free at five users, Toggl at three, Harvest at a single seat, and Hubstaff's free plan covers only the account owner.

Is Clockify still free for unlimited users?

No. The free plan now stops at five users, where it once allowed unlimited ones. Core tracking and PDF export stay free for up to five people, but billable rates, invoicing, and Excel export are paid-tier features. For a team larger than five, TimeCamp or Jibble is the better free choice.

How much does a time tracking app cost once you outgrow free?

For a 15-person team, TimeCamp and Jibble can stay free, and Homebase and Connecteam sit at a flat $24 to $29 monthly. The per-user tools climb: Clockify around $60, Hubstaff around $75, and Toggl, Harvest, and Everhour reaching $128 to $135. Unlimited-free and flat-rate tools barely move as you grow, while per-user tools scale with headcount.

What is the catch with free time tracking apps?

Almost always one of three things: a user cap that forces an upgrade as you grow, a feature paywall on invoicing or reporting, or a free plan too small to be more than a demo. A fourth is worth checking too: a free plan that covers only the account owner's own seat, as Hubstaff's does, so tracking even one employee means paying. The honest question is whether the free plan covers your actual team size and the features you need, or stops just short on purpose.

Do free time tracking apps work for deskless and field teams?

Yes. Jibble and Connecteam offer free tiers with mobile clock-in and GPS to verify where someone clocked in, and Homebase's free tier covers tablet and POS clock-in at one location. TimeCamp adds GPS location tracking free too. A desk team tracking projects is better served by TimeCamp, Toggl, or Clockify.

How long does it take to set up a free time tracking app?

Most are same-day. Toggl, Clockify, and Jibble take minutes to start tracking. Tools that add scheduling and rules, like Connecteam, Homebase, and Deputy, take a little longer to configure but remain self-serve within a day or two. None require an implementation project.

Does a time tracking app handle hiring, onboarding, and HR?

No. A time tracking app records hours; it does not run hiring, onboarding, e-signature on the I-9 and W-4, document management, or employee records. For a small business without an HR person, that people-operations layer is often the bigger pain, and it recurs with every hire.

Can a free time tracking app replace a spreadsheet for timesheets?

Yes, and for most small businesses that is the main reason to switch. A spreadsheet cannot stamp who actually clocked in, calculate overtime, or stop duplicate entries, so it quietly produces errors that surface at payroll. A free timesheet app records hours at the source and exports payroll-ready totals at no cost on tools like TimeCamp, Jibble, Clockify, and Connecteam.

Is a free timesheet app the same as a free timekeeping or time card app?

In practice, yes. Free timesheet software, free timekeeping apps, and free time card software are different names for the same category: tools that record hours and turn them into a payroll total. Timesheet leans toward project and billable tools; time card and timekeeping lean toward hourly teams, but the core job is identical. Pick by team type and free-plan limits, not the term.

What is time tracking software and how does it work?

Time tracking software records when people work and turns those hours into a total you can pay from. In practice that means a timer, or a clock-in on a phone, kiosk, or browser, hours attached to a person and often a project, and a report you export at the end of a pay period. A free app does the same job, usually with limits on team size, reporting depth, or exports.