Time Tracking Software for Small Business: 12 Compared

Almost every comparison in this category ranks a project timer, a GPS clock-in app, and a payroll module in one numbered list, then names a winner. That winner is useless to roughly half the people reading, because the two halves of this market solve different problems for different businesses and are not substitutes at any price.

The split that actually matters is where your people work. A design studio needs to know which client consumed which hours. A plumbing company needs to know that the van reached the second job at 10:40 and left at 12:15. Both searches are for time tracking software for a small business, and the products that serve them share almost no features and no pricing logic.

This page separates them, then does the arithmetic nobody publishes: monthly cost at 10 and at 25 employees with base fees and seat minimums included, how deeply each tool actually reaches payroll, and three documented pricing changes in the last fifteen months that have quietly invalidated most of the advice still circulating about these tools.

Desk work and field work split the market

Every product here records hours. What differs is the question it was built to answer, and that single distinction predicts adoption better than any feature list.

The last two rows are where the money is. Because desk tools are uniformly per-user, comparing them is a matter of reading rates. Field tools are priced three different ways, so the cheapest one at ten employees is frequently not the cheapest at twenty-five, and the gap between them widens rather than narrowing.

12 time tracking tools at a glance

Grouped by track, then sorted by entry price within each. The last column marks the products that charge something before the first employee is counted.

How we evaluated these tools

We evaluated for a US business of 5 to 50 people, where whoever approves the hours also does several other jobs. Four tests, applied identically to all twelve.

For desk and project work

Built around a timer and a project code. These suit salaried and billable teams who need to know where the hours went rather than whether somebody arrived.

My Hours is the cheapest paid tier in this comparison and does the core job without ceremony: timer or weekly timesheet, hours attached to a client and project, billable rates, budgets, and clean exportable reports. It has been in the market for two decades, which shows in how little explanation staff need before they start logging time.

Sources disagree on the free plan, with some describing a five-user cap and others unlimited users, so verify it directly if free is the reason you are looking. Approval workflows and the deeper permission controls sit on Pro, roughly doubling the rate. There is no scheduling, no clock-in, and no GPS, so an hourly workforce is served badly, and the integration list is shorter than the better-known project trackers.

Clockify has the widest feature spread per dollar here and a sensibly built ladder: Basic adds administrative controls, Standard adds approvals, time off, and invoicing, Pro adds scheduling and GPS. The integration list runs well past eighty tools, and the product handles a fifty-person team as comfortably as a five-person one.

The important change is the free plan. On April 21, 2026 free workspaces were capped at five users, and billable hours, CSV and Excel export, kiosk mode, and private projects moved to paid tiers, with free reporting limited to a one-month range. Any article recommending Clockify for an unlimited free team is describing the previous product. Review data across small business users also puts implementation at roughly a month and payback at around six, which is worth setting against the low headline price.

Everhour embeds the timer inside the project management tool your team already uses, so hours attach to the task where the work is actually planned rather than in a separate application nobody remembers to open. For a team that lives in a task board, this is the difference between tracking that happens and tracking that is reconstructed on Friday afternoon.

The five-seat minimum sets a floor of roughly $43 a month, which makes it poor value for a three-person team. The budgeting and forecasting are genuinely strong, but the value collapses entirely if you are not already committed to a supported project platform, and there is nothing here for hourly staff: no clock-in, no schedule, no GPS.

Toggl Track has the best day-to-day tracking experience in this comparison. The timer is fast, the background autotracker suggests what you were doing when you forget to start it, the browser extension works inside dozens of tools, and the reporting is pleasant enough that people actually look at it. The company also takes an explicit position against employee surveillance, which is worth something if you want hours recorded without the cultural cost.

It is roughly double Clockify per seat for a broadly comparable payroll job, and at twenty-five people Starter is $225 a month against $125. The difference buys polish, project profitability, and an autotracker, all of which matter to a billing agency and none of which matter to a business that just needs hours for a pay run. There is no scheduling, no clock-in, and no GPS.

Harvest combines time tracking with invoicing and expense capture, which for a services firm removes an entire second tool from the stack. Track hours against a client, turn them into an invoice, attach expenses, and chase payment from one place. The product is mature and the approval and reporting flows are clean.

The pricing model is now the main consideration. Following the July 2025 acquisition, Harvest moved from a flat per-seat rate to a plan fee plus usage-based billing, charging against active projects, active clients, active tasks, and invoices sent. The practical consequence is that a renewal can rise without a single seat being added, and documented user reports describe substantial increases at renewal. Get a written quote covering your actual project and client counts rather than budgeting from the per-seat rate.

Timely records what you actually did in the background and then drafts the timesheet from it, which solves the real failure mode of this category: people forgetting to press start and reconstructing the week from memory on Friday. For a small consultancy where billable accuracy is revenue, automatic capture is worth more than a cheaper manual timer.

The constraints are structural. Starter caps at five users and roughly twenty projects, so a ten-person team is on a higher tier from day one and the advertised entry price does not describe what you will pay. There is no permanent free plan, per-user cost is mid to high, and the automatic capture that makes it useful is also the part staff need convincing about, which is a conversation worth having before rollout rather than after.

For hourly and field work

Built around a clock-in tied to a place and a shift. For a restaurant, shop, clinic, or crew in vans, this group fits the shape of the problem and the group above does not.

Homebase charges per location rather than per person, and at these headcounts that is the single most consequential pricing fact on this page. A twenty-five-person team at one address pays exactly what a ten-person team pays, so the bill does not move as you hire. Scheduling, time clock, timesheets, and labor cost tools all sit in one product, and there is a genuinely usable free tier for a single location.

The model inverts across sites, and sharply: you pay the full location fee again for each one regardless of how few people work there, so five small sites cost five times over. Payroll is a separately priced add-on rather than an included feature, and the deeper HR and hiring tools sit on the higher tiers, so the entry price does not describe what a growing multi-site operator ends up paying.

Connecteam has the strongest free offer here for the audience this page is written for: full feature access, including GPS clock-in and geofencing, for up to ten users with no gating inside the cap. Above that, $29 flat covering thirty users works out under $1.20 a seat at twenty-five people, which nothing priced per user approaches, and the mobile app is genuinely built for staff who have no work email address.

The structure to understand before buying is the hub. Time tracking and scheduling live in one hub, team communication in another, training and HR in a third, so wanting two means paying two base fees and the flat-rate advantage narrows. It is also a broad workforce platform rather than a time tracker, which means a business that only wanted timekeeping adopts a great deal of product it will never open.

When I Work is a scheduling product with a competent time clock attached rather than the reverse, and for a shift business where the weekly roster is the actual work, that ordering is correct. Shift swaps, availability, and coverage alerts behave the way managers expect, the mobile app has high staff adoption, and payroll export is straightforward.

Two corrections before budgeting. There is no permanent free plan, despite regular appearances in free tool roundups, and the trial is short for testing across a full pay period. And the widely quoted $2.50 rate is the scheduling plan; timekeeping roughly doubles it. At twenty-five employees that is $125 a month against $24.95 for Homebase at one location, which is the clearest illustration on this page of how much the pricing model matters.

Deputy is the most capable product here on the parts of timekeeping that carry legal exposure: meal and rest break compliance, overtime rule handling, and labor forecasting against sales. For a restaurant group or a clinic where break rules are enforced and audited, that depth is precisely what the premium buys, and the cheaper tools approximate it rather than doing it.

For a simpler business it is more product than the problem needs. At twenty-five employees Core is about $163 a month against $29 for Connecteam Basic, and that gap only repays if somebody uses the compliance and forecasting features weekly. The free Starter tier is capped by shifts rather than users, which makes it an evaluation path rather than a plan, and the roughly $30 monthly minimum matters below about six employees.

Buddy Punch is built around one problem and solves it better than anything else here: proving that the person clocking in is the person working. Facial recognition, QR codes, PIN entry, and geofencing all sit on the clock rather than being bolted on, and rounding rules are configurable rather than assumed.

The $19 monthly base fee is the thing to weigh, because it lands hardest on the smallest teams: at ten employees it is roughly thirty percent of the bill, and at four it is most of it. There is no free plan and the trial runs fourteen days. Scheduling sits on higher tiers, so a business wanting both scheduling and verification pays above the entry rate. If time theft is a theory rather than a measured problem, cheaper tools cover the timekeeping.

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 and attendance data most often goes wrong, and the GPS, geofencing, and job costing are mature rather than tacked on.

It is also the most expensive option on this page at both headcounts. The $20 base fee is $240 a year before anyone clocks in, the per-employee rate rose from $8 to $10 on July 1, 2026, and the total reaches $270 a month at twenty-five employees against $24.95 for Homebase at one location. That premium is worth paying if payroll reconciliation currently costs you hours every pay run, and hard to justify if it does not. Outside the QuickBooks ecosystem the central argument disappears entirely.

What 10 and 25 employees actually cost

Two tables, because the tracks are not substitutes. Base fees and seat minimums are included, since those are the lines most comparison tables leave out and the ones that reorder the results.

Nothing surprising happens on the desk side. Every product is per-user, so the ordering at twenty-five is the ordering at ten and the only decision is what the extra rate buys. The one thing to catch is Timely, whose entry tier caps at five users, so the advertised $9 does not describe a ten-person team at all.

The field table behaves completely differently. Homebase and Connecteam do not move between the two columns while every per-user option roughly doubles, so a choice that looks close at ten people is a five to eleven times difference at twenty-five. If you expect to grow, the pricing model is a larger decision than the feature set.

How hours reach payroll

Every vendor claims payroll integration and they mean three different things by it. The distinction is not a feature bullet, it is whether somebody has a monthly task.

The honest test is arithmetic rather than preference. Count the minutes somebody currently spends moving hours between systems each pay run, multiply by the number of runs in a year, and compare that to the price difference between a tool that eliminates the step and one that does not. At twenty-five employees, QuickBooks Time costs about $2,940 a year more than Homebase Essentials, which only makes sense if reconciliation is genuinely consuming that much time. For many small businesses on a payroll platform that already works, it is not.

Recent price changes worth knowing

This category re-prices more often than most, and three changes inside about fifteen months have quietly invalidated a large share of the advice still ranking for these searches.

The verdict by team type

A single ranking assumes every small business has the same problem. Across this audience the right answer changes seven times.

The uncomfortable summary is that a business under about twenty-five people at a single site is usually served well by one of the two cheapest options in its track, and the tools that market hardest in this category are frequently priced for a stage past this audience. If activity monitoring and screenshots are also under consideration, that is a separate category with its own legal obligations and belongs in a separate decision.

Before you choose

FirstHR does not track time. There is no timer, no clock-in, and no timesheet, and for those you need one of the twelve tools above. What it covers is the employment record underneath them: an HR platform for US teams of 5 to 50 handling onboarding, employee files, e-signature, training records, and document management at a flat $98 to $198 a month.

One connection is worth naming before you buy. Every tool here assumes the person clocking in already exists as an employee: hired, papered, trained, and authorised to work. Adding somebody to a time tracking system is not onboarding them, and the federal deadlines attached to a new hire run from their first day whatever the timesheet says. In a business with hourly turnover, decide where that paperwork lives before the next person starts rather than after.

How to choose time tracking software for a small business

Five questions settle this, and the first eliminates half 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 record their hours without being chased. Our guide to rolling out time tracking covers what usually goes wrong in that first month.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best time tracking software for a small business?

There is no single answer, because the category splits by where your people work. For desk teams tracking billable hours, My Hours at $4 and Clockify at $4.99 per user are cheapest and Toggl Track at $9 has the best experience. For hourly staff, Homebase at $24.95 per location and Connecteam at $29 flat are structurally cheaper than anything per-user, while Deputy handles compliance best.

How much does time tracking software cost for 10 employees?

For a desk team, roughly $40 to $180 a month: My Hours about $40, Clockify $50, Everhour $85, Toggl Starter $90, Harvest about $110 plus usage, Toggl Premium $180. For ten hourly employees at one site: Homebase $24.95, Connecteam $29, When I Work about $50, Buddy Punch about $64 with its base fee, Deputy about $65, QuickBooks Time $120 with its base fee.

What is the difference between time tracking for office staff and field staff?

Office tools attach a timer to a project code and answer where the hours went. Field tools attach a clock-in to a place and a shift and answer whether somebody showed up. The features follow: project budgets and invoicing on one side, GPS and clock-in verification on the other. The pricing models differ too, with office tools charging per user and field tools often charging per location or as a flat team fee.

Is there free time tracking software for small business?

Yes, though the free plans have tightened. Connecteam is free with full features up to ten users, Homebase free for one location, and Toggl Track and My Hours have free tiers for very small teams. Clockify capped its free workspaces at five users in April 2026 and moved exports and billable hours to paid tiers, so older articles are out of date. See our comparison of free time tracking apps for the full picture.

Does time tracking software integrate with payroll?

Most do, but the depth varies and that is the question to ask. QuickBooks Time is the tightest case here: approved hours land inside QuickBooks payroll with no export. Homebase, Deputy, Buddy Punch, and Connecteam offer named connectors. Desk and project tools are usually built around client billing, so a CSV export is often the whole integration. Confirm against your specific payroll product rather than a general compatibility claim.

How long does time tracking software take to set up?

Simple per-user trackers go live the same day. Shift and field platforms take longer, because somebody has to build schedules, set geofences, and configure overtime and rounding. Review data across small business users puts Clockify at roughly a month to implement and around six months to payback, which is a useful check against claims of instant setup. The slow part is rarely the software.

Do I need time tracking software if I only have salaried staff?

Often not for payroll, but frequently yes for cost visibility. Salaried teams are paid correctly without recorded hours, so the payroll argument disappears and what remains is knowing which clients or projects consume the time you already pay for. That points at the desk tools. If nobody would act on the resulting report, you do not need the software.

Do small businesses have to keep time records by law?

Yes for non-exempt employees, and the requirement concerns the record rather than the method. The Department of Labor permits any timekeeping method, including a time clock, a timekeeper, or workers writing their own hours. Required is hours worked each day and each workweek, with payroll records kept three years and time cards two. A spreadsheet satisfies that until hours are disputed.