Time Tracking Options

Hot take: time tracking is one of the worst parts about being a freelancer. It isn’t hard to create a template in Excel or Google Drive to track your time, but then converting that into an invoice on something like PayPal is a total chore.

Some of the most popular time-tracking services like RescueTime rely on employee surveillance and micromanaging. (Toggl, one of the options on our list, has a great anti-surveillance piece here.) For some people, having access to their own data about how they’re spending their time online helps them set boundaries on their social media use or assess how they’re doing toward productivity goals–and if that’s you, great, more power to you! But if that just feels like a digital version of having your boss watching you directly over your shoulder… you’re not alone.

We found three great time-tracking services and compared their features, costs, and integrations–Harvest, Toggl, and Clockify. *No one at A Village for Good has been paid by any of these services to write this article, so it is entirely based on opinion.

Shared Features

I’ve been using Harvest for nearly a year to manage my projects, and there were many things I think it got right in terms of making time tracking more user-friendly. Turns out, Toggl and Clockify have these features too!

Organization

Though the language might change slightly, all three let you organize your time by clients, projects, and tasks. Here’s what that might look like in practice:

Your client is A Village for Good. You might have other clients, too.
Your projects include each of the clients you’re working with for A Village for Good.
Your tasks or activities are the things you do.

Timers

Unlike apps like RescueTime, these time-tracking services don’t monitor what sites or apps you’re using during that time. You can simply:

- Start the timer from your browser, a browser extension, or the mobile app

- Record what client, project, and task you’re working with

- Add a note with more detail (for instance, which specific grant you’re working on)

Once you’re done, you can stop the timer just as easily as you started it. You can also edit it if you know you took a 30 minute personal call in the middle of working that you want to edit out, or if you’d like to round up to the nearest 30 minutes for simplicity.

Harvest

Harvest allows you to assign each of your projects certain tasks–such as grant prospecting, grant narratives, etc. Each task you create can have its own billable rate, and you can select which tasks are applicable to which projects or clients—so if you do freelance web development with a different client, you can keep your web development tasks and your grant writing tasks totally separate.

Cost: If you are only managing yourself, with one client and up to two projects, you can use Harvest for free! If you have more clients and projects, you can still get a 30-day free trial... but after that, it’s $12 per user per month (or about $130 per user if you elect to pay for a year in advance).

Invoicing: Invoicing with Harvest is simple, too. You can choose all hours invoiced within the past 30 days, all un-invoiced hours, or any custom time slot you’d like. Harvest also allows you to track fixed-fee projects or a mix of hourly and fixed rates.

At the end, you can email it right to the client who gets an easy link to pay you with PayPal or Stripe.

What the client sees

Harvest has a ton of other features and integrations: it can create custom reports, integrate your time tracking with Slack or your Google/Outlook calendar, automatically add your invoices to QuickBooks... and more!

Toggl

The language on Toggl’s site is more geared towards teams than independent freelancers… but freelancers can still benefit from Toggl. Like Harvest, Toggl lets you press a single button to start tracking time as you work on your clients and projects.

Cost: Toggl is free for up to five users–and unlike Harvest, its free version gives you unlimited projects and clients.

If you upgrade to the $10 per person per month plan, you can create tasks as sub-projects. I like this system much better than Harvest wherein you type whichever project you’re working on as a note, even if that means creating multiple entries representing the same project.

But one downside: you won’t get access to fixed-fee projects until the $20 per user per month plan. If you are working with many fixed fee projects, this might be enough reason to stick to Harvest’s $12/month plan–that is up to you to determine. The $20 per user per month plan has many other advanced features, too, like SSO and Salesforce integrations.

And speaking of integrations, Toggl has loads. It works with some of my favorite apps like Slack for a team communication hub; Asana or Todoist for task management; Evernote, Notion, and Trello for notes; Google or Outlook calendars; and even software specific to your role or industry such as GitHub and the Adobe Creative Suite.

However, one more downside… Toggl cannot send invoices to clients. You would need to export your billable data and send it to your client for payment elsewhere.

Clockify

Clockify pronounces itself “The most popular free time tracker for teams.” Like Toggl and Harvest, Clockify has a start/stop timer–but it also has a ton of other features great for those managing teams, like the ability to view and approve time off requests.

Cost: Yes, Clockify does have a free version to do basic time tracking… but if you’re looking for the ability to invoice for your time, that requires their $7 per user per month plan. That said, the free version of Clockify can generate a PDF or Excel sheet you can send your clients and then bill them for the total amount.

Here’s what that PDF report looks like:

In all, Clockify has 5 different plans with various features–but like Harvest, it asks you to type in what you’re working on, rather than relying on the tasks system used by Toggl. And like Toggl, fixed fee projects only come at their $10+ plan.

Conclusion

Here’s a really basic rundown of what each app offers:

All 3 services let you stop/start time on your own.
They rely on user input, not on surveillance.
All 3 have a limited free version. After that, monthly user costs start at $12 for Harvest, $10 for Toggl, and $5 for Clockify.
Invoicing is available on the free Harvest plan and the $7 Clockify plan. It is not available at all in Toggl.
Fixed fee projects start at the $10 plan for Clockify, the $12 plan for Harvest, and the $20 plan for Toggl.

I like Toggl’s feature to assign tasks to projects available at their $10/month plan… however, their inability to create invoices is a downside, as is their limitation of fixed fee projects at only their $20/month plan.

Clockify has better pricing: the $7 Clockify plan allows for invoicing, and the $10 Clockify plan allows for fixed-fee projects. Harvest only has the free and $12/month plans, so it is not nearly as customizable. (On a personal note, I found manual time entering on Clockify to be much clunkier than it is on Harvest.)

Do you have another favorite time-tracking app? How does it compare to Harvest, Toggl, and Clockify? Let us know!

Valarie Ward is a really cool grant writer in Minnesota. She has done contract work with V4G over the last couple of years and knows tons fun tools to keep grant writers and organizations organized! :)