Best Time Tracking & Management Software - Free & Paid

How is Time tracking software useful?

Time tracking software is beneficial to a user in the following tedious and time consuming tasks:

• To track productivity of employees
• To fill out timesheets
• To track the usage of applications, documents, websites, games etc.
• To create work reports and proof of work done for clients by Freelancers
• To automatically generate invoices to clients on the basis of hours spent
• To manage workforce by tracking attendance, employee absence, human resource issues, talent management, payroll management etc.

How to choose Time tracking software?

Time tracking is important to analyze how much time you or your employees spend on various tasks and whether it is feasible with respect to the money involved, and the best part is that with these software you can make all of these smart decisions automatically, without disturbing your creative workflow. However, it is difficult to zero in on good software among the wide sea of software available in the field of time-tracking. This is where we come to your rescue. Following is a check list of the important points one must look at while judging a time tracking software:

• Real-time tracking
• Ability to edit time by removing or adding time blocks
• Reporting features
• Ability to create invoice or export data
• Employee monitoring tools
• Project management tools
• Integrations with other applications
• Customer Support
• Pricing

Overall Best Time Tracking & Management Software

Our team here is committed to serve you by trying out the overall best and most commonly used time- tracking software based on the criteria enlisted above, and list out their features, pros and cons, pricing etc. so that you make an informed and reasonable choice.

RescueTime

RescueTime made a cut to our recommendation list because of its amazing automatic time- tracking and One-Click offline time tracking feature and we promptly wanted to give it a try.  It was launched in the year 2007 and in the past 13 years it has grown to over 2 million registered users, clustered mainly around the United States. With its firm belief that “Quality beats Quantity”, RescueTime has logged more than 1.37 billion hours of screen time over the past decade helping out companies to track their team’s productivity.

Features:

• Automatic time tracking

This is a silent software that works in the background and tracks time spent on various online and offline activities, that too without any manual prompts or entries.

• Customizable Time rescuing

One of the best features we found was that you can easily customize which sites are productive to you and which are not on a five-point scale. This feature is extremely useful since some sites which are productive for some people may be unproductive for others, for instance, for a team working on digital marketing and social media analytics, FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram etc. are productive sites while for most others, these are disruptive sites.

You can even control the days and times in a day, when you want the app to monitor your activities, to protect your personal space.

• Insightful Reporting

RescueTime is also one of the best when it comes to making meaning of all the time tracking data collected by it, with its detailed presentation of reports, trends, insights and analytics helping you to work smart and not just work hard.

• One-click offline time tracking

It not just tracks our online activity but can switch promptly to track our offline usage as well with just a click.

• Blocking distractive websites

RescueTime not just monitors disruptive websites that waste our productive hours, but also blocks them to help us focus better on the work at hand, with its FocusTime feature using which we can set daily limits of time to be spent on various apps or sites.

• Real-time alerts

RescueTime also comes to our rescue when we tend to get distracted from our work by sending real-time messages of time spent on disruptive sites, thus rebuilding our focus.

• Integrations

You can even update the status of other apps like Slack, Calendar etc. using integrations with services like IFTTT and Zapier.

• Security

Privacy and security of your sensitive data and activities can be the main concern when allowing 3rd party software to track your online activities. But a detailed skimming of RescueTime’s Security features and Privacy policies assured us that this aspect is well taken care by them.

Customer support:

RescueTime offers adequate technical support through a myriad of help documentations, blogs and FAQs. We may also use their contact form, toll free number or email for any other kind of support.

Pricing: 

RescueTime offers a 14-day free trial period and thereafter charges $12/month.

Check out RescueTime discount coupons here

Pros:

• Works automatically and silently in the background
• Blocking feature for distractive sites
• Detailed reporting and customization

Cons:

• Premium version is a tad bit expensive comparatively

DeskTime

DeskTime is also software in the same category. Its confident claim to boost productivity by 30% within the first week is what caught our eye and prompted us to try it out to check whether its fit to be included in our list and here are our findings. DeskTime initially started out as internal use software developed by a Latvian IT company, Draugiem Group for increasing the work transparency among their employees and management, in July 2011. Today it stands as an independent company catering to the needs of about 287k users worldwide.

Features:

• Automatic Time Tracking

DeskTime supports automatic time tracking without any manual entries, just like RescueTime.

• URL & app tracking

DeskTime let us track URL and apps on which our employee spent time on accurately and categorized into Productive, Unproductive and Neutral apps. This feature, we felt, might definitely improve productivity of your company’s employees by 30% as DeskTime claims.

• Screenshots

DeskTime also captures screenshots of your employees’ computer automatically at random intervals of time.

• Project time tracking

We were also in awe of the Projects feature using which we tracked our work as a team collaboratively based on the time spent on the project collectively and also split it to individual tracking to see who contributed how much to the project.

• Shift scheduling

This feature makes DeskTime stand out from its contemporaries. Using the Shift Schedule feature we can create and manage employee work-shifts, and also get detailed report on their performance with respect to their productivity, efficiency, arrival and leaving time, idle and offline time etc.

• Offline time tracking

This feature increases the accuracy of your billing by letting you to manually add the time you spent away from the desktop, may be for phone calls, meetings or on-site work. You can also ask your time to describe their offline hours and monitor them. These data can also be added to the billable hours and invoiced.

• Invoicing

You can even create invoices for your clients by ‘adding project time’ and it automatically calculates the number of hours and the total payment due for that particular project. You may also manually create invoices by adding all the information and number of hours. All these invoices are automatically downloaded to your system or can be sent to the customer directly.

• Absence calendar

DeskTime can be used as an employee absence calendar to manage who is away from work and to assess if there is a need to call in replacements.

• Integrations

DeskTime also has smart integrations to connect your time tracker with the most used apps and websites like Google calendar, Outlook Calendar, Trello, Gitlab, Asana, Basecamp, Zapier etc. to make your work easier further.

Customer support: Offers Email, Live chat support and Training through Blogs FAQs and videos.

Pricing: After a 14- Day free trial you can chose any among the four reasonable plans offered- Lite(Free), Pro ($7/month), Premium ($9/month) or Enterprise ($14/month) for all full-fledged features.

Check out Desktime discount coupons here

Pros:

• Automatic time tracking
• Shift scheduling features
• Online and live chat customer support
• Reasonable pricing

Cons:

• Manual offline time entry

TimeCamp

TimeCamp is another simple yet powerful time tracking software you can consider to monitor and boost your teams’ work productivity. It was founded in 2008, in Poland. It evolved from its CEO’s class assignment to being a powerful company with over 200,000 users all over the world. It has today phenomenally grown to be one among the 18 companies to be ranked in the 19^th edition of Deloitte ranking of fastest growing technologycompanies in Central Europe.

Features

The features of TimeCamp are comparable with those of RescueTime, which are listed below:

• Automatic time tracking
• Productivity tracking
• Insightful reports
• Tracking billable hours easily
• One-click timesheet approvals
• Easy attendance tracking
• Effortless invoicing
• Integrations with useful apps like Google calendar, Outlook calendar, Asana, Insightly etc.

Customer support: 24x7 email and live chat support with huge Knowledge Base for technical help.

Pricing: TimeCamp offers a Free plan with fairly useful features sufficient for individuals and small companies. You can further upgrade to Basic ($7/month), Pro ($10/month) and a customizable plan Enterprise, where you can select features required.

Check out TimeCamp discount coupons here

Pros:

• Automatic time tracking
• 24x7 support
• Affordable and customizable pricing plan tailor-made for each type of user
• Free plan with many useful features

Cons:

• No screenshot feature
• Interface and design can be improved

Time Doctor

Time Doctor is the last but not least in our list of recommendations which is a time tracking software specially designed for remote employees. It was first launched in 2012 and is one of the first remote employee management software.

Features

• Automatic Time tracking and employee monitoring
• Online timesheets and payrolls
• Project management & budgeting
• Productivity measurement and summary reports
• Distraction alerts to refocus employees attention
• Screenshots and activity levels
• Website and app monitoring
• Offline time tracking
• Integrations with over 35  project management and productivity tools

Customer support: Email customer support and help documentations.

Pricing: Basic ($7/month)

Standard ($10/month)

Premium ($20/ month)

All of these plans come with a 14-day free trial. Check for TimeDoctor discount coupons here

Pros:

• Best for tracking remote employees
• Smooth effortless integrations especially with Asana, Jira etc.
• Affordable pricing plans

Cons:

• Customer support can be more prompt