Timely

At first glance, Timely appears to be quite a standout from competitors like Harvest and Toggl through their deep "automatic time tracking" capabilities (similar to that of Rize—although less powerful, just more team focused).

Time tracking is an incredibly tedious task, so the more that these tools can "do it automatically" (especially with the use of machine learning and AI), sounds like an absolute no-brainer, right? Well...

The same issues we mentioned in the Rize thoughts ring true here as well (although are made even a bit more confusing). Since you're probably like most people and spending most of your working time in the browser (e.g. Arc), you're just going to get long chunks of time labeled as your browser of choice. Along with hundreds of miscellaneous URLs thrown at you of which you're supposed to make some sense of:

Great, so it's just going to say Arc (or Chrome) 99% of the time with lengthy URLs, and that's helpful how exactly?

With all of these "automatic time tracking apps", they are best at #1: Defining and categorizing the app you are in (e.g. browser = browsing) → And then #2: You're still in charge of making sense of all of that URLs you visited, connecting it all to the projects taking place.

Okay, so you're on Facebook Ads, that's clearly the "Ads" category, right? Right! But say you have clients, now are these Facebook ads for X client or Y client? It's impossible to know really, all these tools know for certain is that you spent a lot of time in Facebook Ads today, but you already knew that 😅

So with all of that said, only your team ultimately knows what internal/client work is done, and the actual tasks that are being had (and for how long).

If you're curious as to the additional pain-points that come from this even with a more powerful AI time tracking tool, go read about Rize (versus further reiterating here).

So take the automatic time tracking features out of the race for a moment, and on purely the UI/UX, and functionality side of things, you'd be quite a bit better off with Harvest or even Toggl.

Timely fits into multiple categories based on what it actually helps you do. Each category highlights a different strength and the efficiency points it earned, helping you compare tools not just by features, but by how well they actually perform.

Keep exploring the best software across categories, or explore Timely alternatives