We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what this software does well, and what they could do better. ⤵
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For small and mid-size teams looking to track your team's time, along with powerful invoicing functionality.
The biggest difference between Harvest and Toggl + Timely is that Harvest allows you to track time, and then spin up invoices based on the time tracked without ever leaving Harvest (with powerful invoicing/billing features).
But since we have the main category set to time tracking, lets focus on that for a moment—Harvest has a much more minimal approach to time blocking than that of Toggl and Timely. Now this is actually a good thing... Let me explain:
Harvest focuses less on the timeline/calendar view of time tracking (e.g. what did you get done at each time of the day), and is more focused on simply tracking categorized chunks of time (tasks) across clients/projects.
Their approach is more minimal in a way—versus throwing sometimes an overwhelming amount of data at you (which is intending to help you figure out what you did), actually results in a bit of overwhelm.
Most people we know that use Timely for example actually disable any auto-time categorization because as explained on the Timely + Toggl pages, it's nearly impossible to attribute the auto-tracked time to actual collaborative client/project work.
Harvest was actually built initially as internal tool for a marketing agency to track all of their client work which has since evolved to support hundreds of thousands of users at over 70,000 companies—so with Harvest, client reporting is deeply at the core.
Figuring out who is profitable, who is trending toward being over budget, and all the convenient billing/invoicing features to handle it all are all baked right in. (It even allows for recurring custom invoices and payment via PayPal + Stripe, along with a powerful native QuickBooks Online integration).
In the project view, you'll see every client, their projects, and detailed budget, spend, and costs all in one convenient place:
Harvest still integrates with your calendar like the other tools, pulling up your meetings for the day (and tasks if you're using a time-blocking tool like Motion). But the "what time of the day" is not important with Harvest, making it easier to just get in and out without obsessing over the details:
Harvest also has a super nifty desktop app for MacOS and Windows which allows you to see when your timer is running, and even allows you to remove the AFK (away from keyboard) time from your timer when you leave the computer and come back after forgetting to turn off your timer:
Here at Efficient App, we use and love Harvest. Have actually been using it for nearly a decade. Their powerful API has allowed us to also integrate Harvest deeply into many of our internal processes.
The automatic time tracking tool for individuals who want to maximize productivity through better understanding how they are spending their time.
This is the most impressive "auto-time tracking" tool we've seen—all you really need to do is install the app and then... Well, forget about it 🤯
If you're like most people though, you'll probably spending most of your time in the browser (like Arc), most time tracking tools will just mark this time as "browsing", but if you install the Rize browser extension, it'll actually further categorize your time based on the sites you're actually visiting.
Early on, you might spend a bit of time categorizing some sites and apps (e.g. how would it really know what you want to categorize your time in your CRM as? "Sales", "Business Development", "Relationship Building" maybe? Or something super general like "Work").
The true strengths of Rize are its beautiful reports (also automatically sent over via email on a weekly/monthly basis, to let you know how focused you've been and how to improve some of your habits):
Issues start arising pretty quickly though when you get to the granular levels. Like right now, I'm in Webflow writing content, so that's "Content Creation", right? Nope—I already have a rule that assigns Webflow time as "Web Development", because most of the time that's true. You can probably see where the inaccuracies start arising from this though, and I'd ask you how that can really ever be solved? It's such an obscure complexity that doesn't even seem like a place that OpenAI can help alleviate.
Now while you can go deeper and track your time against "Clients" and "Projects", things are made abundantly clear that this area is just an "add-on" as it isn't very powerful, intuitive, and is totally lacking team features. For this reason, I would not rely on Rize for any critical client time reporting.
All-in-all, Rize is very much an individual productivity-focused time tracking tool, and it does a phenomenal job at that. If you're looking for something more for your team and actual deep reporting on budgetary usage and team capacity planning, you'll definitely want to pick out a team-focused time tracking tool like Harvest or Toggl.
One major thing to note, Rize is a desktop-only app—there's no web app—so if that's important to you, you'll have to skip it for now.
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