Harvest vs Rize

Harvest is a time tracking and invoicing tool built primarily for teams that bill clients for their work. It lets you track time across projects and tasks, monitor budgets in real time, and turn logged hours into professional invoices without needing a separate billing system.

• Clean, minimal approach to time tracking
• Built-in invoicing and billing directly from tracked time
• Recurring invoices and built-in payment support via Stripe and PayPal
• Strong project budgeting and profitability reporting for client work
• Easy client and project organization with clear budget, spend, and cost visibility
• Native QuickBooks Online integration

• Limited automatic activity tracking compared to tools like Timely
• Not ideal for users who want detailed "what happened at each hour of the day" tracking

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.

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).

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.

• Free: $0 forever. Best for individual freelancers who need basic time tracking, reporting, and invoicing for up to 1 seat and 2 projects.
• Teams: $11/mo per user ($108/yr). Best for teams that need unlimited seats, team reporting, capacity tracking, invoicing, and accounting integrations.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing. Best for organizations that need advanced controls like profitability reporting, timesheet approvals, activity logs, custom reports, SAML SSO, and dedicated onboarding support.

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 Browser), 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.