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. ⤵
.webp)
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 time tracking tool for teams of all sizes with some interesting automatic time tracking capabilities.
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:
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.
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.jpg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg){kind=icon}
.svg)
.svg)
