Harvest vs Timely

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.

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, you're just going to get long chunks of time labeled as your web 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.