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 timeline-focused time tracking tool for teams of all sizes.
Toggl, like Timely are both heavily timeline/calendar-based tools—focusing on "what did you do at various times throughout the day". The thing is, do you really care about what time of the day you did something? Or just how much time was spent?
When we evaluated it, there was a bit of fatigue around having to think about the start/end time whenever you track time. Often times you're going to be more in the "I worked on X client task for 30 minutes", and the more friction involved in getting that added will result in more difficulty for your team building the habit of time tracking (it is a habit that needs to be formed over time).
Toggl was initially built as a basic "what have I done" start/stop tool, prioritizing that over the "track time against client/project", which can be seen in the importance each is laid out when tracking time.
Looking at their priority, it's set to: #1 what was done, #2 for what project/client?, #3 what tag (similar to "Harvest task"), #4 billable (or non-billable), #5 start time, #6 stop time, #7 finally "for how long".
Now take a time tracking tool like Harvest, which focuses priority #1 the client, #2 the structured task (billable/non-billable), #3 notes (optional), and #4 for how long (if blank, it just starts the time tracking clock):
Now imagine adding a task 5–10 times per day. With Toggl, you now have 3+ additional steps to think through each time with Toggl as opposed to Harvest. It just adds to more mental fatigue each time.
It's clear that Harvest was built for quickly tracking billable/non-billable time to clients and projects, while Toggl was built for tracking time against what was done (less importance around for whom and task structuring).
Now for the automatic time tracking piece, in comparing it to that of Timely...
While they don't go as far as automatically tracking your time for like Timely, it has the same flaws that Timely and Rize have in the area of automatically tracking "useful" data when 99% of most people's work is done in the browser.
You'll see in the desktop app that all of your time in the browser will simply be categorized as the browser's name (in this case, Arc):
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So in terms of actually getting useful data from all of this monitoring of open apps and windows, you're not really getting much to go off of, especially when trying to remember what work was done, and for which client/project.
Of all the "automatic time tracking" tools on the market, Rize continues to be the best at producing the most comprehensive and usable data of them all—although it is more of an individual productivity tool than a comprehensive team time tracking tool.
A super important note is Toggl has absolutely no billing/invoicing capabilities. So while you can track all of your time, you're going to be manually creating invoices in a proper invoicing tool like that of QuickBooks Online (or even Harvest) to generate invoices from actual time tracked.
Of all the time tracking tools we've looked at that are team focused, we'd place Toggl at #2, but still a non-starter if any semblance of invoicing capabilities are needed.
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