Harvest vs Toggl

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.

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".

Toggl track new time entry

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):

Harvest track new time entry

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):

Toggl desktop app with active app tracking enabled.

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.