21 best productivity and time tracking apps

DeskTime is a simple-to-use time tracking app that combines three crucial features - employee monitoring, project management and productivity analysis. Additionally, this employee productivity tracking software is designed to help managers and their teams identify their unproductive habits, by sorting web pages and applications into "Productive" and "Unproductive".

DeskTime not only tracks time, but also automatically calculates your daily productivity and efficiency based on your categorization of URLs, programs, and apps. This means - the more time you spend on productive applications, the higher your daily productivity is.

Of course, the productivity or un-productivity of URLs depend on each user's position. That's why DeskTime allows you to create employee groups and manage application productivity individually for every group. That way, you can set Facebook as productive for your marketing team, while unproductive for everyone else.

ProofHub is one of the handiest online project management and time tracking software options on the market, combining these two functions seamlessly. It offers a wide selection of features designed to improve team collaboration. You can use the platform to share announcements about the latest achievements, praise colleagues who have done an outstanding job, send birthday greetings, or provide relevant information that everyone should know. ProofHub also has a chat feature for communication with colleagues or customers. The app helps with productivity tracking, too – when you have the full picture of what everyone is doing and the projects they're working on, you can spot and prevent the bottlenecks.

But going back to basics, ProofHub offers straightforward yet effective task management and time tracking solutions. You get an automatic timer to start tracking every billable hour as soon as you start working on a task, or you can use the built-in timer to make manual time entries. ProofHub lets you sort your tasks into lists for easier management; these lists are available to all project members, or you can create private lists visible only to select project members. Each task can be labeled as Backlog, In Progress, and Complete. You can also indicate the percentage of how far it has progressed – a great feature to make task management, time planning, and progress monitoring even more transparent.

This online project management and productivity tracking software also has a calendar where you can see an overview of your tasks and add events or milestones to be reached. It lets you take notes, mark them as private, and add stickies or bookmarks. Generally, ProofHub helps you manage projects and tasks effectively, share announcements, monitor logged time, oversee your team's agenda and the completed activities, create project templates, and do much more. It will also be handy for managers who need to keep track of the team's work, overall progress, logged time, and completed tasks; ProofHub lets you download all the data it collects and stores into handy reports.

Hours TimeLord is a time clock app with basic time tracking features - most suited for people who aren't looking for advanced features. Available as a mobile app, Hours TimeLord allows you to keep a running list of timers and quickly switch between your tasks.

In Hours TimeLord, you can manage your tasks and projects by color-coding them. That is, by applying a specific color for a task or project, you can easily differentiate between them.

Also, the timeline in the app lets you quickly make adjustments in your recorded timestamps at any time. For example, if you started a task at 10:00, but forgot to switch the timer until 10:15, you can adjust it by simply dragging the start time to 10:00.

TimeCamp is a time tracking solution that also provides a whole host of features for task and project management. With TimeCamp's user-friendly interface, tracking project and task progress is effortless – you can add and assign groups or people to the task, set up estimated hours and fees, and provide any other details you might need. The tasks can be set up as billable or non-billable, and you can also add various notes. The calendar feature lets you view tasks by day, week, or month. You can also structure tasks and their subtasks in a hierarchy, setting up dependencies.

The TimeCamp time tracking app automatically logs the time spent on different tasks and projects; manual time entry is also available to maintain control over what gets logged and how. TimeCamp's work tracker has an idle time detection feature, which sends notifications to users when they are inactive.

Another handy feature of TimeCamp is time reporting – it lets you generate custom reports (Time, People, Budgeting, and others), which provide detailed insights into how users have spent their time. These reports can be exported and shared with others. TimeCamp also functions as employee productivity tracking software – it offers productivity analysis, comparing how the time spent on productive activities stacks up against distractions. To improve your team's productivity, you can set goals that need to be reached – for example, set up a benchmark of at least 6 hours spent on productive apps every day.

The TimeCamp time tracking app also offers an invoicing feature that allows users to create and send invoices based on the tracked time data; it also provides various billing methods, helping you accurately charge your customers for the time spent on their projects.

Overall, TimeCamp is one of the best time tracking apps on the market – it helps teams optimize their time usage and improve productivity. This time tracker app helps create and manage projects easily, assign tasks, set deadlines, generate detailed reports, automatically track time, and simply manage your time better in various other ways.

Time Doctor is a time tracking app that helps teams and individual users optimize work efficiency and improve productivity and performance. One of the key features Time Doctor offers is time tracking – the app automatically logs the time spent on various tasks and projects. It also provides idle time detection: it can automatically determine when users are inactive, and when that happens, it pauses time tracking. Time Doctor also has website and app monitoring, time management, and many other features. You can generate and download detailed reports on the tracked time, which break down the time spent on various projects and tasks.

Time tracking, monitoring, and team and project management features make Time Doctor a handy and versatile tool for both employees and managers. The Time Doctor employee time tracking software allows managers to monitor their team's activities, measure productivity levels, and generate reports to evaluate the team's performance. It also has features like attendance tracking, payroll management, and invoicing.

Some other features that will be particularly handy for managers include the option to create paid breaks and assign them to employees, the ability to create work schedules for employees via a CSV import, and the possibility to set up the Screencasts feature, which captures screenshots of employees' screens at specific intervals or even records their activities in a video. You can choose the time intervals at which the screenshots should be taken and whether or not the screenshots should be blurred.

To sum up, Time Doctor is one of the best time tracking apps; it covers not just basic work tracking and productivity measurement needs, but it also offers a wide range of other features that will help your team hit its productivity and performance goals, like website and app usage monitoring, reminder and notification system, detailed reports, and much more.

Toggl is a timer-based time tracking app with an intuitive interface and many functionalities, which help teams and individual users easily manage their time and boost productivity. Toggl's timer is easy to start and stop, letting you accurately track employee hours spent on various activities; the tracked time can be categorized by adding project labels and tags.

One of the most valuable features this time tracking system offers is the possibility to set up estimates and alerts. For example, you can add the number of hours a project or task should take, and as you're working on it, you can check the progress and see how it stacks up to the estimate in the project dashboard. You can also set up alerts to notify you when a project or task has reached a certain completion percentage.

The Toggl time tracking tool provides its users with insightful visual reports, including a breakdown of the day's or week's projects, an activity timeline, and much more. You can set up billable rates and labor costs and get comparative insights by selecting up to 10 projects – see the data trends, project and employee profitability, and more. The possibility to add billable rates and estimates means that Toggl is an excellent tool for invoicing and billing purposes, too. You can also create fixed-fee projects and manage budgets not tied to an hourly rate.

Overall, this time tracking software gives you a quick overview of your work progress and provides insights into team productivity data – provided you ask your employees to share their info. You can also use the data gathered by time tracking to generate detailed reports and dig deeper into your productivity trends. Toggl easily integrates with external calendars, like Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar; plus, it offers native integrations with project management tools like Asana and Jira and has a host of other plugins. Using Toggl for work tracking can improve your time management skills, increase productivity, and improve your overall efficiency and work performance.

Hubstaff, like Time Doctor, offers similar time tracking capabilities, employee monitoring and project management features. The main difference, however, is that Hubstaff lets you track time and your employees anywhere. It's a time tracking app for Windows, Mac and Linux, as well as for mobile devices, so you can keep tracking your employees even when they're on the road or out of the office.

Not only does Hubstaff track time, it also tracks location with a GPS tracker. The GPS tracking feature is most commonly used by companies whose employees are frequent travelers - i.e. sales and delivery people. With an on-the-go productivity tracker, managers see where their employees are at that exact moment, how much time they spend on the road and how much they spend working on the job site.

If you have an unusually large project coming up, Tick is the software to use. It's a project-based time tracking software which tracks time against your estimated project timeline and budget.

For example, with each new time entry to Tick’s timesheet, the app will automatically update how much time is left for you to complete a certain task or project. The software will also notify you if the time is running out and you're about to exceed your budget or schedule. And if you have any recurring tasks, Tick also allows you to use the same budget and timeline repeatedly.

If you're also looking for billing options, you can integrate Tick with an accounting software called QuickBooks to create invoices, run payroll, and more.

RescueTime is a time tracking app that not only tracks time you spend on certain URLs, programs, and apps, but also shows you how productive you've been during the day.

RescueTime calculates your productivity automatically based on pre-grouped categories with built-in productivity scores. For example, Facebook will by default be a distractive URL, while Microsoft Word will be seen as productive. Meanwhile, those who disagree with RescueTime's categorization of URLs, programs and apps, can manually customize the categories according to their specific needs.

Additionally, with RescueTime you can set your task goals and keep track of how you're doing. For example, you can create a list of tasks and a timeline for these tasks which should keep you on track and make you more efficient.

Harvest is a tracking time app and expense monitoring tool that lets you track your time spent on each project or individual tasks. It then collects the data and creates intuitive, visual reports that make it easy to see what your team has been working on and make intelligent decisions about your business.

Once the task or project is done, Harvest lets you send invoices to your clients straight from the app with Stripe or PayPal. That way, you won't have to pay for additional invoicing and payment software. Also, if your client forgets to pay on time, Harvest will politely send an automatic reminder for you.

Qbserve is an automatic time tracking Mac app and productivity tracking software, especially helpful to people who tend to procrastinate. The app only tracks time when it detects a certain set of keywords in a document, or in an URL or app title. You define these keywords when you start to use the app and can add new keywords at any time.

For example, if you've added the keyword "time tracking" into your list, Qbserve will automatically track time spent on web pages and apps with this keyword in the title. That way, if you use YouTube to watch videos about time tracking, it'll be counted into your billable hours. On the other hand, if you watch cat videos, this time won't be counted into your billable hours.

If you’re a part of a team and you’re looking to track time that you and they spend on projects, Clockify is the work time tracking software that can help you do this really well with features such as timer and default project. The timer itself is a stopwatch that helps your team start and stop work, and the default project works with it by being the default timer that will automatically allocate the time to the project of your choosing. There’s even a reminder in case someone forgets to start the timer. Finally, Clockify provides visually pleasing reports for you to see as a way to gauge which projects take up most of your team’s time, giving way to being able to better manage you and your team’s effort.

In terms of feel and use, Clockify has many integrations and has a simple, sleek, and intuitive interface regardless of what supported device or browser you decide to use it on. This is especially true for its user-friendly, easy-to-navigate web app which can be accessed from anywhere for viewing of your and your current team’s progress.

Unlike the other options on this list, Timely stands out as an automatic tracking software that is as seamless as one can imagine because it records everything all the time: GPS locations, emails, meeting, documents, and websites. That means with Timely you’ll never need to start a timer again, which allows you to maintain the peace and quiet needed to stay focused and not get sidetracked or interrupted. To add to that, Timely generally requires very little interaction until there’s a need for pulling reports for whatever work is billable.

In terms of reports, Timely visualizes everything from what you did that day to where your team’s time resources are going in a very organized, easy-to-read fashion. To make it even more appealing and effortless, Timely features an AI that learns how you work on your computer over time. The AI will then start drafting time entries for you which will save you time.

Timesheets can be expensive to maintain, inaccurate, and illegible. QuickBooks Time solves this problem by offering a unique way of doing online time and attendance tracking that gives employees many different ways of clocking in such as texting, tweeting, using the app on a computer or phone, using a web browser, and dialing it in. They can also attach images to show their work. This gives flexibility to employees to be able to track their work time accurately and from anywhere, especially since QuickBooks Time offers geofencing and reminders features.

Although making clocking-in as simple as possible for accurate employee work time tracking is the main advantage of QuickBooks Time, it has one of the most economical ways of doing payroll in that it can synchronize with many of the popular accounting tools available such as Quickbooks, Sage, Xero, and more. This means once the hours are approved on the administration’s side, it’s smooth sailing from thereon out.

Insightful is a suite of online time and attendance software that puts focus on employee work time tracking and on analyzing their work productivity to find out which are laggards and which are top performers. For one, the application makes it super easy to check when employees start work because it’s done automatically based on when they start work. For two, it runs in the background and tracks their work or non-work related activities without violating their privacy (for example, with optional, blurred out screenshots).

Another important part of Insightful is that it can do automatic time allocation as well as budget forecasting. For example, it’s well known that tracking productivity is difficult and, at the same time, important. Thankfully, Insightful is able to accomplish this by automatically assigning work to projects to not disturb employees while counting every second that they spend on them, giving you a good estimate of the project’s costs. This in turn ensures that you can accurately bill your clients while maintaining the peace of mind that the human errors in manual time reporting are eliminated.

BeeBole is one of the most reliable timesheet apps on the market, offering an employee time clock, project time tracking, or both. Completely customizable, it can be set up for employees to clock in and out, or to track time for clients, projects, and sub-projects with a one-click timer. Track time daily, weekly, monthly, and in real-time. Logging attendance, vacations, and leaves of absence couldn’t be easier.

The team overview lets managers check project status, team and employee performance, and overtime at a glance. Approval flow allows for easy bulk review, approve timesheets, request changes, and lock time entries.

Finally, tap into valuable business intelligence by running reports on employee time, budget, margin, and profit. Managers can build the exact report they need or use the custom KPI dashboards to unlock this powerful insight.

timeBro is an automatic time tracking tool that records everything you do throughout the day. This time tracker software logs your daily activities and separates them into time entries that are displayed in a visual timeline, giving you a quick overview of what you were doing at any given moment. The automatic nature of timeBro is a major benefit – similarly to other time recording apps like DeskTime, timeBro launches the moment you turn on your computer. This means you don't have to worry about forgetting to start a time tracking app manually – everything happens automatically.

timeBro's daily work tracker puts particular emphasis on user privacy. All of the data this time tracking software collects is stored on the user's device – no tracking data is stored in the cloud, and no one else can access it. Additionally, the time tracking information is only visible to the particular user; admins or other employees cannot see your data unless you choose to share it with someone else, exporting the time entries.

If you're looking for an all-in-one employee productivity tracker and monitoring solution, EmpMonitor might be the tool you're looking for. It offers a comprehensive list of features that will help managers keep an eye on their employees' work habits and productivity patterns, including keystrokes and screenshots of their desktop activity.

EmpMonitor's time keeping app can be installed on the users computers in stealth mode, meaning that it will not be visible to them; admins who have access to the data will be able to see it, but end users won't know they're being monitored unless you tell them. You can also set up alerts and notifications to inform you about employees who are not being as productive as they should be or are spending too much time being idle – with the app operating online, you can always see who's doing what.

Teramind is a powerful employee monitoring tool that will be especially useful if your company works with sensitive documents or data. It offers the strictest monitoring features out of all the time tracking apps compared in this list, including live recording of your employees' computer screens, access to their webcams, keystroke logs, and more.

With all the monitoring data provided by this time tracking software tool at your disposal, you'll get a comprehensive picture of what your employees are doing during work hours. Once you've identified potential problems, you can figure out solutions on how to increase their productivity and prevent issues before they arise in the first place. Teramind will provide you with all the necessary data and proof of work you might need.

If your company works in an industry where you have to comply with different security standards and regulations, the solutions offered by Teramind might be what you're looking for. Features like screen recording, printed document tracking, and more, in addition to app and website monitoring, will help you ensure data safety and keep an eye on employees accessing sensitive information.

In contrast with the other time tracking apps included in this list, ClickUp is primarily a project management and planning tool; however, it also offers time tracking among its features, so its placement here is certainly warranted.

ClickUp lets you organize and oversee your team's work in various ways – you can use it to plan, collaborate on documents, and even chat with your colleagues. It can replace several tools you're using by consolidating them all in one place and making your team's work more efficient.

When it comes to time tracking, ClickUp lets you calculate the time invested into projects and tasks by providing a start/stop timer. You can indicate which task you were working on, add labels, mark the time as billable if necessary, edit it later, and more. ClickUp also lets you add time estimates before you start working on a project, and the tracked data is accessible in reports. While the tracking is not automatic like with many other tools on this list, in combination with the project management tools that ClickUp provides, the app covers a lot of ground in terms of how it can help you and your team work more productively. Since ClickUp is available on mobile devices too, it can be used as a mobile time tracker.

Buddy Punch is a time tracking system that provides a straightforward solution to one of the most common issues employers have – knowing if your employees are at work on time and have completed their scheduled hours. This time tracker app provides fewer features than other tools on the list, but if you're primarily interested in an app that functions as a place where employees can log work hours, Buddy Punch will take care of that.

It gives you an overview of how many hours your team has worked and if anyone's accumulated overtime; you can also schedule shifts and time off. When employees clock in, the timer starts, and when their shift is over, all they have to do is punch out. In addition to work hours, they can log their breaks to ensure proper rest.

Buddy Punch also works on mobile devices, so it can be useful for all kinds of teams. To ensure full accountability, Buddy Punch can ask employees to clock in via webcam using the facial recognition feature.