DeskTime vs Timely: compare the alternatives

Using a time tracking tool can improve your work performance significantly. But tracking your work time via app that measures your productivity and efficiency levels can be a real game-changer. If you wish to receive analysis of your work performance, DeskTime is a great alternative to Timely.

Next to tracking work hours, DeskTime measures how productive and effective you've spent them. The time tracking software allows account owners and admins to set the status of the apps and URLs used, classifying them as productive, unproductive, or neutral. Then together with tracking work time, DeskTime creates a daily, weekly, and monthly overview of one's productivity and efficiency.

The productivity and efficiency measurements provide an excellent opportunity to explore your own working patterns. You can examine your monthly productivity and see what time of the day you're most efficient, when you experience productivity “slumps,” and much more. This knowledge can significantly uplift your work quality, as you can arrange workday, so it best suits your productivity and energy levels.

With Timely, creating several tag lists is available, for example, “core work” and “distractions.” Then you can add the tags for tasks to classify them accordingly. When receiving a work time report from Timely, you see how much time has been spent doing the meaningful work and what amount of time has been given up for distractions. However, it doesn't allow you to explore your work patterns as deeply as DeskTime does.

Both DeskTime and Timely track your work time automatically. For those who don't see themselves operating a bunch of timers during the workday, these two solutions will be a good fit.

With the DeskTime app, time tracking is convenient and easy. The tool works together with you – no need to manually clock in/out during your work day. DeskTime's time tracking tool is built to automate all of the processes that can be automated – from time tracking to productivity analysis.

Timely will also be a good alternative – it racks your work hours and tasks without unnecessary interruption. This time tracking tool uses AI to capture everything you've been working on during the day and then turns it into accurate timesheets. The longer you use Timely, the better AI can learn your work patterns and start drafting time entries.

Choosing a time tracking tool that runs automatically eases your work quite a lot. A detail worth mentioning is that you'll have to review and approve time entries drafted by the AI manually with Timely. DeskTime, however, tracks your work hours automatically and doesn't require manual input.

Even though both of the time tracking software support third-party integrations, Timely outnumbers DeskTime in the variety of possibilities. While DeskTime has the primary needs of integrations taken care of, such as Trello, Asana, Basecamp, and more, Timely will be a better alternative because it can be integrated with 100 different tools.

Timely's integrations cover six categories – project management, communication, organization, design, development, and accounting. For teams that work with a large scope of different tools, this may be extremely handy. Glancing into Timely's integrations with project management apps, the list shows a substantial variety of nearly 30 options.

DeskTime's benefit here, however, is in integrations with various project management tools, such as Asana, Jira, Zapier, Trello, Basecamp, Google Calendar, GitLab, and more. Even though they may not be that niche-oriented, if you're in need for common project management app integrations, DeskTime will suit your needs quite well. Yet, in other cases, consider Timely to fulfill the variety of your integration needs.

Providing accurate project cost calculations for your customers can sometimes be tricky. It's not easy to estimate the amount of billable time for a project without having legitimate data to back the calculations. Luckily, DeskTime's Project feature can provide the needed support.

Beside tracking ongoing billable hours, DeskTime also allows you to estimate costs of a new project beforehand. You can create a project, assign it to your team members, and see the potential costs according to employees' hourly rates. Plus, no need to worry about writing manual reports after a project is finished – DeskTime does it for you.

Timely also has a project feature, however, it gives a general overview of the situation and helps with managing the workflow overall rather than providing project costs' calculation. If project time tracking and billing are two needs that go hand in hand for you, DeskTime will be a better alternative to Timely.

Additionally, DeskTime offers an Invoicing feature, which is especially useful for small and medium-sized businesses where the manager has to deal with many tasks at once. Creating invoices manually takes a lot of time and energy, plus it adds a risk of underbilling clients.

DeskTime offers a combination of time tracking and billing in one software, saving your time and allowing you to create invoices in a few clicks. You can add the tracked hours of a project, set hourly rates, add taxes and discounts, and what's even better – save your invoices as templates for later use.

Both of the time tracking softwares are very convenient for tracking team's work. Timely offers a handy overview of teams' attendance and performance in an easy-to-use dashboard. With Timely you can also monitor employees' performance against key metrics and see exactly how the work time is spent using the tool's tagging system.

DeskTime adds more to the table with features like the Absence calendar, Shift scheduling, and Private and Offline time options. They make team management a lot easier by providing all the necessary data in one place – be it your team members' planned vacations, preferred shifts, or sick leaves.

In case you're still in the midst of choosing a time tracking tool that suits your team's needs best, pick Timely if you're fine with using other tools for scheduling work hours or employees' absence, and go for DeskTime if you'd rather have it all in one tool.