Best Time Tracking Software: Harvest vs. Toggl Track vs. Clockify

Harvest is the invoicing-native choice. Toggl Track is the simplest. Clockify is the free default. Here's how to pick based on whether you bill clients by the hour or just want visibility into team productivity.

By The StackMatch Research Team

Harvest, Toggl Track, and Clockify pricing varies by team size — choose based on headcount, not features

~$50-100/moHarvest

~$40-80/moToggl Track

$0-50/moClockify

All three tools serve the same category. The wrong pick means paying for complexity you don't use — or outgrowing simplicity too fast.

Monthly cost comparison

Harvest: ~$50-100/mo — the invoicing-native choice

Harvest is in virtually every professional-services vertical we curate — marketing agencies, web design firms, consulting practices — at roughly $50-100/mo for a small team. It's the right choice when you bill clients by the hour and need time entries to flow directly into invoices. The project budgeting feature is genuinely useful: set a budget, track hours against it in real time, and get alerts before you overshoot. The trade-off is that Harvest's pure time-tracking features are lighter than Toggl's — if you don't invoice from time entries, you're paying for functionality you don't use.

Toggl Track: ~$40-80/mo — the simplest, most adopted time tracker

Toggl Track is the easiest time tracker to get a team to actually use. The one-click timer, browser extension, and mobile app are frictionless — which matters because the biggest failure mode in time tracking isn't the tool, it's adoption. At $40-80/mo for a small team, it's priced similarly to Harvest but without the invoicing layer. Toggl is the right choice when you need visibility into where team time goes (project profitability, capacity planning, productivity trends) but don't bill clients directly from time entries. The trade-off is weaker project budgeting and no native invoicing — you'll need integrations or a separate tool.

An illustration of a software audit checklist.

The biggest time-tracking failure isn't the tool — it's adoption. A tracker nobody fills in produces worse data than no tracker at all.

Harvest's invoicing integration only pays for itself if your team actually logs time daily — a firm paying $75/mo for Harvest but reconstructing hours from memory at month-end is paying for a workflow it isn't using.

Clockify: $0-50/mo — the free default for small teams

Clockify is the only genuinely free time tracker that works at small-business scale. The free tier covers unlimited users, projects, and reports — features that competitors gate behind paid plans. At $0-50/mo for paid tiers (mostly admin and SSO features), it's the cheapest option by a wide margin. Clockify is the right choice when you need basic time tracking for a small team and your budget is tight. The trade-off is that the interface is less polished than Toggl or Harvest, the integrations are fewer, and the support is lighter. For teams that just need to know where time goes, Clockify is genuinely sufficient — but it's not a project-management or invoicing tool.

Before adding any of these three, check whether your PM tool (ClickUp, Asana, Harvest itself) already has a time-tracking feature switched off. Paying twice to track the same hours is the single most common overlap in this pillar.

The actual decision rule

Questions to ask before choosing a time tracker

Do we bill clients by the hour and need time to flow directly into invoices? Harvest is the only one of the three with native invoicing.
Do we mainly need visibility into where team time goes, with frictionless adoption? Toggl Track wins on simplicity and actual team buy-in.
Is budget tight with basic tracking needs? Clockify's free tier is genuinely usable at small scale.
Do we already track time inside a project-management tool? Check before adding a fourth place hours get logged.

Run the free audit to see whether your current stack already includes time-tracking features you're not using — and which platform would actually integrate with your project and billing tools.

Run your own audit