Time tracking software for teams

Time tracking software records the hours people work by project, client or shift, then passes those hours to whoever runs payroll or sends invoices. The eleven products on this page each let staff enter time or clock in and out, let a manager approve timesheets or time entries, and send hours on to payroll or invoicing. We checked every price on the vendor's own website on November 3, 2026, and each product page links to the pages we used.

Three kinds of product share the name

Project trackers are built for agencies, consultants and other teams that bill clients by the hour. Toggl, Harvest, Clockify, Everhour, Timely and Kimai start from a timer or a weekly timesheet and end in a report or an invoice. Time clocks are built for hourly staff whose hours feed payroll. Buddy Punch and QuickBooks Time center on punching in and out from a phone or a shared tablet.

A third group watches the computer while the timer runs. Hubstaff and Time Doctor include activity levels and screenshots on every plan, and they sell mostly to teams that work remotely. TimeCamp and Clockify cover parts of all three, with kiosk, GPS and screenshot features spread across their plans.

What the law asks employers to record

The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in May 2019 that member states must require employers to set up an objective, reliable and accessible system for measuring each worker's daily working time. The ruling left the form of that system to each country, which may take company size into account.

Countries have acted at different speeds. Germany's Federal Labour Court held in September 2022 that employers must record the start and end of daily working time, and that paper records can be enough. The labour ministry says the government plans an electronic recording duty, while the Working Hours Act still required records only of hours beyond the daily limit in November 2026. Spain's Workers' Statute has required a daily record with exact start and end times since 2019, kept for four years. A draft decree that would make that record digital had not been published in Spain's official gazette by November 2026.

UK rules ask for records that show compliance with the limits on weekly hours and night work, kept for two years. Since January 2024 an employer need not record each worker's daily hours if it can show compliance another way, and since April 2026 holiday records must be kept for six years.

In the United States, the Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to record hours worked each workday and each workweek for non-exempt employees. Payroll records must be kept for three years and time cards for two years. Federal rules accept rounding to the nearest 5 minutes, tenth or quarter of an hour, as long as it does not underpay people over time. California's Supreme Court ruled in Donohue v. AMN Services in 2021 that employers cannot round time punches for meal periods.

Where timesheet approval starts

Approval is the feature that moves most teams onto a higher plan. Buddy Punch includes time card approval on every plan, where approving locks a card and rejecting sends it back to the employee. QuickBooks Time includes approval on both of its time tracking plans, and Everhour includes it on Team, its only paid plan.

The other eight keep approval for a higher tier. Clockify adds it on Standard at $5.49 per seat a month, one step above Basic, and Time Doctor adds approval of manual entries on Standard at $11.67. Hubstaff adds it on Team at $10, TimeCamp on Ultimate at $9.99 and Harvest on Enterprise at $14. Toggl and Timely add it on Premium at $16, and Kimai Cloud adds monthly approval on Professional at €3.99. All of these prices assume annual billing.

The step up costs a 15-person team $270 a year on Clockify, $900 on Harvest and $1,260 on Toggl. The approval step itself differs from product to product. Harvest cannot reject a timesheet, so a manager messages the person to fix and resubmit it. Time Doctor approves manual time entries rather than whole timesheets, Timely uses custom time entry states such as Submitted for approval and Approved, and Kimai approves and locks whole months.

Base fees, seat minimums and usage charges

Two products charge a monthly base fee on top of the per-user price. QuickBooks Time costs $20 a month plus $10 per user on Time Premium, so an admin and 15 people cost $170 a month once a three-month discount on the base fee ends. It also needs a QuickBooks Online subscription, priced separately. Buddy Punch adds $19 a month to every plan, which puts 15 people on Starter at $93.85 a month on annual billing.

Seat minimums raise the floor for small teams. Hubstaff counts at least 2 seats on its main plans, and Everhour counts at least 5 on Team, so its smallest annual plan costs $510 a year even for a team of two.

Harvest's Flex billing is the hardest to budget. Seats are charged up front, and fees for active projects, clients, tasks and invoicing above a free allowance start at the second paid renewal. Harvest's own help center gives the example of a bill rising from $44 to $404 once usage is added, and its fixed-fee alternative is not priced on the pricing page. The BBC reported in August 2026 that a UK consultancy's monthly Harvest bill went from $130 to $2,110 under the new model, and Harvest said customers on old legacy plans faced the largest increases.

Add-ons change the price of some plans more than the plan itself. Time Doctor charges $200 per account a month for single sign-on on Basic and Standard, and Hubstaff charges $3.33 per seat a month for GPS on Team. TimeCamp estimates that its AI time tracker adds about $6 per user a month in usage. Prices also move with the buyer's location, since TimeCamp shows lower prices in some countries and Kimai lists its cloud prices only in euros, before tax.

Monitoring features and the rules around them

Hubstaff's Starter plan includes activity levels, a limited number of screenshots and app and URL tracking, and screenshots and app tracking can be turned off. Time Doctor records keyboard and mouse activity levels without the keys pressed and takes screenshots for the users an admin picks. Clockify keeps screenshots and app tracking on Pro as optional features, TimeCamp puts screenshots on Ultimate, and Everhour offers blurred screenshots for selected members on Team. Toggl states that it takes no screenshots and records no keystrokes, browsing history or location. Timely's tracker records apps and sites for each person's own use, and Timely says employers cannot see that record.

European regulators treat this kind of monitoring as high risk. The UK Information Commissioner's guidance on monitoring workers says employers must tell workers about monitoring except in very exceptional cases. It also requires a data protection impact assessment before high-risk monitoring such as keystroke tracking, and the ICO says the guidance is under review after the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. In December 2024 France's CNIL fined a property company €40,000 over software that flagged periods without keyboard activity and took regular screenshots of staff screens, finding no legal basis and no impact assessment.

The largest French case involved warehouse scanners rather than desktop software. The CNIL fined Amazon France Logistique €32 million in December 2023 over indicators that measured idle time between scans. In December 2025 the Conseil d'État cut the fine to €15 million, holding that the real-time indicators had a lawful basis but that keeping every indicator for 31 days breached the data minimisation rule.

GPS and kiosks for staff away from a desk

Location features differ in when they record. QuickBooks Time records GPS only while someone is on the clock, and Intuit says admins cannot see location data when workers are off it. Buddy Punch records location at the moment of each punch, set per employee to off, optional or required, and charges $2 per user a month for real-time tracking below Advanced. TimeCamp records location only while the mobile timer runs, Clockify has GPS on Pro, and Hubstaff sells it as a $3.33 add-on on Team. Geofencing on QuickBooks Time is limited to Time Elite.

Shared kiosks let staff clock in on one tablet at a site. QuickBooks Time supports clocking in on a tablet at a job site, Buddy Punch adds kiosk punching on Pro, and Kimai Cloud includes a kiosk mode on Professional with annual billing. Clockify charges people who only use its kiosk a limited seat from $0.79 a month, and TimeCamp keeps its kiosk for Enterprise.

Getting hours into payroll and invoices

Buddy Punch lists integrations with 21 payroll providers, including ADP, Gusto, Paychex Flex and Paylocity. QuickBooks Time connects to QuickBooks payroll, ADP RUN and Gusto. Hubstaff's payroll feature on Team pays people through Wise, PayPal, Payoneer or Bitwage, and Time Doctor's payroll feature exports CSV files for PayPal, Wise, Gusto, Payoneer and ADP. Everhour sends approved time to Deel, and Harvest syncs approved timesheets to Gusto for US businesses.

Harvest creates invoices on every plan, Clockify from Standard and TimeCamp from Starter. Everhour copies invoices as drafts into QuickBooks Online, Xero or FreshBooks, Timely sends drafts to QuickBooks Online, and Kimai has built-in invoice templates.

Two limits are easy to miss. Clockify's QuickBooks Online integration does not work with QuickBooks accounts that have payroll turned on, and payroll sync needs a separate add-on at $6.99 a month. Toggl 2.0, the version sold to new customers, lists no built-in invoicing, and its QuickBooks and Xero integrations are marked as legacy Toggl Track tools.

Security claims and where data is kept

Four vendors state that they hold a SOC 2 Type II report: Toggl, Clockify, Hubstaff and Time Doctor. Five state ISO 27001 certification: Toggl, Clockify, TimeCamp, Time Doctor and Timely. Harvest and Everhour rely on their hosting provider's SOC 2 audit instead of a report of their own, Timely says it is not SOC 2 certified, and Buddy Punch's security page names no certification.

Data location is a choice on a few products. Clockify lets Pro and Enterprise workspaces store data in the USA, the EU, the UK or Australia, and Toggl offers EU hosting for Toggl 2.0. Timely keeps all data in EU-based data centres and Kimai Cloud runs in Germany, while Harvest stores all data in the United States. Kimai can also run on a company's own server for free, and TimeCamp offers self-hosting on Enterprise.

Leaving a product later

Record-keeping rules make the export format matter. Harvest exports all time data as one CSV file and invoices as a zip of PDFs, and Everhour exports every time log as a JSON archive. Clockify and TimeCamp limit the free plan to PDF exports, while their paid plans add CSV and Excel. Kimai exports to PDF, XLSX, CSV or HTML.

Some plans also limit how much history stays in the account. Time Doctor keeps tracking history for 3 months on Basic, 6 months on Standard and 2 years on Premium, so a US team on a lower plan has to export its records to meet the two-year rule for time cards. Buddy Punch sells six-year record retention as an add-on at $24 per user a year, and its terms let it delete customer data 30 days after an account ends.

What to test during a trial

• Submit a week as a test employee, have a manager send it back, then try to edit the approved version as the employee.
• Export one pay period into your payroll system and compare total, overtime and break hours with the timesheet report.
• Clock in on a phone with battery saving turned on, then check the recorded time and location.
• Switch on every monitoring setting you plan to use, sign in as an employee to see what they see, and draft the notice staff will get.
• Export a full month to CSV and check that project, rate and approval status columns came across.