Time tracking covers two jobs that buyers confuse: recording hours against clients and projects so they can be billed, and recording attendance so hours worked are a legal record.
This guide separates the two, then ranks the products on setup effort, what the per-user price becomes with the reporting you need, and how the raw hours export.
AuthorHannah ReiterSenior Analyst, Business Applications
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In short
What time tracking software does
Time tracking software records hours against a client, project or shift, approves them, and turns the result into an invoice line, a payroll input or a working-time record.
Five things, in this order. Feature counts are not among them: they are the least useful
comparison in software, because every vendor ticks every box.
01
Setup effort in time tracking software
What the first ninety days of a time tracking software rollout cost in hours, not in licence fees. A product that needs a partner engagement before it does anything is a different purchase from one a team configures in an afternoon.
02
What time tracking software really costs
What the bill becomes once the modules a normal buyer of time tracking software needs are added, and whether you can read that number without a sales conversation.
03
Getting your data out of time tracking software
How your own data comes back out, in what format, and whether that export is included in the time tracking software contract or billed as a project.
04
Independence from the vendor
Whether you can buy time tracking software, run it and leave it on your own terms. This test decides most of the order on this page, and it is why the largest vendors in time tracking software often sit below the smaller ones.
05
Who the product is built for
The size and shape of company each time tracking software product was actually built for. Most regret in software comes from buying for a company you are not yet.
The fourth test decides most of the order on this page, and it is the reason the largest
time tracking software vendors sit below the smaller ones. A product with a published price, an export
that works and no mandatory implementation partner is a product you can leave.
A platform suite that arrives with a quote, a partner and a two-year commitment may well be
the better software and is still the harder decision to reverse. We rank time tracking software for the
buyer who has to live with that decision without a procurement department, which is a stated
bias rather than a hidden one.
We do not publish a score out of ten. A number like 8.4 is a judgement dressed as a
measurement, and nobody can check it.
What you can check is on this page: what each time tracking tool costs, where the vendor is
established, whether the price is published, and what we think it is bad at. Our full method
is on the how we work page.
Large hourly workforces with accruals, unions and complex pay rules
Companies with under a few hundred hourly staff
Country is where the vendor is headquartered or contracts from, which is a
different question from where your data is hosted. Where the two tell different stories, the
entry says so.
One-click timers that people keep using after week three
Ranked #1 of 12 in Best Time Tracking Software in 2026.
Free tierPublished pricingEurope
Toggl Track wins on the only metric that matters for billable time: how little friction there is between deciding to track and tracking. Timers start from a keyboard shortcut, a browser button or a phone, and idle detection catches the ones left running.
Rates, projects and client reports are all there. It is firmly a timesheet product, so if you need clock-in terminals, statutory break records or overtime accounts, you are looking at the wrong half of this category.
What stands out
Free tier
Published pricing
Estonian vendor
Where it costs you
No attendance, break or overtime rules
Payroll requires an export rather than an integration
Right for
Agencies and consultancies billing client hours from a timer
Wrong for
Shift workplaces needing a legal attendance record
EstoniaFree tier; paid per user per month, published
Timesheets, billing rates and automatic app tracking together
Ranked #2 of 12 in Best Time Tracking Software in 2026.
Free tierPublished pricingEurope
TimeCamp offers most of what Toggl Track does for less money, plus automatic capture of which applications and websites were used, which recovers hours people forget to log. For a small agency watching costs that combination is hard to beat on price.
The interface is denser and the desktop client occasionally needs restarting. In Germany, Austria or the Netherlands, switching on automatic capture is a conversation with the works council first, not an admin setting.
What stands out
Published pricing
Billing rates
Polish vendor
Where it costs you
Desktop app is less reliable than the leaders
Automatic tracking raises works council questions
Right for
Cost-conscious teams wanting billable hours and automatic application capture together
Wrong for
Companies where employee monitoring is politically or legally sensitive
PolandFree tier; paid per user per month, published
Unlimited free users, with the paid features clearly fenced
Ranked #3 of 12 in Best Time Tracking Software in 2026.
Free tierPublished pricingNorth America
Clockify's free tier covers unlimited users, which changes the arithmetic for a company of eighty people where the hours are useful but nobody will sign off a per-seat licence. Kiosk mode lets a shared tablet act as a clock, a bridge the other timesheet tools do not build.
The paid tiers hold the features finance actually wants: approvals, locked timesheets, invoicing. The product is Serbian-built under an American parent, so the jurisdiction is American.
What stands out
Free for teams
Kiosk mode
US parent
Where it costs you
Approvals and invoicing are paid features
Data sits under a United States parent company
Right for
Larger teams that need free time tracking for everyone involved
Wrong for
Buyers who need data held by a European entity
United StatesFree for unlimited users; paid per user per month, published
German timesheet tool built around working-time law and break rules
Ranked #4 of 12 in Best Time Tracking Software in 2026.
Published pricingEurope
Clockodo is the rare product that treats German working-time recording as a core requirement rather than a compliance afterthought, covering break rules, overtime accounts and absence beside ordinary project time, hosted in Germany.
For a Mittelstand agency or engineering office that is the whole shopping list in one subscription. It is plain software with a modest feature curve, the English side is weaker, and outside the German-speaking market most of its advantage disappears.
What stands out
Working-time rules
German vendor
Published pricing
Where it costs you
Little value outside German-speaking markets
English documentation trails the German
Right for
German companies needing project hours and legal time records together
Wrong for
International teams working in English across several countries
Records your activity first, then turns it into timesheets
Ranked #5 of 12 in Best Time Tracking Software in 2026.
Published pricingEurope
Timely inverts the usual design: the machine records a private timeline of what you did, visible only to you, and you turn that into timesheet entries afterwards.
Nobody has to remember to press start, and no manager gets a monitoring feed, which keeps it defensible in European workplaces. The categorisation is helpful rather than finished, so review time remains. The price per user is at the top of this list and there is no attendance side at all.
What stands out
Automatic capture
Norwegian vendor
Private by default
Where it costs you
Expensive per user for the category
Automatic categorisation still needs human correction
Right for
Professionals who forget to start timers but must bill accurately
Wrong for
Teams needing attendance records, or working to tight budgets
Kimai is the independence answer in this category: open source, self-hostable, no per-user licence, and a database you can query without asking anyone's permission. For agencies with technical staff and a data-residency requirement, that combination beats any feature list.
The cost is real work. Updates, backups and PHP hosting are yours, the apps are weaker, and community support means a forum. The hosted plan buys convenience but gives back some of the point.
What stands out
Open source
Self-hostable
No vendor lock-in
Where it costs you
You run the hosting, updates and backups
Mobile experience is behind the commercial products
Right for
Technical teams that want the hours on their own server
Wrong for
Companies without anyone to maintain a server
GermanyFree self-hosted; hosted plan per user per month, published
Project time and client billing without the extra modules
Ranked #7 of 12 in Best Time Tracking Software in 2026.
Free tierPublished pricingEurope
My Hours does project time, rates per task and client-ready reports for less than most of this page charges, and the reports are legible enough to attach to an invoice without editing. For a consultancy of five to twenty people that is the requirement in full.
The limits are integrations and scale: a short connector list, no attendance or scheduling, and a small company behind it, which is worth checking before you make it the system of record.
What stands out
Client billing
Simple setup
Slovenian vendor
Where it costs you
Short integration list
Small vendor with limited resources
Right for
Small consultancies billing clients by project and task rate
Wrong for
Companies needing scheduling, attendance or deep integrations
SloveniaFree tier; paid per user per month, published
Time tracking app with an optional physical tracking cube
Ranked #8 of 12 in Best Time Tracking Software in 2026.
Published pricingEurope
Timeular attacks the habit problem physically: assign an activity to each face of a desk cube, flip it, and the timer follows without a screen. People who have abandoned three timesheet tools tend to stay with this one.
The software around it is competent for billing and reporting on yourself or a handful of colleagues. It is not built for an operations manager: approvals, attendance rules and administration are all thinner than Toggl Track, and hardware costs scale per person.
What stands out
Physical tracker
Austrian vendor
Published pricing
Where it costs you
Team administration and reporting are limited
The tracker is a separate purchase for every user
Right for
Individuals and small teams who forget to start a timer
Wrong for
Companies needing approvals, attendance or deep reporting
AustriaPer user per month, published; hardware tracker sold separately
Free attendance clock with kiosk mode and face recognition
Ranked #9 of 12 in Best Time Tracking Software in 2026.
Free tierPublished pricingEurope
Jibble is the cheapest honest route to a clock-in and clock-out record: a shared tablet in kiosk mode, a phone app with location, face recognition against buddy punching, and a free tier that covers most of it.
For a workshop or a cleaning firm that has never recorded attendance, it is a sensible first system. Face data makes it special-category processing in the EU, so document the assessment first, and expect to export to payroll rather than integrate.
What stands out
Free attendance
Kiosk mode
Face recognition
Where it costs you
Biometric clock-in needs a data protection assessment in the EU
Payroll and scheduling features are shallow
Right for
Small employers needing an attendance record without a licence budget
Wrong for
Project teams billing tracked hours to their clients
United KingdomFree core product; paid per user per month, published
GPS time clock built for construction and field crews
Ranked #10 of 12 in Best Time Tracking Software in 2026.
Published pricingNorth America
ClockShark sits between the two halves of this category: it clocks people in where they actually stand, with GPS and offline tolerance, and it allocates those hours to a job and a cost code so the project margin is real.
For contractors that combination is rare. The limits are geographic and commercial: the payroll integrations and overtime logic assume American practice, and the base fee on top of per-user pricing punishes teams of three.
What stands out
GPS clock-in
Job costing
Offline capable
Where it costs you
Payroll and tax assumptions are American
A base fee makes very small crews expensive per head
Right for
Construction and field crews costing hours to jobs on site
Wrong for
Office teams, or employers needing European payroll integration
United StatesPer user per month plus a base fee, published
Tracking with screenshots and activity scores for remote teams
Ranked #11 of 12 in Best Time Tracking Software in 2026.
Published pricingNorth America
Hubstaff is built for paying people by the hour at a distance: screenshots, activity percentages, optional location, and an invoice at the end of it. Where the contractor has knowingly agreed to that, it removes an argument.
Applied to salaried staff it does the opposite, and in the EU the legal basis for continuous screenshot monitoring is narrow enough that most employers should not try. Note the minimum seat count when comparing the entry price.
What stands out
Screenshots
Activity levels
GPS option
Where it costs you
Monitoring features corrode trust in salaried teams
Minimum seat count raises the effective price
Right for
Companies paying hourly contractors who agreed to be monitored
Wrong for
Salaried European employees under works council agreements
United StatesPer seat per month, published, with a minimum seat count
Workforce management where time feeds an HR and payroll suite
Ranked #12 of 12 in Best Time Tracking Software in 2026.
Pricing on requestNorth America
UKG Ready is workforce management rather than time tracking: scheduling, attendance, accruals, absence and payroll inside one suite, with a rules engine that copes with union agreements and layered overtime policies.
For a hospital group or a manufacturer with a thousand hourly staff, that is the right class of product. For anyone smaller it is a quoted price, a long implementation, an American vendor holding employment data, and modules that stay switched off.
What stands out
Full workforce suite
Accrual rules
Implementation project
Where it costs you
Quoted pricing with a months-long implementation
Far more product than a mid-sized employer will configure
Right for
Large hourly workforces with accruals, unions and complex pay rules
Time tracking software records hours against a client, project or shift, approves them, and turns the result into an invoice line, a payroll input or a working-time record. The differences that matter are rarely in the feature list, so this is
the order we would work through them.
01
Decide whether you need a published price
11 of the 12 tools here publish what they cost; the other 1 quote per organisation, which means a sales conversation before you can compare anything. If you are buying without a procurement function, start with the ones that publish: Toggl Track, TimeCamp, Clockify, Clockodo, Timely, Kimai, My Hours, Timeular, Jibble, ClockShark, Hubstaff.
02
Work out what the first ninety days cost in time
Licence cost is the number in the contract; setup effort is the number that surprises people. Ask every shortlisted vendor who does the configuration, how long it took the last customer of your size, and what happens if that person leaves halfway.
03
Check the exit before the entry
Ask for an export of your own data in a format you can open, and ask whether it is included or billed as a project. A vendor that hesitates here is telling you what renewal negotiations will feel like in three years.
04
Match the tool to the size you are, not the size you plan to be
Most regret in this category comes from buying for a headcount that never arrived. The entry-level products here are not worse; they are aimed at a different company.
05
Decide how much the jurisdiction matters
These 12 vendors are established in 8 countries across 2 regions (Europe 8, North America 4). Where a vendor is established decides which government can compel access to what it holds, which is a different question from where the servers are. For most buyers that is a factor, not a veto.
06
Consider whether you want the source
1 of these are open source, which means you can host them yourself and read what they do with your data. That control is real, and so is the maintenance it hands you.
Billable hours and attendance are two different products
The single most expensive mistake in this category is buying across the line. A timesheet tool answers what the hour was spent on so it can be billed: Toggl Track, My Hours and Kimai are built this way and have no concept of a shift.
An attendance system answers whether someone was at work, when they took a break and what the overtime came to, which is Jibble, ClockShark and UKG Ready. The words on the pricing pages are nearly identical. The products are not, and a company that buys a timer for a warehouse ends up with hours nobody can defend and a payroll run done by hand.
Say out loud whether the output is an invoice line or a payroll line.
If staff work shifts with breaks, start on the attendance side of the list.
Check whether the tool can lock an approved period. Billing tools often cannot.
Recording working time is a legal duty, not a management preference
European employers have to record actual working time, not just contracted hours, following the 2019 Court of Justice ruling and the German federal labour court decision that followed it. That raises the bar for what counts as a record: clock-in and clock-out that the employee cannot silently rewrite, break and rest-period tracking, and retention for the statutory period.
Clockodo is built around those rules, and Jibble at least records a clock-in that the employee cannot quietly rewrite afterwards. A billable-hours timer keeps none of that, so if you also need the legal record, you are buying either a product that does both or two products.
Ask whether edits to a submitted entry leave an audit trail with a timestamp.
Confirm breaks and rest periods are recorded, not assumed from a template.
Check the retention period and whether records survive an employee leaving.
Monitoring changes the legal question and the social one
Screenshots, activity percentages and automatic application capture sit on a spectrum, and where you land decides whether you need a works council agreement. Hubstaff sits at the intrusive end and is honest about it. TimeCamp captures applications and sites by default.
Timely takes the opposite route, recording a timeline only the employee sees until they choose what to submit. In Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, a works council has a say before monitoring is switched on, and in most of Europe continuous screenshot capture of salaried staff is hard to justify. Decide the surveillance question before the feature comparison.
Involve the works council before the trial, not after the purchase order.
Ask what the employee sees of their own data, and what the manager sees.
Check whether monitoring can be switched off per team, not only per account.
The hours are payroll and invoice evidence, so test the export
Time data ends up supporting two things somebody may dispute: an invoice to a client and a wage payment to an employee. Both can be argued about years later, which makes the export more important than any dashboard. Ask for raw entries with user, project, start, stop, edits and approver, as CSV rather than a formatted report.
Kimai passes trivially because you hold the database. The suites are harder: getting history out of UKG Ready at the end of a contract is a service request. Also check that payroll integration sends data rather than a file someone retypes each month.
Export a full month of raw entries during the trial and open them in a spreadsheet.
Confirm the export includes edit history and who approved each period.
Ask whether payroll integration is a real connection or a manual file upload.
What goes wrong most often when buying time tracking software
Buying a billable-hours timer to satisfy a working-time recording duty. The hours are there, the audit trail, break records and locked periods are not.
Choosing on feature lists when adoption decides everything. If starting a timer takes four clicks, the timesheets will be filled in on Friday from memory.
Switching on monitoring because it came with the plan. In several European countries that needs an agreement before anyone is tracked.
Assuming payroll integration means automatic. In many products it is a formatted file that someone still uploads by hand every month.
07
Frequently asked questions
11 answers
What is the best time tracking in 2026?
Toggl Track leads our ranking of 12. The starting and stopping of a timer is faster here than anywhere else on this page, on desktop, browser and phone, which is the only feature that decides whether timesheets get filled in.
Billing rates and reporting are solid. It does not do attendance: no clock-in terminal, no break rules, no overtime calculation, and payroll needs an export.
How did you rank these time tracking tools?
On what separates products after the demo: how much setup the first ninety days take, what the price becomes once the modules a normal buyer needs are added, how your data comes back out, whether you can buy and leave it without a partner engagement, and who the product is genuinely for.
That fourth test is why the large platform suites usually sit lower here than their market share would suggest. Not on feature counts, and not on a score we invented.
Which time tracking tools publish their pricing?
11 of the 12, with the pricing model each one publishes:
Toggl Track: Free tier; paid per user per month, published.
TimeCamp: Free tier; paid per user per month, published.
Clockify: Free for unlimited users; paid per user per month, published.
Clockodo: Per user per month, published.
Timely: Per user per month, published.
Kimai: Free self-hosted; hosted plan per user per month, published.
My Hours: Free tier; paid per user per month, published.
Timeular: Per user per month, published; hardware tracker sold separately.
Jibble: Free core product; paid per user per month, published.
ClockShark: Per user per month plus a base fee, published.
Hubstaff: Per seat per month, published, with a minimum seat count.
The other 1 quote per organisation.
Is there a free time tracking tool?
Toggl Track, TimeCamp, Clockify, Kimai, My Hours, Jibble offer a free tier or a free self-hosted edition. Read what the free tier excludes before you plan around it.
Which time tracking tools are open source?
Kimai. Open source means you can read what the product does with your data and run it yourself. It does not mean the hosted edition is free.
Which time tracking tools can you host yourself?
Kimai. The other 11 are sold as a hosted service only, which means the question of where your data sits is answered by the vendor, not by you.
Where are these time tracking vendors established?
In 8 countries across 2 regions: Europe 8, North America 4.
Toggl Track is established in Estonia.
TimeCamp is established in Poland.
Clockify is established in the United States.
Clockodo is established in Germany.
Timely is established in Norway.
Kimai is established in Germany.
My Hours is established in Slovenia.
Timeular is established in Austria.
Jibble is established in the United Kingdom.
ClockShark is established in the United States.
Hubstaff is established in the United States.
UKG Ready is established in the United States.
Establishment decides whose courts and whose disclosure laws apply, which is a separate question from where the data is hosted.
What should you use instead of Toggl Track?
TimeCamp and Clockify are the next two on this page.
TimeCamp is for Cost-conscious teams wanting billable hours and automatic application capture together; Clockify is for larger teams that need free time tracking for everyone involved. All 12 are ranked here with what each one is bad at.
Who should not buy Toggl Track?
Shift workplaces needing a legal attendance record. No attendance, break or overtime rules.
Do you get paid for these rankings?
Vendors can pay for visibility, which affects where and how prominently a product appears. It does not change a word of what the entry says about that product, including the criticism, and it cannot buy inclusion for something that does not belong in the category.
We take no commission when you click through to a vendor and we do not know whether you bought anything. The full arrangement is on our disclosure page.
How often is this time tracking guide updated?
Whenever the facts move: a price change, an acquisition, a product that stops being maintained. The published and updated dates at the top of the page are real, and a review means someone went back to the vendor documentation rather than bumping a date.
These 12 products are the ones we judged worth ranking in time tracking. If yours belongs here and is missing, tell us what it does and who it is for, and we will look at it. Inclusion is an editorial call and it is not for sale — but nobody gets considered for a list they were never put in front of.
People land on this page with a shortlist to make, not a browsing habit to feed. That is a narrower audience than a banner reaches and a far more decided one.
Written by us, about you
We describe the product in our own words, say who it suits and say who it does not. A vendor never writes the entry and never sees it before it goes up.
A correction costs nothing
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Placement is separate, and disclosed
Where a product sits in the ranking can be paid for, and the notice above the list says so on every page. What the entry says about the product is not for sale at any price.
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