Why the Toggl free plan will not give you a CSV

Which Toggl Track export do you actually need?

Toggl has three separate things that all get called exporting, and they answer different questions. A report export gives you the hours you filtered for. A workspace Data Export gives an admin everything the account holds. A profile export gives one person their own record. Picking the wrong one wastes the most time when you are trying to leave, because the biggest file is the one you can do the least with.

If you are moving to another tool, the detailed report on a paid plan is almost always the file you want, and the workspace JSON almost never is.

How do you export a Toggl Track report?

Open Reports, choose Detailed, set the date range and any filters you want, then use the export control to download the file. Toggl's own guidance is to use the detailed report when you want time entries and to take it as CSV, because that is the shape the rest of its tooling expects.

Two things decide what you actually get. The first is your plan. On the free plan the only format offered is PDF. CSV and Excel appear once the workspace is on Starter or above. The second is your role: you can only export the time entries you have access to, so a regular member exports their own entries and the projects they manage, while an admin can export everything in the workspace.

The PDF is a genuine report rather than a stub, and it takes a portrait or landscape layout, with landscape worth choosing when your report has enough columns to split across pages. What it is not is data. If your next step is a spreadsheet formula, a client breakdown someone can filter, or an import into another tool, a PDF cannot do any of it. That is the practical meaning of the plan gate, and it is worth knowing before you spend an afternoon on the wrong file.

Summary reports drop your timestamps

A summary export gives you totals grouped by project, client or user, and Toggl notes that the summary export does not contain timestamps. If you need to know when work happened rather than only how much of it there was, take the detailed report instead. This catches people who export a summary for an audit or a client query and then find the file cannot answer the follow-up question.

What is in the full workspace Data Export?

A workspace admin can open Settings and use the Data Export page to compile everything the workspace holds. Invoices come out as PDF and all other data comes out as JSON. It is the most complete thing Toggl will give you, and it comes with four constraints worth planning around.

• Admins only: Members cannot run it, so on a shared workspace this needs whoever owns the account.
• One at a time: Only one compilation can proceed per workspace, so a second request waits for the first.
• The link expires in 72 hours: Download it properly rather than leaving the email for next week.
• It cannot be re-uploaded: Toggl documents that JSON exports cannot be re-uploaded to new workspaces.

That last point is the one that surprises people, and it is worth being precise about what it means. The richest file Toggl produces is one that Toggl itself will not read back. It is a good archive: keep it if you want a record of an account you are closing, or if you need something defensible for an audit. It is not a migration file, and no destination tool advertises reading it either.

Individual users have a smaller equivalent. Any user can export their own profile data from the web app, and can choose whether to include their Timeline. That is a per-person record rather than a per-project one, so it answers "what did I do" rather than "what did this client cost", but it is available regardless of plan or role.

What does a Toggl Track export leave out?

A report export is a list of time entries, and that shape decides what it can and cannot carry. Each row holds your project and client as text sitting next to the hours. What it does not hold is the project and client as records in their own right, with their billable rates, their colour, their archived state, and the people assigned to them. Rebuild your workspace from a CSV and you rebuild the hours accurately and everything around them by hand.

This is not unique to Toggl. Every time tracker in this category exports a flat report, which is why moving between two of them is more work than it sounds. It is the reason a direct connection between two tools carries more than a file can.

How do you get data back into Toggl Track?

Toggl accepts a CSV import, and its own advice on the format is refreshingly circular: the easiest way to see how your file should look is to export a detailed report as CSV and match it. The columns available are User, Email, Client, Client External Reference, Project, Project External Reference, Task, Description, Billable, Start date, Start time, Duration and Tags, and the order they appear in does not matter.

Some columns work alone and some need company. Email, Client, Project and Tags can each stand on their own, which is what makes it possible to import a project list without any hours attached. A Description, by contrast, needs Email, Start date, Start time and Duration alongside it, because a description with no entry to attach to is not a time entry.

Three limits decide whether this works for you:

• 1 MB maximum file size: That is a few thousand rows of time entries. A year of history for a small team clears it comfortably, so plan on splitting the file by month or by project.
• Workspace admins only: A member cannot import their own history.
• Active users only: Data can only be imported for active users, so anyone who has left the workspace needs reactivating first or their hours have nowhere to land.

Moving projects between two Toggl workspaces

Toggl's documented method for moving projects from one of its own workspaces to another is worth reading twice. You export a detailed report as CSV, delete every column except Project and Client, then import the result on the other side. It works, and it tells you something useful about the file: the CSV is a report first and a data format second, so even Toggl treats it as raw material to be edited rather than something that moves cleanly.

How do you move Toggl Track data to another time tracker?

Once you have a CSV, the question is which destination will read it. The honest answer is that none of them read Toggl's file as it comes out, because every tool defines its own column names and its own required fields. What differs is how much editing each one needs, and whether it will take your timestamps at all.

Two things stand out from that table. Harvest losing your start and end times is the one people discover late, because the import appears to succeed and the hours are correct, and it is only when someone asks what time a job was done that the loss shows up. And Timely importing from Toggl directly, while stopping at projects and clients, is a good illustration of how much of a migration is the structure rather than the hours.

If you are weighing one of those two, Clockify gates its CSV the same way, and Timely can pull your projects across without a file.

How do you move Toggl Track projects into Timen?

You do not need an export file. Timen connects to Toggl with your API token, reads the workspace directly, and creates the matching records on the Timen side. That sidesteps the plan gate, since it does not depend on your ability to produce a CSV, and it carries the structure rather than a flat list of rows.

In Timen, open Settings, go to the Import tab and choose Toggl Track. You will be asked for your API token, which is on your Profile settings page in Toggl. Pick the workspace, choose what to bring across, and review before starting.

Two honest limits. Invoices do not come across, so if you have billing history in Toggl you want to keep, export it separately as PDF from the Data Export page before you close the account. And Toggl rate-limits its API heavily on free plans, which Toggl documents on its own API limits page. A large import from a free workspace may pause and resume automatically over several hours. It finishes on its own, but it is not instant, and it is worth starting it before you need it rather than on the morning you are switching.

If you are still deciding rather than migrating, the alternatives worth a look covers the shortlist, and a direct feature comparison covers where the two tools differ.

Common questions about exporting Toggl Track data

Can you export Toggl Track data on the free plan?

Only as PDF. Toggl's help centre states that CSV and Excel exports are a paid plan feature, and its pricing page lists XLS/CSV export under Starter. A free workspace can read its reports and print them, but cannot produce a spreadsheet file.

How do you export all of your Toggl Track data at once?

A workspace admin can use the Data Export page in Settings, which compiles the whole workspace as JSON with invoices as PDF. The download link is valid for 72 hours and only one compilation can run per workspace at a time.

Can you import a Toggl JSON export back into Toggl?

No. Toggl documents that JSON exports cannot be re-uploaded to new workspaces. The workspace export is an archive rather than a migration file. Moving data between Toggl workspaces uses a Detailed Report CSV instead.

What is the size limit on a Toggl Track CSV import?

1 MB. Imports are also restricted to workspace admins and only accept data for active users. A long history usually has to be split into several files.

Getting your hours out of Toggl, in order

If you are on a paid plan and staying, the detailed report as CSV is all you need, and it will do everything a spreadsheet asks of it. If you are on the free plan, decide early whether a PDF is genuinely enough, because the answer is usually no the moment anyone wants to filter or total the numbers themselves.

If you are leaving, take the workspace JSON as an archive, take a detailed CSV as the working file, and check what your destination will actually accept before you start editing columns. And if the destination can read your account directly, that route carries the projects, clients, tags and members that a flat file leaves you to rebuild by hand.