Is Toggl Track free?
Yes, and the free plan is more generous than most. Toggl Track gives you unlimited time entries, unlimited projects, and unlimited clients at no cost, with no credit card and no expiry, for a team of up to 5 people. The autotracker, idle detection, calendar view, and CSV and PDF export are all included. What is not included is anything to do with money. Billable rates, invoicing, timesheet approvals, saved and scheduled reports, and profitability analysis all sit behind a paid plan. So the honest answer is that Toggl Track is free for tracking and paid for billing, and which side of that line you need decides whether the free plan works for you.
Is Toggl Track free forever, or just free to start?
Free forever. The Toggl Track free plan is a permanent tier, not a countdown. You sign up without a card, you are not asked for one later, and nothing switches off after 30 days. If you never pay, you keep tracking time indefinitely.
The confusion usually comes from the trial that sits next to it. New workspaces get a 30-day trial of the paid features, also without a card. For a month you have rates, approvals, and saved reports, and then they quietly disappear and you drop to the free plan. Nothing breaks and no data is lost, but people often read that drop as the free trial ending rather than as landing on the real free tier. If your first month felt fuller than your second, that is why.
One small thing worth knowing before you count seats: Toggl's own pricing page does not tell you how many people the free plan covers. It says free for a limited number of users and leaves it there. The number is 5.
What does the Toggl Track free plan actually include?
More than most free tiers, and the generous parts are the ones you use every day. There is no cap on time entries, projects, or clients, which is where a lot of free plans quietly squeeze you. You can run the timer from the web app, desktop, mobile, or a browser extension, and it syncs across all of them.
The free plan also keeps several features that competitors treat as premium. The autotracker suggests entries based on the apps and sites you use. Idle detection catches the timer you left running through lunch. There is a Pomodoro timer, a calendar view, and integrations with more than 100 other tools. You can export to CSV and PDF, so your data is not held hostage.
For a solo freelancer or a small team that wants to know where the hours went, this is a complete product. It is not a crippled demo of a real one.
What is missing from the free plan?
Almost everything the free plan withholds is connected to money or oversight. You can record that four hours happened on a client project, but you cannot attach a rate to those hours, mark them billable at a value, approve them, or turn them into an invoice.
| Feature | Free plan | Needs a paid plan |
|---|---|---|
| Team size | Up to 5 users | 6 people and above |
| Time entries, projects, clients | Unlimited | Nothing - this stays free |
| Autotracker and idle detection | Included | Nothing - this stays free |
| Export | CSV and PDF | Nothing - this stays free |
| Billable rates | Not available | Starter and above |
| Invoicing | Not available | Starter and above |
| Timesheet approvals | Not available | Starter and above |
| Saved and scheduled reports | Not available | Starter and above |
| Project templates and time estimates | Not available | Starter and above |
| Profitability and fixed-fee projects | Not available | Premium |
| Locked entries and audit logs | Not available | Premium |
| SSO, Jira and Salesforce | Not available | Premium and Enterprise |
Read that table as one sentence: free covers the tracking, paid covers the billing. If your reason for tracking time is to invoice someone at the end of it, you are looking at a paid plan from day one.
How does the 5 user limit work in practice?
It counts everyone in the workspace, not just the people running timers. Admins, managers, and anyone you invited to look at reports all take a seat. Small teams routinely hit the cap earlier than expected because they added a founder who never tracks anything and a bookkeeper who only reads exports.
The jump is also not gradual. There is no six-user tier at a small premium - you move from free to 9 dollars per user per month, and you pay it for every seat, including the ones that were previously free. A five-person team adding one contractor goes from 0 to 54 dollars a month. That is a reasonable price for what Starter adds, but it is worth knowing it arrives all at once rather than creeping up.
If your team is hovering around five people and growing, it is worth deciding early whether you want to pay per seat for tracking. That single question is what sends most teams looking at simpler alternatives before they hit the wall rather than after.
Who is the Toggl Track free plan enough for?
The free plan is genuinely sufficient if you track time to understand it rather than to charge for it. Solo freelancers on fixed-fee work, small teams checking where their week went, people doing personal productivity tracking, and anyone who exports to a spreadsheet and handles billing elsewhere are all well served. You will not run into the limits.
It stops being enough at three specific moments. The first is the sixth hire. The second is the first time you need an invoice built from tracked hours rather than assembled by hand afterwards. The third is when someone needs to approve timesheets before they become billable, which usually shows up the first time a client disputes a line item.
Those three moments are worth naming because they are predictable. If none of them are on your horizon, the free plan is not a compromise. If two of them are six months away, you are choosing a paid plan now and may as well compare on that basis.
What does Toggl Track cost when you outgrow free?
Starter is 9 dollars per user per month and covers most of what free withholds - billable rates, invoicing, approvals, saved reports, project templates, and time estimates. For a team that just crossed five people and bills clients, Starter is the plan that matters.
Premium is advertised at 14 dollars per user per month, and this is the number to read carefully. That rate applies to the first year of an annual subscription, then renews at 18. On a team of eight, that is the difference between 1,344 and 1,728 a year, and it arrives without a new decision being made. Premium adds profitability analysis, fixed-fee projects, locked entries, audit logs, SSO, and the Jira and Salesforce integrations. Enterprise is custom priced.
None of that is unreasonable for what it does. It is worth budgeting against the renewal price rather than the headline one, because the gap is about 27 percent and it lands in year two.
How does it compare to other free time trackers?
Toggl Track is not unusual in capping free at five people. Clockify does the same, and it also moved billable rates and invoicing to paid tiers, so the two land in a similar place from different directions - Clockify's free plan now trades some of what it used to give away for a lower entry price on the paid tiers. Jibble goes the other way and keeps unlimited users free, but it is an attendance tool rather than a billing one, so it never turns hours into invoices at any price. If you want the head-to-head, Toggl and Clockify is the comparison most people are actually choosing between.
The pattern across all of them is the same. Free plans are happy to record time. What they hold back is the part where time becomes money, because that is the part businesses will pay for. That is a defensible way to build a pricing page, and it is also why so many small teams end up paying for a tracker before they expected to.
Timen takes the opposite approach and includes billable hours and invoicing in the free product, with no user cap and no tiers, which is a different trade rather than a strictly better one - it means fewer advanced features like profitability analysis or audit logs. If your reason for tracking time is to bill for it, that trade tends to favour you. If you need timesheet approvals and Jira integration, it does not.
FAQ
- Is Toggl Track free?
- Yes. Toggl Track has a free forever plan with no credit card required. It covers up to 5 users and includes unlimited time entries, projects, and clients, plus the autotracker, idle detection, calendar integration, and CSV and PDF export. Billable rates, invoicing, timesheet approvals, and saved reports are on paid plans.
- How many users does the Toggl Track free plan allow?
- Five. Toggl's pricing page only says the free plan covers a limited number of users, but the limit is 5. The sixth person is the point where a free workspace has to start paying, at 9 dollars per user per month on Starter, and that price then applies to every seat rather than only the new one.
- Can you invoice clients from the Toggl Track free plan?
- No. Billable rates and invoicing both sit on paid plans, so a free workspace can record which hours were worked but cannot attach money to them or turn them into an invoice. Freelancers and agencies who bill clients need either a paid Toggl plan or a tool that includes billing by default.
- Does the Toggl Track free plan expire?
- No. It is a permanent tier with no card required. The 30-day trial of the paid features that new workspaces get is separate, and when it ends you drop to the free plan rather than losing access to your data.
The short version
Toggl Track is free, genuinely and permanently, for up to five people who want to know where their time went. The tracking side is unlimited and unusually complete. The moment your reason for tracking is to charge someone, or the moment you hire a sixth person, you are on a paid plan - and the Premium renewal at 18 rather than 14 is the number to plan around.
If you are weighing it up, the useful question is not whether Toggl Track is free. It is whether the free half is the half you need. Teams tracking time for insight should stop reading and go use it. Teams tracking time to invoice clients are shopping for a paid plan, and should compare on that basis from the start.
Timen is free for the whole product, including the billing side, if that is the half you were worried about.