Time tracking pricing compared: what six tools really cost

Harvest: the per-seat price is only half the bill

Harvest runs two plans, Teams and Enterprise, and each can be billed two different ways. That second choice is the one that matters and it is easy to miss.

• Unlimited - a fixed price per seat. Predictable, and what most people assume they are buying.
• Flex - a lower per-seat rate plus usage-based charges, calculated from your previous billing period's activity: active projects, active clients, active tasks and invoicing. Each plan includes a free usage allowance and you pay for what goes above it.

Teams starts from $9 per seat per month billed annually, or $11 monthly, and Enterprise from $14, or $17.50 monthly. Harvest advertises the annual price as 20 percent off, and on Flex every one of those figures is a floor rather than a bill.

The detail worth carrying into a budget: on Flex, usage charges for a new account begin at the second paid renewal. So the first bills look clean, the pattern establishes itself, and the number changes later for reasons that have nothing to do with headcount. If your work is many small client projects rather than a few large ones, that is exactly the shape that accumulates active projects and clients.

Harvest's free tier exists and is narrow: one active person and two active projects. It is a trial with no clock rather than a plan to run a business on. We have written before about how Harvest's pricing has moved, which is worth reading if you are renewing rather than starting.

Toggl Track: the headline rate needs a year up front

This is the clearest example on the page of a price that is accurate and misleading at the same time.

Toggl now sells Toggl Track and Toggl Plan as one product. Its Premium plan is $16 per user per month billed annually, which is the figure the pricing page leads with, and $24 billed monthly. Starter is $9 annually or $12 monthly. Paying month to month costs up to half as much again, at the point when you least know whether the team will keep using the tool.

For a ten person team on Premium that is the difference between $1,920 and $2,880 a year. Nothing about it is improper, and it is documented. It is simply not the figure that gets compared in roundups, which usually quote the annual rate without saying so.

If your reason for looking at Toggl is cost rather than features, compare the rate for the billing term you will actually choose. Its free tier is a separate question we have covered in what Toggl Track's free plan actually includes.

Hubstaff: a real free plan, for exactly one person

Hubstaff's free plan exists, which is worth stating plainly because it has been reported both ways. Per Hubstaff's own support documentation it is the one-member plan: a single seat for the organization owner, with a limited feature set, limited screenshot storage, and no scheduled reports.

That makes it genuinely useful for a freelancer who needs to show proof of work to a client, and useless for a team, because the second person requires a paid plan. There is also a 14-day trial of the full feature set with no card required, which is the better way to evaluate it. The free plan lives in Hubstaff's help centre rather than on its pricing page, which offers only the trial and lists paid plans from Starter at $4.99 per seat per month billed annually, or $7 monthly, with a 2-seat minimum. The help centre also documents Small Business Essentials, a flat $144 a year for up to 4 people, for new organizations on annual billing only and with no add-ons. That works out at $3 per person per month.

The thing to weigh with Hubstaff is not the price but what you are buying: it is built around monitoring, including screenshots and activity levels. If that is not what your team needs, a cheaper monitoring tool is still the wrong tool. Our Hubstaff alternatives piece covers where that fit breaks down.

TimeCamp: the lowest list price here

TimeCamp runs Starter, Premium and Ultimate, and it is the cheapest paid option in this group on headline rate:

• Premium - $4.99 per user per month billed monthly, $3.99 billed annually.
• Ultimate - $6.99 per user per month billed monthly, $4.99 billed annually.
• Starter - lower again, $3.49 per user per month billed monthly, $2.49 billed annually.

A free tier exists, with no cap on users or projects. Each paid rate is shown as a cut from a higher struck-through price, with no end date given, and TimeCamp's own FAQ still lists the older, higher figures. The catch is the AI Time Tracker, which is billed by token use on every plan, including Free: TimeCamp estimates about $6 per user per month, after $10 of starting credit, which is more than any of its seats costs on annual billing. If you are weighing it directly against Hubstaff, the Hubstaff and TimeCamp comparison goes feature by feature.

Everhour and Memtime, briefly

Everhour is best understood next to Harvest rather than on its own, because the choice between them is usually about integration depth rather than price. Harvest versus Everhour covers that comparison properly, and it is the better page for a pricing question about Everhour specifically.

Memtime is the outlier in this group because it is an automatic tracker: it records what you were working on and asks you to assign it later, rather than asking you to start a timer. Basic is $14 per user per month on an annual plan or $18 quarterly, and the $12 the pricing page opens on needs a two-year commitment. Connect and Premium are $21 and $29 on annual plans, and Enterprise is custom for teams of 50 or more. There is no monthly billing, so none of its terms compares cleanly with a monthly price elsewhere.

Why the annual discount is not automatically the cheaper choice

Every tool here discounts annual billing, usually by 20 to 30 percent, and the arithmetic looks settled. Two things complicate it, and both come out of the pricing above.

An annual commitment locks in more than the rate. Toggl is the clean case: its $16 Premium rate needs twelve months paid up front, against $24 month to month. Paying monthly costs more in year one and leaves you free in month four, when you have learned whether the team actually uses it. For a tool nobody has adopted yet, that optionality is worth real money, and it is never priced into the comparison.

An annual seat count is a guess about a year from now. Most annual plans are billed on seats bought rather than seats used, so a team that shrinks pays for people who left, while a team that grows adds seats mid-term at whatever the current rate is. If your headcount is stable, annual is straightforwardly cheaper. If it moves either way, the discount is smaller than it looks.

A reasonable default: pay monthly through the first quarter, then commit annually once you know the tool has stuck and how many seats you truly need. The premium for those three months is usually smaller than one wrong annual commitment, and it removes the most expensive mistake in this category, which is paying for a year of something the team quietly stopped opening in week three.

The exception is Harvest's Flex model, where the variable is usage rather than seats. There, the question to answer before committing to anything is how many active projects and clients you carry in a normal month, because that is the number the bill tracks.

The six compared

Rates are list prices per user per month.

Four things to check before you commit

1. What is the second-year price per seat? Not the first. TimeCamp shows its rates as a cut from higher prices with no end date, and Harvest's usage charges start at the second renewal, so the price you sign at is not guaranteed to be the one you renew at.
2. Is the per-seat rate the whole bill? Harvest's Flex model is the example here, and usage-based components are increasingly common. Ask what is metered and what the included allowance is.
3. What does the free tier actually permit? One person and two projects is a very different thing from a free plan for a small team, and both get called free.
4. What happens at the seat you are about to add? Several plans here change character at seat two rather than seat ten.

If those four questions feel like a lot of work for a time tracker, that is a fair reaction and it is part of why we built Timen to be free with every feature included. There is no second-year rate, no usage meter and no seat at which the answer changes, which is a smaller claim than it sounds and removes exactly these four questions.

The short version

TimeCamp is cheapest on list price. Harvest is the one whose bill can move without you changing anything. Toggl is the one whose headline rate needs a year paid up front. Hubstaff's free plan is one person, and Memtime is billed on a cycle that makes comparison awkward.

None of that shows up if you compare the six headline numbers, which is the comparison almost everyone makes.