Best time tracking and invoicing software in 2026

Pick time tracking and invoicing software by where the money should end up. Harvest and FreshBooks track hours, invoice them and collect card payments. Timen and Everhour turn hours into invoices and pass them to QuickBooks or Xero. Zoho Invoice and Invoice Ninja are the cheapest way to invoice a small client list.

Most billing pain starts before the invoice. Hours sit in a timer without a client, a rate or a clear description, and on the first of the month someone rebuilds the work in a spreadsheet so it can be retyped into an invoice. Good time and billing software removes that second pass: the entry you logged on Tuesday becomes the invoice line on Friday, at the right rate, and can be marked as billed to keep it out of the next invoice. Check whether that marking is automatic or a step you must do yourself.

All ten tools can turn tracked hours into invoice lines, but their billing controls differ. Toggl Track, for example, needs a manual tagging workflow to keep paid entries out of later invoices. The tools come at invoicing from three directions. Some are invoicing or accounting software with a timer added (FreshBooks, Zoho Invoice, Invoice Ninja, Bonsai). Some are time trackers that grew an invoice screen (Harvest, Clockify, Toggl Track, Everhour, Timen). Paymo sits between the two, with projects and tasks as well. The right one depends less on the timer than on three questions: who collects the payment, where the books live, and what the bill looks like once a few more people join.

How were these tools compared?

We read each vendor's pricing page and help centre, in US dollars, and summarised public G2 and Capterra reviews. We did not run a client's billing through each product. Prices below are the list prices the vendors publish, with any running promotion named separately, and review notes describe the linked samples, including where they are small or old.

Time and billing software at a glance

How each tool turns hours into an invoice, whether it can take the payment, and what it costs to start.

The 10 best time tracking and invoicing tools

The list runs roughly from the most complete billing setups to the lightest. Watch the pricing lines more than the feature lists: client caps, seat minimums and usage charges are where these tools differ most once you are past the trial.

1. Harvest - best known pairing of timesheets and invoices

Best for: Agencies and consultancies that want an easy timesheet, invoices from hours and expenses, and online payments, and that will check what usage-based billing does to their bill.

• Pricing: Free for 1 seat and 2 projects, with invoicing included. Teams starts at $9 per seat/month billed annually ($108 a year) or $11 monthly; Enterprise starts at $14 annually or $17.50 monthly; Enterprise Plus is custom. Paid plans bill either as Flex, a seat rate plus charges for active projects, clients, tasks and invoicing above an allowance, or as Unlimited at a fixed price. 30-day free trial. Plan details.
• Rating: 4.5/5 on Capterra from 653 reviews; 4.3/5 on G2 from 842 reviews

Harvest is the tool many people picture when they search for time tracking and invoicing software, and the core flow is still tidy. Team members track time by project and task, billable rates are set per project or person, and an invoice pulls in the tracked hours and expenses for a client and period. Clients can pay online through PayPal or Stripe, and invoices and payments copy across to QuickBooks Online or Xero, so the books stay in your accounting system rather than in Harvest.

The question in 2026 is cost, not capability. Flex counts active projects, clients, tasks and invoices on top of seats, from the previous billing period, and for new accounts those charges start at the second paid renewal. A business that sends many small invoices to many clients is exactly the shape Flex charges for, so open the billing settings during the trial and price the Unlimited option too. The details of what changed, and why some long-time customers left, are in our Harvest pricing breakdown.

What users say about Harvest

2. FreshBooks - best when invoicing should live inside your accounting

Best for: A small business that wants one subscription for tracked time, invoices, card payments, expenses and the accounting reports its bookkeeper needs.

• Pricing: Lite $23 a month for up to 5 billable clients, Plus $43 for 50, Premium $70 for unlimited clients; Select is quoted and includes 2 team member accounts. Every other team member is $11 a month, and Advanced Payments is a $20 add-on below Select. Yearly billing takes an extra 10% off. Promotions currently cut Lite to $1 a month for the first year and Plus or Premium by 80% for three months. 30-day free trial.
• Rating: 4.5/5 on Capterra from 4,529 reviews; 4.5/5 on G2 from 981 reviews

FreshBooks starts from the invoice and adds the timer, which is the opposite of most tools on this list. You and your team track time against clients and projects, and generating an invoice pulls in all the unbilled time for the projects you choose, marking those entries as billed. You decide how the hours appear: each entry as its own line, grouped by service, or one line per project. Clients pay by card, bank transfer or buy-now-pay-later from the invoice, and from Plus upward the same data feeds accounting reports your bookkeeper can log in to see.

The price depends on how many clients you bill. Plans are capped by billable clients, not by features you would notice in a trial, so a studio with sixty clients is on Premium whether it needs the extras or not, and every additional person adds $11 a month. A five-person team on Plus is $87 a month at list price before payment fees. If you already run QuickBooks or Xero, FreshBooks duplicates what you have; if you have no accounting software yet, it may be the only tool you need.

What users say about FreshBooks

3. Paymo - best for small teams billing from projects and tasks

Best for: A small agency or studio that wants tasks, timesheets, estimates and invoices in one product instead of three, and is happy to pay per user for it.

• Pricing: Free for 1 user, 1 client and 2 projects, with invoicing. Solo (1 user, 3 clients, 5 projects) is $5.90 a month billed yearly or $9.90 monthly; Plus is $10.90 per user/month yearly or $15.90 monthly; Pro is $16.90 or $23.90. New accounts currently get up to 40% off monthly plans for the first three months. 15-day free trial.
• Rating: 4.7/5 on Capterra from 686 reviews; 4.6/5 on G2 from 594 reviews

Paymo is project management with billing built in. Work is planned as tasks, time is tracked against them with a timer or timesheet, and invoices are created from that tracked time. Clients can pay online. Plus is the plan most teams land on, because it adds timesheet reports, recurring invoices, estimates, expenses and the integrations and API; Pro adds Gantt charts, scheduling, workload and timesheet approvals.

You are also buying a project tool. If your tasks already live in Asana or Trello, Paymo asks you to move them or run two systems. The free and Solo plans are also deliberately narrow, one or three clients, so they suit a trial or a one-person side business rather than a team. If you are weighing it against similar all-in-one tools, our list of Paymo alternatives goes further.

What users say about Paymo

4. Clockify - low-cost paid tracking with team invoicing

Best for: A team that wants invoices from tracked time at the lowest per-seat price and is fine paying for the Standard plan to get them.

• Pricing: Free for up to 5 users, without billable rates or invoicing. Basic $3.99 per seat/month billed annually ($4.99 monthly) adds billable rates; Standard $5.49 ($6.99) adds invoicing, recurring invoices, approval and QuickBooks; Pro $7.99 ($9.99) adds expenses and budgets; Enterprise $11.99 ($14.99). Every active or invited user takes a paid seat.
• Rating: 4.8/5 on Capterra from 9,268 reviews; 4.5/5 on G2 from 203 reviews

On Standard, an invoice starts from a client: import the uninvoiced billable time, and expenses if you are on Pro, for a date range, remove anything you want to hold back, add taxes and discounts, then download it as a PDF or export it as CSV or Excel. Recurring invoices and timesheet approval sit on the same plan, which matters if a manager signs off hours before they are billed. Five people on Standard cost about $27 a month billed yearly, which is hard to beat for a full billing workflow.

Two things trip people up. The free plan no longer covers billing at all since Clockify moved billable rates to Basic and capped free workspaces at five users, so many older "Clockify is free" recommendations no longer apply; Clockify's free plan changes lists what moved. And Pro, where expenses and budgets live, also carries an optional desktop activity monitoring agent. Nothing forces it on, but decide where you stand before your team asks.

What users say about Clockify

5. Timen - best free option for invoices built from reports

Best for: A team that bills by the hour, wants invoices built straight from its tracked time at no cost, and already uses QuickBooks Online, Xero, FreshBooks or Wave, or is happy to send a PDF, to collect the money.

• Pricing: Free, every feature included, with unlimited users, projects and time entries.
• Rating: No third-party reviews yet. Its G2 listing has none, and there is no Capterra listing.

Timen is a time tracker whose invoices start from a report. You filter the hours you want to bill, usually one client and one period with entries not yet invoiced, and create an invoice from that view. A summary report gives one line per group, by project, person, client or tag, and a detailed report gives one line per entry with its description. Rates come from the person or the project, you can add manual lines with a quantity and rate for fixed fees, and each invoice carries its own currency, tax rate and discount. Your profile can hold a default currency, tax rate and the company and bank details printed on every invoice.

From there the invoice goes out as a PDF, as a CSV, or straight into QuickBooks Online, Xero, FreshBooks or Wave, where Timen finds or creates the client and, if you edit and send again, updates the invoice it already made rather than adding a duplicate (Wave cannot take updates, tax or discounts). That is also where Timen stops. It does not email invoices, take card payments, send reminders, repeat invoices on a schedule, track expenses or keep a ledger. Draft, sent, paid and overdue are statuses you set yourself. If clients expect a pay-now button, FreshBooks, Harvest or Zoho Invoice handle that and Timen does not. The walkthrough below shows the whole route from a week of hours to one invoice, and the invoicing page shows the screens.

6. Zoho Invoice - best free invoicing app for one or two people

Best for: A one- or two-person business with a handful of active projects that wants polished invoices, online payments and reminders without paying for software.

• Pricing: Free. Up to 2 users, 3 projects and 500 invoices a year, with "Powered by Zoho Invoice" branding. For businesses that outgrow those limits, Zoho points to its separate Zoho Billing product.
• Rating: 4.7/5 on Capterra from 823 reviews; 4.7/5 on G2 from 365 reviews

Zoho Invoice is invoicing software first, but its timesheet module is more capable than the price suggests. You log time with a live timer, a browser extension or by entering it afterwards, against projects billed at a fixed cost, a daily rate, or by project, task or staff hours, and each project shows logged, billable, billed and unbilled hours. Creating an invoice from the project pulls in the unbilled time. Around it you get quotes, recurring invoices, automatic payment reminders, a customer portal and online payments through the gateways you connect.

The limits are what make it a small-business tool. Three projects is tight for anyone billing more than a few clients by the hour, and two users rules out most teams. Treat it as the cheapest sensible start for a consultant or a two-person studio, with a planned move to a bigger Zoho product, or to a tracker plus accounting software, once the project count grows.

What users say about Zoho Invoice

7. Invoice Ninja - best open-source option you can host yourself

Best for: A small business that wants low-cost invoicing with online payments and a client portal, and possibly the option to run it on its own server.

• Pricing: Free for up to 5 clients with unlimited invoices. Ninja Pro is $14 a month or $140 a year, with unlimited clients and no Invoice Ninja branding. Extra account users need Enterprise, from $18 a month for 1-2 users up to $300 a month for 51-100; annual billing gives two months free. A self-hosted version is also available.
• Rating: 4.7/5 on Capterra from 167 reviews; 4.3/5 on G2 from 22 reviews

Invoice Ninja treats tracked time as tasks. You create projects, start a timer on a task or enter its duration, and invoice the task in a click, with its status moving from logged to invoiced so it cannot be billed twice. The billing side is broad for the price: recurring invoices with auto-billing, deposits and partial payments, quotes, expenses, a client portal where invoices are viewed and paid, and a long list of payment gateways including Stripe, PayPal, Square and GoCardless. There are apps for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android.

The time tracking is the thinner half. It is built to get billable time onto an invoice, not to give a team rich timesheets, and the per-user pricing jump to Enterprise is the moment to compare it with a dedicated tracker. The open-source, self-hosted route appeals to technical owners who want their data on their own server, but it means you handle upgrades.

What users say about Invoice Ninja

8. Bonsai - best for studios that want proposals through to payment

Best for: A small agency or consultancy that wants proposals, contracts, time, invoices and payments in one client-facing system, and will pay per user for that.

• Pricing: Per user per month, billed annually (monthly in brackets): Basic $9 ($15) has time tracking but no invoicing; Essentials $19 ($25) adds invoices, payments, the client portal and expense tracking; Premium $29 ($39) adds profit reports and the QuickBooks and Xero integrations; Elite $49 ($59) has a 3-user minimum. Online payments carry processing fees. 7-day free trial.
• Rating: 4.6/5 on Capterra from 95 reviews; 4.3/5 on G2 from 101 reviews

Bonsai covers the whole client chain: a proposal, a signed contract, the project, tracked time, the invoice and the payment. Each time entry carries a billing status, non-billable, unbilled or billed, and you can create an invoice from tracked time or add unbilled time to an invoice you are drafting. You choose whether the client sees the full timesheet under the invoice, a link to it, or nothing, which is useful when a client pays a fixed fee but you still want the hours on record. Payments run through Bonsai, with Stripe behind it.

The plan ladder is the thing to read twice. Invoicing starts on Essentials, so the $9 Basic plan is a timer, and the accounting integrations only arrive on Premium at $29 per user billed yearly. For a five-person team on Premium that is $145 a month, which buys a lot more than invoicing. It makes sense if you would otherwise pay separately for proposals, contracts and a client portal; it does not if you only want hours on invoices.

What users say about Bonsai

9. Everhour - best when your work already lives in a project tool

Best for: An agency of five or more that tracks time inside Asana, ClickUp, Jira or a similar tool and wants invoices and budgets built from those hours, then sent to its accounting software.

• Pricing: Free for up to 5 seats, without integrations, invoicing or financial reporting. Team is $8.50 per seat/month billed yearly or $10 monthly, with a 5-seat minimum, so the smallest paid team is $42.50 a month billed yearly. 14-day trial of all features.
• Rating: 4.7/5 on Capterra from 432 reviews; 4.7/5 on G2 from 183 reviews

Everhour puts a timer inside the project tool your team already uses, so time is logged against the actual task rather than a parallel list. On the Team plan you select uninvoiced billable time and expenses for a client, rates apply from your settings, client-level tax and discounts are filled in, and the invoice can carry your logo, terms and extra lines. It then exports to QuickBooks Online, Xero or FreshBooks, and the invoice status syncs back, so Everhour tracks and invoices while your accounting system collects.

It is less convincing on its own. Time is tied to tasks in the connected tool, so a team that wants to log a quick hour against a client without creating a task finds it awkward, and the free plan drops exactly the integrations that make Everhour worth using. A three-person studio pays for five seats. Our roundup of Everhour alternatives covers what to use if you do not live in a project tool.

What users say about Everhour

10. Toggl Track - best timer if invoicing is occasional

Best for: A team that cares most about getting people to track time at all, and bills from exported hours in its accounting tool, with the odd PDF invoice straight from a report.

• Pricing: Free for up to 3 users. Starter $9 per user/month billed annually or $12 monthly, which adds billable rates and CSV export; Premium $16 annually or $24 monthly; Enterprise on request. 30-day trial on the paid plans.
• Rating: 4.7/5 on Capterra from 2,589 reviews; 4.6/5 on G2 from 1,644 reviews

Toggl has the easiest timer on this list, with web, desktop, mobile and browser apps that make tracking a habit. Invoicing is deliberately light. Any workspace user can turn a summary or detailed report into a PDF invoice, adding billing details, a purchase order number, extra items and tax, but the layout cannot be changed and free-plan PDFs carry Toggl's logo. Sending invoices to QuickBooks starts on Starter, as do the billable rates you need for the amounts to mean anything.

So treat Toggl Track as a tracker that can produce an invoice, not as billing software. There is no payment collection or client portal. Its invoice instructions recommend manually tagging paid entries and filtering those tags out of future invoices. Do not assume generating a PDF automatically excludes its hours from the next bill. The free plan also stops at three users now, which Toggl's current plans covers in full.

What users say about Toggl Track

What does a week of hours to one invoice look like?

It looks like four short steps: set up the billing context before anyone starts a timer, track against it, review the week while it is fresh, and invoice from the reviewed hours. The invoice becomes a confirmation of work already understood, not the first time anyone reads the entries. Here is that route in Timen; the same order works in Harvest, Clockify or FreshBooks with their own screens.

Before the first timer: decide what an invoice-ready entry is

The illustrative example is a three-person studio billing a retail client for a website refresh at $95 an hour. Before tracking starts, create the client and a project under it, set the project's billable rate to $95, and give anyone billed at a different rate their own rate, which takes priority over the project's. Then agree the minimum for an entry to be billable: the right project, the billable switch on, and a description a client would understand without a phone call. "Homepage layout, second round after feedback" passes. "Design" does not.

Keep internal work, such as pitches or admin, in a separate non-billable project so it never reaches the client's report. Those few rules take ten minutes to agree, and they are what stop invoicing from turning into interpretation later.

During the week: track against the client, not the clock

People start timers from the project or add entries afterwards on the web, the iPhone or Android app, or the calendar view, which helps rebuild a day nobody tracked. Tags mark the kind of work, here Refresh for the agreed scope and Change request for anything the client asks for on top, so each can be grouped on its own later.

On Friday: review in the right order

Run a report for the client and the week and fix things in this order: first gaps and duplicates, then entries on the wrong project, then the billable switch, and only then the wording of descriptions. Polishing a description on an entry that belongs to another client is wasted work, which is why the order matters. If an admin wants the reviewed week to stay put, Timen's timesheet lock stops members editing entries before a chosen date. Our ten-minute weekly review goes through the checks in more detail.

At month end: invoice from the reviewed hours

Filter the report to the client, the month, billable entries and hours not yet invoiced, then create the invoice from it. The studio's month might come to 38.5 hours: 31 on the refresh at $95 and 7.5 on a change request that the client agreed to pay at the same rate. Grouping the summary by tag gives two lines the client can read at a glance, $2,945 and $712.50, and you can reword either line before sending; a detailed report would list every entry instead. Add a manual line for a fixed item, such as a $400 hosting setup, set the tax rate, check the total, and download the PDF or send the invoice to QuickBooks Online, Xero, FreshBooks or Wave. Mark it sent, and paid when the money arrives.

Exceptions stay simple when the hours are clean. Work to hold for next month is left out of this invoice and stays unbilled. A capped retainer is invoiced at the cap by editing the line's quantity. A disputed line is corrected on the invoice and sent again, and the copy in QuickBooks, Xero or FreshBooks updates rather than duplicating. For finding the hours that slip through anyway, see how to keep billed and unbilled hours apart.

Which one should you try first?

Start from who collects the payment, because that settles half the shortlist. Either your time and billing software collects the payment and you reconcile it later, or it hands a finished invoice to accounting software that collects and records it. Running both, with invoices raised in the tracker and again in QuickBooks, creates a risk of billing the same hours twice.

• The tool collects the money: FreshBooks, Harvest, Bonsai, Zoho Invoice, Invoice Ninja and Paymo can put a pay button on the invoice. Expect card and transfer fees from the payment provider, and on FreshBooks the books live there too.
• The tool hands off to accounting: Timen and Everhour build the invoice and send it to QuickBooks, Xero or FreshBooks (Timen adds Wave), and Harvest copies invoices and payments to QuickBooks Online or Xero. Your accountant works in one system and the tracker never pretends to be a ledger.
• The tool exports hours: Toggl Track and, below its Standard plan, Clockify are best treated as sources of billable hours. Someone still builds the invoice elsewhere, so make that a weekly job rather than a month-end scramble.

For one or two people without accounting software, Zoho Invoice is worth a trial. A three-person team exceeds its two-user limit; compare FreshBooks including the extra team-member charges, or a tracker that connects to your accounting tool. If a bookkeeper already lives in Xero, a tracker that sends finished invoices there keeps everyone in their own tool. How Timen does that handoff is described in sending invoices to accounting.

Whichever group you land in, the tool should turn tracked entries into invoice lines without retyping, apply the right rate automatically, and remember which hours have already been billed. Those three decide whether invoicing takes ten minutes or an afternoon. Check that it handles your tax rate and the currencies your clients pay in, and price next year's team rather than today's, because per-seat fees, client caps and usage charges change the bill far more than the headline price.

Then test it with one client and a week of hours. Check rates, tax, non-billable entries and the handoff to your accounting tool, and create a second invoice for the same period to see how already-billed hours are handled. That small test catches more billing friction than comparing invoice screenshots.

A tracker with invoices stops being enough when the invoice is no longer the hard part. Once you need retainers that bill themselves, payment reminders, expenses with markup, multi-entity accounting or approval before anything is billed, you want either an all-in-one billing tool (FreshBooks or Bonsai) or professional services software that runs budgets, forecasts and billing together. If the questions move to which projects are profitable or how hours compare with the estimate, the problem is project reporting rather than invoicing, and our comparison of client work time tracking covers it. Heavier agency needs, such as utilisation and resourcing, are in the agency time tracking list.