Ever feel like time slips through your fingers?
Managing projects and knowing where your work hours go can be tough, right?
Especially when you’re juggling multiple tasks.
You need a simple way to track your time, but which tool is best?
In this Clockify vs Harvest showdown, we’ll break down these two popular time-tracking tools.
Overview
We’ve put Clockify and Harvest through their paces, exploring their features, interface, and overall user experience.
Our hands-on testing involved tracking time on various projects, generating reports, and exploring integrations to clearly compare these two time-tracking titans.
Looking for a free and easy way to track your time? Clockify boasts over 10 million users and offers a generous free plan with core time tracking features.
Pricing: 14-day free plan. Paid plan starts at $5.49/month
Key Features:
- Unlimited Users
- Project Tracking
- Integrations
Ready to take control of your time tracking? Harvest boasts over 100,000 customers and integrates with dozens of popular business tools.
Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plan starts at $11/month
Key Features:
- Time Tracking
- Invoicing
- Expense Tracking
What is Clockify?
Now, let’s switch gears and talk about Clockify.
Clockify is known for being a free and simple time-tracking solution.
It’s a great option if you’re starting out or don’t need many bells and whistles.
It’s very user-friendly and easy to get the hang of.
Also, explore our Clockify alternatives…
Our Take
It’s perfect for individuals and small teams. The free plan is incredibly generous. While some advanced features require a paid plan, the core functionality is more than enough for most users. It’s a solid choice that balances simplicity and power effectively.
Key Benefits
- Free for unlimited users: Yes, you read that right!
- Simple and intuitive interface: Easy to learn, even for beginners.
- Robust reporting features: Get detailed insights into your time usage.
- Project management tools: Organize tasks and track progress.
- Cross-platform compatibility: Track time on any device.
Pricing
- Standard: $5.49/month – Time off, invoicing, approval, attendance & overtime, Target & reminders.
- Pro: $7.99/month – Scheduling, Forecasting, Expense, Budget & estimates, Custom fields.
- Enterprise: $11.99/month – Single sign-on SSO, Custom subdomain, control accounts.
- Productivity Suite: 12.99/month – Time tracking, team communication, project management.
Pros
Cons
What is Harvest?
Now, let’s switch gears and talk about Harvest.
It’s another popular time-tracking tool known for its clean interface and focus on simplicity.
Harvest is all about making time tracking effortless.
It’s designed to be user-friendly and integrates well with other tools.
Also, explore our Harvest alternatives…
Our Take
Its integrated time-tracking, invoicing, and expense-tracking features make it valuable. While it can be expensive for individuals, it’s a worthwhile investment for businesses looking to streamline their operations.
Key Benefits
- Time tracking and invoicing in one platform.
- Expense tracking: Manage your project costs.
- Project management tools: Keep projects on track.
- Client management: Track client communication.
- Detailed reports: Analyze your profitability.
Pricing
- Free: Free Forever – 1 seat, 2 project, Time tracking, Reporting basics.
- Pro: $11/monthly – Unlimited seats, Unlimited projects, Team Reporting, Accounting, and payment.
- Premium: $14/monthly – Profitability reporting, Timesheet approvals, Activity log, Custom onboarding support for 50+ seats.
Pros
Cons
Feature Comparison
Clockify and Harvest are two excellent time tracking apps, but they target different organizational needs.
Harvest is the polished, financial-focused tool for agencies, while Clockify is the flexible, free-to-start solution for maximizing users and compliance features.
1. Pricing Structure and Scalability
- Clockify: Clockify is the true free time tracking solution. Its free version includes unlimited users and unlimited time tracking for basic functionality, making it ideal for large startups or teams on a tight budget. Paid plans are lower cost per user billed monthly to unlock more advanced features.
- Harvest: Harvest offers a free plan that is limited to one user and two projects. Its paid plans are priced for professional services. The core philosophy is that the tool should time and invoice clients so efficiently that it pays for itself.
2. Core Tracking Method and Interface
- Clockify: Offers high flexibility, allowing users to enter hours manually via a timesheet, use the live timer on the desktop app or clockify mobile app, or utilize an optional auto-tracker. Users generally rate its timesheet completion as highly intuitive.
- Harvest: Provides a highly user friendly interface praised for its clean, minimalist design. You can start tracking time with just a click from its desktop app, web app, or browser extension. It emphasizes a simple, one-click timer experience.
3. Invoicing and Financial Management
- Clockify: Provides a functional invoicing tool on its pro and enterprise plans that allows you to invoice clients and customize invoices. It supports multiple currencies and managing fixed fees and is great for tracking labor costs.
- Harvest: Harvest shines here, built as a seamless solution to time and invoice clients. It automatically converts tracked hours and expenses into professional-looking client invoices that can be sent directly from the harvest account. It integrates with payment gateways to ensure clients can send invoices and get paid faster.
4. Project and Budget Monitoring
- Clockify: Enables you to create project templates and set an allocated budget based on hours/time for project progress tracking on paid tiers. Its reports tell you how much time was spent on different projects.
- Harvest: Focuses on budget monitoring in dollars. You can set hourly or fixed fee budgets and receive real-time alerts as you approach the budget limit, helping managers track project performance and prevent scope creep. Harvest gives you insights into how much budget is left.
5. Expense Tracking
- Clockify: Supports the ability to record expenses on paid plans, which can be included in invoices and seen in the other clockify features reports.
- Harvest: Excels in expense tracking. It allows the team member to snap photos of receipts via the mobile device and attach them directly to specific projects or client invoices. This organized approach simplifies reconciliation and is a key benefit for bill clients and managing time and expenses.
6. Security and Compliance
- Clockify: Offers high-level security like single sign-on and two-factor authentication in its pro and enterprise plans, along with the option to host data on a custom subdomain for large organizations. It also offers optional GPS tracking on the mobile app.
- Harvest: Offers two-factor authentication and strong security, but lacks the optional compliance tools like GPS tracking or kiosk mode, making it less suitable for managing restaurant or retail businesses or teams requiring strict location verification.
7. Reporting and Data Access
- Clockify: Provides highly detailed and customizable time tracking data exports. You can export data in bulk and use its strong filtering to track progress and analyze time spent on specific tasks or specific projects.
- Harvest: Offers polished, financial reports (Harvest’s reporting) that visualize budget burn rate and profitability. Its time-based reporting gives quick, intuitive insights into non-billable hours versus billable hours and project cost rates. The harvest data is easy to access.
8. Workforce Management Features
- Clockify: Offers core HR management in its paid tiers, including a scheduling feature and tools to manage and approve timesheets and time off requests, helping the account track labor costs and track work hours.
- Harvest: Harvest requires its separate product, Forecast, for comprehensive scheduling. While it allows timesheet approve timesheets, its focus is not on attendance tracking or shift management. Its reporting is designed to analyze utilization rather than adherence.
9. Integrations and Ecosystem
- Clockify: Integrates well with a wide range of apps and offers the ability to control accounts and tracking policies via its web account. Its support team (clockify customer service) provides extensive video tutorials.
- Harvest: Known for its deep, seamless integrations with accounting software (like QuickBooks) and popular project management tools. It provides access to its time tracker through browser extensions and is generally considered less time-consuming to set up within an existing tech stack.
What to Look for When Choosing a Time Tracker?
Choosing the ideal time tracking app requires balancing user flexibility, financial precision, and compliance needs.
The best solution helps your team easily log time while giving management the data to make confident financial decisions.
- Core Free Offerings: Start by assessing the generosity of the free time tracking solution. Clockify’s free features are unmatched, offering unlimited users and projects, while Harvest’s free plan is limited to one user and two projects. For large, cost-conscious teams, Clockify provides the immediate gain access.
- Invoicing and Financial Reporting: Look at the product’s focus. Harvest is a superior financial tool, designed to automatically turn harvest time into professional client invoices that can be paid online. Clockify’s invoicing tool is available on the pro features tier, but it is less automated and requires manual invoice creation.
- Tracking Method and Usability: A good time tracking app needs simple inputs. Both allow you to start timers and stop timers, but Harvest’s timer is often praised for its simplicity. However, Harvest’s reliance on manual timers can be a disadvantage, as its lack of detailed idle detection means users might forget to stop and inflate the tracked time for the week.
- Project Management and Budgeting: While both manage projects, Harvest provides superior budget monitoring in dollars and offers automated alerts when budgets are nearing exhaustion. Clockify focuses more on tracking project progress against time estimates, with dollar-value budgeting available on its higher pro and enterprise plans.
- Compliance and Oversight: Clockify offers essential compliance features like GPS tracking and kiosk mode on its paid tiers, making it better for teams that need to enforce location-based tracking. Harvest, lacking these features, is better suited for remote knowledge workers who do not require strict geographic enforcement.
- Administrative Control and Bulk Editing: For managers, ease of administration is key. Clockify allows admins to bulk edit time entries, manage time off requests, and set up automated timesheets. These administrative features help control labor cost and ensure accurate timesheets.
- Ecosystem and Integration: The tool must fit your tech stack. Both integrate with Google Calendar, but Harvest is known for its seamless integration with accounting software (like QuickBooks). Clockify offers a broader range of integrations and a dedicated API to manage the Clockify account.
- Data Structure and Roles: Clockify offers more granular user roles (Admin, Manager, Regular User) and better customization for time entries, allowing you to track work hours against pull requests or specific client data. Harvest’s data structure is simpler, focusing primarily on client and project.
- Support and Scalability: Clockify offers 24/7 clockify customer service and phone support for all users, including the free tier. When comparing the basic plan and enterprise plan, Clockify’s generous unlimited users model provides a better path for rapid scaling than Harvest’s per-user billed monthly structure.
Final Verdict
Choosing between Clockify and Harvest depends on your specific needs.
If robust project management and expense tracking are crucial, Harvest is the stronger choice.
However, for teams prioritizing simplicity and a completely free solution, Clockify is a fantastic option.
Our testing revealed Clockify‘s ease of use and generous free plan make it ideal for smaller teams or freelancers on a budget.
Ultimately, both are excellent time tracking software options, and by understanding your priorities, you can choose the tool that best fits your workflow.
We’ve used both extensively, and this breakdown reflects our real-world experience.
More of Clockify
Here’s a quick look at how Clockify stacks up:
- Clockify vs clockit: Assuming you meant Clockify, it’s a popular free option.
- Clockify vs Time Doctor: Clockify is simpler, Time Doctor has more monitoring.
- Clockify vs toggl: Both are easy, Toggl can have more integrations.
- Clockify vs Memtime: Clockify needs you to start/stop, Memtime tries to do it for you.
- Clockify vs TrackingTime: Clockify is basic tracking, TrackingTime has more project tools.
- Clockify vs Timeular: Clockify is software, Timeular uses a physical tracker.
- Clockify vs Harvest: Clockify is mostly for tracking time, Harvest adds invoicing.
More of Harvest
Let’s see how Harvest stacks up against these other time-tracking tools:
- Harvest vs Time Doctor: Harvest focuses on time tracking for invoicing and project costing. Time Doctor often includes more features for productivity monitoring, like app tracking and screenshots.
- Harvest vs Clockify: Harvest integrates time tracking with invoicing and expense management, making it ideal for billing. Clockify is a simpler, often free, tool mainly for tracking time.
- Harvest vs Clockit: You likely mean Clockify. Harvest has built-in invoicing, unlike the simpler time-tracking focus of Clockify.
- Harvest vs Toggl: Harvest is designed with invoicing and project budgeting in mind alongside time tracking. Toggl is known for its ease of use in just tracking time for productivity.
- Harvest vs TrackingTime: Harvest focuses on billing and project profitability with its time tracking. TrackingTime emphasizes team and project management features alongside time tracking.
- Harvest vs Memtime: Harvest requires manual or timer-based time entry for billing. Memtime attempts to automate time tracking based on your computer activity.
- Harvest vs Timeular: Harvest is software-based with a focus on billing. Timeular uses a physical device for individual time tracking.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Clockify completely free?
Yes, Clockify offers a generous free plan that includes unlimited users and projects. Paid plans are available for additional features like advanced reporting and team management.
Does Harvest track expenses?
Yes, Harvest excels at expense tracking. You can easily log expenses, categorize them, and even link them to specific projects for accurate billing.
Which platform is easier to use?
Both platforms are user-friendly, but Clockify’s interface is generally considered simpler and more intuitive, especially for basic time tracking.
Can I integrate Clockify/Harvest with other tools?
Yes, both platforms offer integrations. Harvest boasts a wider range, while Clockify continually expands its integrations with popular apps.
Which platform is better for large teams?
Both can handle large teams. However, Harvest’s robust project management and reporting features may make it a slightly better fit for complex team structures.
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