No matter how organized you are, managing a project can get messy. Whether it’s scope creep, missed deadlines, or team communication, you must stay on your toes to keep everything on track. That’s why having the right tools to simplify project management and time tracking is so helpful. This blog compares two popular time-tracking software options: Harvest and Toggl. We’ll explore their key differences and help you choose the right fit for your business.
Automatic time-tracking software like TimeTackle can help you learn about time-tracking tools like Harvest and Toggl. It also helps reduce the manual work associated with time tracking, so you can spend less time on the boring stuff and get back to managing your project.
Harvest VS Toggl at a Glance?
When you compare Harvest and Toggl, it’s like choosing between two reliable companions whose approaches work slightly differently. Harvest feels like the steady accountant of the two, focused on helping you manage your time with a keen eye on:
- Budgets
- Invoicing
- Financial clarity
It’s designed for teams and businesses that thrive on structure, offering tools that track time and translate it into billable hours, project budgets, and insightful reports. Harvest feels like the natural fit if you’re running a client-focused business and need to keep tabs on every dollar and hour.
Toggl is a handy multitasker. It’s built with a creative flair, offering flexibility and automation to make time tracking almost effortless. With Toggl, you can easily juggle multiple tasks, thanks to features that adapt to how you work whether you’re a freelancer needing simple tracking or part of a dynamic team managing complex workflows. Toggl’s charm lies in its ability to feel light yet powerful, making it great for anyone who values simplicity without sacrificing functionality. Harvest leans more toward detailed project management and financial control, while Toggl shines in adaptability and user-friendly time tracking. It’s less about which is better and more about which fits your work’s rhythm.
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What is Toggl? Strengths & Limitations
Toggl is a time-tracking tool that simplifies monitoring and managing time entries for individuals and teams. Toggl helps you accurately track project time and billables and gives you insight into productivity and efficiency. Toggl is much more than your standard time tracker. This solution combines project management, invoicing, and workflow optimization.
Users love the platform’s versatility. Toggl works for independent freelancers tracking billable work and even for team leaders who need to manage project time and profitability. Regardless of your tasks, industry, or daily to-dos, Toggl’s all-in-one solution is perfect for accurate timekeeping.
Key Features of Toggl
Toggl has several features that can help users track their time more effectively. Here are some of the highlights:
- Timer: Allow employees to record their hours down to the second. Depending on your needs, choose from automated time tracking, punch-in and out functionality, or manual time entries. Toggl Track even supports offline time tracking.
- Timesheets: View, approve, or reject digital timesheets showing hours worked across clients and projects.
- Project Dashboard: This tool provides an overview of all your projects, including timelines, hours worked, billable amounts, budget status, and assigned team members.
- Client Billing and Invoicing: View clients’ billable amounts and create invoices in simple steps.
- Reporting and Analytics: See how much time your team has spent on projects or examine detailed time entries, profitability stats, and other data trends.
- Integrations: Connect Toggl Track with 100+ platforms using native integrations (direct app-to-app syncing) or add-on browser extensions.
The Highlights of Using Toggl
Whether you need serious help tracking your team’s time or want to optimize your workday, there’s a lot to love about Toggl. Our Toggl review found that users rave about the productivity app for several reasons.
Comprehensive Time Tracking
Toggl Track is popular because its free version offers simple, effective time tracking. You can track time entries in real time or edit them retroactively, both online and offline. This solution tracks every billable second to ensure precise invoicing. The Pomodoro timer and idle time detection tool also boost focus. Goodbye, distracted work hours, and hello, profitability.
Ease Of Use
Toggl is known for being one of the more intuitive, user-friendly time tracking tools. Its simple, clean interface lets you start a timer with just a click or manually enter your hours. Toggl streamlines complex workloads with features for timesheets, project management tools, and team member tracking.
Cross-Platform Compatibility
With Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android apps and a Chrome browser extension, Toggl is accessible almost everywhere. It’s easy to track your time, regardless of which device you use for work.
Impressive Integrations
Toggl has integrations for popular solutions like Asana, Trello, Jira, Slack, and ClickUp, making the platform even easier to use. These integrations also make synchronizing tasks and time tracking across multiple platforms easy.
Customizable Reports
The free version of the app doesn’t allow for as much customization, but even then, Toggl Track’s reports are helpful. Ask for daily, custom, or weekly reports to understand how you spend my time. Toggl makes it a cinch to analyze time entries and project time to pinpoint work patterns and make more informed decisions.
The Pitfalls of Using Toggl
As much as folks rave about this platform, our Toggl review did uncover a few downsides to Toggl.
Offline Sync Issues
Toggl Track allows offline time management, but there’s just one problem: You still need internet access to sync offline data across devices. That’s probably fine if you’re briefly disconnected from Wi-Fi, but this is inconvenient if you frequently work offline for hours at a time.
Manual Tracking
One of the hardest things about using Toggl is remembering to track your time manually. Toggl competitors like RescueTime can track time automatically, but Toggl’s functionality isn’t quite as good. You can automatically track data with the Toggl Track Chrome extension, which starts and stops the timer based on the browser tabs you have open. It isn’t a perfect workaround, though; some users say it gets annoying after a while.
Multi-Project Complexity
Look, Toggl Plan is cool and all, but Toggl isn’t a project management solution. Toggl offers tools to manage different projects, but it struggles to juggle multiple complex projects. If you try to scale up on this platform, there’s a good chance you’ll see confusing mix-ups and messy time entries.
Notification Overload
Some users say Toggl’s notifications are a bit much. The system notifies employees if they haven’t tracked time for the day, which could get a little annoying if, say, you’re on PTO. If notifications bug you, tweak your Toggl settings or set your device to “do not disturb” to complete work without the constant distraction of notifications.
Customer Service
It’s worth mentioning some users have issues with Toggl customer support. Timely support seems to be the biggest challenge, so if you have an urgent technical problem, it could take a while to hear back from someone.
What is Harvest? Strengths & Limitations
Harvest is time-tracking and invoicing software that helps users monitor project progress and team performance. The tool stands out for its compliance features and multi-platform accessibility. It’s useful for freelancers and small to medium-sized businesses that need to track billable hours and get paid for their work.
Key Features of Harvest
Harvest harnesses the power of time tracking to help users answer critical questions about their team’s time, project progress, and business health. Plus, it turns billable time into invoices, making it easy to get paid online. Businesses can use Harvest to carry out time tracking, expense tracking, project management, task assignment, invoicing, scheduling, and more.
One of the biggest challenges with tracking time is getting team members to do it. The Harvest app makes time tracking easy for teams by letting them track time most easily. They can log their hours for the week into a timesheet at once or track time as they work by starting a timer from their desktop, phone, or browser. Harvest even integrates with third-party tools including Asana, Basecamp, and Trello – so that team members can track time from applications they already use.
Maximizing Productivity and Insights with Harvest’s Time Tracking and Management Tools
Harvest also helps businesses use that timesheet data by turning it into intuitive visual graphs that provide insight into teams and projects. Managers can see what each team member has worked on and what’s taking up the most time. They can see how much time has been tracked for each project, how much budget is left, and how much time is billable.
- Time tracking: Start and stop timers with a click to log hours against projects or clients.
- Invoicing: Generate professional invoices automatically populated with logged time entries and customizable billing rates.
- Expense tracking: Record expenses with attached receipts or billable costs to include on invoices.
- Reporting: Access reports breaking down billable hours, productivity metrics, and project profitability.
- Integrations: Connect with over 50 tools like Slack, Trello, and Asana.
Harvest Strengths
1. Multi-Platform Accessibility
Harvest excels in offering flexibility across platforms, including:
- Desktop
- Mobile apps
- Browser Extensions
- Even a Chrome add-on
This versatility reduces friction in time tracking, making it easy for users to record time from virtually anywhere.
2. Enhanced Compliance
Features Harvest allows managers to enforce compliance through required fields, ensuring entries always include metadata such as client or project names. This ensures complete and compliant entries and simplifies record-keeping.
3. Timesheet Approval Workflow
The tool includes an optional timesheet approval process, enabling managers to review and approve timesheets for accuracy and compliance before submission. This workflow enhances the overall quality of time-tracking data.
4. Customizable Configurations
Harvest provides flexibility in structuring and configuring time entries, accommodating various organizational needs and project requirements. This adaptability makes it suitable for a wide range of businesses and scenarios.
5. Project-Level Insights
While Harvest’s reporting features are limited, its project-level insights help track progress and monitor time allocation within specific projects.
Harvest Limitations
1. Limited Reporting Capabilities
Harvest’s reporting features are basic and primarily focused on visualizing time-tracking data. Key metrics, such as utilization rates, are either absent or overly simplified. For example, Harvest only offers a percentage of billable hours vs. tracked hours, which is insufficient for robust utilization tracking.
2. Data Integrity Issues
Changes to historical data, such as hourly rates or budgets, are applied retroactively across all past entries for recurring projects. This can distort historical reporting and undermine data accuracy, particularly when analyzing long-term trends.
3. Simplistic Data Hierarchy
Harvest uses a three-object hierarchy:
- Client
- Project Name
- Project Phase
Which may feel restrictive for organizations that need more granularity. While additional metadata can be included in notes, this workaround may require advanced integrations and is not intuitive for all users.
4. Lack of Capacity Planning
Harvest’s data structure needs a capacity model, which limits its ability to effectively support capacity and utilization planning. External tools are often necessary to fill this gap, adding complexity to workflows.
6. Potential for Over-Simplicity
While simplicity can be a strength, Harvest’s straightforward approach may feel naive in some scenarios. Advanced users seeking more robust data modeling and integrations might need more.
5. Edge Cases for Metadata
Harvest’s limitations can be a dealbreaker for businesses requiring detailed metadata or intricate reporting structures. While workarounds exist, they often require external integrations and technical expertise.
Streamline Time Tracking with Tackle
Tackle revolutionizes time tracking through seamless calendar integration, eliminating the need for manual logging. Our platform automatically captures and categorizes your time, providing actionable insights through intuitive dashboards and reports. We’ve built everything you need into one seamless package:
- A smart tagging system that works your way
- AI-powered automation to handle the tedious stuff
- Flexible reporting tools to track what matters
- Intelligent time capture right in your browser
Trusted by teams at Roblox, Deel, and Lightspeed Ventures, Tackle helps executives, team leaders, and customer-facing professionals understand and optimize their time allocation.
- Simply connect your Google or Outlook calendar
- Set up custom tags and automations
- Gain valuable insights into how your team spends their time
Whether you’re tracking strategic initiatives, measuring team efficiency, or ensuring resource optimization, Tackle transforms time tracking from a chore into a powerful decision-making tool. Start using our automatic time tracking software for free with one-click today!
Harvest vs Toggl, What Are The Key Differences?
Time Tracking: The Core Feature of Both Tools
Time tracking is the main feature of both Harvest and Toggl, but they differ in execution.
Harvest
Harvest provides simple and intuitive ways to track time. You can use a “Start” and “Stop” timer as you work or manually enter hours into a timesheet. It’s particularly user-friendly for businesses that prefer to track billable hours for projects, tasks, or clients.
- Manual Input Options: Users can bulk-enter their weekly hours into timesheets, making it convenient for teams that review their work retrospectively.
- Notes for Clarity: Harvest allows you to add notes to time entries, ensuring context is captured for every task logged. This is useful for reviewing tasks or generating detailed client reports.
Toggl
Toggl Track offers more flexibility with manual and automatic time-tracking options:
- Manual Tracking: Similar to Harvest, you can start and stop timers or manually input hours.
- Automatic Tracking: Toggl’s unique Autotracker feature detects when specific software is opened or keywords are typed, automatically starting timers based on user-defined triggers. This feature is ideal for professionals who often switch between tasks or need seamless tracking.
Key Takeaway: Harvest provides a straightforward manual time-tracking experience with notes and bulk entry options, while Toggl shines with its innovative automatic tracking capabilities.
Productivity Monitoring: Keep an Eye on Your Team
Both tools aim to enhance productivity through insights, but their approaches differ.
Harvest
Harvest focuses on team and individual productivity:
- Team Monitoring: The “Team” tab shows who’s working, who’s tracking time, and who might be overworked or underutilized.
- Billable Insights: Harvest enables you to monitor billable versus non-billable hours, helping you assess how efficiently time is spent.
- Trend Analysis: Managers can compare tracked hours against employees’ capacity to identify productivity bottlenecks.
Toggl
Toggl emphasizes oversight and automation:
- Capacity Monitoring: Toggl highlights team members at or over capacity and identifies unaccounted time entries.
- Reminders: Automated email reminders ensure team members track their hours consistently, reducing administrative follow-ups.
- Anomalies Detection: Toggl flags unusually short or long time entries for review.
Key Takeaway: Harvest provides a more detailed breakdown of time spent on billable and non-billable tasks, while Toggl leverages automation to streamline productivity tracking.
Project Management: Keeping Your Projects Organized
Managing projects is simplified with both tools, but they cater to different use cases.
Harvest
Harvest integrates time tracking and project management through detailed reports:
- Visual Insights: View tracked hours, budgets, billable amounts, and costs in one place.
- Budget Tracking: Harvest allows you to set hourly or fee-based budgets, providing a clear view of project progress and profitability.
Toggl
Toggl’s project dashboard offers a high-level overview:
- Time Estimates: See how long tasks or projects took to complete and set expectations for future timelines.
- Alerts: Toggl notifies project managers when projects reach predetermined progress milestones, helping to address delays proactively.
- Expense Management: Toggl allows tracking time alongside project expenses, ensuring accurate billing.
Key Takeaway: Harvest is ideal for budget-focused project management, while Toggl’s project alerts and time estimates are better suited for dynamic workflows.
Invoicing: Get Paid for Your Hard Work
Both tools support invoicing but differ in sophistication and customization.
Harvest
Harvest provides robust invoicing capabilities directly within the platform:
- Automated Invoices: Convert billable hours and expenses into invoices seamlessly.
- Payment Integrations: Harvest integrates with Stripe and PayPal for faster client payments.
- Invoice Tracking: Monitor the status of invoices (e.g., sent, viewed, paid) and follow up on outstanding payments.
- Revenue Overview: The invoice graph provides an annual revenue summary, helping businesses assess financial performance.
Toggl
Toggl offers simpler invoicing features:
- Billable Hour Tracking: To ensure invoice accuracy, tag time entries as billable or non-billable.
- Blank Invoice Templates: Create and customize reusable invoice templates.
- Rate Assignments: You can assign billable rates by workspace, team members, or projects, making it easier to manage payroll and client charges.
Key Takeaway: Harvest’s invoicing is more advanced and integrated, ideal for businesses needing comprehensive financial tracking. Toggl’s invoicing is simpler and focuses on tagging and templates.
Integrations: Extend the Functionality of Both Tools
Integrations extend the functionality of both tools, but their ecosystems differ.
Harvest
Harvest supports 70+ integrations, including:
- Productivity: Google Workspace, Outlook, Google Calendar.
- Project Management: Asana, Trello, Jira.
- CRM and Communication: Slack, Zendesk.
- Reporting: EasyBI, Grow.
Toggl
Toggl boasts over 100 integrations, including a browser extension for seamless time tracking in other apps:
- Project Management: Basecamp, QuickBooks Time, Asana.
- Communication: Slack, Gmail.
- Development Tools: GitHub, Visual Studio.
Key Takeaway: Toggl offers broader integration options, especially for development and technical teams, while Harvest focuses on business and productivity tools.
Platform Compatibility: Where Can You Use Each Tool?
Both tools are accessible across major platforms, but there’s a key difference.
- Harvest: Available on Mac, Windows, Android, and iOS. However, it lacks support for Linux.
- Toggl: Supports Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. It also offers browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox.
Key Takeaway: Toggl is more versatile, especially for Linux users and those who prefer browser-based tracking.
Pricing: How Much Will Each Tool Cost You?
Pricing plans vary based on features and team size.
Harvest
- Free Plan: One user, two projects.
- Paid Plan: $12/seat per month.
- Trial: 30 days, no credit card required.
Toggl
- Free Plan: Up to five users, includes manual time tracking and Pomodoro timer.
- Starter Plan: $10/user per month – billable rates, project templates.
- Premium Plan: $20/user per month – scheduled reports, project dashboard.
- Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing for large teams.
Key Takeaway: Harvest’s pricing is straightforward with fewer tiers, while Toggl’s plans cater to diverse team needs with more granular options.
Related Reading
- Time Tracking Software for Accountants
- Time Tracking Software for Architects
- Time Tracking Software for Developers
Choosing The Best Time Tracking Software
Keep It Simple: Find a Time Tracking Tool Your Team Will Use
Every time you introduce new software, there’s a learning curve. You might need to:
- Migrate data
- Set up users and accounts
- Add clients, etc
That all takes time. But after the initial setup, you want software to make your life easier. An app with many bells and whistles may be great for management, but tracking time should be as intuitive and easy as possible.
The simpler it is for your team to track time, the better. Managers might want detailed reporting features or aspects. But when you’re assessing time-tracking tools, ask yourself how easy it is for your team to start and stop the timer. Another way to evaluate ease of use is to try their customer support resources to answer questions like:
- Does the app offer articles and videos that you can watch or share with your team?
- How responsive is their support team if someone has a question or issue?
- Check reviews of the software and see if other customers mentioned the quality of customer support.
Some tools have a live chat, which can provide estimated wait times. You can compare these to understand how difficult it is to contact someone. Beyond simplicity, look for the best automation that fits your company’s needs like:
- Does the app send reminders to start tracking time or to stop tracking when someone goes idle?
- Can it automatically start tracking based on location?
- Does it include scheduling so that you can see if shifts start late or leave early?
These are all features that simplify time tracking. Look for these to ensure your new time-tracking solution is easy for everyone.
Find a Tool With All the Features You Need
Think about what features you want before you sign up. Having one solution is a lot better than piecing apps together and resorting to spreadsheets to bring it all into one view. Do you just need it to track employees’ time? Or would you also like to create project budgets and manage payroll?
Write down a list of all the features you want and prioritize them so it’s easier to weigh your options. Most businesses would benefit from a time-tracking solution that includes the following features:
Tags and Properties for Better Organization
The ability to tag and categorize calendar events adds significant flexibility to your time tracking. Tags and properties let you attach metadata to events, enabling you to track details like clients, projects, or specific task types.
This level of customization ensures that your time-tracking system doesn’t just capture hours. It provides context. By tagging work with project or client names, you can generate reports that offer deeper insights into time spent across different activities.
Intuitive Reporting with Interactive Dashboards
A good time-tracking tool doesn’t just collect data; it helps you make sense of it. Look for software with intuitive reporting capabilities, such as interactive dashboards and visually appealing charts. These tools make it easy to summarize and analyze time data at a glance.
You can quickly identify trends, measure productivity, and adjust project strategies by clearly presenting information. This feature is particularly valuable for stakeholders who require regular updates without diving into raw data.
Auto-Tagging and Auto-Sync for Efficiency
Manual data entry can be time-consuming and lead to inaccuracies. Software with auto-tagging and auto-sync capabilities eliminates this issue by automating the process.
The tool can automatically categorize tasks and sync timesheets with predefined rules, ensuring your data is always up-to-date and accurately logged. This automation allows teams to generate timesheets or custom reports on demand, giving them real-time insights into productivity and enabling quick adjustments to operations.
Calendar Extensions for Streamlined Tracking
For many professionals, calendars are the primary hub for organizing tasks and schedules. A time-tracking tool with a calendar extension simplifies the process by letting you document hours directly within your existing calendar interface. This approach reduces the need for additional tools or duplicate entries.
Make Sure the Time Tracker Integrates with Your Favorite Tools
It’s important that the time-tracking tool you decide on can integrate with the tools you already use. For example, a sales team will need a tool to integrate with its sales reps’ CRM software.
If you’re looking for a time tracking solution to track your customer support team’s time, you’ll want to look for one that can integrate with your help desk software. Checking for integrations before you sign up can save you from the hassle of moving things over later on.
Start Using Our Automatic Time Tracking Software for Free with One-click Today
Automatic time tracking software does exactly what its name suggests — it automatically tracks the time you spend on different tasks. Instead of manually starting and stopping timers, this software tracks time in the background as you work. It captures your activity, logs this information for you to review later, and generates reports based on it.
Automated Time Tracking for Coding Projects
This process eliminates the tediousness of time tracking and helps create more accurate records. For example, suppose you are working on a coding project. In that case, automatic time tracking software might log your time spent in different areas of the code repository and any time spent in related documents or communication tools. This helps you uncover helpful information about your time allocation and productivity to help you get back to work faster.
Customizable Time Tracking for Tailored Insights
You can also customize automatic time tracking software to fit your workflow. For instance, you can set up rules to create reports based on your coding tasks or activities in particular software programs. This further streamlines the time tracking process to help you seamlessly optimize your productivity and time management skills. Developers love automatic time tracking software because it helps remove the burdensome nature of traditional time tracking so they can focus on what they do best: coding.
