Time Trakkr made this page, and Time Trakkr is first on the list. That’s the bias, stated up front so you can price it in. Everything below it is ordered on merit, every figure links to the vendor whose price it is, and each entry says what that tool does better than ours — because a comparison where the author wins every row isn’t worth reading.
Freelancing changes what a time tracker is for. There are no approvals, nobody to report to, and no seat count to negotiate. What is left is narrow and unforgiving: capture the hours without breaking concentration, and turn them into an invoice that gets paid. Then, usually around year two, one more question arrives — which of these clients is actually worth the hours, once you count the ones you never billed.
The good news is that this is the part of the market where free is genuinely good. Clockify, TimeCamp, TrackingTime and Jibble all publish free plans with no seat cap, and Toggl Track and My Hours are free for small numbers. But a free tier with no seat limit isn’t the same as a free tier that does what you need — several of these leave invoicing and billable rates on a paid plan, which for a freelancer is most of the point. The table below says which, so the entries state plainly when free is actually enough.
One more thing worth reading closely: what a tool records while you work. The automatic trackers here earn their keep by watching your screen, and they differ on where that record goes — Memtime keeps it on your own machine and never uploads it, and not all of them do. We went the other way and record nothing in the background at all, which is a genuine trade rather than a free win: it means we are no help at all with the hours you forgot to log.
| Tool | Price | Free plan | Invoicing | Profitability | Approvals | Monitoring | Imports history |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Time Trakkr | Free during invite-only beta | YesFree for now; founding rate later | YesIncluded | YesIncluded, not a premium tier | YesIncluded | NoDeliberately not built. No screenshots. | YesHarvest, Toggl, Clockify tokens or CSV |
 Harvest | From $9/seat/mo billed annually ($11 monthly), plus usage fees | Yes1 seat, 2 projects | YesAll paid plans | YesEnterprise, $14/seat | YesEnterprise, $14/seat | No | YesCSV import |
 Toggl Track | Free for up to 5; paid from $9/user/mo annually | YesUp to 5 users | YesStarter, $9/user — PDF export | YesPremium, $18/user | YesPremium, $18/user | NoOptional private activity log | YesCSV import |
 Clockify | Free for unlimited users; paid from $3.99/user/mo annually | YesUnlimited users | YesStandard, $5.49/user | YesPro, $7.99/user | YesStandard, $5.49/user | YesScreenshots on Pro | YesCSV import |
 TimeCamp | Free for unlimited users; paid from $3.99/user/mo annually | YesUnlimited users and projects | YesStarter, $3.99/user | YesBillable rates on Premium, $6.99 | YesUltimate, $9.99/user | YesOptional app and site tracking | YesCSV import |
 Timely | From $9/user/mo annually ($11 monthly) | NoTrial only | NoExports to invoicing tools | YesProject health and rates | YesPremium, $16/user | YesPrivate to the user by design | YesCSV import |
 Paymo | Free for 1 user; paid from $9.90/user/mo | Yes1 user, 2 projects | YesSolo, $9.90/user | YesPlus, $15.90/user | YesTimesheet approvals | YesOptional desktop tracker | YesCSV import |
 My Hours | Free for up to 5; paid from $4/user/mo annually | YesUp to 5 users | YesPro, $8/user | YesCost rates and margins | YesPro, $8/user | No | YesCSV import |
 TrackingTime | Free for unlimited users; paid from $3.75/user/mo annually | YesNo seat limit, but no rates or invoicing | NoExports for billing | YesBusiness, $10/user | YesPro, $5.75/user | YesOptional auto-tracking | YesCSV import |
 Memtime | From $14/user/mo billed annually | NoTrial only | NoExports to other tools | No | No | YesLocal only, never uploaded | No |
 EARLY | From $7.50/user/mo billed annually | NoTrial only | NoExports for billing | YesBillable rates and goals | No | YesPrivate to the user | No |
Prices verified 2026-08-09 from each vendor’s own pricing page — linked from the tool name so you can check rather than take our word for it. Per user per month unless noted. Vendors reprice without warning; if you find something out of date here, tell us and we’ll fix it.
The back office behind billable work: time, approvals, margin and invoicing in one plan, for teams that bill by the hour.
Nothing — this is our product. We’re first on this list because we wrote it, and the rows below say where the others are ahead.
The long-standing default for agencies that bill hourly, with the deepest invoicing and accounting integrations of anything here.
Invoicing and accounting. Harvest has been doing this for well over a decade, and its QuickBooks and Xero integrations, payment gateways and multi-currency handling are more complete than ours.
The tracker people actually enjoy using, with the widest browser-extension coverage in the category.
The act of tracking itself. The extension puts a timer inside a hundred-plus other tools, the desktop apps are excellent, and idle detection and reminders are better than ours. If your problem is that nobody logs their time, Toggl solves it more directly.
The volume play: a genuinely unlimited free tier and the lowest paid rates in the category.
Price, and it isn’t close. Unlimited users free is an offer nobody else here matches, and the paid tiers undercut everyone. It also has more integrations and a longer track record than we do.
Time tracking plus attendance — kiosk clock-in, leave and overtime alongside the project timer.
Attendance. If you need clock-in terminals, overtime rules and billable-hour reporting in the same tool, TimeCamp covers ground we don’t, and its free tier carries unlimited users and projects.
Automatic tracking: it records what you worked on and drafts the timesheet with AI, rather than asking you to start a timer.
Capturing time nobody remembered to log. The automatic memory of your day is the best answer in this list to the problem of hours reconstructed on a Friday afternoon, and we have nothing equivalent.
Project management and time tracking in one: Kanban boards, tasks, files and invoices around the timer.
Task management. Paymo is a real project-management tool with boards, Gantt charts, task dependencies and file proofing, none of which we do — if you want one tool instead of two, that matters.
Deliberately small: log time against projects, bill it, and little else.
Getting out of the way. It’s the simplest tool on this list and the fastest to set up, and for a small team that wants only timesheets and invoices it’s cheaper than us will ever be.
Time tracking with task management attached, and a timeline view of the working day rather than a list.
The calendar view. Its timeline of the working day is clearer than our timesheet for spotting gaps. The free plan carries no seat limit either — though read the next column before treating that as free forever, because the useful billing features aren’t in it.
Automatic capture that never leaves your machine: it records every document, tab and call locally and you decide what becomes a time entry.
Privacy-preserving automatic capture. The activity record stays offline on the device, which is the one design that answers "track everything" and "don’t surveil me" at the same time. We have no equivalent.
Formerly Timeular. Automatic tracking plus an optional physical eight-sided dice you flip to switch tasks.
Making tracking a physical habit. The tracker device sounds like a gimmick and is the most effective answer in this list for people who simply won’t click a timer. Sold separately from the subscription.
Time Trakkr is free during the invite-only beta — so switching saves your entire current tracking bill.
Based on prices published on each vendor’s site as of 9 August 2026 (USD, before tax) — always confirm with the vendor. When Time Trakkr sets a post-beta price, early teams get a founding-team rate and advance notice.
Clockify, TrackingTime, TimeCamp and Jibble all publish free plans with no seat limit. For a solo freelancer the seat count isn’t the question, though — what matters is whether billing is included, and only Clockify and TimeCamp get close on their free tiers. Toggl Track is free for up to five users and is the nicest of them to use day to day. If invoicing is the point, Harvest is free for one user and two projects.
Often not. The free tiers in this category are unusually generous, and a solo practice tracking a handful of clients can run on one indefinitely. Paying starts to make sense when you need invoicing built in, want automatic capture of hours you would otherwise forget, or begin bringing in subcontractors and need rates and margins per project.
For most people Toggl Track, because the browser extension puts a timer inside the tools they already use and the reminders are good without being irritating. If you’ve tried and failed with manual timers more than once, the honest answer is to stop fighting it and use automatic tracking — Timely, Memtime or EARLY — rather than looking for a nicer timer.
From some of them. Harvest, Paymo, Clockify (from $5.49), TimeCamp, My Hours (from $8) and Time Trakkr all turn tracked hours into an invoice. Toggl Track generates a PDF from its Starter plan. Timely, Memtime, EARLY, TrackingTime and Beebole export instead and expect you to bill elsewhere.
It depends on whether your problem is discipline or recall. Automatic tools record what you were working on and let you turn it into entries afterwards, which fixes the Friday-afternoon reconstruction problem convincingly. The trade-off is that something is watching your screen — Memtime answers this by keeping the record on your own machine and never uploading it, which is the version most freelancers are comfortable with. We chose not to record anything in the background, so we are no help with recall at all; if that is your problem, Timely or Memtime is the honest answer and not us.
Switching from one of these? We import from Harvest, Toggl Track and Clockify with a token, and from anything else with a CSV — clients, projects, rates, people and every hour you have logged, with their original dates. Also worth reading: best time tracking software for agencies.
Time, approvals, profitability and invoicing in one plan, for one person or fifty.
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