5 ActivTrak Alternatives You Must Try For Breakthrough Productivity

5 ActivTrak Alternatives You Must Try For Breakthrough Productivity

Remote work has been a revolutionary trend for businesses across the globe. But managing remote teams can pose significant challenges like tracking individual and team progress, fixing potential communication gaps, identifying billable hours, and other management concerns. Modern managers are using different SaaS tools like ActivTrak to solve most of these challenges. Without any further ado, let’s get right into it.

What is ActivTrak?

ActivTrak is an employee productivity tool that allows managers like you to monitor remote teams by collecting data about employees' productive and non-productive activities, placing them into intuitive dashboards, setting individual and team goals, and doing a lot more.  

Core features

• Performance evaluation to increase productivity
• Time tracking to record work patterns
• Burnout prevention to ensure a good work-life balance

What it lacks?

• Non-invasive time tracking
• Project management module to assign tasks to users and track project-wise performance
• A simple and easy to navigate interface for smaller teams

5 ActivTrak Alternatives

ActivTrak is just one of the many SaaS tools that you can use to enjoy a productive remote team. There are several ActivTrak alternatives that you can try and probably prefer as your daily time tracking and productivity tool. Here are 5 of our best picks you can start with: 

1. DeskTime

DeskTime is a time tracking and productivity software that allows users to monitor their computer usage, track tasks and projects, analyze productivity trends, and generate reports.

DeskTime is an automated time-tracking tool that helps you track employee activities throughout the day. You can do it by tracking the time your team spends on apps, URLs, documents, etc., which allows you to keep a record of employee data.

The collected data is then used to identify and group productive and non-productive hours or time spent on specific areas, and is finally reproduced in a detailed report form. You get insights into your team's individual performances and areas of improvement.  

It also provides an in-built Pomodoro timer which allows your employees to have focused work sessions, enhancing their daily productivity levels. You can also integrate DeskTime with multiple third-party apps for a more seamless workflow. 

Popular features

• Private time: Employees can pause the timer while on breaks. The app will stop tracking activity during this period, ensuring that the time that shows up on the custom reports reflects the accurate work time. 
• Automated screenshots: DeskTime allows managers to keep employees under surveillance by capturing screenshots at irregular intervals, in stealth mode. The screenshots that catch unproductive activities are also highlighted in the reports. Since employees are unaware when the screenshot is being taken, they're likely to focus on work instead of spending their time slacking. 
• Booking: The booking feature helps you book meeting rooms, parking spots, and office gadgets. However, this feature is more useful for hybrid teams rather than fully remote employees. 

2. timegram

timegram is a privacy-first time-tracking and performance management tool designed to simplify workflows for managers and employees. It provides all the right features required for effective project and team management while giving employees control over logging work-related activities only.

It allows your employees to take charge of their productivity by showing performance insights, which helps them identify and work on their unproductive activities.

The app comes with a dedicated desktop app called Highlights, which captures the entire daily activity of employees, groups them into app blocks, and neatly presents them on the timegram dashboard. Individuals can select activities and log them into relevant tasks, skipping non-work-related activities. By doing this, timegram promotes a culture of trust and accountability, which are proven to boost team productivity.

timegram turns data from employee logs into actionable insights, which you can use for improved project planning or task allocation. 

What's more?  You can:

• Assign daily capacities to track individual progress
• Set hourly rates for each individual to monitor billable hours and costs incurred 
• Generate accurate invoices based on the time spent on tasks with a few clicks
• Get detailed reports to analyze individual and team performances

All in all, timegram is one of the best ActivTrak alternatives on the market, as it packs all the right features to make your remote team efficient and productive.

Popular features

• Employee-friendly: timegram is all about fostering accountability with autonomy, which is why the tool does not have any surveillance features like screenshots, webcam monitoring, keystroke tracking, etc. The idea behind the privacy-first policy is that trusting employees with work responsibilities and promoting accountability increases overall team productivity.
• Effortless time tracking: Working on daily tasks is often quite hectic, with calls lined up and emails waiting for a reply. Amidst all of this, employees are quite likely to forget to turn the tracker on and thus lose data from potentially the most productive time of their day. timegram's desktop app auto launches upon starting your laptop, making sure all activities are tracked accurately. 
• Advanced project planning: timegram provides efficient project and task planning through its dedicated project management feature. You can easily create projects, and tasks/subtasks within those projects, assign them to individuals and follow the progress. The simple and easy-to-use interface makes project planning and monitoring a breeze for you.
• In-depth Reporting with Insights You can access detailed individual and team performance reports with insights such as the time taken on particular tasks, actual vs estimated capacities, projects/tasks completed in most or least time, billable hours, ongoing task list, and much more.

3. Insightful

Insightful is workforce analytics and productivity software that helps you work in a more informed way with actionable data insights.

Insightful, formerly Workpuls, is a time-tracking tool that provides employee insights to improve productivity and performance. It captures employee activities in real time and uses surveillance tactics to monitor the activities of remote employees and the number of hours they work on projects. 

You can use its Project Overview feature to create and assign projects. Once the employee begins working on them, the tool automatically takes screenshots of their desktops as proof of how the employee has been spending work time. All of these insights are available on your main dashboard.

Insightful also highlights employees' time away from the desk during a work shift, ensuring you get a complete picture of your team's daily activity.

Popular features

• Customizable analytics dashboard: Analytics dashboard contains a lot of information about teams and individuals you can use to analyze performances and track progress. You may not need some of that data, so you can easily customize the dashboard as per your preferences.  
• Screen monitoring: This feature enables you to tailor the dedicated screen-recorder app to your needs: the intervals you want to take screenshots in, the activities you want to be highlighted, etc. You can adjust how strict or flexible you want to be with surveillance.
• Balance workloads: a primary feature of this tool is that it allows you to keep an eye on task overload. If you see an employee is overworking and at risk of burnout, you can readjust the workload accordingly, allowing you to ensure employee wellbeing at all times. 

4. Teramind

Teramind is an employee monitoring and insider threat detection software that offers advanced features such as keystroke logging, email monitoring, file tracking, behavior analysis, and automated alerts.

This ActivTrak alternative comes with some unique features, like Insider Threat Prevention and Business Process Optimization, which allow you to make the most out of your remote team management experience. 

Its intelligent data collection feature enables the tool to analyze data and redesign workflows for optimal outputs. You can take a deep dive into different project stages to identify each employee's workflow by seeing the frequency of breaks, productive hours, and non-productive time. 

Teramind also allows you to watch employees' activity in video sessions recorded by the app to see precisely what and how individuals worked. However, the app is configured to pause recording whenever employees indulge in personal activities like opening their banking app.

Popular features 

• Insider Threat Prevention: This feature allows you to protect critical data and business information on Teramind from intruders or compromised employees. The app takes a proactive approach to identify potential threats like data exfiltration through emails and blocks them. 
• Employee Monitoring System: The tool collects employee data by tracking their activity and creates relevant insights based on it so you can make decisions regarding resource allocation. Teramind's employee monitoring system also helps you identify bottlenecks so you can take measures to resolve them and streamline your work progress. 
• Data Loss Prevention: time tracking and project management software capture large amounts of user data daily. This internal data is private and needs to be safeguarded. Teramind's data loss prevention feature secures your data from accidental losses by keeping a close eye on users signed into servers. 

5. BetterCloud

BetterCloud is an employee productivity tool that enables you to maximize your team's potential through a transparent workflow. 

It is a no-code software that helps managers like you manage teams effortlessly and efficiently. 

The tool helps promote a collaborative working environment by consolidating redundant apps. By allowing swift access to materials, apps, and groups, BetterCloud also makes off-boarding hassle-free through its automated access revoking feature while keeping company data safe.

Overall, it's a good tool but with limited features regarding day-to-day remote team and project management. 

Popular features

• Data Protection: It detects sensitive data within the tool and automatically mitigates potential threats. This proactive approach allows you to keep data safe at all times. 
• No-code workflows: BetterCloud is an excellent tool for people with little to no code backgrounds. This feature maximizes operational efficiency by enabling the full potential of the app. You can also automate recurring administrative tasks, which spares time to focus on more primary business functions. 
• Least privilege access: This particular feature in BetterCloud is designed for users who deal with a particular list of applications or files. Through this feature, you can limit their access to those files and apps only, keeping them from getting their hands on critical business data. 

Which ActivTrak Alternative Should You Go For? 

We compared the above mentioned list of tools based on the following factors:

• Employee privacy 
• Accurate insights for team productivity  
• Ease of assigning projects and tasks to users
• Accurate invoice generation 
• Visual dashboard to analyze individual and team performances
•  Additional features

Based on these parameters, we recommend timegram – a non-invasive time tracking and project management tool. It integerates all the right features that make project and resource management simple and effective for managers like you.

Learn more about timegram today.

Not sure yet? Start with a free trial!

FAQs

Can ActivTrak see your screen?

Yes. Managers using ActivTrak can take screenshots of employee activity.

How do I know if my employer can see my screen?

It depends on which time tracking tool your employer is using. Most time trackers use invasive tactics to spy on teams. There are very few apps that use no surveillance tactics and rely purely on trust and accountability. You can look up the tool your organization uses to find out if your employer can see your screen. 

Does Workpuls screenshot?

Yes, Workpuls takes screenshots of employees randomly if the manager has automated it. The tool also allows managers to take manual screenshots. Furthermore, managers can also set instances when the app will take a screenshot, for example, whenever a user launches YouTube or Facebook.

How do you track what employees are working on?

There are several ways managers can track employee activity using time tracking tools. The most common way of tracking what employees are working on is by taking screenshots. Some time tracking tools also enable managers to monitor employee desktops in real-time. However, such tactics have been found to reduce employee productivity. An ideal way to make teams more productive is to promote a culture of trust and accountability.