9 ClickTime Alternatives That Will Change The Way You Approach Time-Tracking

Think about it: if you're an employer and you have no idea how much time your employees are spending on each project or task, how are you supposed to make informed decisions about assignments, deadlines, and budgets?

You can't rely on your gut feeling or hope for the best. That's a recipe for disaster.

As post-pandemic conditions and virtual reality usher in a new era of remote work culture, time-tracking software has become a vital part of the workforce management process. By tracking how much time is spent on each project, managers can see which ones are taking longer than expected, which are under budget, and which are on track. 

ClickTime is a cloud-based timesheet application that helps you track and manage employee time from anywhere. It offers a range of management tools that make it easy to understand employee availability, costs, and productivity.

Why Go for ClickTime Alternatives?

As much as time-tracking has become an essential component of remote team management, there are equally valid concerns about the invasive nature of employee monitoring software like ClickTime. Some of its surveillance features might lead to micromanagement and employee dissatisfaction.

According to ClickTime reviews, there are some other issues faced by users:

ClickTime Pricing 

ClickTime pricing might be a layoff compared to its alternatives. It offers a free version, but you must have a subscription to avail most of its useful features. This subscription can be expensive for individuals and small businesses. 

Other Aspects

• Screenshot monitoring
• Unreliable customer care
• Manual timer inputs may lead to costly inaccuracies
• Some users find its interface a bit overwhelming

Top 9 ClickTime Alternatives to Try

Here is a list of the top 9 ClickTime alternatives with similar or varying approaches to time-tracking and productivity management:

1. timegram

timegram is a non-invasive smart time-tracking and project management tool that provides insights into individual, team, and project performances. 

It is the only privacy-first, smart time-tracking platform that respects your team’s privacy and concentrates everyone’s focus on delivering their best work. It offers a range of features that allow you to manage your projects and team members effortlessly.

The Highlights app

timegram offers a brilliant Highlights feature that inventively groups the time spent on all desktop and online applications into Highlights, giving employees the freedom to log only the productive activities while keeping everything else private. It ensures that work is tracked accurately without invading employee privacy.

Visual dashboards

Its holistic visual dashboard allows you to assign tasks to team members and track progress, ensuring effective resource allocation and on-time completions. The intuitive timelines allow for easy project creation and task assignment, providing a clean bird's eye view of planned projects and your team's capacity.

Estimated vs. actual time

But that's not all - timegram also allows you to instantly see estimated vs. actual time spent completing tasks, enabling you to build more accurate and realistic timelines for future projects. Additionally, the deep insights into projects, tasks, clients, costs, and employee productivity that timegram provides, help you to see your team's performance through quick exportable reports.

Timesheet templates

Time tracking becomes easy with pre-built templates for daily, weekly, or monthly timesheets. You can also share productivity reports with stakeholders. Furthermore, timegram enables you to easily convert billable time into detailed invoices and set schedules for recurring payments with just a few clicks, making billing and payments a breeze.

Non-surveillance policy

According to research, 78% of “productivity” tools take screenshots of an employee’s screen based on employer-set conditions. At this point, it is difficult to find applications that strictly follow a non-invasive productivity management approach.

With its privacy-first approach, timegram makes an exception by following a zero-surveillance policy, prohibiting invasive employee monitoring tactics like screenshots, keystroke tracking, webcam captures, and microphone monitoring. This ensures that employees have the privacy they deserve while still allowing for smart time-tracking capabilities.

The only potential downside to timegram is that it might not be suitable for businesses that prefer surveillance bossware. However, for businesses that prioritize employee privacy and productivity, timegram is the ideal Clicktime alternative.

2. Jibble

Jibble is an online cloud-based time-tracking application that helps you streamline tasks, improve productivity, and make data-driven decisions. 

It offers robust time and attendance tracking for businesses of all sizes. Its user-friendly interface makes it easy for employees to clock in and out using their mobile, tablet, or desktop devices.

The software's versatility makes it appropriate for various industries, including remote work, startups, field services, healthcare agencies, education, and office-based companies. It offers biometric recognition and GPS-location tracking capabilities, which ensure attendance tracking and eliminate buddy punching.

It allows you to access real-time timesheets and reports, including overtime calculations and project activity breakdowns, from anywhere, at any time. It provides detailed insights into your team's behavior and productivity, making it a valuable tool for performance reviews, client billing, and invoicing.

While it integrates with popular apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams, some users have mentioned that they would like to see more integration options with other business tools they use. There are also complaints about its GPS location feature not always working accurately, and it can be slightly more expensive than similar apps on the web.

3. Desktime

DeskTime is a popular time-tracking and employee-monitoring app that claims to boost productivity by detailed tracking of employee activities. 

DeskTime offers a variety of project management tools, including shift and absence scheduling, custom reports, and optional screenshots. It provides detailed reports on productivity and website usage. These real-time reports featuring intuitive graphs, pie charts, and bar charts let you visualize the data for a quick view. You can add specific productivity goals and customize reports. 

Its booking feature makes scheduling meetings, appointments, and other important events easy and could be particularly useful for remote or hybrid teams. 

With its URL tracking and screenshots features, however, it can easily lead to micromanaging and invasion of privacy, which is a major cause of employee turnover. Another drawback is the learning curve which can be difficult to navigate for some users and may require additional time and resources to fully utilize all of the features and functions of the app.

Pricing is based on the number of users and is available on a monthly subscription basis. The free plan is limited to one user.

4. Clockify

Clockify is a cloud-based platform that keeps track of employee timesheets and billable hours, project progress, reports, and schedules.

It offers a range of features ideal for businesses of all sizes, digital agencies, NGOs, and educational institutions. It helps you create tasks and projects and set hourly rates for your employees. It has an unlimited free version, but you must update to the premium to access the essential features.

Clockify finds its place among ClickTime alternatives due to its flexible functionality. It allows users to track time using a timer or log hours manually in a timesheet. Users get reminders as well in case they forget to start the timer. Additionally, it is available on the web, mobile, and desktop, so you can easily access it from any device.

It lets you specify the time duration for each project, track employees' hourly rates, view ongoing activities, and visualize time breakdowns for various tasks. Clockify allows you to generate, share, and export customizable reports in PDF, Excel, and CSV formats. 

It also provides integration with other project management tools. However, cheaper options are available in the market with the same features. Users have reported syncing issues where data can be lost or old data keeps appearing.

5. Harvest

Harvest is a cloud-based time and expense management tool that offers time-tracking, project management, scheduling, and invoicing as its key features. It creates visual reports that help you keep projects running smoothly and support your team.

Its user-friendly interface records and analyzes employee, contractor, and consultant time spent on jobs and tasks. These applications can generate invoices based on the time spent on client-related activities, making it easy to bill accurately and get paid quickly.

Real-time reports help you manage your milestones and make intelligent decisions about your business. It supports several integrations and plugins, making it easy to fit into your team's workflow.

It provides time-tracking on multiple devices, such as desktop widgets, mobile devices, Macs, and PC. But the application has some snags as well. Cost is the biggest constraint if you seek a low-cost ClickTime alternative. It is a paid app and requires a subscription to unlock its paid features, which come at high-end pricing. Also, the mobile application is not optimized for use on the go.

6. Insightful

Insightful is a workforce time-tracking and productivity management software that enables you to make informed decisions with the help of actionable data insights.

It provides real-time data about your employee's progress and attendance that can help you manage projects more efficiently and increase your team's productivity. It displays information in a visual form with charts and graphs that make data interpretation much easier.

It claims to increase clock-in efficiency by 15% and daily active work time by 10%. Plus, it offers a range of features, including productivity labelling and tracking, manual time entries for offline work, time and cost budgets for resource management, and detailed reporting features that provide raw data per second.

It supports integration with several plugins and APIs, making the project analytics smoother. Customizable reports and real-time data make it a solid option as a ClickTime substitute. 

On the downside, this app has reportedly not been syncing the clock in time with the system time automatically, and the process takes around 24 hours. This glitch compromises the app's functionality as it can cause inaccuracies.

7. Everhour

Everhour provides over-the-air real-time tracking and project management capabilities on-site and remotely. 

Using this app, you can efficiently handle tasks like scheduling, setting timers, monitoring attendance, reminders and notifications, insightful reports, visually appealing graphs and charts, and managing the finances.

Everhour claims to provide an intuitive and easy-to-use interface that helps you quickly understand the overall functionality. It offers seamless integration with project management tools like Trello, Asana, and Jira, which allows you to manage your projects, and track time from a single platform.

With its budget tracking feature, you can set budgets for individual projects and manage your expenses. It's available across multiple platforms like iOS, Windows, and mobile devices, so you don't have to worry about compatibility. You can manage your project on your work desk or from anywhere.

With all its good work, there are some points of concern to weigh before you subscribe to it. You don’t have the option to buy it in modules, and the overall cost of the package might be a bit too heavy on your pocket if you are tight on budget. Some users also find it difficult to set up.  

8. Toggle     

Toggl is an employee monitoring tool that simplifies project management by helping you keep track of overdue and over-budget projects. 

The application features include setting goals and milestones, real-time tracking, seamless clock-in and clock-out, analytical charts, and managing project expenses.

Toggle has a clean and user-friendly interface making it easy for beginners to get their hands on quickly and familiarise themselves with the app. Integrating with popular productivity tools makes task management easier from a single platform. Its flexible time-tracking capabilities can easily fit into any workflow, whether you're a solo entrepreneur or managing a large workforce.

The bad news is that it has no free plan. The paid features come at a hefty price which can be a major constraint for individuals and smaller businesses. As per reviews, the mobile version is not quite optimized and doesn’t deliver complete information making real-time tracking difficult while working remotely.

9. Apploye           

Apploye is a time-tracking software that monitors employees’ activities, remote teams’ project milestones, and freelancers’ work progress.

It offers time-tracking, offline tracking, employee monitoring, visually appealing reports using graphs and charts for better analytics, and reliable customer support. Training sessions and webinars, invoices and payrolls, billing, and managing expenses are prominent features of Apploye. You can remotely monitor your employees’ activity levels, attendance, and productivity.

You can measure employee productivity through activity levels, daily and weekly timesheets, reports, and random screenshots. You can also track your remote employees through GPS location tracking. You can see the lists of top performers based on the activity percentage and total working hours that encourage employees to always be at the top of their performance.

The downside is that it is expensive and unaffordable if you are looking for a low-cost solution. According to the reviews, some employees find it too intrusive and uncomfortable due to its surveillance features. 

Conclusion 

Let's address the elephant in the room. Time tracking sucks. It's tedious, it's boring, and it makes your employees stressed when they are being constantly monitored. Traditional time-tracking software can often be invasive and hinder employees' privacy, leading to low morale and reduced productivity. 

But here's the thing: not all time tracking is created equal. In contrast to ClickTime and some of its alternatives, timegram enables you to achieve the optimal balance between monitoring and confidentiality that promotes efficiency and preserves the privacy of your employees. 

It is an ideal ClickTime alternative for businesses that aim to increase their productivity by focusing on capacity rather than hours worked on projects.

Discover more about our key features, and sign up today for an ethically innovative time-tracking experience!

FAQS

What are the best click-time alternatives?

We have reviewed a list of top ClickTime alternatives in this blog. timegram, Harvest, and Insightful are some of the best time-tracking substitutes depending on the nature and requirements of your business. You can scroll up to compare the features offered by these apps.

Is there a free timesheet app?

Time-tracking tools come with timesheet applications, and some of them offer free-forever plans. Others have free trials, but you have to upgrade to premium versions for complete functionality. timegram, for instance, is free for individuals and small businesses.

How do you do timesheet hours?

To track timesheet hours, you must record the start and end times of each task or activity you perform during your workday. Subtract your start and end times to calculate the total hours worked on that task or project. You have to repeat the process for all the tasks or projects you work on during the day. This can be done manually using a spreadsheet, paper form, or time-tracking software. 

Time-tracking software can make this process more efficient and accurate by automatically tracking your hours as you work.