15 Best Tools for Project Time Tracking

  • Kate Borucka
  • January 8, 2024
  • 16 min read

Different projects require different approaches to working hours tracking and measuring team performance. A good project time tracking app can help you become a better project manager, improve your productivity, and also increase project profitability. All you have to do is choose the right software. However, the market is full of time tracking apps that suit different project management solutions.

Luckily, we know how to help you choose the one to track project profitability effortlessly.

What Is Project Time Tracking?

We are all very much surrounded by projects. Either when working as a freelancer, remote worker, or in a larger organization. That concerns project managers in particular. They have to keep a hand on all processes relating to project delivery. Since managing projects requires lots of energy and the ability to pay attention to details, great time management skills and tracking different aspects of a project may be challenging.

One of the ways to tackle this challenge is to use the project time tracker app. It will save much of your time and enhance the process of project management.

But what exactly is project time tracking? It is the practice of tracking a project’s time to ensure it meets the deadline. But it is more than just that. Project hours tracking allows for allocating resources appropriately, monitoring all processes in real-time, and implementing the project on time, avoiding dangerous scope creep.

If you track time and track project profitability, you can not only keep your finances under control but also gain insights and a better understanding of resource usage, which is crucial for future projects. Understanding where you have spent time historically is key to more accurately forecasting for the future and important enough to be worth learning how to do it properly with a professional trainer.

But let’s dig more into why and how to track time and billable hours for your client projects!

Why Track Time for Projects?

Project tracking apps with time tracking can significantly improve business processes and contribute to company growth.

👉 Here are the main benefits of tracking hours for projects with process tracking software:

  • You can monitor employee productivity to help them overcome work obstacles and be more efficient,
  • It collects timesheet data and stores it in one accessible place,
  • Better project planning is possible with real-time insights into the team’s schedule,
  • Improved workflow—tracking the team’s time helps to allocate work better; you can view in real-time who’s working on what – no matter if they’re on-site or remote workers,
  • Better estimates for future new projects and client profitability — time reports give you precise information about hours spent on particular activities so that you can make better estimates,
  • A better understanding of project performance – if you track progress of time consumption, you can estimate more easily if your team will deliver work without missing the deadline,
  • You can control project profitability and make better business decisions for your employees and company—whether you charge enough money, have the right profit margin for products or services against the business costs, etc.
  • Reporting features make it easier to manage projects with accurate and necessary statistics and project data,
  • Payroll support – accurately tracked time with hourly rates and billable hours seamlessly create a list of payments,
  • Pointing out flaws – keeping time and financial data under control, you can discover weaknesses in your project schedules and react fast enough to ensure continuous improvement and deliver work on time,
  • A project management software with time tracking gives you a quick overview of all the essential metrics and your business health.

💡 Check here top project management metrics

What Is the Best Project Time Tracking App?

There are many tools that can be of great help in project time tracking. Even though they share similarities, not all of them function in the same way. Most of the project time tracking solutions are available in a subscription model, only these advanced ones whose services are addressed to teams with high requirements ensure one-time cost. The software existing on the market varies in features, purposes, and aims at different niches.  That’s why choosing the most suitable tool for project time tracking for your business is important.

For this reason, we present the best project time tracking tools todayWhether you are a freelancer, a project leader, or need a simple time recording app, we hope you’ll find the best time tracking app to bring more value to you and your team.

So, no matter if you hire a team of resource managers or need an online timer for your virtual assistant agency, you’ll definitely find a good solution for you among these below!

1.  TimeCamp

👉  Best for: intuitive and automatic project management time tracking for tracking billable time

Time Tracking Reports

TimeCamp is a free time tracking software for unlimited users. It’s suitable for agencies, small and large companies, and freelancers. Whether your employees prefer fixed or flexible work, the tool reports their tracked time and creates an accurate payroll list based on tracked time, billable hours, and hourly rates.

This project deadline tracker helps to automate and optimize different tasks and administrative activities. It also helps you accurately track actual time spent working on specific tasks and projects. What’s more, it turns tracked time into valuable reports that allow a better understanding of how time is consumed over the projects.

Main features:

  • You can easily track project hours and the progress of work and detect possible delays with automatic time tracking features
  • The tool collects valuable time tracking data on tasks and projects, employee time, budget, revenue, costs, and more
  • Decide how to report your project work – you can track time automatically (along with daily activity, if you want) or enter time manually,
  • With extensive reports based on tracked time data collection, you can assess if a project is profitable for your business and predict future project budgets estimates for new ventures,
  • Easy timesheet management with approvals (perfect for approval workflows, with one-click timesheet filling, it copies each time entry)
  • Export business-based data to share with clients and stakeholders or use with other tools
  • Absence tracking allows you to track employee attendance and plan the work of your team members so they can participate in different assignments without harm to other duties
  • You can bill your clients accurately with the feature of billable hours tracking and hourly rates, automatically create accurate invoices based on hours tracked, and send them with just one click
  • Integrations with the most popular apps for project tracking and management, CRM, productivity, and more (including a personal iCal integration for Outlook and Google Calendar),
  • TimeCamp is available as time tracking apps for desktop, web, and mobile; it also has browser extensions for Chrome and Microsoft Edge,
  • Tags let you organize the hierarchical structure of work so you can easily administer similar projects

Pricing

  • Free – a free plan of TimeCamp for unlimited users includes all the essentials – accurate time tracking, unlimited projects, a time clock kiosk, desktop, and mobile apps, idle time detection, and many more,
  • Starter$2.99 per user per month, including unlimited tasks, excel reports export, attendance, time-off, overtime tracking (billed annually)
  • Premium $4.99 per user per month, including one integrations, billable time, budget & estimates, apps & websites tracking, project archiving, and more (billed annually),
  • Ultimate $7.99 per user per month, including unlimited integrations, billable rates, labor costs, invoicing, timesheet approvals, custom user roles, and more (billed annually)

Enterprise – custom pricing; contact sales team for more details

Sign up for free time tracking software to improve your time management.

Register now and start tracking project time!

Check also Google Docs time tracking or Gmail time tracking integrations with Timecamp which make your work smoother!

2. Hubstaff

👉  Best for: employee monitoring for remote teams and field workers

Hubstaff is another popular project time reporting app offering the feature of project time tracking. It’s a time clock system that your employees can install on a desktop or mobile device. You can use it as an employee monitoring system and track the number of hours your employees spend working and their activity. Hubstaff captures screenshots of websites visited with URL and app tracking—suitable for remote and distributed teams to stay up to date and make more informed decisions. And is also a great tool for fleet or GPS tracking to record time and location of work.

This online timer works as a basic project management tool that helps project managers see the work of team members while employees can access their time tracking data to check the progress of work.

Main features:

  • Time reporting with most essential time management features: auto-reminders, idle time detection, manual time entries, time-off management
  • Staff scheduling to assign your team members to a particular project
  • Create invoices based on time tracked with Hubstaff or for fixed payments
  • You can set weekly limits on how many hours you want your employees to work to have the budget under control
  • Setting a budget for a project helps you monitor money spent on it and gets alerts whenever the budget exceeds estimates
  • GPS tracking with geofencing and employee monitoring

Pricing: Free plan is available only for one user and offers limited features. Pricing starts at $7 per month per user.

3. Tick

👉  Best for: straightforward web-based project tracking app for tracking billable hours

Tick is a simple project management time tracker app. This software may be perfect for you if you are looking for an easy project time logging app. It’s suitable for you if you’re a small business owner or freelancer. It works great for those who want to track their projects based on budget.

Tick works in three steps. The first one is simply entering your project into the timecard with all the details you need —a task, the client’s name, notes, and anything that will enhance your project. You can add multiple time entries from any place at any time.

The second step is monitoring the budget. You can quickly check the project’s status, get immediate feedback to stay on track, assign team members to particular tasks, and even set recurring projects.

The last and third step is digging into your reports. That’s a great feature because it gives you a detailed insight into specific work hours spent on work. Moreover, you can export data and reports to Quickbooks, Freshbooks, or a CSV file.

Pricing: Tick’s free plan is available for one user for only one project but for an unlimited number of people. Pricing varies depending on how many projects you need—10 projects – $19 / month; 30 projects – $49 / month; 60 projects – $79 / month; unlimited projects – $149 / month.

4. Harvest

👉 Best for: time tracking with expense monitoring and invoicing

Harvest Inside

Harvest is best for those who need to know where all the time and money spent on the project goes. It will answer all your questions concerning resources and budget in project management. Harvest is a simple time tracking app but offers many helpful features:

  • Tracking time in this tool tracks not only time but expenses, clients, projects, and tasks
  • The timesheets in the visual form help you understand your team’s work and see how much time they spend on different tasks. You see how much, when, and on what tasks people are working
  • With extensive reports, you get information on every single aspect of your project: time spent, hours worked, budget, progress, time left to a deadline, etc.
  • Harvest allows you to integrate with Xero or QuickBooks to create invoices and quickly send them to your clients

This simple project tracking tool software is available as a mobile app, web app, browser extensions, and for desktop.

Pricing: Harvest offers a free plan for 1 person with 2 projects. The Pro version is available for unlimited people and projects at $12 per month.

💡 Learn how to keep track of business expenses.

5. ProofHub

👉 Best for: adding timesheets, tracking time, and creating time reports

ProofHub is a top-rated team collaboration and project management software with a powerful inbuilt time tracking tool, which can be used by teams of any size to efficiently manage all time tracking data in one place. 

From adding timesheets to tracking time manually or using timers, setting time estimates to creating time reports, ProofHub’s time tracking software accurately records how much time you spend on every task. 

You can visualize all-time data of people across all projects, billable hours or non-billable, project progress, and status without the need to jump through projects

Main features: 

  • You can add multiple timesheets to record time data and use them for payroll, client billing, estimation, tracking, and even time management
  • Set time estimates for tasks to define how much time it should take to get work done
  • Manually enter hours it took to get work done and track time spent for billable or non-billable hours manually
  • Record time it takes to get work done using timers. Start and pause them as you switch between tasks
  • Export timesheets and use them for client invoicing, payroll, estimation, and even time management 
  • Create custom time reports of people and projects
  • Limit visibility of timesheets only to the people you want with private timesheets
  • See all time data of people across all projects, billable or non-billable, progress of projects, and status in bird’s eye view without jumping through projects

Pricing: A Free 14-day trial is available. The Ultimate Control plan is priced at $89/month, billed annually.

6. todo.vu

👉  Best for: task management software with time tracking

This tool combines time tracking and project management features. Similar to TimeCamp, todo.vu tracks the time spent on all your activities. It focuses mainly on project details such as setting billing rates on projects and staff, breaking larger tasks into small checklists, file storage, or categorizing work by custom labels.

todo.vu also offers other features that help bring your customer and project management into one place. It allows you to keep track of your customers and information about them, e-mail tasks directly to your clients, or invite them to see information related to them.

If you are looking for a project time tracking tool that will allow you to control aspects of the CRM relating to work, todo.vu is the right tool.

Pricing: Free for a single user with limited features. Business Time plan is $9/user/month

7. Toggl Track

👉 Best for: basic time management with simple project hours tracking

toggl track calendar

If you love simple solutions, Toggl Track is the right tool for you. This timer app gets many praises for being the best minimalistic of all time tracking apps on the market. Nevertheless, its features are quite limited.

Toggl Track works just like most of the time tracking apps. The desktop app tracks your activities and then creates time reports. It lets you track individual tasks or a team’s time.

You have all the information about your work after you log into your account You see the data concerning time spent on work, the progress in a specific task or a project, and see the general overview of how your business is doing. It can be perfect for you if you need simple and free project time tracking software.

However, if you are looking for more extensive features, Toggl Track may not meet your expectations. Especially if you are interested in detailed project time tracking.

Pricing: Toggl Track is free for up to five users and has basic functionalities that allow for keeping track of hours spent on work. For additional features, you need to subscribe to one of the paid plans—at $9 per user per month; Premium at $18 per user per month; or Enterprise with custom pricing and features tailored to your organization.

8. Wrike

👉 Best for: tracking business goals and for those who want to manage projects in a collaboration tool

Wrike is a project management software with the feature of online time tracking. Together, these two options create a functional project time tracking tool.

Wrike is a great web-based project tracking tool for project managers who work with many clients and have to monitor the team’s progress on a daily basis. Additionally, you can customize the tool to fit your needs better.

Main features:

  • You can create projects and divide them into smaller tasks to develop blocks of work with due dates, assigned people, and any other adjustments that are most suitable for you. You can use this feature for deep work to improve productivity
  • Wrike has a feature of managing resources so that you can balance resources and track the team performance,
  • Tracking time and budget assigned to client projects is easy,
  • The tool has a friendly and intuitive interface
  • Wrike project tracking tool allows you to visualize work with Gantt Chart, Kanban boards, or pre-built templates
  • The tool offers collaboration features to better manage the team’s time
  • Pricing: Wrike is free for teams that are starting. Pricing starts at $9.80 per user per month.

💚 Enable our time tracker Wrike integration and get detailed time stats for your projects!

9. Paymo

👉 Best for: teams to manage clients, projects, timesheets, and invoices in one platform

Paymo is an online time logging, project management, and invoicing application for agencies and businesses of small and medium sizes. With its help, you can keep track of the entire lifetime of a project without using any other apps. It is reasonably cheap software with a lot of assets.

It facilitates team collaboration and communication and provides time tracking and timesheet reporting. The tools Paymo offers should be handy in identifying bottlenecks, monitoring and analyzing the time spent on projects and tasks, and generally boosting the team’s productivity. It is available as a desktop and mobile app.

Pricing: Paymo is free for up to ten users and offers limited features. Paid plans include Small Office at $11.95 / user per month and Business at $18.95 / user per month.

💡 Read more about small business time tracking

10. Jira

👉 Best for: time tracking with agile project management

Jira team task management software

One of the niches of project time tracking is software developersJira is a tool aimed at that group of specialists. It may not exactly be a time tracking software, but it works exceptionally well as a tool for monitoring processes of project implementation or development, including time, resources management, project stages, or reports.

One of the best features of Jira is the ability to create a project roadmap that’s connected to your work. You can track progress across teams and projects and easily share your plan with stakeholders. With such a roadmap, you see if the project is on time, share reports with the entire team, and connect with everyone to present the progress.

💚 What’s more, you can check Jira and TimeCamp integration and get even more insights about your team’s work. Our time tracker provides agile teams and professional services with priceless data on tasks-related issues.

Pricing: Jira is a free project management software for ten users. Paid plans start at $7 and depend on the number of users in your team.

11. Smartsheet

👉 Best for: sharing work progress with clients and stakeholders

Smartsheets - business process improvement

Smartsheet is a task management software and tracking app that enhances work in or between teams. It’s a flexible system for managing projects, perfect for organizations working with lean methodology. Smartsheets is a cloud-based tool that helps to plan, manage, and oversee work in one hub. Its clear and simple interface allows having all the tasks-related details in one place and managing multiple projects at once.

You can share your work with clients and stakeholders, review and collaborate, and eliminate manual repetitive tasks. Reports give you insight into organizational data with time entries, and thanks to the dashboard with a real-time view teams have centralized access to all information.

Smartsheet is advanced Kanban software that helps automate work processes and visualize the workflow with boards, kanban cards, or swim lanes. Also, you can customize the software and integrate it with a variety of enterprise apps to enhance work. It’s an extremely powerful tool for demanding users.

It’s a good project management app that automizes and enhances processes in the company and easily tracks time.

Pricing: Smartsheet offers free time tracking in the trial and lets you test all the features. Pricing starts at $7 per user/month with a minimum of three users.

💚  Improve time management in your team and get a robust work time tracker. Two ways to track hours for Smartsheet in one, thanks to Smartsheet time tracking integration!

 12. HourStack

👉 Best for: workflow management and work scheduling with time tracking

HourStack project time tracking app

HourStack is a combination of a workflow management app and project time tracking software. It helps to see, track, and better plan the team’s time.

The app allows managers to create schedules, improve workflow, and organize tools with a single workspace where it’s easy to track project time. HourStack works like a calendar with details on employee working hours.

Main features:

  • An all-in-one visual calendar helps to see and plan your time in one complete view; you can arrange workflow with a drag-and-drop feature
  • You can log time on each time entry (cards with details on work)
  • Simple reports
  • Different workspaces for different clients
  • Team view visualizes workflow and progress of works
  • Integrations with the most popular other apps like Google Calendar, Asana, Trello, and more
  • HourStack offers time tracking apps for web, desktop, and mobile devices to sync your work

Pricing: HourStack offers two pricing plans—Personal at $12 per month for one workspace member; and Team at $15 per member per month.

13. Dovico

👉 Best for: timesheet management and work time recording

Dovico screen

Dovico is a time tracking app that focuses on timesheets and payroll. It’s a project time and expense tracking solution that monitors every hour of your business’ life.

This time recording software helps to automate business processes and administrative work. It’s an online timesheet tool that eliminates paper spreadsheets and documents.

Here are Dovico’s main features:

  • The tool offers rich timesheet management functionalities: review total hours, billable hours, and overtime hours; entering time on the go with the mobile app; timesheet customization
  • Expense tracking with expense sheet and the ability to attach receipts
  • Managing work with setting estimates and setting a budget of hours, assigning employees to tasks, and moving tasks with the drag-and-drop feature for a better arrangement
  • Keeping track of projects with a summary of the most important data
  • Vacation and time off management
  • Project costing, billing, custom overtime rules
  • Built-in advanced reports
  • Workload dashboard for resource planning and scheduling

Pricing: Dovico is free for up to five users. Pricing starts at $8 per user per month.

💡 Read also our article about Best Time Recording Apps

14. YouTrack

👉 Best for: project management and team collaboration

YouTrack team management software

Its aim is to boost productivity of a workflow. YouTrack makes communication between teams more efortless and intuitive. It allows to keep everybody in the loop by using conversations, mentions and reactions. It is available on a web platform as well as on mobile for iOS and Android. It is worth mentioning YouTrack time tracking integration with TimeCamp. 

Main features:

  • Task management- easy task prioritization 
  • Workflows- a great reminder about upcoming deadlines
  • Agile boards—Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban
  • Knowledge base to organize everything in one place—texts, tables, checklists, videos, images, documents, etc. 
  • A variety of reports- help you analyze and manage projects, teams activities, and performance
  • Time tracking with time tracking reports
  • Gantt charts for planning

Pricing:

  • free for up to 10 users
  • for 11+ users pricing starts at $4.40 per user/month
  • also the free 14-day trial is available

15. Flipsnack

👉 Best for: interactive content creation and document sharing 

Flipsnack is primarily known as an online presentation maker that allows users to create and publish various interactive publications like digital flipbooks, brochure templates, magazines, you name it. 

In terms of project management, Flipsnack can be an asset when it comes to documentation and information sharing: users can create and share project documentation, such as proposals, or progress reports. It provides a visually appealing and interactive way to present information to stakeholders and team members. 

When it comes to presentations and client communication, Flipsnack’s interactive flipbooks can be used to create engaging presentations for clients, stakeholders, or team meetings. The software provides a wide range of interactive features, such as videos, audio elements, photo slideshows,GIFs and many more, making presentations more engaging. Its’ interactivity enhances communication and helps in conveying project updates effectively. 

Overall Flipsnack provides a user-friendly content creation platform that can enhance communication, streamline feedback, and present project information in a more interactive way. 

Main features: 

  • User-friendly editor 
  • Wide range of interactive features 
  • Template library 
  • Built-in statistics and Google Analytics integration 
  • Multiple sharing options 
  • Various privacy features
  • Automation 
  • Collaboration – users can create workspaces, manage projects, invite teammates, and assign different roles.

Pricing: The pricing plans start from 14$/month for the Starter Plan, the Professional Plan 35$/month, and the Business Plan is 79$/month these are the Standard Plans, and the Enterprise Plans start from 207.5 $/month.

To Conclude

Project time recording may not be an easy process. The tools mentioned above help you, but you must remember that they are all different. Once you know your organization’s and employee’s needs and requirements, choosing the right tool should be easy.

Every software works differently and was created with a different purpose in the mind of the designers. Make a list of your specifications and start acting with the proper time tracking app!

If you are not sure you found the right time tracker, try TimeCamp for free!

Co-author: Ola Rybacka, Content Specialist at TimeCamp 

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