Toggl Track, Harvest and Clockify are the three names that come up whenever someone starts looking for time tracking. They are all mature, they all work, and they differ less in what they track than in where each one decides its job ends — at the timer, at the invoice, or somewhere in between.
You should know before you read another sentence: we make TimerOS, which competes with all three. This post names it. It also tells you, in a section of its own, exactly when one of the other three is the better answer — because TimerOS shipped on 21 July 2026 and is ten days old, and there are several situations where recommending it would be daft.
The comparison
Four products, seven rows, one fact per line. Everything here is drawn from the vendors’ own pages, linked in place.
What Toggl Track is best at
Reach and reassurance. Toggl Track runs on the web, on Windows and Mac, as browser extensions, and on iOS and Android, and it offers time tracking from inside 100+ tools via its extensions. If your work already lives inside other software, that matters more than any feature list.
It also has the paperwork: an ISO/IEC 27001:2022-certified ISMS and a completed SOC 2 Type II attestation, with data encrypted at rest and in transit, and Toggl OÜ — incorporated in Estonia and subject to EU law — as the provider for its EU customers (security page). And it has taken a public position that deserves quoting rather than paraphrasing:
We will never have features for screen recording, location tracking, keystroke tracking, or webcam monitoring.
Choose this if your team is on mixed operating systems, your tracker needs to live inside Jira, Salesforce or a hundred other tools, or procurement wants third-party attestations on file today.
What Harvest is best at
Getting paid. Harvest has spent two decades on the invoice-to-cash loop and it shows: card and ACH payments through Stripe, PayPal, recurring invoices, and automatic copying of invoices and payments into QuickBooks Online or Xero. If your bookkeeping already runs on one of those, that is a finished road rather than a project.
It is also the most deliberately hands-off of the four about what it watches — its own FAQ answers plainly that Harvest does not track the websites or apps you use, and does not take screenshots or video recordings. Time comes from a timer you start or an entry you type. Its free plan is unusually durable too: $0 forever for one seat and two projects, with time tracking, invoicing and expenses on the card (pricing page).
Choose this if you bill per project or per task from a timer, you want the invoice and the accounting to be one continuous flow, or you would simply rather nothing on your machine watched anything at all.
What Clockify is best at
Price and coverage. Clockify starts at $3.99 per seat per month billed annually, runs a five-tier ladder to Enterprise at $11.99, sells kiosk-only seats from $0.79, and ships desktop apps for Mac, Windows and Linux alongside iOS, Android and three browser extensions. Its free plan — up to five users since the April 2026 changes — still includes 24/7 email, chat and phone support, which is more than most paid plans anywhere offer.
It is also the only one of the four with manager-visible screen capture, and the design is more considered than the category norm: screenshots are a Pro feature, captured at random five-minute intervals only while the timer is running and the desktop app is active, blurred by default, deleted after a year, and every workspace member is notified when capture is switched on. Its auto-tracker data, separately, never leaves the local machine and is deleted after 45 days. Teams needing EU data residency can pick a region on Pro (docs).
Choose this if budget is the binding constraint, you have Linux machines, or you genuinely need shared-device kiosk tracking.
Where TimerOS loses today
This section comes before the pitch, deliberately. A ten-day-old product loses on a lot of axes and you would find these out in week one anyway.
- You are on macOS or Linux, or your team is on iPhone → use Toggl Track or Clockify. TimerOS tracking runs on Windows 10/11 only; macOS is in active development and not shipped, and there is no Linux or iOS app. The web dashboard works in any browser for managing projects, people and billing — it just has no timer.
- Your tracker must live inside Jira, Slack, QuickBooks or Xero → use Toggl Track or Harvest. TimerOS has shipped none of those. If your admin already lives in a toolchain rather than in email and spreadsheets, this is disqualifying today.
- You want hours attributed to a task automatically → use Harvest today. TimerOS attributes time to activity states, not to projects, so per-task hours are entered by hand. Automatic mapping of tracked time to project tasks is on our public roadmap as committed work with no date attached — which is a plan, not a feature, and you should buy on what exists.
- Your budget is zero, or you cannot put a card down to evaluate → use Clockify Free or Harvest Free. We do not have a free tier, and we are not going to pretend the trial is one.
- Procurement needs attestations today → use Toggl. ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II are on their site and not on ours. What we can offer instead is a published commitment that customer personal data is processed in the EU.
- You need SSO or an audit log now → Clockify Enterprise ships both today. On TimerOS they carry a coming-soon marker on a tier that is itself early access.
How the tracking actually differs
The Windows-only tracker is a consequence of a design choice rather than an oversight, and the choice is worth explaining because it is the part that genuinely differs.
Toggl Track and Clockify both capture activity in the background without a timer running, so “it tracks by itself” is not the distinction. Toggl’s Timeline “gets recorded automatically in the background… and you have enabled the recording”, and records each website and program viewed for over ten seconds. Clockify’s Auto tracker creates a record every time you switch application, tab or document.
In both, the list stays a list until you act on it. Clockify states that recorded activities must be manually converted into time entries; Toggl states that “only you decide which activity turns into time entries”. Neither vendor documents a feature that labels the captured apps and sites as productive or unproductive. Both can start a timer automatically from a rule or preference you set up in advance — Toggl’s Autotracker can even pre-set the project — but neither infers the project from what it observed.
They hand you a list to turn into time. TimerOS makes the judgement on the device and keeps the judgement.
The TimerOS desktop app classifies the foreground activity into productive or idle on your own machine, and what it keeps is that label. What reaches our server is an hours-per-day total per activity state — not a record of what you had open. The window title, the application name, and, where a workspace uses domain rules, the browser host are read in memory to reach the decision and are not transmitted.
Two caveats we would rather state than have you discover. If you correct a classification, that app name and window title are saved on your own machine, in the app’s data folder, so the local model can learn from it. And, as above, time attaches to activity states rather than to projects. If you want the longer version of the privacy architecture, it is written up separately.
What you get in one system
The other half of the argument is scope. These are the things that exist in TimerOS today, with the tier each one sits on, because a capability behind a tier you are not buying is not a capability you have.
What Startup adds (€15/user/mo annually)
- Shifts, scheduling, leave and time-off, and approvals.
- Team management, departments, team performance, company and team goals, and awards.
- Five built-in role presets across a 228-key permission model.
- Your own custom domain on the client portal, rather than the free subdomain.
What Enterprise adds — and the caveat
- Payroll, computed from assigned shifts and approved leave, with configurable earnings and deductions, statutory caps, and per-employee PDF payslips.
- Full expenses — vendor bills and an asset register — and a P&L that includes payroll.
- The org-wide org chart, and fully custom roles rather than presets.
- The caveat: Enterprise is early access. It is a “talk to sales” conversation, not something you can sign up for, and four of the things advertised on it — SSO/SAML, audit log, integrations and dedicated support — have not shipped.
That breadth is the trade being offered, and it is a real trade rather than a free win. You are choosing a younger product with no integrations and one desktop platform, in exchange for the projects, the invoice, the client’s own login and the schedule living in one place instead of three subscriptions. Whether that is a good deal depends entirely on which of those you are currently paying for twice.
The one difference that is actually structural
You can see where each product draws its boundary in its own documentation, without anyone having to characterise anyone. Harvest documents scheduling as a second product on a second invoice and the books as an integration. Toggl Track documents invoicing as a PDF you download, noting generated invoices are not saved in the app, and its six access levels are all internal to your organization. Clockify puts invoicing at Standard, time off and approvals at Standard, scheduling and expenses at Pro, and shows the client a shared report link or a PIN-protected PDF.
Those are all reasonable places to stop. A time tracker that does one thing well and connects to the rest is a legitimate architecture — it is why these three have lasted. TimerOS draws the line somewhere else, and the client having their own login is the part that changes the working week most.
So who should actually switch
Small Windows teams and EU-based solo consultants whose problem is not capturing hours — it is everything around them. The invoice assembled by hand, the client requests living in email, the schedule in a spreadsheet, and a preference for not installing something that photographs the screen. You can see what each tier costs before talking to anybody.
If none of that describes you, one of the three above is a better buy today, and the losses section tells you which. We would rather you found that out here than in week two.