Toggl Track, Harvest and Clockify are the three names that come up whenever someone starts looking for time tracking. All three are mature products that work. They differ less in what they track than in where each one stops: at the timer, at the invoice, or somewhere in between.
A disclosure first: we make TimerOS, which competes with all three. It appears in this post, along with a section on exactly when one of the other three is the better choice. TimerOS was released on 21 July 2026, ten days before this post, and in several situations it would be the wrong recommendation.
The comparison
Seven rows, one fact per line, with a source link next to every competitor claim.
What Toggl Track is best at
Its strength is reach. Toggl Track runs on the web, Windows, Mac, iOS and Android, and its browser extensions let you track time from inside 100+ tools. If your work already happens inside other software, that matters more than any feature list.
It also has third-party security credentials: an ISMS certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and a completed SOC 2 Type II attestation. Data is encrypted at rest and in transit, and EU customers are served by Toggl OÜ, a company incorporated in Estonia and subject to EU law (security page). And Toggl has taken a public position worth quoting in full:
We will never have features for screen recording, location tracking, keystroke tracking, or webcam monitoring.
Choose this if your team uses different operating systems, your tracker needs to work inside Jira, Salesforce or a hundred other tools, or your procurement team needs third-party attestations today.
What Harvest is best at
Harvest is built around the path from invoice to payment, 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, the connection is ready to use.
Of the four, it also monitors the least, by design. Its own FAQ states 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 does not expire: $0 forever for one seat and two projects, with time tracking, invoicing and expenses included (pricing page).
Choose this if you bill per project or per task from a timer, you want invoicing and accounting to be one continuous flow, or you simply prefer that nothing on your computer monitors what you do.
What Clockify is best at
Clockify competes on price and platform coverage. It starts at $3.99 per seat per month billed annually, with five tiers up to Enterprise at $11.99 and kiosk-only seats from $0.79. It has desktop apps for Mac, Windows and Linux, mobile apps for iOS and 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.
It is also the only one of the four with screenshots that managers can see, and its documentation spells out their limits. Screenshots are a Pro feature. They are taken at random five-minute intervals, only while the timer is running and the desktop app is active. They are blurred by default and deleted after a year, and every workspace member is notified when capture is switched on. Auto tracker data is kept separately: it never leaves the local machine and is deleted after 45 days. Teams that need EU data residency can pick a region on Pro (docs).
Choose this if budget is your main constraint, you have Linux machines, or you need kiosk tracking on shared devices.
Where TimerOS loses today
We put this section before the pitch on purpose. A ten-day-old product has plenty of gaps, and you would find them in the first week 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 but has not shipped, and there is no Linux or iOS app. The web dashboard works in any browser for managing projects, people and billing, but it has no timer.
- Your tracker must live inside tools like Jira, Slack, QuickBooks or Xero → look at Toggl Track or Harvest, and check their integration pages for yours. TimerOS has none of those integrations yet. If your admin work already runs through connected tools rather than email and spreadsheets, TimerOS is not an option for you today.
- You want a long-proven timer-to-invoice workflow → Harvest is the safer choice. TimerOS matches tracked time to your open tasks automatically (beta). Since v1.15.0, time-and-materials invoices bill those tracked hours, but only for projects with a resource budget. In Harvest, the timer-to-invoice workflow is the core of the product and long established.
- 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. Instead, we offer a published commitment that customer personal data is processed in the EU, with every exception named on our sub-processor list.
- You need SSO or an audit log now → Clockify Enterprise ships both today. [src] In TimerOS they are marked “coming soon”, on a tier that is itself in early access.
How the tracking differs
The timer lives only in the desktop app, by design: reading the active window and classifying it on the device takes a native app. That classification step is where TimerOS differs.
Toggl Track and Clockify both capture activity in the background without a timer running, so “it tracks by itself” is not what sets TimerOS apart. Toggl’s help page says Timeline “gets recorded automatically in the background… and you have enabled the recording”, and it 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 products, the captured 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 works out the project from the activity it recorded.
They give you a list to turn into time entries. TimerOS classifies the activity on the device and keeps the classification.
The TimerOS desktop app classifies the activity in the active window as productive or idle on your own computer, and keeps that label. Our server receives hours per day for each activity state, not a record of what you had open. The window title, the application name and, where domain rules or task matching need it, the browser host are read in memory to make the decision and are not sent.
Two caveats, so you hear them from us first. First, 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. Second, the task matching mentioned above assigns tracked time to your open tasks. It runs on the device, is in beta, and you can review and undo every assignment. The privacy design is written up separately.
What you get in one system
The other half of the argument is scope. Below is what TimerOS has today and which tier each feature is on, because a feature on a tier you do not buy is not a feature you have.
What Startup adds (€15/user/mo annually)
- Shifts, scheduling, leave and time-off, and approvals.
- Team management within a single company-wide department, team performance, company and team goals, and awards.
- Five built-in role presets over a model of 228 separate permissions.
- 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 in early access. You get it by talking to sales, not by signing up, and three of its advertised features (SSO/SAML, audit log and dedicated support) have not been released. The fourth “coming soon” item is integrations, meaning third-party integrations other than the AI assistant connector, the only one released so far (as of September 2026).
The trade-off is a younger product with two integrations (an AI assistant connector and a GitHub connection for AI employees) and one desktop platform. In return, projects, invoices, the client’s own login and the schedule sit in one place, under one subscription. Whether that is a good deal depends on how many of those you pay for separately today.
The one structural difference
Each product’s own documentation shows where it draws its boundary, so we do not need to describe anyone in our own words. Harvest documents scheduling as a second product on a second invoice and accounting as an integration. Toggl Track documents invoicing as a PDF you download, noting that generated invoices are not saved in the app. Its six access levels are all internal to your organization. Clockify puts invoicing, 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 design, and 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 switch
Small Windows teams and EU-based solo consultants who find tracking hours easy and everything around it hard: invoices built in a separate tool, client requests scattered across email, and a schedule in a spreadsheet. You can see what each tier costs before talking to anyone.
If none of that describes you, one of the three above is a better buy today, and the section on where TimerOS loses tells you which. We would rather you found that out here than in week two.