Time-tracking apps aren’t just tools—they are stolid billable hours. Obviously, that’s the case for freelancers, but as you might have guessed, these tools are equally appealing to remote teams and everyone looking to capture an accurate record of how employees spend or kill time.

Toggl track & Clockify is all the rage nowadays. One can barely talk about time tracking without highlighting these apps’ versatile scheduling functionalities.

And that’s the issue: When two apps go all out like this—staking their claim to the seat of category king—potential users can’t help but pair them against each other hoping to avoid the head-scratching part of decision-making.  

This guide is simply a deliberate effort to help you come to terms with the Toggl track vs. Clokify debate; whichever you choose is all you. 

About Toggl Track 

If questions like, “how did I spend the day? Was I as productive as I needed to be? And where did all the billable hours go?” resounds a familiar echo, you’ve got an idea of the problem Toggl track solves. 

Toggl track is a perfect description of what all the billable hours would look like if you keep tabs on them. Create a Toggl account, click the green button, and do as you please; the purple-colored app will trail every second, regardless of whether or not you input a name for the project you’re working on.

Here is Toggl’s backstory. In 2006, Alari Aho and Krister Haav, Estonian-based software developers (at the time), needed to keep track of their workload, wow clients, and subdue productivity roadblocks; their best guest was Toggl Track. Thankfully, clients loved every bit of it. 

The brand name ‘Toggl’ became a parent company in 2020 after merging with Teamweek (now Toggl plan) and Hundred5 (now Toggl hire). 

About Clockify 

With 11 years of Toggl track on our faces (and a handful of fine time-management apps competing for market share), US-based Nenad Milanovic faced a similar productivity problem. He wanted to know how much time was spent on a project, but nothing fancy or intrusive in this case—just a good old time tracker. 

Simple incentive: make it free for all. Target audience: startups and SMEs in need of an easy and affordable system to track billable hours. Fast forward to this day, Clockify has enabled over 5 million users push for a nice finish to the task at hand. 

As Clockify continues to stand true to its free-forever time-tracking promise, the demand for extra features has opened doors for the growth and development of multiple products. So Yes! Clockify, as of this day, is only partially free.

Along with Clockify, under the COING banner, Nenad has founded productivity tools like Pumble and Plaky. 

Time tracking, Analytics & Payroll management

Overall, amidst the many differences, Toggl track and Clockify thrive on three key features:

Time tracking

Figuring out where your time has gone can be frustrating. To a laudable extent, Toggl track and Clockify’s one-click timer, plus readily displayed and filterable data, enhances productivity. You and your team won’t have to go through hell and high waters to keep track of daily contributions and performance.

Analytics

Whether you want a platform that supports accurate data entry, generate, share, and export customizable reports in PDF, Excel, and CSV formats, or a time tracking tool offering detailed analysis of your work week, Toggl track and Clockify have got you covered.

Payroll management

Billable hours mean more invoices. With Toggl track or Clockify (paid plan), you can have all your employees’ attendance data in one place, minus the messy paperwork – and wave goodbye to manual invoicing. Simply set either app to charge clients by the hour; they’ll automate the whole accounting process.

Toggl track vs. Clockify Philosophies

A word about philosophies: behind every software, you’ll find a set of moral standards, guiding principles, or beliefs, regulating their daily activities—a way of doing things they openly boast and brag about.

Clockify and Toggl track are no different.

Clockify prides itself as a time tracking app existing to make time tracking accessible to students, freelancers, employees, and teams of all sizes, hence their power-packed free-forever plan.

On the other hand, Toggl track believes that productivity monitoring is creepy and the data is pure noise, so it doesn’t support minute-by-minute screenshots or third-party screen monitoring of any sort.

Toggl vs. Clockify at a Glance

Before diving in, here is a summary of my findings. In earnest, students, freelancers, or small teams can’t go wrong using Toggl track and Clockify’s free plan.

Only that, as the tough get going, numbers increase in size, and time tracking becomes more complex, the limited features of free plans won’t hold the waters. When it comes to this, here is my verdict:

If you’ve got a limited budget and need to keep an eye on the productivity level of a close-knit team, go with Clockify. But if you manage a large team, whether or not your budget is a constraint, find a way to make Toggl track work for you.

Toggl Track & Clockify: A Blow-by-Blow Analysis

This software comparison guide won’t be worth anyone’s time (even mine) without a deep dive into how Toggl track and Clockify stack up and how I came about my findings. A blow-by-blow analysis will definitely ruffle a few feathers, and things are bound to get heated up, so brace yourself; we’ve got an uphill journey ahead. 

 

 

 

Toggl track keeps you away from prying eyes  

Above the fold, Toggl track and Clockify’s time tracking feature share a soft spot for multiple attributes. Amongst the many, the fact that you need to switch the timer on or off manually sticks out like a sore thumb. The timer won’t stop because you turned off your PC or mobile. 

Suppose you forget to turn off the timer after a project. In that case, you’d have to modify the total length of the project to have the timer reset to the correct end time—though you can always lessen this hassle with the Pomodoro timer, idle detection feature, or use the calendar to log time after the fact.

On an unparalleled level, Toggl’s time-tracking feature is free of productivity monitoring. You can track hours against clients, projects, and tasks or track against a fixed budget and recurring client retainers without the prying eyes of creepy admins.

However, to spice things up and keep users updated, Toggl track offers a timeline feature that privately records—for personal use— every website and program Togglers view for longer than 10 seconds; basically an all-in-one time tracker for large teams.

Clockify’s timeline isn’t that different; just that, when merged with the desktop app, it screenshots everything. The tracker is built around straight-up time tracking and helps admins keep tabs on productivity and billable work hours across projects. Highlight what you’re working on, categorize your time and, if needed, add a tag; that’s it!

Clockify is obviously not a time management tool for techies or complex time monitoring activities. Close-knit teams and individuals on a budget who don’t like to get distracted by weird commands and clunky user interfaces will find Clockify comforting. 

Clockify allows users to log hours and raise invoices without leaving the app

Generally, Toggl and Clockify offer a comprehensive record of billable hours and how they were tracked. They both support categorization by grouping activities and help differentiate useful tasks from waste.

If you’re a freelancer, student, or company admin, you can seamlessly link Toggl track and Clockify with payroll management tools like Quick books. That way, you’re sure every billable minute gets measured as you track all the things users do on the side.

Creating an invoice with Clockify is relatively easy. Personalize the in-app invoice template with billing address, personal notes, and tax info; select project, then import time, and you’re good to go. You can also group options and round invoices into decimals.

Toggl track doesn’t support in-app invoicing as Clockify does. You’d have to use Toggl’s downloadable template to create an invoice and then back it up with a copy of the reports and analytics file to show the authenticity of your invoice. Though with Toggl track’s exceptionally detailed analytics, it’s safe to say the app eliminates vendor/client trust issues.

Reports & Analytics can’t get any better across tools

It’s amazing how reinvigorated one can feel when they have a detailed understanding of their time. You’d know where all the billable hours go and effortlessly determine whether or not the way you spent your time is true to your priorities.

Clockify, Toggl track and a handful of other unmentioned time-tracking tools take pride in the reports and analytics they offer. However, unlike the two juggernauts of this piece, not all time tracking tools are user-friendly when you want to have statistics and do other things than just entering the time for a task.

The report & analytics section of a Toggl track account will lead you to an entertaining purple-populated interface packed with bars, graphs, and pie charts. It’s not the most professionally looking summary page on the internet, but the filterable data guarantees a client-ready report within seconds.

Clockify’s report and analytics are equivalent to Toggl’s in attributes and segmentation (also filterable). But not as sparkly or as shouty in terms of color coding. To an arguable extent, Clockify’s simple and less intrusive design comes with a professional touch that makes data believable.

For the first time since I set out to run a detailed comparison of these two behemoths, Toggl track and Clockify’s reporting and analytics abilities are identical across tools. This one is a toss-up.

Toggl Track ticks all the right boxes for team management

Tracking the activities of multiple team members can be a drag, even for the most carefree admin. The bare minimum when picking a time tracking tool for team management is that the tool can equate time tracking for everyone and help admins easily find team members who forgot to add their time (or tracked too little or too much)—a system that tracks time for management and leadership as well.

On a balanced scale, you can bank on Toggl track and Clockify to speedily organize everyone’s data into graphs and send them weekly emails. And if, for any reason, a team member fails to work the required number of hours scheduled for the week; you can rest assured an automated email reminder straightening the hard lines will hit their inbox.

Splitting the difference, Clockify’s team management capability is quite robust, but not in comparison with Toggl’s. What I love about Clockify is its kiosk feature which allows your team members to clock in and clock out using a shared device—and later, admins can see their tracked time and attendance in reports.

Toggl track offers a bird-eye view of team management. Onboarding a large team comes with a 30-minute demo showing a detailed walkthrough of all the scopes and creeps. Plus, its organization feature makes billing a breeze and puts business insights at your fingertips.

Thinking abstractly, I didn’t find any feature on Toggl track or Clockify that allows team members to add comments about the working conditions, such as “network issues” for software developers or “heavy rain” for bricklayers. Quite a much-needed inclusion.

Clockify has all the bells and whistles you need to manage projects on a tight leash

It’s easy to confuse activity and productivity, especially when juggling multiple projects. But unfortunately, even on days when team members get lost in the noise and spend billable hours procrastinating, you’d still have to foot their dusty invoices. You now know why time tracking and project management compliments each other.😉

With Toggl track or Clockify, you can connect your calendar tools to see daily and weekly events, duplicate and copy calendar events as time entries, break projects into multiple tasks, add tags to activities, and track specific budgets. You can also preserve data integrity by locking time entries so no one can make changes past a particular date.

Coming down to differences. Personal or company-wide culture is the one true criterion we can use to split hairs between Clockify and Toggl track’s project management capabilities.

If your team needs a tight leash to keep them productive, Clockify’s productivity monitoring feature will make project management a breeze. Otherwise, if you value a creative space where everyone thrives without prying eyes or minute-by-minute screenshots, go with Toggl track.

For the most part, Toggl track and Clockify are not hardcore project management tools. Their task feature, which provides an extra hierarchy level within projects (sub-projects), is quite limited. You’d need to integrate with advanced project management tools like Notion or Coda to get the best of both worlds.

Toggl track brings a whole heap of options to the integration table

In as much as, at a surface level, we might brag about our desire for a time-tracking tool that makes our workflow smarter and more powerful, deep down, below the surface level—where desire gives room to needs—what we are really asking for is a stress-free bill-tracking app that interacts seamlessly with every productivity tool in our wheelhouse.

Part of what makes Toggl track and Clockify newsworthy is that they can serve as a single source of truth for all things productivity. From billable hours to employee performance reviews and task allotment, Toggl track and Clockify bridge the gap and set the pace.

On a personal level, students and freelancers would find Toggl track and Clockify’s browser extension for on-the-go time tracking activities and the automated reminders a God-sent for multiple time-sensitive projects.

From a business perspective, large teams value Clockify and Toggl track’s integrations because they help to seamlessly connect;

• project management tools (Podio, Asana, ClickUp) 
• customer support tools (Hubspot, Freshdesk, Pipedrive), 
• web development tools,(Github, Gitlab, Zappier) 
• productivity tools (Todoist, Timeuler, Google calendar)
• And to build custom integration (webhooks).

Overall, Toggl track offers more integrations than Clockify. Meaning: even as these two time-tracking behemoths exist to serve audiences of different sizes, small and medium enterprises will thrive easily with the ample integrations Clockify offers. At the same time, fortune 500 companies would need the extra seats Toggl track brings to the table.

Both apps offer a feature-rich and intuitive user interface across platforms

As with any SaaS productivity tool, the going gets started—consumers start subscribing—only after they feel the user interface is worth their daily experience.

And to an applaudable extent, Toggl track and Clockify have, over the years, done a great job at exciting subscribers with a frictionless user experience and exceptional cross-platform compatibility.

Be it IOS or Android, Mac or Windows, time tracking is swift and intuitive with both tools. But since this is a comparison article, I know you can’t help but wonder how Toggl track’s purple-dominated user interface stacks up against Clockify’s less intrusive white and blue.

Well, putting color preference aside, Toggl track’s web-app loading time is faster than Clockify‘s by probably a millisecond (or lesser). This is definitely not something that would hinder productivity or make anyone think less of Clockify; just the subtle truth.

Either way, based on cross-platform functionality, distinct features, or durability on multiple operating systems, you can’t go wrong with either app; Toggl Track and Clockify are well ahead of the game.

Clockify offers budget-friendly paid plans

Indeed, success and a well-rested mind go together. Clockify and Toggl track can help you, and your team avoid common stressors at work and keep the load organized even when things sometimes become too much to handle. But not without a catch!

Toggl track and Clockify offer a free forever plan to keep track of unlimited projects and make the most of your time. However, the free plan is quite limited. To meander past the front door and grab time by the throat, you need a Toggl track and Clockify paid plan. 

Here is how they compare:

Toggl Track plans 

• Free plan
• Starter plan: $9 per user 
• Premium plan: $18 per user 
• Enterprise plan: Book a demo

Clockify plans

• Basic plan: $3.99 per user
• Standard plan: $5.49 per user
• Pro plan: $7.99 per user
• Enterprise plan $11.99 per user 

Toggl vs. Clockify: Final Verdict

Any time-tracking app worth its salt will help you change your relationship with time and ensure you reach your goals with less effort and anxiety. But that also means there is much more to an excellent time-tracking tool than timesheet friendliness and minute-by-minute screenshots.

Toggl track and Clockify have proven that they can help users effortlessly achieve more in less time.

You’ve got the facts and figures at your fingertips; it’s now up to you and your organization to decide whether or not either of these all-in-one time tracking apps is worth the expense. Good luck!