Best Time Tracking Apps When You Work From Home

Why should I track my time when I work from home?

In recent years, the rising demand for remote positions has forced organizations and employers to completely transform their labor policies and offer their employees the flexibility to work from home. But no matter if you’re working for a corporation, within a small team, or if you’re self-employed, we all have to agree on one thing – tracking your working hours is crucial. 

But why is it important to track your time at work? 

Well, for starters, it has been suggested that when people work and live in the same place, they don’t have an objective perception of their time. It’s easy to fall within the rabbit hole of overworking, and it’s sometimes hard to maintain a balance. 

Also, in terms of working in a bigger team, employers must track their staff and what they do during working hours. And from an individual perspective, despite improving self-management tracking your time at work is important for sticking to the contracted hours.

It all sounds great, but how do you achieve that? How can you track your time while working from home?

Luckily, thanks to global technology and digitalization advancements, there are countless options that you can choose from. From apps and programs to simple Chrome extensions tracking your time has never been easier. 

So without further ado, let’s dive into this epic list of best time tracking apps when you work from home. 

Which app is best for work from home?

Before you choose a work-from-home time tracker, you should identify your objective. 

Are you a freelancer that needs a hand with keeping track of their time? Or maybe you’re a small team of a few people that are looking for ways to optimize their remote work policy? Perhaps you’re in charge of time reports, and you need to find the best work from home time tracker for your employees? 

Fortunately, there’s an app for everything nowadays. What app can you use to keep track of my hours at work? Let’s take a look at some of the options.

Toggl Track

Toggl Track is one of the best-rated apps for tracking work, and it’s a popular choice among small teams and freelancers. Its intuitive and user-friendly interface lets you make use of its functionality in a pleasant and easy-to-use way.

How it works: Toggl Track doesn’t ask much of you when you start tracking a task. Sometimes tracking apps ask you to create a client, project, and task into your account. However, unlike them, Toggle Track lets you track your time right away, which is one of the app’s best features. As a Chrome or Firefox extension, the Toggle Track icon appears above every web app you use during your work, and you have a continual reminder to track your time. You can also automatically start and stop tracking time based on whether the browser is open or not.

Pricing: Free for up to five users; $9 per user per month for the Starter plan, and $18 per user per month for the Premium plan. Find out more about the features of each plan here. 

Clockify

Clockify is a simple time tracking software that’s designed to help businesses track productivity among their teams. It’s a popular app among freelancers, remote workers, and small and medium businesses.

How it works: Clockify lets you start and stop the timer as you work or enter hours manually. It enables managers to specify the time duration for each project, track employees’ hourly rates, view ongoing activities, and visualize time breakdown for various tasks. 

Pricing: Clockify is free and unlimited, regardless of team size.

DeskTime

DeskTime is a helpful app to keep track of working hours, and it’s mainly used by companies and larger teams. It enables employers to have an overview of their team’s time online and offline.

How it works: DeskTime tracks time by projects and automatically calculates their costs based on workers’ hourly rates. It also generates custom reports, plans employee shifts, vacations, and it calculates overtime pay. 

Pricing: DeskTime has a free version for one user; a Pro plan for $95 a month; a Premium one for $124; and an Enterprise plan for $190. Find out more about the features of each plan here. 

TimeTrack

Time Track is a cheaper alternative to DeskTime. It’s a tracking software used to manage and track projects, working hours, employee leaves, and used resources. It’s known as one of the most efficient time trackers for optimizing time management. 

How it works: It creates timesheets that help you control and evaluate projects. Plans tasks and keeps track of the project performance in real-time. You can track time on the web app or directly on your smartphone.

Pricing: TimeTrack has a free version that’s ideal for freelancers, individuals, and entrepreneurs. The paid plans start from $4 per month per person. 

Harvest

Harvest is a tacking app used mainly by teams. However, it’s equally useful for solo entrepreneurs and freelancers alike. It’s among the best time tracking apps overall, and it’s built to handle a collaborative workload in an easy way. 

How it works: Among other features such as editing, reviewing, and approving team timesheets, the best one is the tracking component. It lets you track your working hours directly from apps like Asana, Basecamp, Slack, Trello. 

Pricing: Free for one user and up to two active projects; $12 per user per month for the paid plan. They also offer a fully functional 30-day trial. 

Timecamp

Timecamp is a tracking software popular among freelancers. It combines features of a time tracker and a lightweight project management app.

How it works: It’s an automatic time tracker built in the desktop app that works in the background. It collects all your information, and it gives you reports and in-depth analyses of your activities.

Pricing: Timecamp has a free version and paid plans starting from $5.25 a month. You can also start with a free 14-day trial.

Toptracker

Toptracker is one of the few and best free time tracking apps for freelancers out there. It’s a combination between a time tracker and a payment processing tool.

How it works: The time tracker is rather traditional – it runs on the web and tracks your activities, and takes screenshots of them. Toptracker’s most useful feature for freelancers that travel frequently is the hotkeys that allow you to track time with start and stop quickly.

Pricing: Toptracker is free and unlimited.

Timeular 

Timeular is an incredibly effortless time tracker app that helps to manage your time and improve productivity. More than 10 million people choose Timeular as their time tracking tool, which makes it one of the most popular timers to keep track of work hours. 

How it works: The Timeular tracker is the world’s first 8-sided time tracking dice that automatically tracks activities when flipped. All you have to do is to flip Timeular, and it automatically tracks time spent on tasks.

Pricing: Timeular doesn’t have a free trial, but they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee if it doesn’t meet your expectations. The basic plan is great for personal use, and the Pro one is perfect for teams.

Chekiant

Chekiant is among the best free time trackers that help freelancers monitor their work hours and budget. It’s designed in a minimalistic and user-friendly way, and it’s a simple tool that has all the necessary features for tracking your time efficiently. 

How it works: The app has a simple start and stop function as you can also add, remove and change time entries. You can also generate reports for certain projects by displaying the tracked time.

Pricing: Checkaint has a free version for an individual user. You can add extra features by upgrading to a Premium plan ($5 per month) or Enterprise one ($10 per month). They also offer a free 30-day trial.

Kimai 

Kimai is an open-source real-time tracking app that’s customizable and allows you to control your working hours, activities, and even budgets. 

How it works: The app has a web-based time tracker with a stop and start button. As an alternative, you can also time clock and duration modes. Additionally, it allows you to edit your time entries. 

Pricing: Kami is available to use free of charge.

BONUS TIP: App to eliminate distractions when you work from home

Although it’s proven that remote work has generally increased motivation among most people, some individuals have the exact opposite experience. 

So while working from home has a positive effect on the productivity levels of some people, others find it hard to focus and get the job done when they work from home. And even if we hate admitting it – we are addicted to our phones. And it’s been proven that social media is the main distraction when you work from home.

Luckily, we can use the enormous amount of information that we have access to for our benefit. There are countless apps that help you to avoid your phone while working from home. For example, the app Forest helps you stay away from your phone when it’s necessary and lets you focus on your work. The app’s best feature is that they partner with a real-tree-planting organization and plant real trees on Earth.

If you want to know more about eliminating distractions when you work from home, you might want to read out article on the topic.

Share this! Thanks!