A head-to-head comparison for 2024

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Clockify and Harvest are popular time tracking tools that many businesses use to streamline their workflow.

Both Clockify and Harvest offer similar features like time tracking, expense management, and detailed reporting, which can make it difficult to choose the best tool between the two.

Want a comprehensive Clockify vs Harvest review to help you make the decision?

We’ve got you covered!

In this article, we’ll compare Clockify vs Harvest in detail to help you understand them better. We’ll also offer powerful alternative software to help improve your organization’s bottom line and skyrocket your productivity.

Table of Contents

Let’s get to it! 

Clockify vs Harvest: Comparison summary

Before we start, let’s skim through the Harvest vs Clockify comparison real quick:

Now let’s get into the details.

Clockify vs Harvest: A detailed comparison

Let’s take a detailed look at what each project management software offers.

1. Tool overview

Here’s a brief overview of Harvest and Clockify before we cover the features in detail.

A. What is Clockify?

Clockify is a free time tracking and project management tool used by freelancers, small businesses, and large enterprises to help employees boost their personal productivity.

The tool lets you:

• Track employee time in detail and export timesheets with ease.
• Create, download, and share in-depth time use and productivity reports.
• Generate and track billable hours for payroll and client billing.
• Integrate with other productivity and project management tools like ClickUp to streamline your workflow.

The desktop app supports Windows, Mac, and Linux, while the mobile app runs on Android and iOS devices. The tool also has a browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.

Check out our detailed Clockify review to learn more about the tool.

B. What is Harvest?

Harvest is an online tracking software used by freelancers, as well as small and large enterprises, to track their work time and expenses.

Harvest allows you to:

• Track tasks and projects by the hour in real time.
• Monitor employee attendance with its Time-off feature.
• Create projects and manage them with comprehensive visual reports.
• Streamline your workflow with various integrations.

Harvest is available on Windows and Mac desktops as well as Android and iOS mobile devices. It also has a browser extension for Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox.

Read our Harvest time tracking review to learn more about the tool.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s take a closer look at the key features of each tool.

2. Time tracking

Clockify and Harvest offer a host of time tracking features. 

Let’s see how they differ.

A. Clockify

You can track time on Clockify using the manual timer or timesheet entries.

1) Interactive timer

The app offers a stopwatch that employees can use to track time manually. To do that, select a task and press Start or Stop to begin or end the timer.

2) Manual timesheet

This feature lets you manually add work hours to the Clockify timesheet app. It’s suitable for those who spend time working offline and need to submit daily timesheets to their managers.

To enable the Timesheet:

• Open Settings on the left sidebar of the screen.
• Switch the Timesheet toggle on.

Admins can also edit timesheets for their team members.

B. Harvest

Harvest tracks time using an interactive timer. Here’s how it works:

• To start tracking, select or create a new task to work on. 
• Click on the Start button next to your task to begin tracking.
• Once done or when you need a break, click Stop to stop or pause the timer.

There is also an option to insert time manually into your timesheet daily or in bulk for the whole week.

Quick recap

Both time tracking software provides manual time tracking and time entry.

3. Productivity management

Let’s find out how Clockify and Harvest help with productivity management.

A. Clockify

Clockify provides the following features to help manage productivity: 

1. Idle time detection

The app detects activity based on keystrokes and mouse movement. If there is no movement for a predetermined time period, the app immediately starts the idle timer. 

When you start working again, you can choose to:

• Delete the idle time data.
• Delete idle time and start task tracking.
• Edit the idle time and save it as a separate time entry.

2) Screenshots

The features capture screenshots of users’ screens during work hours based on a customizable timer. This allows admins to double-check and see if their members are working or stalling during work. 

However, this feature is only available in the Pro Plan.

3) Pomodoro timer

Clockify’s built-in Pomodoro timer creates a four-cycle loop consisting of a 25-minutes work session followed by a 5-minute break. After four consecutive sessions, the timer starts a 20-minute break.

This is a customizable function, allowing you to set longer work and break periods with the same looping cycle.

The timer helps employees maintain focus throughout the sessions and prevent burn-outs with the scheduled breaks, thereby increasing productivity.

4) Auto tracker

Clockify offers an automatic time tracker that tracks the websites and apps you use for more than 10 seconds. You can then manually add or hide a time entry to your time sheet.

B. Harvest

Harvest time tracking software helps you to monitor productivity with the following features:

1) Idle timer

Harvest uses keystrokes and mouse movement to track time. So if there’s no movement for a specific period, the idle timer starts tracking inactive time. 

You can delete, add or edit the idle time recorded to your total time use.

2) Team Overview

This feature shows a team’s overall performance and activity in a week. Admins can view which team member has tracked enough hours, overshoots or is below the minimum required hours.

Quick recap

Both tools provide productivity management features to help with employee monitoring. 

4. Task and project management

Both Clockify and Harvest provide excellent project management features. Here’s how they work.

A. Clockify

Clockify’s project management feature allows admins and team leaders to set up tasks based on projects and clients. They can then set Projects as either:

• Public projects: Accessible to all team members and users.
• Private projects: Accessible only to a specific team and users.

Additionally, Clockify lets admins create custom billing rates and budgets for a project. It can also notify teams when a project budget overshoots.  

B. Harvest

Harvest’s project and task management feature allows you to organize and create new tasks based on projects and clients. Admins can create and assign three different projects:

• Time & Materials project: Set specific hourly billable rates for certain projects. 
• Fixed Fee project: Assign a fixed payment for overall project costs, regardless of the number of hours tracked.
• Non-Billable project: Projects that don’t involve invoices for time tracked. 

Harvest helps managers keep track of the overall project performance through visualized charts. It shows your teams’ total time on a project, the budget spent, and the number of billable hours tracked. 

Quick recap

Both tools’ project management software allows admins to create tasks and projects with customizable billing rates.

5. Reporting

Detailed activity reports are essential to gain insights into your employees’ time management and business workflow.

Let’s see how the tools help you with reporting.

A. Clockify

Clockify generates time use, assignment progress, and expense reports. Here’s what each report is: 

• Summary Report: Shows total time entries, expense, and billable hours tracked at a specific interval.
• Assignment Report: Breaks down total time spent by each user on a project, and shows who tracks the most and least hours.
• Expense Report: Shows total expenses for each project, user and client, along with reference receipts.

You can share and export these reports as PDF or Excel files for easy client invoicing.

B. Harvest

Harvest generates the following detailed reports. 

• Time Report: Summarizes the time and billable hours tracked by each user on a client or project.
• Detailed Time Report: Displays user’s detailed time entries for different timeframes, clients, and projects.
• Detailed Expense Report: Breaks down total expenses by periods, clients, projects, and teams.

You can save these reports as CSV or Excel files from the tool’s web app and PDFs from the mobile app.

Note: Only detailed time, expense, and invoice reports are exportable as PDF files. The rest are only available as CSV and Excel files.

Quick recap

Both Clockify and Harvest offer similar reports.

6. Budgeting and expense management

Managing your company’s budgets and expenses are important to track your bottom line and increase profitability.

Let’s look at how Clockify and Harvest do that.

A. Clockify

Clockify offers invoice and expense management functions to help you understand your company’s finances.

Its invoice management feature lets you:

• Generate invoices with customizable contents— add company logo, billing details, and currency.
• Import timesheets and expenses for references.

Clockify’s expense tracking feature lets you track expenses based on fixed fees, sums, or units. You can also attach receipts and invoices on projects for easy report referencing.

B. Harvest

Harvest also provides a budgeting and expense management system. 

It allows you to:

• Customize invoices with the company logo, currencies, tax information, and translations.
• Manage accounting with ease using Quickbooks and Xero integration.
• Set budgets for projects and receive email notifications for when the budget starts to run out.

Quick recap

Both software have expense tracking, budget monitoring, and invoice management functions. 

7. Integrations

Software integrations allow you to sync data from the time tracking tool to any management software. 

Let’s dig into how Clockify and Harvest do it.

A. Clockify

Clockify integrates with 30+ third-party apps, such as:

• Asana
• Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Sheets
• Trello
• Jira
• Freshdesk
• Microsoft Teams

B. Harvest

Harvest integrates with 50+ web apps and tools to ease workflow management. These include:

Quick recap

Compared to Clockify, Harvest provides more software integrations to boost work management.

8. Pricing

With all the awesome functions listed, let’s now look at how much these time tracking apps cost.

A. Clockify

Clockify offers a free plan for unlimited projects. Its paid plans start from $3.99/user per month.

B. Harvest

Harvest offers a free plan for a single user or two projects.The tool’s paid plan is priced at $12/user per month.

Quick recap

Both tools offer a free plan. However, Clockify’s paid plans are more economical.

Before you make a decision, let’s check out these tools’ drawbacks.

3 limitations of Clockify and Harvest

Although both time tracking tools are great at what they do, they have a few drawbacks too. 

Here’s to name a few:

• No productivity reports: Neither Clockify nor Harvest provides you with productivity reports like activity summary reports that break down users’ time by active and unproductive time. This makes it difficult to track your business’ productivity.

• No direct payment integrations: Harvest and Clockify don’t offer direct payment integration. You’ll need a separate application to pay your employees or clients, instead of making the payments straight from the app.

• Limited software integration: Both Clockfiy and Harvest have a limited number of software integrations. This can hinder your workflow if the tools don’t integrate with the software you’re currently using.

To ensure you don’t run into these problems, why not consider another time tracking software with more advanced features?

Best Harvest and Clockify alternative: Time Doctor

Time Doctor is a robust employee time tracking and productivity management software used by major companies, like Verizon, as well as small businesses, like Thrive Market. 

With Time Doctor, you can:

Learn more about Time Doctor’s incredible features here!

Wrapping up

Both tools offer a simple user interface, time tracking, and reporting features. 

However, these tools don’t offer productivity ratings or reports, which could affect your productivity management. So if you need a more advanced tool, then Time Doctor is the right choice for you.

Why not sign up for a free trial and experience Time Doctor’s excellent features first-hand?