Choosing the best time-tracking software comes down to one question: where does your work actually happen? After testing Toggl Track, Timely, 7pace, QuickBooks Time, and ActivityWatch, the answer is rarely the same for a solo freelancer as it is for a DevOps team or a field-services business running hourly payroll.
The wrong tool doesn’t just sit unused. It generates admin without producing useful data, which is worse than having nothing at all. The picks below are the strongest answers to five distinct versions of the problem.
Toggl Track: The Best Time-Tracking Software for Most Users
Toggl Track is the top choice for freelancers and remote teams. Setup took under ten minutes in testing, the free plan supports up to five users with no time limit, and the Starter tier at $9 per user per month covers billable rates, project estimates, and revenue reports.
Privacy and compliance credentials go beyond the basics. Toggl holds ISO 27001:2022 certification alongside SOC 2 Type 1 compliance, with strict access controls, encryption, and continuous monitoring. The company has also introduced an EU Data Act Addendum to meet European data-regulation requirements. Toggl does not sell user data or use it for advertising, and all tracking information remains yours.
The Premium plan at $18 per user per month adds profitability analysis, timesheet approvals, fixed-fee project support, and Jira and Salesforce integrations. Enterprise pricing is custom. For most freelancers, the Starter plan is enough.
Timely: AI-Powered Logging for Teams That Forget to Track
Timely takes a different approach. Its Memory Tracker runs in the background, recording time spent in apps, documents, meetings, and websites automatically, then uses AI to generate a timesheet from that log. There is nothing to start or stop.
The privacy model is designed for remote teams. Users see only their own data by default, and managers see only what employees choose to share. That framing matters for teams where surveillance concerns typically kill adoption of tracking tools.
The Starter plan runs $11 per user per month (or $9 billed annually) and caps at five users and 20 projects. Premium at $20 per user per month lifts those caps and adds accounting integrations. The Unlimited plan at $28 per user per month includes capacity management, overtime tracking, and support for more than 50 currencies, making it the practical tier for larger distributed teams.
7pace: Built for Development Teams Inside Their Existing Tools
7pace Timetracker is the top-rated time-tracking extension on the Azure DevOps Marketplace. Appfire, which acquired the German company in September 2022, expanded the product into the Atlassian ecosystem; 7pace Timetracker was recognised as a best-selling app in the monday.com app marketplace for 2024.
The core argument for 7pace is adoption. Time-tracking fails more often from habit friction than from missing features. Logging time directly on a work item with a single click, inside Azure DevOps or Jira, removes the context switch that causes developers to skip logging altogether.
Pricing for Azure DevOps starts at around $8 per user per month; the Jira version starts at $12.10 per month for 11 users. Prices rose by 6%–20% in July 2025 depending on plan and user tier. The tool serves over 3,000 customers worldwide but is only worth evaluating if your team already works inside one of the three supported platforms.
QuickBooks Time: The Payroll-First Choice, With a Price Rise Coming
QuickBooks Time (previously TSheets) is the obvious pick if your business already runs on QuickBooks Online. Time entries flow directly into payroll and invoicing without any manual export, which removes several hours of reconciliation each month for businesses paying hourly workers.
The Premium plan currently runs $20 per month as a base fee plus $8 per user per month. Elite costs $40 per month plus $10 per user per month and adds project tracking, job costing, and advanced controls. Both plans require an active QuickBooks Online subscription on top of those costs. According to OnTheClock, QuickBooks Time is raising its per-employee rate by $2 per month across both plans effective 1 July 2026, a 25% increase on the Premium tier’s current rate. Teams pricing a rollout should use the post-July figures.
QuickBooks Time is also bundled with certain QuickBooks Online Payroll tiers. Capterra’s pricing summary notes it is included with QuickBooks Online Payroll Premium ($80 per month plus $9 per employee) and Payroll Elite ($130 per month), which changes the effective cost calculation for businesses already on those plans.
The GPS tracking and geofencing features are genuinely practical for construction, cleaning, or delivery operations. For remote knowledge workers, those features add cost without adding value.
ActivityWatch: Free, Private, and Fully Local
ActivityWatch costs nothing and sends zero data to any server. Everything it records is stored locally, in an open format you can export and query however you like. The open-source codebase, licensed under MPL-2.0, has over 15,000 GitHub stars and a contributor community that regularly adds plugins and browser extensions.
The tool runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android. It automatically tracks app and website usage without any manual input, and supports custom tagging and daily or weekly breakdowns.
The trade-off is that ActivityWatch has no billing, no client reporting, and no shared dashboards. It is a personal productivity tool, not a team one. Setup requires comfort installing local server software, and support is community-only. For a privacy-focused freelancer who wants honest insight into their own work patterns at no cost, it is a serious option.
How to Choose Between Them
If you bill clients by the hour and want a tool that works with minimal setup, Toggl Track’s Starter plan is the right starting point. If your team consistently forgets to log time, Timely’s AI approach solves a behavioural problem that no amount of manual discipline will fix. DevOps teams should evaluate 7pace only if the team already lives in Azure DevOps or Jira; its value disappears outside those environments. QuickBooks Time makes sense only inside the QuickBooks ecosystem, and the forthcoming price rise makes that calculus worth running before committing to a plan. ActivityWatch is the right answer when privacy and cost are the only constraints.