Top 12 employee monitoring software (features, pricing)

Looking for the best employee monitoring software?

In this article, we’ll highlight 12 excellent employee monitoring tools to help you choose the perfect one for your needs. We’ll go over their key features, pricing plans, and user ratings to help you make an informed decision.

What is employee monitoring software?
Features to look for in an employee monitoring software
Top 12 employee monitoring software

Let’s get started.

What is employee monitoring software?

Employee monitoring software monitors your employees’ activities during their work hours. You can use the data from the tool to analyze employee productivity, track billable hours, and even identify security risks.

Because of the pandemic, many businesses are moving to a remote first, or even a 100% remote team model. As a result, tons of companies are deploying remote employee monitoring tools.

Features to look for in an employee monitoring software

Most employee monitoring solutions offer features like:

Computer monitoring.
Time tracking.
Screenshot monitoring.
Location tracking.
Advanced productivity reporting.

However, it’s crucial to only choose an employee monitoring tool that respects your team’s privacy and offers several employee-friendly settings. This helps you steer clear of any privacy and legal issues.

Read more about monitoring employees in 2021.

Top 12 employee monitoring software

With hundreds of employee monitoring tools in the market, which one should you go for?

Don’t worry.

Here’s a list of the 12 best employee tracking software to help you decide:

1. Time Doctor

Time Doctor is a workforce analytics platform that empowers managers with the visibility to lead with trust, not control. Mid-market companies and growing SMBs use it to gain real-time visibility into work, support employee well-being, and continuously improve productivity across remote, hybrid, and in-office teams.

With Time Doctor, you can:

Track how long employees spend on tasks and projects with accurate, down-to-the-second time tracking
Give managers clear, real-time visibility into work patterns without hovering or micromanaging
Surface productivity, focus, and work-life balance trends to prevent burnout and capacity issues
Generate audit-ready timesheets and automate payroll and client billing
Empower employees with transparency into their own time data so they can self-manage and improve

Key features

Here’s a closer look at what makes Time Doctor the ultimate in-house and remote employee monitoring software:

A. Interactive time tracking

Time Doctor is a workforce analytics platform that gives you flexible time tracking so employees can record their hours in a way that fits how they work. The platform captures work activity in real time and transforms it into clear visibility for teams, helping leaders understand how work happens while keeping the experience simple for employees.

In manual/interactive mode, employees simply open the app, select their current task, and start the timer. Time Doctor runs in the background and tracks the apps and websites used during work. When they’re finished or want to take a break, they can stop the timer with a single click.

In automatic mode, Time Doctor can start tracking time when employees turn on or log into their work devices. This mode helps improve accuracy and reduces the need for manual edits or forgotten time entries.

Both modes are designed to provide clear visibility for managers and employees while minimizing disruption to the workday.

B. Idle time tracking

Time Doctor measures idle time (periods without keyboard or mouse activity) to help teams understand focus patterns and potential productivity blockers.

Idle time is measured in idle seconds and idle minutes
You can configure when idle time should start counting and set limits that make sense for different roles

Instead of silently recording behavior, Time Doctor can display a gentle idle time pop-up when someone has been inactive for too long—nudging them to either refocus or take a break. This helps reduce unintentional time drift and supports more accurate timesheets.

This design helps organizations balance accountability with privacy and trust.Moreover, you can set how long the timer can run without any activity. Once it reaches the limit, the tracker automatically stops tracking time and displays an idle time pop-up. This pop-up alerts employees to focus on their tasks.

C. Productivity reports

Time Doctor tracks several data points related to employees activity. You can access a wide range of reports generated in real-time.

Here’s a quick look at these reports :

Activity summary report: See active seconds, minutes, unproductive, manual, and mobile time for each employee over a selected time period.
Attendance report: See if an employee is present, absent, partially absent, or late in real-time.
Hours tracked report: View the total number of hours tracked by employees for any date range.
Projects & tasks report: See the time spent on projects as well as individual tasks.
Timeline report: Look at the time spent on tasks and breaks in a day or the whole week.
Custom export report: Customize the fields you’d like to include in one single report.
Web and app usage report: View the time spent by an employee on each app and website during work hours.

D. Shifts and schedules

Managers can use Time Doctor’s Work Schedules feature to create and edit employee shifts.

Here’s what you can do with schedules:

Save time by automating schedule creation and updates.
Easily adjust schedules to ensure round-the-clock availability.
Monitor and manage employee overtime.

E. Screencasts (optional)

An essential part of employee monitoring, this feature serves as an employee activity monitor.

The software takes screenshots of the user’s screen at random intervals within the time interval you’ve set.

Additionally, to protect user privacy, the employer or admin can decide whether an employee can blur or delete screenshots. This is essential if the screenshot contains any sensitive data, like passwords.

Note: Screenshot monitoring is an optional monitoring feature, and you can turn it off if needed.

F. Payroll

Time Doctor’s comprehensive employee monitoring solution also offers a powerful payroll feature to streamline your payroll management.

Based on the employees’ work hours, you can quickly pay them through the tool’s payroll integrations with PayPal, Gusto, ADP, and Wise (formally Transferwise).

You can also customize several aspects like the:

Employees in your payroll.
Pay periods.
Payment currencies and pay rates.
Payment methods, and more

G. Powerful integrations and Chrome extension

Time Doctor’s powerful Chrome Extension integrates with 60+ tools that include project management, helpdesk, accounting software, and more.

For example, Time Doctor integrates easily with tools like Asana and Jira.

You can even add time tracking to tasks you’ve created on tools like ClickUp. As a result, you can help your team avoid wasting time and work more efficiently.

The tool also offers a robust Chrome extension to track time within apps like ClickUp, Asana, Todoist, and more.

H. Benchmark AI

Benchmarks AI helps you understand your team’s performance by comparing their work patterns to similar roles and workflows across Time Doctor’s extensive behavior-based dataset.

See how your team’s productivity, idle time, and tool usage compare to similar users across thousands of organizations.
Identify whether shifts in productive time reflect healthy focus, rising workload pressure, or early signs of burnout.
Spot unusual activity and changes in behavior before they affect performance or well-being.
Give managers clearer context during coaching by showing where teams fall across percentile rankings and behavior groups.
Make smarter decisions on resourcing, planning, and workload balancing using AI-matched comparisons instead of generic industry averages.

I. Meeting insight

Meeting Insights helps you understand how meetings affect productivity, focus time, and engagement across your team.

See total meeting hours, number of meetings, and which teams spend the highest or lowest percentage of their time in meetings.
Measure meeting quality by tracking average duration, idle minutes per meeting, and idle time during meetings versus regular work hours.
Identify low-value or ineffective meetings by spotting high idle time or unrelated app usage during calls.
Compare meeting habits across groups to find overload, spot bottlenecks, or highlight teams that collaborate effectively.
Decide which meetings to shorten, restructure, or move async using data instead of assumptions.
Protect focus hours by understanding how recurring calls impact productive time and daily workflow.
Support coaching and policy decisions with clear insights into meeting load, engagement patterns, and collaboration trends.

Pros

Supports manual time editing in employee timesheets.
Can track time without selecting a task.
Supports both online and offline employee tracking.
Tracks each employee’s website and application usage during work hours.
Can create and assign projects to employees.
Doesn’t involve keystroke monitoring since it can invade an employee’s privacy.
Strict privacy and security policies that protect employees’ private data.
Several employee-friendly monitoring features.
Has a desktop app for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.
Provides a mobile app for Android devices.
Responsive customer support team.

Pricing

Time Doctor has three affordable pricing plans, and you can quickly sign up for a 14-day free trial without a credit card.

Here’s an overview of the pricing plans:

Basic: $6.67/user per month – offers time tracking + task management + activity tracking + unlimited screenshots.
Standard: $10/user per month – includes “Basic” features + integrations + payroll and invoicing.
Premium: $20/user per month – includes “Standard” features + executive dashboard + client login access.

User ratings

G2: 4.4/5 (420+ reviews)
Capterra: 4.5/5 (540+ reviews)

2. Workpuls

Workpuls is an employee tracking tool that can optimize employee productivity. It combines employee monitoring, time tracking, and automatic time mapping functionalities to enhance team performance.

However, Workpuls has limited flexibility as the tool isn’t available as a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.