Looking for a one-on-one Harvest vs Toggl comparison?
Harvest and Toggl are primarily time tracking tools.
However, Harvest supports workforce management features like timesheets and invoicing, whereas Toggl offers various reports to help you gain team performance insights.
This way, both tools can help enhance your team’s productivity levels.
But which time tracking software should you choose?
In this article, we’ll do a Toggl vs Harvest comparison to help you pick the right tool. We’ll go over their key features, tool integrations, platform compatibility, and pricing options.
We’ll also highlight a better alternative to help you skyrocket your team’s productivity.
Let’s get started.
What is Harvest?
Harvest is a cloud-based time tracking and employee monitoring software suitable for businesses of all sizes. The app is suitable for both freelancers and salaried employees alike.
This time tracking solution provides invoicing, timesheet, and various project and team management features to help you monitor everything under one roof.
The time tracking app helps you:
- Track time or fill timesheets manually with one-click.
- Monitor projects with the help of visual reports.
- Turn billable hours and expenses into invoices.
- Integrate with various tools to manage work efficiently.
What is Toggl?
Toggl Track is a user-friendly time tracking tool that helps small businesses manage their in-house or remote teams’ working hours.
The project management software also offers project and revenue tracking features and its flagship timesheets feature.
Some of its key features are:
- Gain actionable insights into your projects and team members’ workflows.
- Streamline work hours and improve team productivity.
- Monitor profitability by easily comparing your payroll to your billables.
- Estimate timelines and budgets for efficient project management.
Harvest vs Toggl: Detailed comparison
While both Harvest and Toggl are great time tracking software, they focus on different functionalities.
To make things more transparent, let’s take a closer look at these tools:
1. Time tracking
With time tracking being the primary aim, it’s safe to say both apps do it well.
Here’s a one-on-one comparison of how these two tools track time:
A. Harvest
With Harvest, you can “Start” and “Stop” timers as you work through your tasks or manually enter all your hours into a timesheet.
You can track time for any specific task, project, or client. You can also add notes for important details or to remember exactly what you worked on.
Additionally, you can also use timesheets to:
- Enter time for the whole week in bulk.
- See what you tracked for the entire week.
B. Toggl
Toggl Track helps you track time both manually and automatically.
For tracking time manually, enter a new project, click on the “Start” icon, and the time clock starts tracking time. You can click the “Stop” icon when you’re done or wish to take a break.
For automatic time tracking, Toggl Track offers an auto tracker.
This automatic time tracker is triggered when you open a specific software or type keywords. You can adjust these triggers under the app’s “Autotracker” tab.
Quick recap
With Harvest, you can only track time manually or enter time in bulk. On the other hand, Toggl can track time both manually and automatically. You just need to define triggers to use Toggl’s automatic mode.
2. Productivity monitoring
Remember, the aim behind time tracking is to boost productivity.
Here’s how Harvest and Toggl help you with productivity monitoring:
A. Harvest
With Harvest, you can easily monitor your team members.
You can use the “Team” tab to see:
- Who’s tracking time.
- Who is working overtime.
- Who can handle more tasks at the moment.
You can also keep track of the billable hours from the same tab.
Additionally, Harvest helps you analyze how your team members spend their time.
You can use the tracked time data to:
- Take note of trends by comparing tracked hours vs. employees’ capacity.
- Break down the billable and non-billable hours to see if they spend time on the right tasks.
- Get an overview of all the projects a team member has worked on.
B. Toggl
Toggl Track allows you to:
- Check team members who are over capacity.
- See who might be able to take on more work.
- Find unaccounted time entries that seem too short or too long.
- Automate email reminders for team members who lag in tracking their target number of hours.
Quick recap
Harvest and Toggl both provide insights into the hours tracked by your team members. You can use the data to take further action and guide your team’s productivity on the right path.
3. Project management
Managing projects is not an easy task.
And if several tasks are running concurrently, your time tracking tool should have some project management functionalities.
Let’s see how you can manage your projects with Harvest and Toggl:
A. Harvest
Harvest converts the timesheet entries into intuitive visual reports to help you make decisions and ensure your projects run smoothly.
These reports help you:
- See the tracked number of hours and time.
- View tracked budgets, billable amounts, costs, and unbilled totals.
- Set hourly and fee-based budgets to track your project’s progress.
B. Toggl
Toggl Track offers a project dashboard that can help you get an overview of all your projects.
From the dashboard, you’ll be able to track:
- Total time spent on projects.
- Time estimates for other projects.
- How much time projects took to complete.
You can use this visual overview to estimate timelines and budgets and track progress as you proceed. It can also help you detect problems early to draw up a plan to overcome any unforeseen situation.
Additionally, the project estimates alert feature notifies project managers or workspace admins when a project reaches a predetermined progress percentage. This can help you speed things up if you’re behind schedule.
You can also add information like tracked time and expenses to your time entry for accurate billing.
Quick recap
Both Harvest and Toggl offer various visual reports to help you get detailed insights into your projects and employees.
4. Invoicing
Creating invoices can be a hassle at times. Here’s how these two tools can help you out:
A. Harvest
Other than the basic features, Harvest allows you to automatically convert the billable time and expenses you’ve tracked into invoices. You can also manually create free-form invoices.
Harvest also allows its users to:
- Send invoices with just a few clicks and see when clients view them.
- Integrate with platforms like Stripe and PayPal for quick payments.
- Remind clients to pay their invoices through Harvest.
You can get a bird’s eye view of all the invoices you’ve created and easily follow up on any open invoices.
Moreover, the invoice graph provides an overview of your revenue for the year. The additional filters let you view reports for a particular client or timeframe.
B. Toggl
To help you create an accurate invoice, Toggl Track offers features like:
- Tag billable and non-billable hours.
- Assign billable rates by workspace, team members, or projects.
- Assign labor costs by team members and compare your payroll to your billables.
You can then use this data to monitor profitable projects or clients for your organization.
Additionally, Toggl Track offers a blank invoice template.
With this blank template, you can:
- Quickly fill out the details with Adobe Reader.
- Reuse it whenever you need it, as it’s a blank sample.
- Personalize it with additional information like company details and logo.
- Instantly get it printed from anywhere.
Quick recap
Harvest offers extensive invoicing features, whereas Toggl helps you separate billable hours from non-billable to help you with invoicing.
5. Integrations
Integration with other work tools helps you manage your work efficiently.
Here are some popular integrations both tools offer:
A. Harvest
Harvest connects and syncs with 70+ tools to help you streamline your workflow.
Some of the key integrations are:
- Productivity: Google Workspace, Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar.
- Project management: Asana, Jira, Trello.
- Communication and CRM: Slack, Zendesk Sell
- Analytics and reporting: Databox, EasyBI, Grow.
B. Toggl
With Toggl Track’s browser extension, you can track time directly from other tools.
This time tracking app integrates with 100+ popular tools, like:
- Project management: Asana, Basecamp, Quickbooks Time.
- Communication: Slack, Gmail, Flow.
- CRMs: Salesforce, Zendesk, Capsule CRM.
- Web development: GitHub, Visual Studio, Jira.
Quick recap
Both Harvest and Toggl integrate with several project management and productivity apps, helping you manage your work efficiently.
6. Platform compatibility
Here are the platforms Harvest and Toggl are available on:
A. Harvest
Harvest offers mobile devices and a desktop app to help you track time on the go. You can install the Harvest app for Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android devices.
B. Toggl
Toggl Track offers apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems.
It also offers a Firefox and Chrome extension as well as a mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
Quick recap
Both time tracking tools are available on all major operating systems and devices. However, Harvest doesn’t offer an app for the Linux operating system.
7. Pricing
Here are the pricing plans for both tools:
A. Harvest
Harvest offers a free version for one seat with two active projects.
However, you can upgrade to its paid plan for more users and functionalities, which starts at $12/seat per month.
These plans support features like:
- Easy time and expense tracking.
- Integrations that fit your workflow.
- Insight into your projects and team.
- Seamless invoicing and payments.
- Apps for all your devices.
Harvest also offers a 30-day free trial without any credit card requirement.
B. Toggl
Toggl Track’s free plan can support up to five users and offer functionalities like time tracking, idle detection, and Pomodoro timer.
This time tracking app offers three paid plans:
- Starter: $10/user per month – includes all free plan features + billable rates + time rounding + time estimates + project templates.
- Premium: $20/user per month – includes Starter plan features + unlimited project + time tracking reminders + scheduled reports + project dashboard.
- Enterprise: Contact support for custom pricing – includes Premium plan features + unlimited users + expert training and assistance.
Toggl Track also offers a 30-day free trial to these paid plans. However, it requires a credit card.
Quick recap
While both Harvest and Toggl offer a 30-day free trial to their paid plan, Toggl provides several plans for various needs.
A better way to monitor productivity
Sure, Harvest and Toggl can lend their time tracking features for small teams, with Toggl offering more variety.
Regardless, both tools mainly focus on tracking time with limited advanced productivity management ability.
But before making a decision, there’s another tool that you should look at…
It’s called Time Doctor — a user-friendly solution with powerful productivity management functionalities.
What is Time Doctor?
Time Doctor is a powerful employee productivity management software used by major corporates and small businesses to boost employee productivity.
With Time Doctor, you can:
- Easily track employee time manually or automatically.
- Gain insights into performance with various accurate and detailed reports.
- Track inactivity to monitor productivity levels better.
- Categorize websites based on productivity ratings.
- Set access level for any user, like a manager, client, or admin.
- Generate payroll for employees at any point in time.
- Use various employee-friendly productivity management settings.
- Integrate with project management and time management tools, like Jira, QuickBooks, PayPal, Github, etc., via its Chrome extension.
- Track time from anywhere with app compatibility on Windows, Mac, Chrome, and other platforms.
Check out Time Doctor’s complete list of features.
Time Doctor’s Productivity Ratings is an advanced productivity management feature not offered by Harvest and Toggl. You can customize which websites and applications are productive at the team level to get an accurate measure of productivity.
Unlike Harvest and Toggl, Time Doctor also offers Screencasts — an optional feature that takes automatic screenshots or videos of computer screens during an employee’s work hours.
To protect privacy, Time Doctor allows you to blur or delete screenshots that capture sensitive information.
Additionally, Time Doctor’s pricing plans are more cost-efficient than Harvest and Toggl.
Its basic plan starts at just $7/user per month with unlimited screenshots, offline time tracking, activity tracking, and project management functionalities.
Check out our in-depth comparison of Time Doctor vs Toggl to learn more.
Final verdict
Harvest provides simple time tracking and manual timesheets features. It also offers extensive invoicing features.
Whereas Toggl Track can help you get insight into your projects and team members with robust performance reports.
And while both tools are great, they can’t track productivity as well as Time Doctor, making it a better Harvest and Toggl alternative.
Time Doctor provides all the necessary functionalities in a powerful time and productivity management tool.
Sign up for a free 14-day trial of Time Doctor today and manage productivity the right way!
