A time tracking tool is an application that allows you to record time spent on tasks or projects. These tools are used by many industries—mainly employing freelancers and contractors—to improve efficiency and workflow. They help prioritize tasks, offer insights into jobs and completion times and smooth your work processes.
This article compares and contrasts Harvest and Toggl Track time tracking tools, two of the most popular cloud-based time trackers that help businesses manage work hours. While both these tools have similar features, each is unique in its own way.
What is Harvest?
Harvest is a great cloud-based time tracking application for businesses, organizing work hours and assisting with team management, expenses and invoicing. The Harvest app helps users track time and create timesheets with a single click, monitoring projects via visual reports, turning the billing hours and expenses into invoices, and enabling you to integrate with a host of different tools to manage work efficiently.
Harvest is best known for its invoicing feature, allowing you to turn billable hours of work into invoices to present to your clients—a handy feature for businesses. This software manages collaborative workloads primarily, and hence, can be the best option for team time tracking.
What is Toggl Track?
Toggl Track is an easy-to-use cloud-based time tracking software for teams, offering easy work-hours tracking and assisting in comprehensive report generation. The Toggl Track app streamlines work hours, estimates timelines and budgeting for projects and compares payroll to billables, thereby providing practical observation for your projects and team members and helping improve team productivity and project efficiency.
Toggl Track is best for its ease of use and flexibility and excellent services, even in the free version. Overall, this application assists with analyzing productivity and profitability.
Comparison of Harvest & Toggl Track
While both the Harvest and Toggl app track time, they also have their focus areas. Let’s compare them across some key features.
Better tools for tracking
Both Harvest and Toggl Track are time tracking apps, and their primary purpose is to help you keep track of time spent on tasks and projects. However, there are some key differences here.
Harvest offers you a ‘Start’ and ‘Stop’ timer to record your work hours instead of entering all your hours into a timesheet manually. It also lets you track time for any specific task, project or client. Additionally, you can add detailed notes on the work you have completed. With Harvest, you can get a weekly view of your tasks, enabling you to enter your time for a whole week in bulk as well.
With Toggl Track, there’s a Manual mode and an Automatic mode to log hours. The manual mode is the same: you can use the ‘Start’ and ‘Stop’ icons to enter a new time on a project by clicking the icons.
It also has an automatic timer, which starts when you open a specific software or enter specific keywords and stops when you close the software. You can adjust the options in the Toggl app’s ‘Autotracker’ tab. However, there is no weekly view or such on Toggle – you’ll need to scroll down to see previous days.
Both of these apps carry out the basic functionalities well enough. The key difference here is the auto-tracking that Toggle offers and the Weekly view that Harvest has. Therefore, your choice depends on which function you think adds more value to your work.
Better UI / UX
The Harvest app and Toggl app differ considerably in terms of the user interface.
Harvest is pretty comprehensive, so you may have to spend quite some time exploring the applications. Various tabs and options customize your workspace, create clients, identify projects and invite team members. It also supports invoicing. You can explore a list of invoice templates before deciding to use one.
In contrast, Toggl is a breeze – it’s intuitive and easy-to-use. After setting up the Toggl app, it ushers you quickly through so you can get to work immediately and start tracking. It acts as something like a background time tracker, enabling you to log what you’re doing each session. And you can create projects, clients, teams and workspaces when you want.
As for user experience, there are some similarities and a few differences.
Harvest’s ease of recording time and making new entries is pretty straightforward. You can view the timer running in hours and minutes while you’re on task. Among its features, the best here is the ‘Week View,’ which shows you an aggregate view of all tasks completed weekly. In addition, this view also displays time anomalies for other team members.
Toggl Track’s time entries are pretty easy too. The timer displays time down to the seconds, which is an excellent addition. However, it only offers ‘Day View,’ and you’ll need to scroll to view the older tasks. A good thing about Toggl is the tagging system that helps you tag projects, jobs and clients with necessary info.
All in all, Harvest offers a clearer view of the workspace, while Toggl gives a lot of information in one place. Though Harvest takes time to set up, it provides you more flexibility. Toggl, on the other hand, is a lot easier and simpler to kickstart time tracking.
Better reporting and analytics
Harvest handles the reporting aspect well. It lets you convert the timesheet entries and generate easy-to-understand, visual reports to ensure the smooth running of your projects.
The reports allow you to see the tracked number of hours and time, the billable amounts, costs, tracked budgets, expenses and capacity. It also lets you drill down to each detail, such as time spent among projects and projects exceeding assigned time. With all these features, Harvest enables you to monitor productivity easily.
Toggl, however, does not give you a comprehensive report as does Harvest. You can get an overview of all your projects and track the time spent, time estimates for projects, and total time spent on the project. It can help you estimate timelines and budgets as you go ahead with your projects and can alert your team if a project is running behind on a deadline.
Toggl Track reveals when team members run over capacity and which members can accept more work. In addition, it assists you in finding unaccounted-for irregular time entries.
In regards to reporting, Harvest does a tad bit better than Toggl Track. Its superiority results primarily from the visual and comprehensive reporting that helps you get better analytics.
Better price for value
Harvest has a simple pricing mechanism: Free and Paid. The free plan supports only a single person and two projects, while the paid plan is $12 per user per month. You can also choose Individual or Team on paid plans, but the rate is the same anyway. You can either choose annual billing or monthly billing, with the former providing you a 10% discount.
Toggl Track is slightly cheaper than Harvest, or at least, its Starter plan is. Its generous free plan accommodates up to 5 people and offers a host of features that may be suitable for small teams. The Starter plan starts at $10 per user per month. The premium plan for enterprises starts at $20 per user per month and adds comprehensive features. When paid annually, you can get a 10% discount.
The plans here may be slightly difficult to compare as Harvest has a single paid plan while Toggl Track has two. Therefore, it depends entirely on what you want in time-tracking features. If we compare Toggl Track’s Starter plan, Harvest is expensive but offers more features. However, Toggl Track’s generous free tier services are hard to beat.
Platform with good support
With Harvest, you can get good support from their team via email, help desk, phone and chat. You can also find plenty of FAQs and Forums to guide you to answers for any problems you might face. In addition, it offers an excellent Knowledge Base and provides resources to get started via Webinars, Documentation and Videos.
As for Toggl Track, support comes in the form of email, help desk, chat support, FAQs and forums. However, they don’t provide interactive and comprehensive documentation. Toggl Track’s knowledge comes in the form of traditional documentation. But then again, Toggl Track is already intuitive and straightforward, so there may not be a need for that.
If you are looking for better support and resources, the Harvest app can be a better alternative.
Understand the Difference Between Toggl and Harvest
If you weigh all the factors, you can see how both these time tracking applications are excellent time management solutions that address different needs.
Harvest is suitable for teams that require invoicing and expensive tools and enough support materials. Toggl Track focuses solidly on time tracking and ease of use and lets you add other features as needed. It’s essential to evaluate your requirements before choosing the app that best suits your needs.
