Ever feel like you’re losing track of time?
Managing projects and knowing where your work hours go can be tough, right?
Especially when you’re juggling multiple tasks or working with a team.
You need a way to keep things organized and make sure everyone’s on the same page.
In this post, we’ll break down Time Doctor vs Harvest in plain English.
Overview
We’ve put Time Doctor and Harvest through their paces, exploring their features, pricing, and ease of use.
Our hands-on testing and research will give you the insights you need to decide which time-tracking tool best suits your needs.
Ready to boost your productivity? Time Doctor offers powerful time-tracking and project management tools.
Pricing: It has a free plan. Paid plan starts at $6.67/month
Key Features:
- Automatic Time Tracking
- Project Management
- Detailed Reporting
Ready to take control of your time tracking? Harvest boasts over 100,000 customers and integrates with dozens of popular business tools.
Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plan starts at $11/month
Key Features:
- Time Tracking
- Invoicing
- Expense Tracking
What is Time Doctor?
Okay, let’s talk about Time Doctor.
It’s a pretty popular time-tracking tool, especially for teams.
It’s designed to help you understand where your work hours are going.
Think of it as a detailed breakdown of your workday.
It’s more than just a timer; it’s about boosting productivity.
Also, explore our TimeDoctor alternatives…
Our Take
Join over 250,000 users who trust Time Doctor to track their time. On average, companies save 22% on wasted hours within the first month. Click to boost your team’s productivity today!
Key Benefits
- Accurate Time Tracking: Tracks time spent on tasks with precision.
- Detailed Reporting: Generates comprehensive reports on time usage.
- Productivity Monitoring: Monitors website and app usage.
- Screenshot Monitoring (Optional): Provides visual proof of work.
- Integrations: Works with many popular project management tools.
Pricing
- Basic: $6.70/month for Unlimited Projects & Tasks.
- Standard: $11.70/month for Productivity ratings.
- Premium: $16.70/month for Client login access
Pros
Cons
What is Harvest?
Now, let’s switch gears and talk about Harvest.
It’s another popular time-tracking tool known for its clean interface and focus on simplicity.
Harvest is all about making time tracking effortless.
It’s designed to be user-friendly and integrates well with other tools.
Also, explore our Harvest alternatives…
Our Take
Its integrated time-tracking, invoicing, and expense-tracking features make it valuable. While it can be expensive for individuals, it’s a worthwhile investment for businesses looking to streamline their operations.
Key Benefits
- Time tracking and invoicing in one platform.
- Expense tracking: Manage your project costs.
- Project management tools: Keep projects on track.
- Client management: Track client communication.
- Detailed reports: Analyze your profitability.
Pricing
- Free: Free Forever – 1 seat, 2 project, Time tracking, Reporting basics.
- Pro: $11/monthly – Unlimited seats, Unlimited projects, Team Reporting, Accounting, and payment.
- Premium: $14/monthly – Profitability reporting, Timesheet approvals, Activity log, Custom onboarding support for 50+ seats.
Pros
Cons
Features Comparison
Are you choosing between deep behavioral oversight and clean financial management?
Time Doctor and Harvest are two excellent solutions, but they serve different sides of the remote or hybrid teams equation.
This guide breaks down the features to help you improve productivity and choose wisely.
1. Core Philosophy and Monitoring
- TimeDoctor: Time doctor shines as a comprehensive employee monitoring tool. It offers advanced tracking features like silent tracking on the desktop app, optional video recording, and app usage report to track employee activity. The goal is to provide actionable insights into employee behavior.
- Harvest: Harvest is designed to simplify the workflow for time and invoice clients. Its time tracking is user-initiated—you start timers with just a click and stop timers when done. It lacks the deep behavioral monitoring capabilities of Time Doctor, focusing on simple time entries for accurate billing.
2. Financial Management and Invoicing
- TimeDoctor: While it tracks billable hours and supports payroll processing, Time Doctor’s primary strength is monitoring. Its invoicing tool features are functional but less comprehensive than Harvest’s.
- Harvest: This is Harvest’s strongest suit. It helps you invoice clients quickly and seamlessly based on tracked hours and expenses. You can send invoices and get paid faster by integrating with payment gateways, offering a streamlined process to bill clients.
3. Productivity and Performance Metrics
- TimeDoctor: It provides granular productivity metrics and productivity ratings based on keyboard and mouse activity, app usage, and idle time. The timeline report gives managers a real-time view of what employees spend their employee time on, helping identify time wasting.
- Harvest: Harvest focuses its reporting on resource allocation and finance. Its reports show how much budget is left on a project and how much time spent is non-billable hours, giving managers high-level data on project progress rather than individual behavioral metrics.
4. Timesheets and Attendance
- TimeDoctor: It generates accurate timesheets and includes features like attendance software and an attendance report. It helps managers keep employee devices compliant and verify employee activity.
- Harvest: Harvest is highly praised for its user-friendly interface for filling out detailed timesheets. While it helps track time easily, it does not include features like GPS tracking or complex scheduling feature management, making it less of a dedicated attendance tool.
5. Reporting and Data Access
- TimeDoctor: Provides detailed reports, an hours tracked report, and productivity reports that give doctor users deep analysis of time usage and team performance. It also offers client login access for transparency on logged hours.
- Harvest: Harvest’s reporting focuses on financial health. It provides project reports that show budget consumption, billable hours, and profitability. Managers can review the harvest data to answer the key question of how much time they have left in a budgets.
6. Platform and Integrations
- TimeDoctor: Offers a desktop app for Windows/Mac/Linux and mobile apps, and supports offline tracking. The Time Doctor website provides a comprehensive web app. Time Doctor integrates well with payroll processing systems and other apps.
- Harvest: Harvest provides its own desktop app, mobile app, and browser extension, making it easy to start tracking time with just a click. It is known for its extensive integrations with popular project management features and accounting other apps.
7. Pricing and Scalability
- TimeDoctor: It does not offer a free plan but provides a trial. Its paid tiers are billed monthly (or annually) per user and cater to businesses that need deep control over their remote teams or remote workers.
- Harvest: Harvest offers a free plan for unlimited projects and one user, making it ideal for freelancers. The pro plan is for teams that need unlimited users and advanced features. It provides great value for agencies who time and invoice clients.
8. Accountability and Quality Control
- TimeDoctor: Provides a timeline report of the employee’s day, along with web and app usage reports and distraction alerts. This ensures accountability and helps managers determine if employee activity in certain periods is productive. This means employees are encouraged to be focused.
- Harvest: Harvest relies on timesheet approvals and a clear system for logging time entries to ensure accurate billing. Its focus is on financial transparency, allowing managers to quickly review and approve a week’s worth of time data.
9. Administration and Support
- TimeDoctor: Features like single sign on, company settings, vip support, and phone support are available in higher tiers to manage a large organization’s employee devices. It also monitors internet connection with its internet connectivity report.
- Harvest: Administration is centered on managing cost rates for different team member roles and setting up different projects and clients. Its support is known to be strong, helping users create project reports and manage their account efficiently.
What to Look for When Choosing a Time Tracking Tool?
The complexity of your business—whether you prioritize deep behavioral oversight or simple project oversight—must guide your choice.
The best tool helps your team effortlessly keeping track of their work.
- Scope of Tracking: The time doctor’s system is built to monitor employee activities across employee devices and generate a detailed projects and tasks report. The core question is whether you need that level of insight into where employees spend their time.
- Privacy and Trust: Any comprehensive solution must be balanced. Check how the app handles personal time and whether it allows you to define certain periods where tracking is disabled. This is key to maintaining trust and ensuring the tool truly means employees feel respected, not just watched.
- Reporting and Metrics: Look for detailed reports that provide productivity metrics and an hours tracked report. This data should allow doctor users to analyze time usage and make decisions about future projects.
- Admin and Compliance: For operational efficiency, the tool should offer automated timesheets, attendance tracking, and the ability to use a scheduling feature. The attendance report is vital for HR and payroll.
- Connectivity and Reliability: For remote teams, internet connection reliability matters. Check if the tool offers features like an internet connectivity report and if it supports GPS tracking for field teams via mobile apps.
- Project Management Focus: Evaluate the strength of the system’s project tracking and task tracking. Can you easily tie time tracking data to specific tasks, view project progression, and run time-based reporting? For financial teams, robust budget monitoring is non-negotiable.
- Financial Integration: Look for tools that simplify billing. Harvest, for instance, offers strong support for creating and sending client invoices and integrates with tools like Google Calendar to convert meetings into time entries. The ability to track work related to development operations like pull requests (via integrations) is also a specialized need for certain teams.
- Usability and Scalability: If you plan to grow, the software must handle unlimited users without a significant jump in price or complexity. The search bar is also a simple but critical feature for finding old data quickly. Finally, features like notifications ensure that employees remember to start or stop the timer, which is essential for accurate data collection and reducing the time-consuming task of filling out timesheets.
Final Verdict
After thorough testing and comparison, we believe Harvest is the better choice for most users.
Its intuitive interface, combined time and expense tracking, and robust invoicing features make it ideal for freelancers, small businesses, and teams with billable hours.
While Time Doctor’s detailed tracking and screenshot features might be useful for specific use cases.
Harvest’s well-rounded functionality and ease of use make it the winner in our book.
We’ve spent countless hours with these tools.
And our experience shows Harvest provides the best balance of features and usability for effective time management.
More of TimeDoctor
Let’s see how Time Doctor compares to these other time-tracking tools:
- Time Doctor vs Clockify: Time Doctor often has more in-depth features like screenshots and website monitoring, while Clockify is generally simpler and offers a robust free plan.
- Time Doctor vs clockit: It seems you might have meant Clockify. Comparing Time Doctor to Clockify (as mentioned above), Time Doctor can be more focused on detailed monitoring, whereas Clockify is often favored for its straightforward time tracking.
- Time Doctor vs Toggl: Time Doctor can offer more detailed employee monitoring. Toggl Track is known for its ease of use and quick time entry.
- Time Doctor vs Memtime: Time Doctor relies on manual or timer-based tracking with optional monitoring. Memtime aims for more automatic time tracking based on your computer activity.
- Time Doctor vs TrackingTime: Time Doctor often has more features for employee productivity monitoring. TrackingTime focuses on team time management, project planning, and reporting.
- Time Doctor vs Timeular: Time Doctor is software-based.5 Timeular uses a physical device for task switching and tracking, offering a different approach to time entry compared to Time Doctor’s software interface.
- Time Doctor vs Harvest: Time Doctor focuses on time tracking and productivity monitoring. Harvest integrates time tracking with invoicing and project budgeting, making it more geared towards client billing.
More of Harvest
Let’s see how Harvest stacks up against these other time-tracking tools:
- Harvest vs Time Doctor: Harvest focuses on time tracking for invoicing and project costing. Time Doctor often includes more features for productivity monitoring, like app tracking and screenshots.
- Harvest vs Clockify: Harvest integrates time tracking with invoicing and expense management, making it ideal for billing. Clockify is a simpler, often free, tool mainly for tracking time.
- Harvest vs Clockit: You likely mean Clockify. Harvest has built-in invoicing, unlike the simpler time-tracking focus of Clockify.
- Harvest vs Toggl: Harvest is designed with invoicing and project budgeting in mind alongside time tracking. Toggl is known for its ease of use in just tracking time for productivity.
- Harvest vs TrackingTime: Harvest focuses on billing and project profitability with its time tracking. TrackingTime emphasizes team and project management features alongside time tracking.
- Harvest vs Memtime: Harvest requires manual or timer-based time entry for billing. Memtime attempts to automate time tracking based on your computer activity.
- Harvest vs Timeular: Harvest is software-based with a focus on billing. Timeular uses a physical device for individual time tracking.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Time Doctor good for freelancers?
Time Doctor can be useful for freelancers who need detailed time tracking and proof of work, especially if clients require screenshots or activity monitoring. However, the screenshot feature might be overkill for some freelancers, and the interface can feel less streamlined than other options.
Does Harvest track expenses?
Yes, Harvest excels at expense tracking. It allows you to log expenses, categorize them, and even attach receipts. This makes it easy to manage both your time and expenses within a single platform, simplifying project costing and client billing.
Which is easier to use, Time Doctor or Harvest?
Harvest is generally considered easier to use due to its intuitive interface and straightforward design. Time Doctor, while powerful, can be more complex, especially with its screenshot and activity monitoring features. For simple time tracking, Harvest is the winner.
Does Time Doctor integrate with QuickBooks?
While Time Doctor offers integrations with various tools, its QuickBooks integration is not as direct as some other platforms. You might need to use Zapier or similar tools to connect Time Doctor data with QuickBooks.
Can I use Harvest for project management?
Harvest is primarily a time and expense tracking tool, not a full-fledged project management platform. While it offers some project management features, like task assignment and progress tracking, it’s best used in conjunction with dedicated project management software like Asana or Trello.
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