If you are tracking time so people can see where the week went and so projects can be billed and priced correctly, pick Toggl Track. If you are tracking time because someone has to be accountable for it — attendance, shifts, approvals, expenses, invoices, and in some cases GPS or screenshots — pick Clockify. Both record hours against projects and clients competently. The real difference is what surrounds that: Toggl Track is a focused, deliberately non-surveillance tool aimed at knowledge and project teams, while Clockify has grown into a broad workforce administration suite where time tracking is the entry point. Choosing badly here usually means buying oversight features a team resents, or a lovely timer that cannot produce the compliance record you actually need.
The short answer
- Pick Toggl Track if your team is salaried knowledge workers and adoption is the risk — the tracking experience is better, and there is no monitoring layer to argue about.
- Pick Clockify if you need the administrative surround: timesheet approvals, attendance and overtime reporting, invoicing, expenses, time off and scheduling in one place.
- Pick Clockify if you have deskless, kiosk or field staff who clock in on a shared device, or you need location capture for compliance reasons.
- Pick Toggl Track if the question you most need answered is “which clients and projects are actually profitable,” rather than “did everyone log their eight hours.”
- On price, Clockify is much cheaper per seat. Its entry paid tier is $3.99 per seat per month billed annually against Toggl Track’s $9. If seat cost is the deciding factor, the comparison is not close.
Where they differ that actually matters
Measurement versus oversight
Toggl Track takes an explicit position against employee surveillance: no screenshots, no camera capture, and its automatic Timeline records app and browser activity privately to the individual, who decides what becomes a time entry. That is a philosophy, not a missing feature, and it shapes how a rollout lands with a team. Clockify sits at the other end, offering kiosk mode for shared devices with QR-code login and photo capture, GPS location tracking, and periodic screenshots on higher tiers. None of it is forced on you, but its existence is exactly why some buyers choose Clockify and others rule it out immediately. Decide which kind of company you are before comparing feature lists.
Focused product versus broad suite
Clockify covers far more administrative ground: employee scheduling with capacity forecasting, expense logging, recurring invoicing, time off policies, attendance and overtime reporting, approval workflows with entry locking, and labour cost analysis. If your alternative is stitching four tools together, that consolidation is worth real money. Toggl Track stays narrower on purpose: tracking across web, desktop, mobile and browser extensions, projects with tasks and estimates, fixed-fee and retainer projects, budget alerts, timesheet approvals, and reporting. It does fewer things and does them with less configuration, and it covers the gaps through integrations with more than a hundred tools — which usually means another vendor and another bill rather than a blocker. Clockify’s breadth is the opposite trade: more to configure, more that can be set up wrong, but fewer subscriptions. Our breakdown of resource scheduling features is useful if the scheduling side is what is pulling you toward Clockify.
What each one costs
Checked against both vendors’ own pricing pages in August 2026. All figures are per seat per month.
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Clockify Free | $0, up to 5 users | $0, up to 5 users |
| Clockify Basic | $3.99 | $4.99 |
| Clockify Standard | $5.49 | $6.99 |
| Clockify Pro | $7.99 | $9.99 |
| Clockify Enterprise | $11.99 | $14.99 |
| Toggl Track Free | $0, limited number of users | $0, limited number of users |
| Toggl Track Starter | $9 | $9 |
| Toggl Track Premium | $14 first year, $18 on renewal | $14 |
| Toggl Track Enterprise | Quoted on request | Quoted on request |
Two things worth noticing. Clockify’s Premium-equivalent tier costs less than Toggl Track’s entry tier, and Clockify also sells cheaper kiosk-limited seats — under a dollar a month per seat on Basic — for staff who only ever clock in on a shared device. That is a real saving on a large deskless workforce and Toggl Track has no equivalent. Against that, Toggl Track’s Premium price rises from $14 to $18 per seat per month at renewal, so budget for the second year rather than the first. Clockify counts every active or invited user on the Team page as a paid seat, which catches people out when they invite an accountant or a client. Confirm all of this on the vendors’ pages before you budget.
What the free plans now get you
This changed recently and it matters. Clockify’s free plan was for years unusually generous; it is no longer the free-for-any-size option people remember. It is now capped at five users, its reports are limited to a one-month date range at a time, and billable rates, CSV and Excel exports and project permission controls have moved to paid tiers. Toggl Track’s free plan is likewise limited to a small team — Toggl says “a limited number of users” without publishing a figure — and keeps core tracking on web, desktop and mobile, calendar integrations and productivity reports, with billable rates and team features starting on the first paid tier. If you were planning to run a fifteen-person team free on either, that option no longer exists.
Reporting and what you can prove with it
Toggl Track’s reporting is oriented around margin: profitability by project, task, client and team member, billable rates, estimates with variance, fixed-fee budget monitoring and scheduled reports. It answers whether the work was worth doing. Clockify leans operational and payroll-adjacent: attendance, overtime, targets and reminders, labour cost against billable amount, budget alerts and detailed exports for auditing. Both produce a defensible record of hours; only one makes profitability the headline. Our guide to time tracking for accounting firms covers the billing angle in more depth.
Side by side
| Decision criterion | Toggl Track | Clockify |
|---|---|---|
| Core purpose | Understand where time and margin go | Administer and account for time |
| Monitoring features | None by design; no screenshots or camera | Optional GPS, screenshots, kiosk photo capture |
| Scope beyond tracking | Deliberately narrow | Invoicing, expenses, scheduling, time off, attendance |
| Reporting emphasis | Profitability and project margin | Attendance, labour cost, compliance record |
| Deskless and shift workers | Weak fit | Strong fit via kiosk and scheduling |
| Free tier today | Limited users, core tracking only | Up to 5 users, one-month report range |
| Setup effort | Low | Moderate to high, scales with modules used |
| Likely team reaction | Generally accepted | Depends entirely on which features you enable |
| Entry paid tier | $9 per seat per month | $3.99 per seat per month billed annually |
Who each one is really for
Toggl Track is for agencies, consultancies, studios and product teams where the people tracking time are the ones doing the skilled work, and the number that matters is margin per client or project. It wins on what decides whether time tracking survives contact with reality: whether people actually use it. A tracker that is fast and visibly not spying on anyone gets logged consistently, and consistent data is the only kind worth reporting on. You are paying a premium for that, and it is worth being honest with yourself about whether adoption really is your risk.
Clockify is for companies where time has administrative consequences: hourly or mixed workforces, client work that turns directly into invoices, teams across shifts and sites, and managers who need approvals, attendance records and exports that hold up in an audit or payroll dispute. It is also stronger when you are deliberately collapsing several tools into one and will spend the configuration time. If team-wide collaboration tooling is part of that same consolidation, our roundup of collaboration tools for remote work is a reasonable companion read.
When neither is the right answer
If time tracking exists mainly to feed project plans, resourcing and delivery status, a standalone tracker is the wrong shape — you will reconcile hours in one system against tasks in another and trust neither. Pick a project management platform with native time tracking instead, and accept less refined tracking. Equally, if your only real need is turning hours into invoices at a very small firm, accounting or practice management software with a built-in timer may cover it without another seat-priced subscription.
FAQs
Can I move my history from one to the other?
Both support importing users and time entries and both offer exports and an API, so a migration is feasible. Expect to rebuild projects, clients, tags and rates by hand, and to lose approval history. Do it at a clean period boundary.
Does Clockify force screenshots or GPS on employees?
No. Those sit on higher tiers and are switched on by an administrator. But before enabling them, check what your local employment and privacy law requires in terms of notice and consent — availability in the product is not the same as legality in your jurisdiction.
Is Toggl Track enough for client billing?
It tracks billable rates, fixed-fee projects and budgets, and reports on profitability, and it integrates with accounting tools. Clockify goes further by generating invoices directly. If you want hours to become an invoice without leaving the tool, that is a point for Clockify.
Plan contents, free-tier limits and pricing in this category move often, and both vendors have changed their free plans recently. Prices here were checked against Toggl Track’s and Clockify’s own pricing pages in August 2026; check them again before committing.
More on this topic
Browse all 40 articles on Project & Team Management, or jump straight to our buying guide: Best Project Management Tools for Small Teams.