TrackTime vs. Clockify for Hourly Billing

Clockify's pitch is hard to argue with: a real time tracker, free forever, for an unlimited number of people. TrackTime's pitch is different: your problem is not the price of your timer, it is the billable hours that never reach the timer at all. Both pitches are true, and which one matters more depends on how you work and how you bill.

Full disclosure first: TrackTime is our product, so we are not a neutral referee here. We have written this comparison to be genuinely useful anyway, and that includes telling you plainly when Clockify is the right call. It often is, especially when budget is the deciding factor, and we say so below.

The short version

• Choose Clockify if you are cost-sensitive, if you need to put a whole team on timers without a per-seat bill, or if you are still building the basic habit of tracking time at all. The free plan is genuinely free, and you should try it before paying anyone, including us.
• Choose TrackTime if you bill clients by the hour and your real losses are the phone calls, text messages, email sessions, and client trips that no manual timer ever records. TrackTime captures those automatically on Android and carries them through review to a finished invoice in one product.

What Clockify does well

Clockify's free plan is the most generous in the time tracking market. It includes unlimited users, unlimited projects, timers, timesheets, calendar view, and basic reports, along with apps for the web, desktop, and mobile. For a team that simply needs everyone logging hours somewhere, the free tier alone solves the problem, and that is not a small thing.

The paid tiers stay cheap and add real substance. Prices run from $3.99 to $11.99 per user per month with annual billing, and invoicing arrives on the Standard tier at $5.49 per user per month, alongside timesheet approvals, time locking, time off management, and a QuickBooks integration. Clockify even offers a desktop auto tracker that records your computer activity so you can create entries from it afterward, and a kiosk mode that lets on-site staff clock in from a shared device.

In other words, Clockify is not just a free timer with a paywall behind it. It is a broad, inexpensive workforce time tracking suite, and for internal timekeeping, payroll-adjacent tracking, and building a tracking habit from nothing, it is one of the easiest recommendations in the category.

Where Clockify falls short for hourly billers

Clockify's weaknesses only show up when your tracked time has to turn into client revenue, which is exactly the situation this comparison is about.

Capture is manual, and manual capture leaks. Clockify records what you tell it and nothing more. Its desktop auto tracker helps at a computer, since it records which applications you used and lets you build entries from that record, but it cannot see your phone. The client who calls you during your commute, the text thread you handle from the couch, and the email you answer from the school parking lot are all invisible to it. For communication-heavy professionals, those are precisely the hours that go unbilled, a pattern we documented in our article on the five ways billable time leaks.

The billing workflow is a feature, not the product. Invoicing exists from the Standard tier up, and it works, but Clockify is fundamentally a workforce time tracker with invoicing attached. There are no six-minute billing increments and nothing profession-specific, which is why it ranks as the budget pick rather than the billing pick in our lawyer-focused comparison. If your invoices are the whole point of tracking, you will feel the difference between a tool that supports billing and a tool that is built around it.

Free has an operational cost. None of this is hidden or dishonest on Clockify's part. But a free timer that captures eighty percent of your billable day is not free in any meaningful sense. The missing twenty percent is your money.

What TrackTime does well

TrackTime starts from the observation that hourly professionals do not lose money because their timer is bad. They lose money because the work happens where no timer is running. Its Android app runs in the background and, with your permission, automatically captures the work that leaks out of manual systems:

• Phone calls. Inbound and outbound cellular calls are timed and matched to the right client automatically.
• Text messages. SMS conversations and incoming RCS messages in Google Messages are captured as billable events.
• Email. Time spent working in Gmail and Outlook is tracked and attributed to clients.
• Travel. Drive time and mileage are recorded for client trips.

The billing workflow is built in rather than bolted on. Captured entries appear in the web dashboard, where you review and adjust them before they are billed, and then you generate the invoice in the same place. Unlimited clients, two-factor authentication, and full API access are all included on the Professional plan.

Privacy is the design constraint that makes automatic capture acceptable for client work. TrackTime stores metadata only: who the activity involved, when it happened, and how long it lasted. Message contents and email subject lines are never stored.

Where TrackTime falls short

An honest comparison lists our gaps too, so here they are.

There is no free plan. TrackTime's Professional plan costs $14.99 per month or $161.89 per year for a single user, with a 7-day free trial. Clockify costs nothing forever. If your budget is zero, this comparison is already over, and you should use Clockify.

Automatic capture requires Android. The full automatic-tracking app is downloaded from TrackTime.com, and a Lite manual-tracking version is on Google Play. There is no iOS app, because iOS does not allow any app to observe calls, message notifications, or foreground apps at the operating-system level. Automatic capture like TrackTime's is technically impossible on iPhone, and any product that implies otherwise is overselling. Clockify's manual apps run happily on iPhone.

Clockify scales to bigger headcounts. TrackTime offers team plans, and the Enterprise plan supports up to 30 users with team control from the dashboard. Clockify's free unlimited seats and low per-user prices make it the natural choice for large teams doing internal timekeeping rather than client billing.

Pricing compared

Clockify is free for unlimited users on the free plan. Paid tiers run from $3.99 to $11.99 per user per month with annual billing, and invoicing starts on the Standard tier at $5.49 per user per month. TrackTime is $14.99 per month or $161.89 per year for a single user, with a 7-day free trial and team plans available.

On a price sheet, Clockify wins, and we will not pretend otherwise. The right way to compare them is per recovered hour rather than per month. A professional billing at a typical hourly rate needs automatic capture to recover only a few short calls or email sessions per month before the $14.99 has paid for itself several times over, arithmetic we walk through at typical rates in our post on the revenue lost to unbilled phone calls. Whether that recovery happens in your practice depends on how much of your client work happens on your phone, which is a question you can answer with a trial rather than a guess.

How to choose

• Start with Clockify if cost is the constraint, if your team just needs a shared timesheet, or if you are not yet sure time tracking will stick. Trying the free plan first is sensible, and we genuinely recommend doing so. If manual tracking captures your work completely, keep it and spend nothing.
• Move to TrackTime when you notice the pattern that manual tracking cannot fix: your invoices are missing calls you know you made and email you know you answered. That gap is a capture problem, not a discipline problem, as we explain in our guide to capturing every billable hour, and on Android it is a solved problem.
• Do the two-week test. Track a typical fortnight in Clockify, then compare your entries against your phone's call log and your sent email. The difference between the two lists is your monthly leak, priced at your hourly rate. That number, not our marketing, should make this decision.

Frequently asked questions

Is Clockify really free, or is it a trial?

It is really free. The free plan has no user limit and no time limit, and it covers timers, timesheets, projects, and basic reports. Paid tiers add invoicing, approvals, and other team management features, but a team can run on the free plan indefinitely, which is exactly why we recommend cost-sensitive teams try it before paying for anything.

Does Clockify have automatic time tracking?

On the desktop, partially. Clockify's auto tracker records your computer activity so you can create time entries from it afterward, which helps recover desk work you forgot to time. It does not capture anything from your phone, so calls, texts, and mobile email remain untracked. Toggl Track's desktop app takes a similar timeline approach, as we cover in our TrackTime vs. Toggl comparison. TrackTime's automatic capture on Android covers exactly that territory.

Can I use Clockify and TrackTime together?

Yes, and the combination makes sense for some teams. A firm can keep Clockify as the free shared timesheet for internal and project time while individual hourly billers use TrackTime to capture client communication and generate invoices. TrackTime also offers full API access, so tracked data can be pulled into whatever reporting process you already run.

Why is there no TrackTime app for iPhone?

Because the product would be dishonest there. iOS does not permit any third-party app to observe phone calls, message notifications, or which app is in the foreground, so the automatic capture that defines TrackTime cannot exist on iPhone. Rather than ship a manual timer with our name on it and imply otherwise, we say plainly that automatic capture requires Android.

The bottom line

Clockify is the best free time tracker available, and if a manual timer covers your work, use it with our blessing. If you bill by the hour and your phone is where a real share of your client work happens, the cheapest timer in the world still costs you every call and text it never sees. Start a free 7-day TrackTime trial and compare a week of automatic capture against your manual timesheet, or see how the Android app works before you decide.