TrackTime vs. Toggl Track: Which Captures More Billable Time?

Toggl Track and TrackTime both promise to help you get paid for the hours you actually work, but they attack the problem from opposite directions. Toggl gives you the most polished manual timer on the market and trusts you to press start. TrackTime assumes you will forget to press start, because everyone does, and captures the work automatically on Android instead.

One disclosure before anything else: TrackTime is our product. That gives us an obvious interest in the outcome of this comparison, so we have tried to be genuinely fair, and there are several situations described below where we think Toggl Track is the better choice. If you finish this article and pick Toggl, we would rather you pick it for the right reasons than pick us for the wrong ones.

The short version

• Choose Toggl Track if you run a team that needs manual project tracking, deep reporting, and a huge integration catalog, or if your billable work happens mostly at a desk where a timer is easy to remember.
• Choose TrackTime if you bill by the hour as an individual professional and your losses come from phone calls, text messages, email, and travel that never make it onto a timesheet. TrackTime captures those automatically on Android and turns them into invoices.

What Toggl Track does well

Toggl Track has spent years refining one experience: starting and stopping a timer with as little friction as possible. It succeeds. You can start a timer from the web app, the desktop app, the mobile app, or the browser extension, and entries sync everywhere. If a tool you already use has a time tracking integration, it probably supports Toggl, since the catalog covers more than a hundred applications.

The supporting features are equally strong. Calendar integrations for Google and Outlook let you convert meetings into time entries so you never track the same hour twice. Idle detection notices when you walk away from your computer with a timer running. The desktop app can record which applications and websites you used into a private timeline and suggest time entries from that activity, although it does not assign that time to clients on its own. A built-in Pomodoro mode nudges you to take breaks. Reports are excellent, with filtering by client, project, and team member, plus clean exports.

For teams, Toggl is a mature product. Managers get billable rates on paid plans, project budgets, and reporting that answers the questions agencies and consultancies actually ask, such as which projects are profitable and who is over capacity.

Where Toggl Track falls short for hourly billing

Toggl is a general-purpose tracker, and that shows in two places that matter to anyone who bills clients directly.

First, everything depends on the timer. Toggl records exactly what you tell it to record and nothing else. The eight-minute client call you took in the car, the text thread you answered during dinner, and the twenty minutes you spent in Gmail untangling a client question all happened, and all of them were billable, but none of them exist in Toggl unless you remembered to start a timer or reconstructed the entry afterward. We wrote about this pattern in detail in our breakdown of where billable time leaks, and communication time is consistently the biggest hole.

Second, there is no real invoicing. Toggl records time and reports on it, but when the month ends you still need to move your hours into another system to bill them. There are also no six-minute billing increments, no trust accounting, and no LEDES support, which is why general-purpose timers rank below specialist tools in our comparison of time tracking apps for lawyers. For a team tracking internal projects that is irrelevant. For a solo professional whose tracked hours must become invoices, it means a second tool and a second monthly task.

What TrackTime does well

TrackTime is built for one person in particular: the professional who bills by the hour and loses money to the work that happens between timers. Its Android app runs in the background and, with your permission, automatically captures the categories of work that manual trackers miss:

• 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.

Every captured entry lands in the web dashboard for review before it goes anywhere near a bill. You confirm, adjust, or discard entries, and then generate invoices directly, because invoicing is built in. There is no export step and no second subscription. The service also includes unlimited clients, two-factor authentication, and full API access.

Privacy is handled the way a professional handling confidential client matters would want. TrackTime stores metadata only: who the communication was with, when it happened, and how long it took. It never stores message contents or email subject lines.

Where TrackTime falls short

Fairness cuts both ways, so here is where Toggl users would find TrackTime lacking.

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, and we will not pretend otherwise. iOS does not allow any app to observe calls, message notifications, or foreground apps at the operating-system level, so automatic capture like TrackTime's is technically impossible on iPhone, no matter who builds it. If you carry an iPhone and will not switch, Toggl's manual timer works fine there and TrackTime does not.

Toggl is stronger for team project management. TrackTime offers team plans, and the Enterprise plan supports up to 30 users with team control from the dashboard, but Toggl's project budgets, integration catalog, and reporting depth are the product of years of focus on team workflows. A twelve-person agency tracking time against project budgets is squarely Toggl's home turf.

Toggl is cheaper to start. Toggl Track is free for up to five users, which is a real free tier, not a trial. TrackTime offers a 7-day free trial and then costs money.

Pricing compared

Toggl Track is free for up to five users. The Starter plan is $9 per user per month and the Premium plan is $18 per user per month with annual billing, which works out to roughly $11 and $23 respectively when billed monthly. For a five-person team on Premium, that is $90 per month billed annually.

TrackTime's Professional plan is $14.99 per month, or $161.89 per year, for a single user, with a 7-day free trial. That single price includes the automatic capture, unlimited clients, and built-in invoicing described above, so for a solo professional it typically replaces both a tracker and a separate invoicing tool.

The honest framing is that these prices buy different things. Toggl's free and Starter tiers are unbeatable if a manual timer is all you need. TrackTime costs more than Toggl's Starter tier for one person, and the difference is the capture: if automatic capture recovers even one short client call per week that you would otherwise have forgotten, it has covered its price at almost any professional hourly rate.

How to choose

• Pick Toggl Track if you manage a team tracking time against projects and budgets, if your work happens almost entirely at a desk where timers are easy, if you depend on integrations with project management tools, or if you carry an iPhone. It is the best manual timer available, and for those situations we recommend it over our own product.
• Pick TrackTime if you are a lawyer, consultant, accountant, or other hourly professional on Android whose days are full of client calls, texts, and email, and whose timesheets chronically understate what you actually worked, a problem we unpack fully in our guide to capturing every billable hour. A timer cannot catch work you did not know to time. Automatic capture can.
• Running both is reasonable. Some professionals keep a manual timer for deliberate desk work and let TrackTime sweep up the communication and travel time around it. The tools do not conflict, and the combination covers nearly everything.

Frequently asked questions

Does Toggl Track have automatic time tracking?

Partially, and only on the desktop. Toggl's desktop app can record which applications and websites you use into a private timeline and suggest entries from that activity, but you still confirm and assign the time yourself, and nothing on your phone is captured. It does not observe phone calls, text messages, or mobile email the way TrackTime does on Android.

Can TrackTime replace Toggl for a team?

It depends on the team. TrackTime offers team plans, and its Enterprise plan supports up to 30 users with team control from the dashboard, so a small firm of hourly billers can absolutely run on it. A team that needs project budgets, a large integration catalog, and deep project reporting is better served by Toggl today.

Does TrackTime work on iPhone?

No, and no app can honestly offer what TrackTime does on iOS. Apple does not allow third-party apps to observe calls, message notifications, or which app is in the foreground, so automatic capture of communication time is technically impossible on iPhone. TrackTime is an Android app with a web dashboard, and we state that plainly rather than shipping a diminished iOS version that could not do the one thing the product is for.

Is automatic capture private enough for confidential client work?

TrackTime was designed around that concern. It stores metadata only, meaning the contact, the time, and the duration of the activity. Message contents and email subject lines are never stored, which matters a great deal if your client communications are privileged or confidential.

The bottom line

Toggl Track is the better manual timer, and TrackTime does not try to compete with it on that ground. TrackTime is the better tool for capturing the billable communication that no timer ever sees, and Toggl does not compete on that ground either. If your losses come from calls, texts, email, and drive time, start a free 7-day TrackTime trial and let a week of automatic capture show you what your timesheet has been missing, or read how the Android app works first.