10 Best Time Tracking Software for Engineers, From Free to Enterprise

A civil engineer hands a design off to structural, structural hands it to MEP, a client-side change order lands mid-phase, and somewhere in there a subconsultant’s invoice shows up needing a markup applied before it goes to the client. None of that shows up in a simple timer built for one person doing one job for one client – the handoffs, the markups, the discipline-specific work all disappear into an undifferentiated pile of hours.

Most engineering firms respond by bolting together a timesheet spreadsheet, a separate invoicing tool, and a resourcing chart that only ever gets updated when someone remembers. This guide walks through the tools built to handle multi-discipline, multi-firm engineering work directly, so your billing and staffing data can come from one place instead of three.

What is time tracking for engineers?

Time tracking for engineers means logging hours against a discipline, a project phase, and often a specific client contract, rather than just a generic task. A structural calculation hour and a site inspection hour can belong to entirely different billing arrangements, so the record needs to show which discipline, which phase, and which contract each hour belongs to instead of a single running total for the day.

A generic timer can’t make that distinction. It logs one person against one job for one client, full stop. Real time tracking software for engineers has to do more: roll hours up across disciplines, carry subconsultant markups through to the client invoice, and still hold together when a project spans several firms working under one prime contract, the way a civil firm might subcontract structural analysis to a specialist and need to bill the client for both pieces of work.

Common challenges engineers face

Before picking a tool, it helps to name what actually makes engineering work hard to track in the first place. Most of these problems exist whether or not a firm has software at all – the right tool just makes them visible instead of invisible.

• Work jumps between disciplines mid-project. A single project can move through civil, structural, and MEP review inside the same week, each with its own scope and sometimes its own billing rate. Hours logged without a discipline tag get flattened into one undifferentiated bucket.
• Deadlines compress faster than staffing adjusts. A permit review comes back with comments two weeks before a deadline that hasn’t moved, and a bit of quiet scope creep suddenly pulls three people onto a task that was budgeted for one. Without current time data, nobody can tell who actually has room to absorb it.
• Multiple firms work under one prime contract. A subconsultant’s hours, a specialist’s site visit, a testing lab’s invoice – all of it has to be tracked, marked up correctly, and passed through to the client without the paper trail falling apart.
• Regulated and government work comes with its own documentation rules. Public infrastructure and defense-adjacent contracts often require time records that hold up to an outside audit rather than an internal report alone.
• A day rarely fits into one task. Calculations, a client call, a code review, an hour answering a contractor’s question on an older project – switching this often makes people round hours to whatever feels close, rather than log what actually happened.
• Reporting to the client and reporting internally pull in different directions. A client wants a clean phase-by-phase summary; a principal wants to know which discipline is eating the budget. Manually producing both from the same raw timesheet data eats a real chunk of a project manager’s week.

What to look for in a tool

Line these challenges up against a shortlist of tools and a pattern shows up fast: the following six capabilities are what actually separate a fit from a frustration when you settle on time tracking software for engineers.

1. Discipline and phase tagging on every entry: Look for software that lets an hour carry both a project phase and a discipline, beyond a bare task name, so cross-discipline handoffs stay visible instead of blending together.
2. Real time staffing visibility: A dashboard built for resource planning, showing who’s logging hours against what as the week happens, is what lets a PM catch an overloaded person before a deadline forces the issue.
3. Multi-firm and subconsultant support: A tool should let you record a subconsultant’s hours or invoice, apply a markup, and pass the cost through to client billing without a manual spreadsheet step in between.
4. Audit-ready records: If any of your work touches public or government contracts, look for time records detailed and timestamped enough to survive an outside audit rather than an internal summary alone.
5. Low-friction daily entry: The easier it is to log a few minutes here and there throughout the day, the less everyone rounds their hours to whatever’s convenient at 5 PM.
6. Realization rate reporting: A report that compares what was actually billed against what a standard rate would have generated tells you far more about firm health than raw hours logged ever will.

Best time tracking software for engineers

The table below rounds up all ten tools in this guide, including whether each one goes beyond basic time tracking into PSA-level territory like resourcing and subcontractor billing.

1. actiTIME

Key features:

• Online timesheet
• Task estimates vs. actuals
• Billing & invoicing
• Custom fields
• Mobile apps

Why it works: actiTIME lets you tag time entries with custom fields, which covers discipline and phase tracking without needing a purpose built engineering platform. Billing rates are set per work type rather than per person, so a structural review hour and a site visit hour can carry different rates on the same project, and tracked hours turn directly into a client invoice.

Best for: Engineering firms of any size that want time, cost, and billing in one system without paying for full PSA complexity.

Pricing: Free for up to 3 users; $6/user/month for 1–40 users, $5/user/month for 41–200 users, $1,500/month for unlimited users on the online version; self-hosted from $120/user as a one-time purchase.

Free trial: 30 days, no credit card required.

Pros:

• Custom fields let a firm build its own discipline and phase categories rather than fitting into a fixed structure
• Invoices generate directly from tracked billable time, with different rates by work type on the same project
• Available as both cloud and self-hosted, useful for firms with government or defense-adjacent data requirements

Cons:

• No built-in subconsultant markup calculation, so multi-firm billing still needs a manual step

2. Toggl Track

Key features:

• One-click timers
• Billable rates
• Timesheet approvals
• Profitability reports

Why it works: Toggl Track keeps entry down to a single click, then lets you layer on billable rates, timesheet approvals, and labor cost reporting as a firm grows into needing them. It won’t natively separate a subconsultant’s markup from your own team’s hours, but for a firm that mainly needs clean, low-friction tracking with room to grow, that simplicity is the draw.

Best for: Engineering teams that want a clean, well-known interface and plan to add billing depth gradually rather than all at once.

Pricing: Free for up to 3 users; Starter $9/user/month; Premium $16/user/month; Enterprise custom, all with 33% off on annual billing.

Free trial: 30 days on paid tiers, no credit card required.

Pros:

• Interface is genuinely fast to use daily, which helps with the rounding-hours problem common in engineering timesheets
• Fixed fee project support on Premium matches firms that bill some phases at a flat rate

Cons:

• No native discipline or subconsultant markup structure, so multi-firm billing has to be approximated with tags and rates
• Free plan caps out at 3 users, tight for a firm with more than a couple of engineers

3. Apploye

Key features:

• Time tracking & timesheets
• Attendance
• Screenshot monitoring
• Project management

Why it works: Apploye combines time tracking with attendance and optional screenshot monitoring at a price point well below most competitors on this list, with a free tier that covers up to 10 users. For a small engineering practice watching software spend closely, that’s a meaningful gap in cost without giving up core tracking and reporting.

Best for: Small engineering firms that want affordable tracking and basic workforce oversight without paying for PSA-level billing depth.

Pricing: Free for up to 10 users; Elite from $4.50/seat/month; Power from $8/seat/month; Enterprise custom, all billed annually for the listed rate.

Free trial: 10 days, no credit card required; 30-day money-back guarantee on paid tiers.

Pros:

• Free tier supports up to 10 users, generous for a firm this size compared to most competitors here
• Lowest paid entry price on this list, useful for a firm that has outgrown the free tier but still watches costs

Cons:

• Screenshot and activity monitoring can read as surveillance to engineering staff unless rolled out with a clear policy
• No discipline, phase, or subconsultant billing structure built in

4. Kantata

Key features:

• Resource management
• Time & expense tracking
• Revenue forecasting
• Project financials

Why it works: Kantata treats time tracking as one input into a much larger resourcing and forecasting system, which fits a multi-discipline firm juggling engineers across several concurrent projects with different skill requirements. Revenue forecasting draws on the same time data logged day to day, rather than a separate spreadsheet exercise built after the fact.

Best for: Larger engineering firms with multiple disciplines and overlapping projects that need enterprise-grade resourcing beyond a simple timer.

Pricing: Not published; quote based after a demo.

Free trial: Demo-based – contact sales to see the product before committing.

Pros:

• Resourcing and forecasting share the same data set as time tracking, so staffing plans reflect actual logged effort
• Built specifically as a professional-services automation platform, not a general project tool with time tracking bolted on

Cons:

• No published pricing or self-serve trial, and the feature depth is more than a small firm typically needs

5. TimeCamp

Key features:

• Automatic time tracking
• 100+ integrations
• Resource planner
• Audit logs

Why it works: TimeCamp connects to over 100 other tools, so engineers working across CAD platforms, project trackers, and messaging apps can have time captured without switching context to log it manually. Audit logs and data export on the higher tiers give firms with regulated or government contracts a paper trail that holds up to outside review.

Best for: Engineering firms already running several other tools that want time capture to happen automatically in the background.

Pricing: Free for unlimited users with core features; Starter from $3.99/user/month; Premium from $6.99/user/month; Ultimate from $9.99/user/month; Enterprise custom, all billed annually.

Free trial: Available on paid tiers, no credit card required.

Pros:

• Free tier has no user cap, unusual among competitors on this list and useful for a growing firm testing the tool broadly
• Audit logs and self-hosted Enterprise deployment support firms with strict compliance requirements

Cons:

• Resource planning and deeper reporting sit behind the Premium and Ultimate tiers, not available on Free or Starter

6. Hubstaff

Key features:

• GPS time tracking
• Automated timesheets
• Invoicing
• Workforce analytics

Why it works: Hubstaff’s GPS tracking and automated timesheets suit engineers who split time between the office and job sites, capturing location alongside hours without a separate field-reporting step. Invoicing pulls straight from tracked hours once a project wraps, so site-visit time doesn’t get reconstructed from memory back at the desk.

Best for: Engineering firms with staff regularly working from job sites or distributed across multiple office locations.

Pricing: Starter from $4.99/user/month; Grow $7.50/user/month; Team $10/user/month; Enterprise from $25/user/month, all billed annually.

Free trial: 14 days, no credit card required; 30-day money-back guarantee on paid plans.

Pros:

• GPS and location tracking are built in from the entry tier, not gated behind a premium plan
• Automated timesheets reduce the manual reconstruction that happens when field time gets logged late

Cons:

• No permanent free plan, only a 14-day trial
• Location and activity monitoring can raise privacy concerns with staff if introduced without a clear policy

7. My Hours

Key features:

• Timer & manual entry
• Billable rates per project
• Approval workflows
• Audit logs

Why it works: My Hours keeps its free tier genuinely usable, with unlimited projects and clients up to 5 users, then adds billable rates, approval workflows, and audit logs as a firm steps up to the Pro tier. The audit logs specifically give smaller firms a lightweight way to keep defensible time records without a heavier compliance-focused platform.

Best for: Small engineering practices that want a real free tier and a straightforward upgrade path once they need approvals and audit trails.

Pricing: Free for up to 5 users; Basic from $4/user/month; Pro from $8/user/month; Enterprise custom, all billed annually.

Free trial: 14 days of Pro features, no credit card required.

Pros:

• Free tier covers unlimited projects and clients rather than a capped feature set, up to 5 users
• Audit logs on the Pro tier are a genuine differentiator at this price point

Cons:

• No discipline or subconsultant markup structure, and approvals only unlock on the Pro tier

8. timeBuzzer

Key features:

• One-click tracking
• Custom categories
• Team reporting
• Physical hardware timer

Why it works: timeBuzzer is built around removing every possible bit of friction from logging a switch between tasks, down to an optional physical desk button that starts and stops a timer without opening an app. For engineers who resist software-based tracking specifically because it interrupts a train of thought, that’s a genuinely different approach than another browser tab.

Best for: Firms where getting staff to actually log time consistently is the main obstacle, more than needing deep reporting.

Pricing: Pro at $8/user/month, billed annually; optional Desktop Buzzer hardware add-on at $59 per device.

Free trial: 15 days, no credit card required.

Pros:

• The physical hardware timer is a real solution to the specific problem of people forgetting to start a digital timer
• Custom categories let a firm define its own discipline or phase labels rather than fitting a fixed template

Cons:

• No permanent free plan, and reporting is noticeably lighter than PSA-style competitors on this list

9. QuickBooks Time

Key features:

• GPS tracking
• Time kiosk
• Project tracking
• Payroll integration

Why it works: QuickBooks Time folds directly into QuickBooks’ own payroll and accounting, so a firm already using QuickBooks avoids a second system just for hours. The time kiosk feature covers shared job-site tablets or shop-floor stations where individual devices aren’t practical, which suits engineering firms with a manufacturing or fabrication component alongside design work.

Best for: Firms already on QuickBooks that want payroll, GPS field tracking, and time in one connected system.

Pricing: Time Premium from $20/month base plus $10/user/month; Time Elite from $40/month base plus $12/user/month; Workforce tiers add full payroll from $13/employee/month. Intuit runs frequent introductory discounts on the base fee, so check the live price before budgeting off the list rate.

Free trial: 30 days on the base monthly price, no credit card required for new QuickBooks Online customers.

Pros:

• Direct QuickBooks integration means no separate reconciliation step between hours and payroll or invoicing
• Time kiosk mode covers shared-device job sites that per-person app logins don’t handle well

Cons:

• Pricing stacks a base fee on top of per-user cost, which adds up faster than a flat per-seat competitor at small team sizes
• No discipline or subconsultant markup structure built in

10. Productive.io

Key features:

• Budgeting
• Resource planning
• Time tracking
• Profitability reporting

Why it works: Productive.io bundles time tracking into a wider budgeting and resource planning system built for project-based service firms, so a logged hour immediately shows up in profitability and utilization reports rather than sitting in a separate export. Rate cards on the Professional tier let different roles or disciplines carry different billing rates without manual overrides on every entry.

Best for: Multi-discipline engineering firms that want budgeting, resourcing, and time tracking working from the same data instead of three separate tools.

Pricing: Essential from roughly $10–12/user/month depending on billing cycle; Professional around $25/user/month; Ultimate custom. Check the live pricing page for the exact current split between monthly and annual billing.

Free trial: 14 days, no credit card required.

Pros:

• Budgeting, resourcing, and time tracking share one data set, avoiding the reconciliation work of separate tools
• Rate cards support different billing rates by role or discipline without manual entry-by-entry overrides

Cons:

• Jump from Essential to Professional roughly triples the per-user price, a real cost step for a growing firm

The real cost of not tracking time

Without discipline level time data, a firm’s realization rate stays a mystery until the books close for the quarter. Realization rate is simply what a firm actually billed compared to what its standard rates would have generated if every hour worked had been billed at full value – and it’s a far more honest measure of firm health than total hours logged, since it captures write-offs, discounts, and the hours that never made it onto an invoice at all. A firm running below its target realization rate is quietly giving away margin on every project, and without project profitability metrics broken out by discipline, nobody can tell which projects or which disciplines are actually dragging that number down.

The same blind spot shows up in future bids. Estimating a new project’s fee depends on real task estimates from similar past work, not how long a project was originally scoped to take. A firm that can’t pull real hours by discipline from its last three retaining wall designs is estimating the next one from memory, and memory tends to remember the version of events that makes for a smoother client conversation, not the version with the honest hour count.

Discipline and phase level tracking fixes both problems at once, simply by making the numbers available while they’re still actionable. A principal checking realization rate mid-project, not at quarter close, can move a person off a struggling discipline or push back on scope before the fee is fully spent. And a closed project logged this way hands the next proposal something real to work from, rather than a guess dressed up as an estimate.

Sub-consultants and markup billing

Few engineering projects stay inside one firm. A civil engineering practice might bring in a geotechnical specialist for soil analysis, a structural firm might subcontract a specialty welding inspector, or a prime contractor on a public infrastructure project might coordinate five subconsultants across as many disciplines. Every one of those arrangements has to be tracked, marked up, and billed through to the client without the paper trail breaking down somewhere in the middle.

The markup itself is usually straightforward on paper: a firm adds a percentage to a subconsultant’s invoiced cost before passing it to the client, covering the administrative overhead of managing that relationship. What’s not straightforward is keeping that markup consistent and defensible across a dozen different subconsultants, each invoicing on their own schedule, when the tracking happens in whatever spreadsheet a project manager happened to set up for that particular job. Two projects with the same markup policy can end up billed differently just because one PM’s spreadsheet had a formula error and nobody caught it before the invoice went out.

A tool that treats subconsultant time and cost as a first class category, not an afterthought bolted onto a client invoice, keeps the markup calculation consistent and keeps a clean record of what came from your own staff versus what came from a subcontracted firm. That distinction matters beyond billing accuracy too – a client or an auditor asking how a project’s budget was actually spent deserves a real answer, not a guess about which invoices were whose.

Who tracks time, and how it differs by discipline

The same timesheet entry means something different depending on who’s logging it and which discipline they sit in, which is part of why a one-size-fits-all setup rarely holds up firm-wide.

• Civil and structural engineers tend to work in longer, calculation-heavy blocks punctuated by site visits, so their tracking needs to handle both desk time and field time without forcing two separate workflows.
• MEP engineers often need to manage multiple projects in the same week, each with tighter capacity constraints, since a single mechanical or electrical specialist can be the bottleneck across several jobs at once.
• Project managers use the aggregated data to catch a phase drifting over budget, rebalance who’s assigned to what, and keep client-facing reports accurate without chasing down individual timesheets by hand.
• Principals and firm owners look at realization rate and utilization metrics across disciplines and offices, which is what actually tells them whether the firm as a whole is healthy rather than simply busy.

A tool built around one generic “employee” role usually serves whichever group set it up well and leaves the others working around it. The better fit is software flexible enough to let a civil engineer log a site visit from a phone, an MEP lead see their own capacity across projects, and a principal pull a firm-wide realization report, all from the same underlying data.

How to choose the right tool

With ten options on the table above, picking the right time tracking software for engineering comes down to a handful of practical questions about how your firm is actually structured.

• How many disciplines does your firm run under one roof? A single-discipline practice can usually get by with a general purpose tracker like Toggl Track or My Hours. A multi-discipline firm coordinating civil, structural, and MEP under one project benefits more from something built around resourcing across teams, like Kantata or Productive.io.
• How often do you work with subconsultants? If subcontracted work is occasional, a tool that just tracks your own team’s time is enough. If it’s constant, weight tools that can cleanly separate and mark up third-party costs more heavily.
• Do any of your contracts require audit-ready records? Public infrastructure or government-adjacent work often needs documentation that holds up to outside review. TimeCamp and My Hours both offer audit logs at a relatively accessible price point if this applies to you.
• How much of your work happens in the field versus at a desk? Firms with regular site visits or shop-floor time benefit from GPS tracking and offline capture, which Hubstaff and QuickBooks Time both build in from an early tier.
• Is a paid PSA platform actually justified yet? Dozens of staff across several offices is where the resourcing depth of Kantata or Productive.io starts to pay for itself. Below that headcount, free time tracking software for engineers – actiTIME, TimeCamp, and My Hours all have real free tiers – usually covers a solo practitioner or small team without the enterprise price tag.
• Don’t judge a tool on its demo project. A sales walkthrough is built around one clean task type on purpose. Load a real week of your own multi-discipline, multi-subconsultant work into the trial instead, and see whether the tool still holds together once the mess is real.

Common mistakes engineering firms make

Even the best time tracking software for engineering firms gets undermined by a handful of avoidable habits.

• Logging time to a project, not a discipline. Without a discipline tag on every entry, a project can look profitable overall while one discipline is quietly bleeding hours and another is barely being used, with the two numbers canceling out on paper.
• Treating subconsultant hours as a footnote. If a subcontracted firm’s time and markup aren’t tracked with the same rigor as internal hours, nobody can answer a basic question about where a project’s budget actually went.
• Reconstructing site visit time from memory. Field hours logged days later, back at a desk, tend to round toward whatever’s convenient to remember, not what actually happened on site.
• Waiting for quarter close to check realization rate. By the time the number is calculated, the projects that dragged it down are already finished, and there’s nothing left to adjust.
• Assuming government or public contract requirements will sort themselves out later. Audit-ready record keeping is much easier to build in from day one than to reconstruct retroactively once a contract requires it.
• Choosing on integrations instead of on structure. A long list of connected apps means nothing if the tool underneath still can’t represent a multi-discipline, multi-firm project the way your firm actually delivers it – that mismatch shows up across every timesheet the tool touches.

How to roll it out

• Define disciplines and categories before day one. Decide how your firm splits civil, structural, MEP, or whatever your actual disciplines are, plus how subconsultant hours get categorized separately from internal time, and write it down somewhere everyone can check.
• Set a markup policy before the first subconsultant invoice comes in. Agree on the percentage and how it gets applied before someone has to figure it out under deadline pressure on a live invoice.
• Make the pitch about their own numbers. An engineer logs more consistently once they see it protects their own billable hours and feeds better estimates into the next proposal; a monitoring pitch lands far worse.
• Train on the actual interface, beyond a policy walkthrough. A short demonstration of real discipline and project entry prevents the most common failure: people skipping entries because they haven’t built the habit yet.
• Put a mobile entry option in front of anyone who does site visits. A structural engineer standing on scaffolding isn’t opening a laptop to log time, so if the phone experience is slow or awkward, that time gets reconstructed from memory back at the office instead.
• Close out each task the moment it wraps. A discipline tag attached right then stays accurate. Reconstructing the same hour from memory on Friday afternoon, after five days of mixed disciplines, produces a rounded-off guess at best.
• Review realization rate monthly, ahead of year end. Checking the number regularly catches a slipping project or discipline while there’s still time to adjust staffing or renegotiate scope.
• Feed closed-project hours back into future bids. If a discipline consistently runs over its estimated hours on a certain project type, that’s real data for the next proposal, and not simply a line item to write off.

The right tool matches how your firm actually delivers projects

An hour logged without a discipline, a phase, and a firm attached to it is just a number – it can’t feed a realization rate, and it can’t tell a principal anything useful before the quarter is already over. Kantata and Productive.io are built with multi-discipline resourcing and forecasting as native features, which is what a firm running several offices and dozens of staff across disciplines is paying for. A smaller firm doesn’t need that scale to get the same underlying structure: actiTIME, Toggl Track, and TimeCamp can be set up with the same discipline and phase tags for a fraction of the licensing cost.

A firm’s actual size points toward one route long before its feature list does. Either way, the thing worth buying is the ability to catch a discipline sliding over budget while a change is still possible, rather than reading about it for the first time on a finished invoice.

FAQ

Is a general time tracker enough, or does an engineering firm need a full PSA platform?

Depends on how many disciplines and subconsultants you coordinate. A firm working in one discipline with occasional subcontracted work usually does fine with a general tracker like actiTIME or Toggl Track. A firm running multiple disciplines under one roof, with subconsultants on most projects, gets more value from a PSA platform like Kantata or Productive.io that treats resourcing and markup billing as core features, not workarounds.

Does time tracking software for engineers apply to in-house teams that don’t bill clients, or only to consulting firms?

Most of the advice here about discipline tagging and realization rate assumes client billing, but in-house engineering teams still benefit from the same discipline tags and staffing visibility. The difference is what the hours get compared against: instead of a client invoice, an in-house team compares logged time to an internal project budget or headcount plan.

Is time tracking software for engineers really different from tools built for other professional services industries?

Not really, when it comes to the tools themselves – most of the software on this list, including actiTIME, isn’t locked to one industry at all. What differs is which features matter most to prioritize: an engineering firm gets more value from discipline tagging and subconsultant markup billing, while an architecture firm leans harder on phase-based fixed fee and hourly billing for a single firm. The same flexible tool can serve both well once it’s set up around the right priorities.