Clockify vs Harvest: full comparison (and a third option worth knowing about)

Clockify vs Harvest: full comparison (and a third option worth knowing about)

If you’ve narrowed your search down to Clockify vs Harvest, you’ve already done the hard part. Both are solid, well-reviewed time trackers, and you genuinely can’t make a bad choice between them. But “solid” isn’t the same as “right for you,” and the two tools split apart in ways that matter once you look past the marketing pages.

Clockify wins on price and flexibility. Harvest wins on invoicing polish. Neither one, by design, tells you whether your projects are actually making money, and for teams that bill clients or track budgets, that’s often the question that matters most. We’ll get to a third option that handles this later in the piece. First, the head to head.

Clockify vs Harvest: the short answer

Pick Clockify if you want the most generous free plan available and don’t mind paying more later for profitability and budget features.

Pick Harvest if invoicing is the center of your workflow and you’re willing to pay Enterprise pricing for approvals and reporting.

Keep reading if neither answer feels complete. That’s usually the sign your team needs something built around project profitability from day one, not bolted on at the top tier.

What is Clockify?

Clockify came out of CAKE.com in 2017 and grew fast on the strength of one decision: make the free plan actually good. Unlimited users, no credit card, a real feature set. That’s rare, and it’s why Clockify shows up on almost every “best free time tracker” list with a 4.8 rating across 9,000-plus Capterra reviews.

The tradeoff is that Clockify monetizes in layers. Invoicing sits on the Standard tier, labor cost and profit analysis on Pro, single sign-on on Enterprise. None of this is hidden, but it means the “free time tracker” you signed up for can turn into a $7.99-per-seat-per-month tool fairly quickly once you need to see whether a project is profitable.

What is Harvest?

Harvest has been around since 2006, old enough that it predates most of the category. It’s a New York company, and its whole design philosophy seems to be: keep it light, make invoicing painless. That focus shows. Turning tracked hours into a client invoice, and getting paid for it through Stripe or PayPal, is the smoothest version of that workflow we tested.

The cost of that focus is depth. Harvest’s free plan caps out at one seat and two projects, which is workable for a freelancer and nothing else. Its Teams tier ($9/seat/month) covers basic budgets, but profitability reporting and timesheet approvals are locked to Enterprise at $14 per seat per month. For a 10-person team, that’s the difference between $1,080 and $1,680 a year just to see whether your projects are paying off. And if you also want capacity planning, that’s a separate purchase: Harvest Forecast.

What is actiTIME?

actiTIME has been on the market for more than 20 years, runs in 130-plus countries, and has over 1,000 five-star reviews from actual customers, a track record neither Clockify nor Harvest can match yet, simply by age.

The bigger difference is what it’s built around. Clockify and Harvest both start from “track hours” and add profitability as a paid upgrade. actiTIME starts from the other direction: every report ties hours back to cost of work, billing, and profit or loss by customer, project, or task, and that’s true on the free version, not just the top tier. There’s also no tiering within the paid product, one option, full feature set, plus a self-hosted version for a one-time $120 per user, which is the only option in this comparison that doesn’t ask you to keep paying forever.

See also: actiTIME vs Harvest: Side-by-Side Comparison

Time tracking: how each tool captures hours

All three cover the obvious ground: a timer you start and stop, and a timesheet you fill in by hand. Past that, they diverge.

Clockify adds a calendar view, an auto tracker that watches app and website activity in the background, and a kiosk mode so people can clock in with a PIN or QR code from a shared device. It’s the most feature-dense of the three on pure tracking methods. Harvest stays deliberately simple: a timer, day and week entry, nothing else competing for attention. actiTIME sits in between, with a weekly timesheet and a calendar view that shows leave time alongside worked hours, so a manager can see the full picture without switching reports.

Leave tracking is where the gap actually shows up in pricing. Clockify puts it behind the Standard tier. Harvest puts it behind Enterprise. actiTIME includes it free. If your team needs to track both billable hours and time off in the same place without an upgrade, that’s worth knowing before you commit.

Reporting and profitability

This is the section that matters most if you’re choosing based on more than “does it have a timer.”

Clockify’s reports are clean, summary, detailed, weekly, attendance, expense, and from the Basic tier up you get earnings and cost breakdowns. Pro tier adds GPS-based location reports. It’s a good system, but the report that tells you whether a project made money sits behind that same Pro tier.

Harvest covers budgets and team capacity well enough, and its activity log (Enterprise only) is useful for audit purposes. But real profitability reporting, what a project earned against what it cost, only exists on the $14-per-seat Enterprise tier.

actiTIME ships over 17 report types standard, including a profit and loss report by customer, project, or task; a cost of work report tying hours to pay rates (regular, overtime, leave); a billing summary; and an estimated-versus-actual report for tracking against scope. None of it requires an upgrade. If profitability visibility is the actual reason you’re shopping for a new tool, and for a lot of teams comparing Clockify and Harvest, it is, this is the gap between them that’s easy to miss until you’re three months into a paid plan.

Project budgets

Clockify’s budgeting lives on Pro: estimates, alerts, labor cost and profit analysis, all reasonably well built, all $7.99 per seat per month away from the free version.

Harvest gives you basic time and cost budgets on Teams. Whether that budget actually turned a profit is, again, an Enterprise question.

actiTIME runs three separate budget types on every version: time budgets (hours vs. estimate), cost budgets (expense vs. pay rate), and billing budgets (what the client owes). You can apply any of them at the task, project, or customer level, over a date range or the project’s whole life, and the profit and loss report pulls from all three automatically.

Invoicing

Harvest wins this one outright. Time to invoice, invoice to paid, via Stripe or PayPal, is fast and well designed, and it’s the reason a lot of service businesses pick Harvest in the first place.

Clockify’s invoicing (Standard tier) covers the basics: generate from tracked time, apply rates, log payment. It works, but it’s not in Harvest’s league.

actiTIME generates invoices from tracked time and work-type billing rates, and syncs with QuickBooks Online for the accounting side. It doesn’t take payments directly the way Harvest does. If invoicing is the single most important workflow you have, Harvest is still the better pick. If invoicing is one piece of a bigger financial picture you want in one tool, actiTIME folds it in rather than treating it as the main event.

Team management and time off

Role-based permissions exist in all three. Scheduling and capacity planning live on Clockify Pro, or as a separate purchase (Forecast) if you’re on Harvest, actiTIME doesn’t do forward scheduling either, though task assignment and reporting cover a lot of the same ground.

Where actiTIME pulls ahead is leave management depth: PTO accrual rules, per-employee balances, sick day tracking, blackout days, and a shared company calendar, all included on every version. That’s a meaningfully bigger leave system than what either competitor offers without a tier upgrade.

Integrations

Clockify connects to 90-plus apps natively, QuickBooks, Trello, Asana, Jira, Slack, and that breadth makes it the safe pick if you have one specific tool you need wired in. Harvest’s native list is shorter but pointed at accounting: QuickBooks Online, Xero, Stripe. actiTIME relies on Zapier (2,000-plus apps), a REST API, a QuickBooks Online integration, and a companion product (actiPLANS) for absence tracking. Fewer native logos, but the API and Zapier combination covers most custom needs just as well.

Clockify vs Harvest pricing

Clockify

Harvest

actiTIME

The honest read: Clockify’s free plan is the best deal here if your needs stay simple. Harvest’s free plan barely qualifies as one (one seat, two projects). actiTIME is the only one of the three where paying more never means unlocking a feature you didn’t have before, every option ships the same product, and the self-hosted, one-time-payment route is the only way in this comparison to stop the meter on a per-seat subscription entirely.

Support

Clockify offers 24/7 support and a 7-day trial on paid tiers. Harvest gives you email support and a help center, with custom onboarding if you’re 50-plus seats on Enterprise. actiTIME includes human support and free onboarding on every option, including the free one, and its 30-day trial is full-featured rather than a stripped preview.

Final Verdict

Go with Clockify if you want a free tracker that scales to any team size, you use a mix of tracking methods, and you’re fine paying Pro-tier prices once profitability tracking becomes a requirement.

Go with Harvest if invoicing is the job the tool needs to do well, you’re already on QuickBooks or Xero, and your team is small enough that Enterprise pricing doesn’t sting.

Go with actiTIME if you want profitability, billing, and cost of work included from day one, you’d rather not pay per seat forever, or you just want a vendor that’s been doing this for 20 years and has the reviews to back it up.

If you’re evaluating other tools alongside Clockify and Harvest, also worth reading: 9 Clockify Alternatives Worth Switching To in 2026 | 9 Best Harvest Alternatives After the Bending Spoons Price Hike (2026)

Resources

Clockify pricing (verified June 2026): clockify.me/pricing
Harvest pricing (verified June 2026): getharvest.com/pricing
actiTIME pricing (verified June 2026): actitime.com/pricing