Harvest vs Toggl vs actiTIME: tested and compared in-depth (2026)

Harvest vs Toggl vs actiTIME: tested and compared in-depth [2026]

Harvest and Toggl Track are two of the cleanest, most widely used time trackers on the market. No employee monitoring, no GPS, no screenshot tools. Both are built around the same basic premise: track hours, understand where time goes, and get paid for it.

What surprises most people comparing them is that both tools have invoicing. Toggl Track added basic invoice generation across all plans, including the free one. Harvest has had invoicing as a core feature since day one. So the question isn’t “which one has invoicing” — it’s “which invoicing workflow actually matches how you bill clients.”

We’ve added actiTIME as a third option because both Harvest and Toggl lock profitability reporting behind their most expensive tiers, and for many project-based teams, that’s the number they most need to see.

Harvest vs Toggl: the short answer

Pick Harvest if invoicing clients is central to your workflow. Harvest’s invoicing is deeper than Toggl’s: it collects payments via Stripe and PayPal, syncs directly with QuickBooks, Xero, and Deel, and connects time tracking to billing in a way that actually replaces a separate invoicing tool.

Pick Toggl Track if you want a better free plan, a cleaner interface, optional desktop auto-tracking, and wider integration coverage. Toggl’s invoicing works, but it’s a supporting feature rather than the main event.

Pick actiTIME if project profitability, cost of work, and leave management are what you need, and you’d rather not pay Enterprise-tier pricing to see whether your projects are making money.

Harvest vs Toggl vs actiTIME: comparison summary

* Harvest displays $9/seat/month as their annual-equivalent Teams price, which reflects a 20% discount from monthly billing. The effective annual rate is approximately $7.20/seat/month when prepaid. Verify current pricing at getharvest.com/pricing before purchasing.

What is Harvest?

Harvest launched in 2006 and has built its reputation on one workflow done well: track time, invoice the client, get paid. Over 70,000 companies use it. The interface is deliberately simple, and the path from logged hours to a paid invoice is shorter than in almost any other tool. Integration with Stripe and PayPal means payment collection happens inside the same platform rather than across two separate tools.

The limitation is feature depth outside of invoicing. Profitability reporting, timesheet approvals, activity logs, and custom reports all require the Enterprise tier at $14/seat/month annual. There’s no native scheduling: that requires Harvest Forecast, a separate product. The free plan is limited to one seat and two projects, which works for a single freelancer evaluating the tool and nothing else.

What is Toggl Track?

Toggl Track launched in 2006 as well, and has since become one of the go-to time trackers for freelancers and creative teams. It sits inside the Toggl suite alongside Toggl Plan (project scheduling) and Toggl Hire, but operates as a standalone product. The free plan supports up to 5 users with actual useful features: time tracking, 100-plus integrations via browser extension, calendar sync, and basic invoicing.

Toggl Track’s Timeline feature sets it apart from Harvest on the tracking side: it passively records desktop app and browser activity in the background, and users can review it and convert entries to time manually. It’s opt-in and privacy-respecting, which makes it a middle ground between pure manual tracking and the always-on monitoring tools like Hubstaff or Time Doctor. Profitability analysis, timesheet approvals, and SSO require the Premium plan at $16.20/user/month annual.

What is actiTIME?

actiTIME has been on the market for over 20 years, runs in 130-plus countries, and carries over 1,000 five-star reviews from real customers. Like Harvest and Toggl, it has no employee monitoring. Unlike both, it’s built specifically around connecting time to project finances: cost of work, billing totals, and profit or loss by customer, project, or task are built into the standard product, not locked behind the highest tier.

Every paid version includes the full feature set. There are no tiers within the paid product. A permanent free version supports up to three users. A self-hosted version is available for a one-time payment of $120 per user, which removes the subscription cost entirely. Human support and free onboarding come with every option.

Time tracking methods

Harvest

Harvest tracks time through a start-stop timer and direct timesheet entry, available on web, desktop (Mac), and mobile (iOS and Android). There’s no calendar view for visualizing time blocks, no auto-tracking of desktop activity, and no kiosk mode. It’s a deliberately minimal input surface, which suits teams that want time entry to be fast and frictionless rather than feature-dense. The browser extension adds a timer button to tools like Asana, Basecamp, and GitHub.

Toggl Track

More ways to log time: a running timer, manual entry, a calendar view integrated with Google and Outlook calendars, and the Timeline feature that passively records desktop app and browser activity for users to review and convert. Timeline is opt-in and user-controlled, which sidesteps the privacy concerns that come with tools like Time Doctor or Hubstaff. One-click timers are available across 100-plus apps via the browser extension. The extension works on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.

actiTIME

Manual time entry via a weekly timesheet and a calendar view with start and stop times per task. Leave time appears in the same view as worked hours, giving managers a complete picture of any week without switching screens. A Chrome extension handles one-click capture from web-based tools. All entry is voluntary, which reflects actiTIME’s philosophy that accurate manual tracking is more useful than passively captured data that needs heavy review.

Invoicing and billing

Both tools have invoicing. The gap is what happens after you send the invoice.

Harvest

Invoicing is Harvest’s most developed feature. From the Teams plan, tracked time converts to a client invoice in a few clicks. Clients can pay directly via Stripe or PayPal without leaving the invoice. The accounting sync with QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Deel keeps records aligned automatically. For service businesses that bill clients regularly, this workflow replaces what would otherwise require a separate invoicing tool.

Harvest also tracks expenses, which can be added to invoices alongside time. For agencies billing on a cost-plus basis, that covers both hours and disbursements in one place.

Toggl Track

Toggl Track added invoicing across all plans, including the free one. Invoices are generated from billable time and sent to clients, with the option to push them to QuickBooks Online for accounting. Free-plan invoices carry a Toggl logo on the PDF; paid plans remove it. What Toggl doesn’t have is payment collection: there’s no Stripe or PayPal integration, so clients receive the invoice and pay through whatever method you arrange separately. For teams that already use a separate payment tool, this is fine. For teams that want the full billing cycle inside one platform, it’s a gap.

actiTIME

Invoicing is included on all paid versions. It generates invoices automatically from tracked time and billing rates set at the work type level, and syncs with QuickBooks Online. Like Toggl, there’s no built-in payment collection. Where actiTIME differs from both competitors is that invoicing data feeds directly into the profit and loss reports, so billing and project profitability live in the same system. You don’t need to cross-reference an invoice export with a separate profitability report.

Harvest wins on invoicing if you need payment collection and tight accounting sync in one platform. Toggl works for teams that just need to generate and send invoices. actiTIME wins on connecting invoicing to project profitability reporting.

Project budgets and profitability

Both Harvest and Toggl lock their most important financial features behind top tiers. This is where the cost difference with actiTIME becomes hard to ignore.

Harvest

Harvest has no project budget tracking in the traditional sense. You can monitor budget hours and costs on the Teams plan through team reporting and capacity views, but there’s no budget-versus-actual comparison with alerts. Profitability reporting — seeing whether a project earned more than it cost — requires the Enterprise plan at $14/seat/month annual. For a 10-person team, that’s $1,680 per year just to answer “did this project make money.”

Toggl Track

Project time estimates with alerts are available from the Starter plan at $8.10/user/month annual. That’s a useful early-warning system for scope creep, but it’s not the same as budget tracking with cost data. Full profitability analysis, fixed fee project monitoring, and scheduled reports require Premium at $16.20/user/month annual. For a 10-person team at Premium, that’s $1,944 per year — more expensive than Harvest Enterprise for the equivalent feature.

actiTIME

Three budget types come standard on all paid versions at $5/user/month: time budgets comparing invested hours to estimates, cost budgets tracking expenses against pay rates, and billing budgets monitoring what clients owe. The profit and loss report draws from all three and returns profitability by customer, project, or task. No upgrade needed. For 10 people, that’s $600 per year for the full picture.

actiTIME wins this category at a fraction of the cost. Toggl’s project estimates at Starter are a useful workaround, but they’re not profitability reporting. Harvest’s profitability requires Enterprise, and it’s cheaper than Toggl Premium for the same outcome.

Reporting and analytics

Harvest

Team reporting and capacity visualization come with the Teams plan: see who is working on what, how much time is going to each project, and where team members are against their capacity. Custom reports, scheduled report delivery, and activity logs (useful for compliance or client transparency) require Enterprise. There’s no profitability report until Enterprise, and no estimated-versus-actual comparison at any tier.

Toggl Track

Toggl’s reporting is one of its genuine strengths. On Starter, billable rates and revenue analysis are available, giving a financial view of tracked time that Harvest doesn’t offer until Teams. On Premium, profitability analysis, customizable reports with advanced filtering, and scheduled delivery via email all unlock. Toggl also lets you share reports via direct link without requiring the recipient to have an account, which is useful for client-facing transparency.

actiTIME

Over 17 report types come standard at the entry paid tier. The financial ones: a profit and loss report by customer, project, or task; a cost of work report tying hours to individual pay rates including overtime and leave; a billing summary for total billable amounts; and an estimated-versus-actual report. The leave time and balances report, which neither Harvest nor Toggl can produce, is also included. None of these require an upgrade.

Toggl leads on reporting at the Starter tier — revenue analysis earlier and better report customization than Harvest at an equivalent price. actiTIME leads on financial depth at any tier. Harvest’s reporting is straightforward but unlocks slowly.

Team management and approvals

Harvest

Timesheet approvals require the Enterprise plan ($14/seat/month annual). The activity log, also Enterprise-only, records all time entry changes and is useful for teams with billing compliance requirements or clients who audit hour logs. There’s no leave tracking, PTO management, or overtime handling at any Harvest tier.

Toggl Track

Timesheet approvals land on Premium ($18/user/month annual), alongside required fields enforcement for complete time entries and locked entries to prevent retroactive edits. Team reminders for insufficient tracked hours are available on Starter. There’s no leave tracking, PTO management, or overtime handling in Toggl Track either.

actiTIME

Timesheet approvals are included on all paid versions. Leave tracking, PTO accrual rules, per-employee PTO balances, sick day tracking, a blackout days calendar, and a company-wide holiday calendar are all included as well. None of this requires an upgrade. For teams managing remote or distributed workforces where attendance and leave data matter alongside project time, actiTIME is the only tool in this comparison that handles it.

actiTIME wins on team management at any price point: approvals, leave, and PTO are standard. Both Harvest and Toggl require expensive tier upgrades for approvals and have no leave management at all.

Integrations

Harvest

Harvest’s integrations are fewer but more purposeful. The accounting connections — QuickBooks Online, Xero, Stripe, PayPal, and Deel — are the strongest in this comparison for teams that need the invoicing-to-payment cycle to work without manual steps. Asana is natively integrated for time tracking within projects. The browser extension adds a timer button to a handful of supported tools. For teams whose whole workflow runs through invoicing and accounting, the focused list is an advantage.

Toggl Track

The 100-plus integrations available through Toggl’s browser extension on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge are the widest in this comparison, and they’re available even on the free plan. Jira and Salesforce native integrations come on Premium. Zapier connects to 3,000-plus additional apps on all plans. Google and Outlook calendar integration is built in across all tiers. For teams with a diverse tool stack, Toggl’s breadth is hard to match.

actiTIME

Zapier (2,000-plus apps), REST API, QuickBooks Online, Chrome extension, and actiPLANS for absence management. Narrower native list, but the API and Zapier connection covers most custom needs without building a proprietary integration.

Pricing and value

Harvest pricing

Prices verified from getharvest.com/pricing (June 2026). The $9/seat/month Teams price represents the annual-equivalent rate after Harvest’s 20% annual discount. Monthly billing is approximately $11.25/seat/month. Harvest’s pricing page displays the discounted annual rate.

Note: Harvest’s pricing page shows $9/seat/month and $14/seat/month as headline rates, which appear to be the monthly billing prices. Annual billing with 20% discount brings these to approximately $7.20 and $11.20 respectively. Verify exact pricing at getharvest.com/pricing before purchasing.

See also: Harvest Pricing Review 2026: Plans, Costs & actiTIME Comparison

Toggl Track pricing

Prices verified from toggl.com/track/pricing/ (June 2026).

See also: Toggl Pricing Review 2026: Plans & Value Analysis

actiTIME pricing

Prices per actiTIME product documentation.

Cost comparison: 10-person team needing profitability reporting and timesheet approvals

Toggl Premium is the most expensive path to profitability reporting in this comparison. Harvest Enterprise gets there more cheaply. actiTIME gets there at less than half the cost of either, with leave management and PTO tracking also included.

Final verdict: Harvest vs Toggl vs actiTIME

Harvest and Toggl Track occupy similar territory — clean time trackers without monitoring — but they split on where they invest their product depth. Harvest invests in the invoicing-to-payment workflow. Toggl invests in the tracking-to-reporting workflow, with a better free plan and more integration breadth.

If you invoice clients and want payment collection inside the same platform, Harvest is the cleaner answer. If you need more from the free plan, prefer auto-tracking, or work with a wide range of tools, Toggl Track is worth the look.

Both tools ask you to pay significant Enterprise or Premium pricing to see whether your projects are actually profitable. At Harvest that’s $14/seat/month; at Toggl it’s $16.20/user/month. actiTIME answers that question at $5/user/month, and adds leave management and PTO tracking that neither competitor offers at any price.

Go with Harvest if client invoicing is the heart of your workflow, you need payment collection via Stripe or PayPal inside the tool, and accounting sync with QuickBooks or Xero is a requirement.

Go with Toggl Track if a generous free plan matters, you want optional auto-tracking for your desktop, you need wide integration coverage, and basic invoicing is enough for how you bill clients.

Go with actiTIME if you need project profitability, leave management, and full budget tracking at a price that doesn’t require your most expensive tier, and you’d value a self-hosted option or a vendor with 20-plus years of track record.

Resources

Harvest pricing (verified June 2026): getharvest.com/pricing
Toggl Track pricing (verified June 2026): toggl.com/track/pricing
actiTIME pricing (verified June 2026): actitime.com/pricing