With an ever-growing list of clients and projects to oversee, balancing estimated project timelines and the actual hours spent becomes necessary for project managers. Traditional time tracking methods, such as manual timesheets, can be time-consuming and prone to errors. Investing in time tracking software can help.
If you wish to explore software functionalities without the commitment of purchasing, go with a free time tracking tool. It will help you identify the necessary features for your business operations and test multiple options before finalizing a product.
This article highlights, in alphabetical order, the six top-rated free time tracking software products based on verified software reviews. Read more.
We classify these tools into two categories: mobile-focused time trackers, which prioritize mobile functionality with dedicated apps or responsive interfaces, and desktop-centric/platform-agnostic time trackers, which prioritize desktop functionality. However, desktop-centric/platform-agnostic tools may still have mobile options in beta versions or limited device compatibility, such as mobile apps available only for iPhone users. Both categories offer core time tracking features, including billable hours tracking, real-time reporting, overtime calculation, and project time tracking.
1. busybusy
busybusy is a mobile time card app. It offers GPS reminders that notify employees to clock in when they arrive at the worksite and clock out when they leave. The software enables users to customize their overtime calculations based on weekly and daily hours or weekend rates, ensuring accurate and compliant overtime compensation. It also leverages GPS technology to provide real-time tracking and monitor the whereabouts of equipment, enabling businesses to optimize asset utilization, enhance security, and improve operational efficiency.
In addition to the features mentioned above, the free version includes an offline mode that enables employees to track their time without an internet connection, ensuring accurate records in any location. Employee breaks can be managed and recorded within the software, helping businesses stay compliant with labor regulations. However, if you require supervisor tools, such as clocking in on behalf of your team or assigning/editing tasks, you would need to consider the paid version of busybusy.
Free featuresOvertime calculations: Automate overtime hours calculation to determine any hours worked beyond regular working hours, considering factors such as shift differential and overtime rate. This feature helps you comply with labor regulations and ensures accurate payment for overtime work.
Mobile reports: Create mobile-accessible reports, offering real-time insights into workforce productivity, project progress, and labor costs. You can also generate customizable reports directly from mobile devices, enabling you to make informed decisions and monitor useful metrics from anywhere, anytime.
Equipment usage: Monitor equipment usage, identify idle or underutilized equipment, and optimize resource allocation. This feature helps prevent equipment misuse, schedule maintenance tasks, and improve overall operational efficiency.
Customer support options: Live chat, email, and phone
Who should consider busybusy?
busybusy is specifically designed for construction companies, field service businesses, contractors, and other remote industries. Its GPS reminders ensure employees clock in and out at the worksite, while the equipment tracking feature optimizes resource allocation. Additionally, the offline mode and mobile reports make busybusy a good option for businesses that need to track time and manage productivity in various locations.
Trial/Free Version
- Free Trial
- Free Version
Cost to upgrade
Device compatibility
2. Elorus
Elorus is a desktop-centric time tracker. Whether tracking time manually or using its built-in timer, you can accurately monitor the hours spent on different tasks or projects. You can get a complete picture of the total hours worked, including both billable (hours you can charge clients for) and non-billable (hours that are not directly invoiced to clients) time. Elorus' browser extension allows you to monitor and track team members' progress on tasks and projects, ensuring they are working on the right things and aligning with team goals.
Under its free version, you track unlimited projects and send unlimited invoices to up to five customers. By integrating time tracking with invoicing capabilities, Elorus simplifies the billing process and improves overall financial management.
Free featuresBillable hours: Track billable hours spent on client projects or tasks and categorize time entries to specify the clients or projects they align to. This feature simplifies invoicing based on the tracked billable hours, ensuring transparency and precise billing for clients.
Client portal to share timesheets: Use a client portal to share timesheets with the clients, allowing them to view and verify the hours worked on their projects. This feature enhances transparency and communication, as clients can review and validate the recorded time entries.
Real-time team monitoring: Get an overview of each team member’s real-time time entries and project status. This helps managers identify bottlenecks, allocate resources efficiently, and meet project deadlines.
Customer support options: Live chat, help center, and social media
Who should consider Elorus?
Elorus is worth considering for businesses and teams that prioritize real-time visibility into their work processes and want to optimize productivity. By using its browser extension, project managers can monitor who is currently working on what tasks, identify potential bottlenecks or imbalances in workload, and make informed decisions about resource allocation and task assignments.
Trial/Free Version
- Free Trial
- Free Version
Cost to upgrade
Device compatibility
/ Pro tip
Outline your business/project-specific time tracking needs and objectives. Even if the software is free, evaluate the features it offers. Look for essential functionalities such as time entry creation, project/task tracking, reporting, and user management, and compare them across different options to find the most comprehensive solution for your needs.
3. Everhour
Everhour is a desktop-centric time tracker with a browser extension that helps you track time directly from your web browsers. Its mobile app is currently available for iPhone users only. The tool lets you track time spent on different activities, such as project tasks, client work, or personal projects. It offers various methods for time tracking, including manual entry, timers, and integration with popular project management tools. You can generate detailed reports on time tracked, team productivity, project costs, and more. These reports offer valuable insights into your business operations, enabling data-driven decisions and optimizing resource allocation.
Everhour’s free version offers unlimited time and project tracking along with the ability to generate customized reports. You can add time entries for others and track your team members’ contributions. This version is free for up to five users. However, you can choose to upgrade to a paid version if you have a larger team.
Free featuresTimer or manual entry: Track work in real time by starting or stopping the timer as needed. You can manually input start and end times or total duration for a particular task or project.
Browser extension: Start or stop timer and record time without switching between web applications. With the browser extension, users can access timers and time tracking widgets directly in their project management interface.
Estimates and reminders: Set expectations and allocate a predefined amount of time for specific tasks or projects. Everhour sends reminders when you are approaching or exceeding the allocated time, allowing you to make necessary adjustments in the timeline.
Customer support options: Email and a help center
Who should consider Everhour?
Businesses that prioritize time-specific tasks and require the ability to set estimates and receive reminders can consider Everhour. With this software, users can allocate predefined amounts of time for tasks and projects. The reminder feature keeps users informed when approaching or exceeding allocated time, enabling timely adjustments to maintain project timelines. Additionally, businesses can benefit from the freedom and flexibility to track unlimited projects and generate reports, allowing them to manage and analyze their time-related data.
Trial/Free Version
- Free Trial
- Free Version
Cost to upgrade
Device compatibility
4. My Hours
My Hours is a platform-agnostic tool, meaning that it is compatible with both desktop and mobile devices. It offers a set of features designed to optimize time tracking, project management, and expense monitoring. With its generative AI-powered assistant, Andrew, the software automates the process of creating time logs by analyzing the duration and description of the activities performed. You also have the flexibility to input task descriptions using various methods, including typing, voice recording, or sending transcriptions.
The free version of My Hours is available for unlimited team members and projects. You can choose to track time with its built-in timer or manually add time logs for past activities. The daily tracking reminder on the mobile app ensures you never miss logging your time, promoting consistent and accurate tracking. However, if you want bulk editing or deleting capabilities to manage different time entries under multiple projects, you can upgrade to its paid version.
Free featuresTimesheets: Track and manage your work hours with timesheets. Use timers or manual entries to record start and end times for tasks. You can assign entries to projects or tasks and add tags to better organize your work for analysis.
Timeline view: Visualize your tasks and activities, in chronological order, over a specific period of time. This feature helps you track your progress throughout the day or week, identify patterns, and make necessary adjustments to better allocate your time.
Group tasks and mark as done: Create categories or projects and assign related tasks to them. For example, if you're working on a project with multiple subtasks, you can group them under a specific project name. Once completed, you can mark the grouped tasks as done.
Customer support options: Messages, email, and a help center
Who should consider My Hours?
My Hours is a good option for businesses that prioritize process automation. Its AI assistant automates the creation of time and activity logs, eliminating manual data entry, saving time, and ensuring data accuracy. These time logs can be used for various purposes, such as billing clients, generating reports, or evaluating project progress.
Trial/Free Version
- Free Trial
- Free Version
Cost to upgrade
Device compatibility
/ Pro tip
Consider the software's scalability. While it may be suitable for your current team size and requirements, check if it can accommodate additional users in the future. A scalable solution saves you the hassle of migrating to a new system later on.
5. Timesheet
Timesheet is a mobile-first time tracker. It lets you plan, track, collaborate on, and execute projects from a unified dashboard. Using wireless local area network (WLAN) technology, this app improves the accuracy of time tracking by automatically starting and stopping work hour tracking based on your presence within a designated Wi-Fi network range. This technology detects when your device connects or disconnects from the specified wireless network, ensuring precise tracking of your working hours. The time tracking app generates work-hour reports on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, enabling you to analyze your current time allocation and optimize resource utilization in the future.
The free version grants access to the mobile application only. It offers unlimited project tracking capabilities and auto-generates time tracking reports in Microsoft Excel or CSV format. These reports can be exported, uploaded, or shared with other platforms such as accounting or payroll software, enhancing integration into your existing workflow.
Free featuresGeofencing: Pre-define specific geofences or virtual boundaries or geographic zones for your workplace or client sites. The Timesheet app automatically tracks work hours based on your physical presence within the specified locations. This feature ensures accurate and automated time tracking, eliminating the need for manual start/stop actions.
Excel timesheet: Generate and export timesheets in Microsoft Excel format. These reports may include the details of your working hours, such as the tasks performed, start and end times, breaks, and any relevant notes.
Activity and expense logging: Log expenses, distance traveled for work-related purposes, and even coffee breaks throughout the day. This feature helps keep a record of your team’s activities and expenses, improving productivity as well as work-related cost management.
work-related cost management.
Customer support options: Messages and FAQs
Who should consider Timesheet?
Timesheet is worth considering for those who work remotely or have flexible working hours and prefer using a mobile application to track work hours. Its app enables users to start or stop timers, log breaks, and review their time entries directly from their mobile devices. The app's use of WLAN technology eliminates the need for manual start/stop actions, making it convenient for those who frequently move between different locations or client sites.
Trial/Free Version
- Free Trial
- Free Version
Cost to upgrade
Device compatibility
6. Timesheets.com
Timesheets.com is a desktop-centric time tracker. It enables you to track projects for multiple clients, monitor time taken to complete a project, and prepare billing reports via timesheets. Timesheets.com has an employee attendance tracking feature that tracks who is on the clock, who is running late, and on active projects. The software uses GPS time tracking to record the location of employees when they clock in or out of work. This feature enhances attendance data reliability and prevents fraudulent reporting.
Timesheets.com has a free version for freelancers and individuals who track only their own time and expenses. They can log their time spent on various tasks and projects, enabling them to accurately record their billable hours. Freelancers can generate reports that summarize their time entries by project, task, or date range. These reports provide valuable insights into their productivity and can be used for invoicing or evaluating project profitability.
Free featuresBilling and job costing: Allocate time and expenses to specific clients, projects, or tasks, enabling accurate invoicing and cost analysis. This feature facilitates effective financial management and helps users track project profitability.
IP locking: Restrict access to the time tracking system based on IP addresses, adding an extra layer of protection to the time clock system. With this feature, users can ensure that their time tracking records are accessed only from trusted locations, such as their own office or home network.
Flexible time entry options: Use flexible time entry options to accommodate different workflows. You can add your work hours manually, use timers to track real-time activities, or import data from other systems. This flexibility improves integration with existing processes and simplifies time-tracking.
Customer support options: Message, call, and chat
Who should consider Timesheets.com?
Freelancers looking for a free time tracking solution to monitor their own tasks and generate basic reports can benefit from using Timesheets.com. The tool allows users to create separate projects and assign time entries to each project. This functionality helps freelancers organize their work, monitor the progress of individual projects, and gain insights into their workload.
Trial/Free Version
- Free Trial
- Free Version
Cost to upgrade
Device compatibility
/ Pro tip
Evaluate real-time employee monitoring functionality, which allows you to track the number of hours spent by each team member to complete assigned tasks. With this, you can gain insights into your team's productivity and time utilization, ensure accountability, and provide valuable data for project management and resource allocation.
What is the cost to upgrade from free time tracking software to a paid one?
A time tracking scheduling software upgrade can be as low as $1.99 per user, per month, or increase up to $20+ per month, depending on various factors—features, number of users, number of employees, business locations, and more. Most time tracking software typically includes the following subscription plans:
Free trial: No-cost trial plans ranging from a week to a month, giving users access to either all or limited features of the software. These are ideal for businesses that wish to try out a tool before purchasing it.
Free version: Free software plans offer basic features and limited premium feature access. This is ideal for small businesses or individuals with a limited budget.
Entry-level: Starts at $1.99 per user, per month and offers limited features. This is a good option for small businesses or teams with basic feature requirements such as time tracking, customizable reports, and time audit.
Mid-tier: Ranges from $7 to $16 per month and offers features such as attendance and overtime tracker, approval dashboard, and more. These are ideal for businesses that have outgrown basic time tracking solutions but don’t require the full range of functionality offered by enterprise-level tools.
High-end: Advanced plans cost up to or more than $20 per month and offer unlimited time tracking features, advanced GPS tracking, and multi-department/office controls. These are ideal for cross-functional businesses with multiple teams and departments that need a customized solution.
Hidden costs associated with time tracking software
Besides the software license itself, there may be additional costs associated with time tracking software, including data migration, training, integration, hardware and IT, and maintenance/upgrades, which small businesses should budget for when considering a new tool.
Frequently asked questions when selecting free time tracking software
Here are some questions to ask time tracking software providers before making a final purchase:
What are the limitations of this free software?
A free time tracking app may have some limitations regarding the number of users and projects. Make sure you can work with these limitations rather than experiencing unforeseen financial implications.
Does the free tool offer reporting and analytics?
Choose a tool that allows you to track the time spent on a project or task and discover which ones are the most profitable. This will help you improve employee productivity and better plan and manage your time as well as resources.
What collaboration tools does it offer?
Collaboration tools help establish project time estimates, communicate with clients and team members, and keep them on track. Having a set of collaborative tools would help in a seamless workflow and a well-timed project.