Best Time Tracking Software for Consultants (2026 Guide)

Trying to keep an accurate record of your work hours as a consultant can be a serious pain. Between switching tasks, juggling clients, and managing clunky spreadsheets for multiple projects, tracking billable hours and understanding where your time actually goes becomes nearly impossible.

A robust time tracking app for consultants can help you overcome these problems. To help you find the right one for your needs, this guide lists 10 time tracking apps for solo consultants and consulting firms looking to adopt time tracking at scale. 

We’ll explore each tool’s essential features, pricing, and customer reviews to help you select the right one for your needs.

What is the best time tracker for consultants? (Quick summary)

Here are our picks for the 10 best time tracking and client billing tools for consultants, based on our 20+ years of experience in the time tracking world:

Tool	G2 Rating	Best for	Pricing
Toggl Track	4.6	Simple, accurate, privacy-first time tracking, invoicing, reporting, and profitability analysis	From $9/user/month
Hubstaff	4.5	Monitoring remote employees with surveillance features	From $4.99/user/month
Clockify	4.5	Freelancers and small teams requiring simple tracking and invoicing	From $5.49/user/month
TimeCamp	4.7	Billing, invoicing, and profitability tracking	From $2.99/user/month
My Hours	4.6	Easy-to-use invoicing and reporting	From $8/user/month
Timely	4.8	Automatic and non-invasive time tracking	From $9/user/month
Time Analytics	4.9	Monitoring employee activity and productivity	From $4.99 per user/month
Harvest	4.3	Invoicing and payments	From $11/user/month
DeskTime	4.5	Automatic time tracking and employee monitoring	From $6.42/user/month
Apploye	4.5	Billing and employee productivity tracking	From $2.50/user/month

Key features to look for in a consultant time tracker (for solo consultants and consulting firms)

Before diving into each tool, it’s worth noting that consulting work is not created equal. 

A solo consultant working with multiple clients might only need simple time tracking, basic invoicing, and some reporting capabilities. In contrast, most consulting firms should consider features like project profitability analysis, in-depth reporting, and integrations.

Here are some general things to consider when choosing your time tracking software:

• Ease of use: Your consultant time tracking software should have a user-friendly interface. You should be able to easily log hours, view reports, and manage tasks. If it’s too complicated, it can waste more time than it saves, while employees refuse to adopt it at scale.
• Reporting depth: Most time tracking tools for professional services use cases can give you basic information about tracked hours and billable vs non-billable time. If you need more insights around profitability, capacity, and expense tracking, consider a solution with advanced reporting like Toggl.
• Device and platform support: If your consulting work involves a lot of back-and-forth across different locations, multi-device support is a must. Look for good mobile, web, and desktop apps that also work offline and sync data reliably, so you’re not left wondering whether you missed logging billable hours on your latest trip.
• GDPR compliance: Depending on your industry, you might need to ensure your employee time tracking methods comply with legal standards. 
• Integrations: If you use a plethora of digital tools in your day-to-day, it’s best to find a solution that plays nice with them, either with native connectors, Zapier integrations, or browser extensions. 

The 10 best time tracking software tools for consultants: In-depth look and comparison

Below, we’ll explore 10 tools for freelance consultants and consulting firms that want to track their time reliably, starting with our own tool — Toggl Track.

1. Toggl Track: The best automatic time tracking tool for consultants

Toggl Track is a privacy-first time tracking software for consultants, freelancers, contractors, and professional service businesses with time tracking, billing, and reporting features. It makes it easy to log hours on any device online and offline, organize time by client, project, and task, set different billable rates, invoice accurately, and much more.

As a complete consultant time tracker, Toggl makes logging time dead simple. Its intuitive interface and seamless tracking between web, desktop, and mobile apps ensure 100% adoption. You can also use it as a client billing solution by generating invoices based on your logged time or integrating and passing time data to invoicing tools like QuickBooks or Xero.

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
Toggl Track is a powerful, automatic time tracking tool and an equally powerful profitability tool. With Toggl Track, consultants can calculate billable hours, monitor labor costs, analyze project and employee profitability, and forecast future revenue.	Creepy surveillance features aren’t part of Toggl Track. You can learn more in our anti-surveillance statement.

Here’s how one PR consultant describes our platform: “I work as an external consultant in different projects and it allows me to perfectly track the time I spend on each task. It’s simple and easy to use.”

Similarly, another user says, “The reporting makes it easy to see where I am with each client’s hours for the current month. And also easy to see the client’s total hours for the previous month, for invoicing.”

Top features

• Billable time tracking: Record every minute, ensure accurate billing, and get paid what you worked for.
• Flexible billable rates: Set flexible billing rates for the entire workspace or at the project, team member, or task level.
• Summary, Detailed, and Weekly Reports: Choose the data you want to see and analyze time usage. 
• Multi-platform time tracking: Track work hours across web, mobile, and desktop apps online and offline. 
• Saved reports: Generate a live-updating permalink for particular reports and share this link with your clients so they can monitor your progress in real-time.
• Team member audits: Quickly see which team members forgot to log their time, logged too much, or too little. 

Tool integrations

Integrations include Google Calendar, Outlook, Asana, Jira, Salesforce, and other 100+ popular apps. 

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0	Personal use and freelance consulting
Starter	$9 per user per month	Freelancers consultants and small teams with basic time tracking needs
Premium	$18 per user per month	Consulting firms who need online and offline functionality for tracking time and profitability
Enterprise	Custom pricing	Enterprise teams

2. Hubstaff

Hubstaff is a time tracking, employee monitoring, and productivity management app for consultants. It empowers consultants to keep track of their work through accurate multi-platform time tracking and actionable productivity data. 

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
Hubstaff simplifies payroll with features like timesheet approvals and payroll reports. While it doesn’t offer everything you need under one roof, it does offer powerful integrations with payroll solutions like PayPal, Wise, Gusto, and different types of project management software, too. It also has workforce management features, including time off management, attendance tracking, and payments.	Trust is missing from this platform. Instead, Hubstaff offers employee surveillance features that some find intrusive and counterproductive. It tracks app and URL activity, takes random screenshots, and registers activity levels.

For example, one SEO consultant describes, “I love that this software integrates seamlessly with Asana and allows me to track my time from anywhere. It’s been a great help to me as an SEO consultant, helping me be mindful of how I spend time on growing/maintaining my business.”

Surveillance is a concern, too, though. Here’s how one person describes this ‘feature’: “I feel some element of surveillance when the program takes screenshots of my screen. I need to work a certain number of hours, and sometimes, knowing that I can complete a project faster than planned, I have to simulate cursor activity. I don’t particularly appreciate being watched.”

Top features

• Multi-platform timer app: Consultants can track time on the go using multiple devices like laptops, mobile phones, and tablets. 
• Client invoicing: Create client invoices from your tracked time in minutes.
• Expense tracking: Upload receipts, organize expenses, and link them to projects for accurate invoicing. 
• Detailed timesheets: See total hours tracked, manual time entries, activity rates, and more to understand productivity and simplify payroll. 

Tool integrations

Integrations include Asana, Slack, and QuickBooks. 

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0	For individual use
Starter	$4.99 per user/month	Small teams who need a basic time-tracking solution
Grow	$7.50 per user/month	Teams who need more complex time-tracking and time-management features
Team	$10 per user/month	Teams with advanced time-tracking needs
Enterprise	Contact Hubstaff for prices, starting at $25 per user/month	Enterprise companies

3. Clockify

Clockify is a comprehensive timesheet and time tracking app that helps consultants track their work hours and productivity and simplify invoicing. 

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
There’s a lot you can do with Clockify’s invoicing features. For example, you can create invoices directly from tracked time, include billable expenses, set custom currencies, and send them to your clients directly from Clockify. Pretty handy, eh?	Clockify is another platform that prioritizes employee monitoring features over trust and autonomy. These encourage micromanagement and impact employee privacy and productivity.

As a bonus, this user describes how they enjoy the platform’s set-it-and-forget functionality. “I can track everything so well and create tags for specific types of work within a particular client project. It’s efficient and saves me so much time in the end. The timer is so handy, I don’t even have to remember when I started something.” You can also track time for on-site employees by using clock-in and clock-out kiosks. 

However, some also report issues with user-friendliness, as described here: “The interface can feel a bit confusing at first, especially for new users. The mobile app sometimes doesn’t sync right away, which can be frustrating when switching between devices. With a few tweaks it can be much better for user experience.”

Top features

• Billable and non-billable time tracking: Track time accurately in the office or on the go and make sure you get paid for every working minute. 
• GPS tracking and screenshots: Clocify tracks your team’s location and takes random screenshots when the timer is on. 
• PTO tracking: Employees can request time off, while managers can track leave and absences.
• Time reports: Analyze how your team spends work hours with summary, weekly, or detailed reports. 
• Time off management: Standard, Pro, and Enterprise plan users can track and manage time off for better scheduling and resource planning. 

Tool integrations

Integrations include Trello, Google Calendar, and Quickbooks. 

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Starter	$3.99 per user/month	Solo users with basic time-tracking needs
Grow	$5.49 per user/month	Small teams with more complex time-tracking needs
Team	$7.99 per user/month	Teams who need a robust project and time tracking tool
Enterprise	$11.99 per user/month	Teams with complex client projects that require advanced time-tracking features

4. TimeCamp

TimeCamp is a time tracking, attendance, and billing software that consultants can use to simplify their billing and invoicing process and track project and team profitability. Plus, it connects with other tools you’re probably already using, so it fits right into your workflow.

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
TimeCamp offers many time tracking features for consultants in its free plan, like multi-platform tracking, 80+ tool integrations, and idle time tracking.	Yet again, TimeCamp is another tool that doesn’t believe in empowering employees with trust. Instead, the platform includes employee surveillance features like GPS location tracking, activity levels, and screenshots, so TimeCamp can feel like an intrusive app.

Despite this user describing the surveillance features as “micromanaging in a sense,” here’s how one small business consultant finds TimeCamp valuable in their work: “As a consultant, I work on multiple mandates simultaneously. 

I needed a tool to help me capture my time spent on various projects directly from iCalendar on my Macs. Using Keywords in my Calendar time entries, the time gets associated automatically to the proper project. Generating invoices at the end of the month for my various mandates becomes kids-play. And to top it all off it syncs those invoices with Quickbooks which saves me time.”

Top features

• Multi-platform time tracking: Track time through TimeCamp’s web, desktop, and mobile apps.
• Billable rates: Set specific billable rates for different projects or clients.
• Time rounding: Round up your time entries to the nearest specified increment for easier invoicing and payroll. 
• Data security: Secure your data with Single Sign-On Login and Two-Factor Authentication features.
• Invoicing: Generate invoices automatically based on timesheet data.

Tool integrations

Integrations include Xero, Google Calendar, and ClickUp. 

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0	Individual users with minimal time tracking needs
Starter	$2.99 per user/month	Teams with more complex time-tracking needs
Premium	$4.99 per user/month	Large teams that need advanced time-tracking features
Ultimate	$7.99 per user/month	Multiple teams
Enterprise	$11.99 per user/month	Enterprise teams

5. My Hours

MyHours prides itself on being an easy-to-use project time tracker app with powerful billing and reporting features. It lets you log the time you spend on different tasks and break it down by projects or clients, so you always know where your effort is going.

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
My Hours provides a clear view of the time spent on billable projects with comprehensive reports. The Dashboard shows an overview of your billable hours and time tracked, and the detailed report provides an in-depth analysis of time billing data.	With only two pricing plans, some users find they don’t have enough features, while others have too many. For example, My Hours doesn’t have a time-rounding feature that simplifies invoicing and payroll. It also doesn’t have custom reporting or timesheet approval features.

The Dashboard feature seems to be particularly valuable to small business consultancy founders like Michael O., who says, “We love the ability to manage project budgets directly against time spent on them so that the whole team is clear if we are running ahead or behind.”

But for some consultants, the breadth of features may be overkill, as one person describes, “As a solo consultant, I don’t need the additional features such as billing and breaking out by team member.”

Top features

• Customized billing: Add hourly rates by project, task, or team member, set monthly retainers, and create budgets for every project.
• Expense tracking: Set expense categories, add receipts, and generate expense reports.  
• Custom reports: Customize your reports to show the needed information, export them in PDF or XLS, and share them with clients. 
• Timesheets and invoicing: My Hours creates weekly timesheets automatically from your tracked hours. It also generates invoices directly from your time tracked. 

Tool integrations

Integrations include Zapier and PowerBI. 

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0	Solo users with basic time-tracking needs
Pro	$8 per month	Consulting firms with more complex time-tracking needs

6. Timely

Timely is a private and secure AI-powered time tracker that helps consultancies track billable time and increase profitability. It’s a good shout if you prefer the idea of a timer running in the background so you don’t need to stop and start the clock.

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
Timely automates time tracking by capturing everything you work on. Using AI, it then creates timesheets for you that you can approve in just one click.	You can’t create invoices in Timely. But can manage your invoices through Timely’s QuickBooks Online invoicing integration.

Here’s why one small business user finds Timely to be convenient, “Timely makes time tracking extremely easy and accurate. Since it’s tracking every activity you do during work and groups these activities with machine learning, I don’t need to manually start and stop timers to measure how long I worked on a particular project. It gives teams and clients more transparency when it comes to invoicing and project reviews. I also like the Planning feature, which helps me set the hours and project I want to work on the following days.”

Crucially, Timely is also on the same page as Toggl Track when it comes to anti-surveillance. The platform is committed to providing users with the privacy to capture their own “memories” and then do what they want with them, whether that’s downloading them, sharing them, or keeping them under locks.

Top features

• Automatic time tracking: Timely automatically captures every second of your work in the background. 
• AI timesheets: Timely uses artificial intelligence to draft your timesheets based on the time it tracked. 
• Billable rates: Set hourly rates for each project or team member and keep your invoices accurate. 
• Multiple currencies: Timely lets you add different currencies for your international projects.

Tool integrations

Integrations include Google Calendar, Microsoft Excel, and QuickBooks. 

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Starter	$9 per user/ month	Freelancers and small teams
Premium	$16 per user/ month	Midsize teams
Unlimited	$22 per user/ month	Midsize and large teams
Unlimited+	Contact for more pricing	Large teams

7. Time Analytics

Time Analytics is a time tracking app that consultants can use to track and manage their time across multiple projects and clients and analyze their efficiency. Think of it as a no-fuss way to stay on top of your time and boost productivity.

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
With Time Analytics, you can manually track time by task, project, or client by using a timer or clocking in time. You can also set hours as billable and add labor and billing rates for your consulting team.	You can’t track time via browser extension with Time Analytics which might lead to inaccurate time tracking data. Additionally, some users experience challenges with loading and exporting data.

This small business user gives an overview of how adding billing rates for consulting works, “It prepares data for the invoice, based on hard facts and time utilization so you could control all tasks and services suitable for billing and review which activities are billable/unbillable.”

Top features

• Auto-generated invoices: Time Analytics automatically generates invoices based on your tracked time data. 
• Daily and weekly timesheets: Keep track of employee work hours, manage workloads, and analyze productivity. 
• Revenue, cost, and profit reports: Get key data on revenue generated, costs incurred, and overall profit margins.
• Mobile app (Android and iOS): Track time and manage tasks on the go from Android and iOS platforms. 

Tool integrations

Integrations include Microsoft Excel and Google Chrome.

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Starter	$4.99 per user per month	Teams who want to track time and employee productivity
Optimum	$6.99 per user per month	Teams who want to streamline time tracking, increase profitability, and transparency

8. Harvest

Harvest is a consultant time and billing tool that tracks billable hours online and offline. But it’s not just about tracking — Harvest also lets you create invoices right from the time you’ve logged and even tracks expenses.

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
Harvest lets consultants do many things without leaving the app: track time and expenses, create invoices, generate client reports, and collect payments. This end-to-end workflow simplifies and accelerates client billing and payment processing.	Harvest is a simple tool that doesn’t embrace some of the advanced functionality you’ll find in other tools. There have also been reports of massive price hikes, as we discussed in our guide to the top Harvest alternatives.

Here’s how one Harvest user reviews the platform, “It works very well and is very intuitive. It facilitates time tracking for users who need to work on sending invoices to clients and track multiple projects, from multiple devices, complementing several applications.”

Top features

• Billable and non-billable time tracking: Track your paid and non-paid time and share billable reports with clients for transparency. 
• Expense tracking: Track project and task expenses, add receipts, and add them to client invoices. 
• Online payments: Harvest’s Stripe and PayPal integrations mean clients can pay you easier, faster, and safer. 
• Invoicing: Create invoices based on your tracked time in just a few clicks.
• Project and team reporting: Visualize project progress, track internal costs, and see how your team spends time with Harvest’s detailed reports. 

Tool integrations

Integrations include Stripe, Google Calendar, and PayPal. 

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best
Free	$0	Solo users
Pro	$11 per user per month	Small teams
Premium	$14 per user per month	Teams with advanced reporting and administrative needs

9. DeskTime

DeskTime is a multi-platform automatic time tracking app for consultants with employee monitoring features. DeskTime tracks URLs and app usage and takes random screenshots. So, if you’re managing a team, you’ll definitely gain insights into everyone’s workday to help with planning and balancing workloads. Or you may just think this functionality is too invasive — you decide!

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
Solo consultants who aren’t being spied on by a team leader will likely love the level of insights that DeskTime delivers.	We’ll say it again. Tools equipped with employee monitoring features like URL tracking and screenshots aren’t bringing any positive functionality to the table. Instead, they’re artificially inserting toxicity into their company cultures — and that’s a loss in our book.

For example, this user describes, “The level of configuration that DeskTime allows is perfect for me. I can see how I use my time, how productive I am and the number of hours I dedicate to each thing. It helps me keep track of how I am doing and to set limits.”

However, the surveillance features are pretty…invasive. One employer describes, “We use it in our office to check the time on which every individual arrives, and the time they spent productively in the office.”

Another enjoys it for similar reasons, “As project lead, I can measure the productivity of my employees with its in-depth application usage details, such as which sites they have visited in browser and other applications.” Yikes — scary much?

Top features

• Automatic time tracking: DeskTime can automatically track your work hours in the background without manual input. 
• Offline time tracking: Track time when you’re not connected to the internet, and DeskTime syncs it once you’re online again. 
• Employee surveillance: DeskTime can track URLs and apps and take random screenshots as proof of work. 
• Multiple platform time tracking: With DeskTime, you can track time from your browser, iOS, and Android devices. 

Tool integrations

Integrations include Outlook Calendar, Google Calendar, and Asana. 

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Lite	$0	Solo users
Pro	$6.42 per user/month	Teams who need a basic time-tracking app
Premium	$9.17 per user/month	Teams with more complex time-tracking and project-scheduling needs
Enterprise	Custom	Enterprise teams with over 200 users

10. Apploye

Apploye is an affordable time tracking and timesheet app that helps consultants improve their billing and productivity.

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
Apploye has five types of timesheet views showing a real-time view of employees’ tracked time to help you understand their work habits. You can view daily, weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly timesheets or select a custom date range you want to check.	By now, you’ll know where we stand on tracking employee activity. And yep, Apploye is another tool that doesn’t empower companies with trust.

Although there are other tools with entirely free plans, Apploye still offers a reasonably affordable price which many consultants will be happy to pay for.

In fact, one user doesn’t even feel the need to sync the platform with other tools, as they explain here: “The most remarkable thing about Apploye is it has many features with a very minimum monthly subscription fee. Apart from time tracking, it also provides a Task Management feature that helps organizations monitor employees’ productivity. I don’t need to use any other project management tool like Trello or Asana when Apploye came with all the features in one single step.”

Consider the level of surveillance when choosing the best software for your needs, though. Here are some thoughts from Peter P., a small business founder, on why he doesn’t need the employee tracking feature: “There needs to be a level of trust between employer and employee, since no one (even the superstars) works at 100% focus during all working hours. Everyone needs a mini break to surf the web or do something not work related, so if a screenshot captures that, it caused friction.”

Top features

• Daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, and custom timesheets: Choose how you want to see each team member’s time data.
• Random screenshots: Apploye takes screenshots every ten minutes for proof of work. 
• Apps and URL usage: See the total time and percentages of the apps and URLs your team uses. 
• Invoicing: You can quickly generate client invoices based on your tracked work hours. 

Tool integrations

Integrations include Asana, Trello, and ClickUp.

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Standard	$2.50 per user/month	Consultants who need basic time tracking, invoicing, and budgeting features
Elite	$3.50 per user/month	Remote teams who need screenshot monitoring, URL tracking, and app usage tracking

Try Toggl Track for consultants

Time tracking for consultants is now non-negotiable. The data speaks for itself: accurate time tracking drives better billing practices, optimizes project management, and ensures you’re not leaving money on the table. Whether you’re managing a packed client roster or chasing tight deadlines, the right tool can be the difference between chaos and control.

The must-haves? Billable time tracking, profitability reports, cross-platform access, and rock-solid data security. And while free plans can be a decent starting point, premium versions unlock the real power with advanced features designed to save you time and maximize profits.

Still wondering where to start? Toggl Track is one of the best time tracking tools for consultants. It’s simple yet robust, giving you all the insights you need to stay on top of your game. If you’re serious about scaling your consulting business and making every second count, Toggl Track is the obvious pick.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about time tracking software for consultants

What is the best time tracker for consultants?

The best time tracking software for consultants depends on your needs but Toggl Track is a great option across the board. Freelance consultants, small teams, and consulting firms can use it to easily log billable hours (both automatically and manually), invoice accurately, and get detailed reports with useful time insights. Other popular options include Hubstaff, Clockify, and TimeCamp.

How do consultants track billable hours?

Consultants track their time manually (most commonly in spreadsheets) or with a dedicated time tracking software like Toggl Track. An automatic and privacy-first solution like Toggl makes tracking billable hours much easier by allowing consultants to automatically log hours, differentiate between billable and non-billable work, track time per client, project, and task, and generate invoices based on their time data.

Is there free time tracking software for consultants?

Yes, time trackers like Toggl Track offer generous free plans for consultants with up to 5 user seats, multi-platform tracking (web, mobile, and desktop), productivity reports, integrations, and many other features. Other popular solutions with free plans include Clockify and MyHours.

What time tracking software integrates with invoicing?

Toggl Track integrates with invoicing software like QuickBooks and Xero (as well as 100+ other tools). It also has a built-in invoicing feature, so you can generate simple invoices from your time tracking reports, without requiring a separate invoicing tool.