There’s been a myth circling around for a while that it takes 21 days to form a habit. As much as we’d like that to be true — it’s not. Studies actually suggest it can take anywhere from 18–254 days to turn an activity into a habit. Quite the range, huh? 

(And no, missing one day doesn’t reset the clock back to zero, either…)

To achieve repetition over the long haul, you need to track your time and activities. Not with a pen and paper. An app will track your to-do list — or gamify the process and make it more fun! To get you started, we’ve reviewed 11 habit tracker apps to choose from for different use cases and daily routines.

The best habit tracking apps

App	Description
DailyHabits	Lets you focus on goals rather than streaks. Best for beginner habit tracking.
Loop	An open-source, customizable habit tracker. Best for tech-savvy Android users.
Toggl Track	Uses time goals to encourage consistency. Best for time tracking habits.
Habitica	Lets you challenge friends, embark on quests, and reap rewards. Best for gamified habit tracking.
Way of Life	Prioritizes custom “chains” over streaks. Best for a comprehensive and customizable tracking experience.
StickK	Uses high-stakes financial incentives to improve accountability. Best for those who need a strong motivational push.
Habitify	Fosters motivation through social challenges. Best for competition habit tracking.
Streaks	Keeps track of all the data associated with your streaks. Best for those who focus on consistency without missing a day.
Everyday	A beginner-friendly cross-platform habit tracker. Best for those just starting their habit journey.
Momentum	Offers two views for habit tracking. Best for those looking for a simple app.
Notion	Comes with a free habit tracker template as part of its productivity app. Best for those wanting full customization and are familiar with Notion.

DailyHabits

📌 DailyHabits is a simple, daily habit tracker for individuals to reach their goals.

DailyHabits encourages goals rather than streaks, so you don’t feel discouraged if you miss a day. You can use the web version for free, forever, or pay a one-time fee to access the app on your phone (Android or iPhone). 

It comes with one calendar view to visualize your month. It’s a great, basic option for beginner habit trackers. But advanced users might want more features and insights from their habit tracking app.

✅ Pros	❌ Cons
• Clean, easy-to-use interface • Can add notes to habits	• Lacks advanced features like reports, charts, and graphs • Advertises “free forever,” but users report a cost to access mobile

Pricing, plans, and platforms

There is a free-to-use web version, which the website advertises as free to use forever, but users report there is a fee to access the app. You can download DailyHabits on iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows. ​​

Apple App Store: 3.0 (4)

Loop

📌 Loop is a free habit tracker app that measures your habits on your Android or Chromebook.

Whether you want an out-of-the-box app or something you can fully customize, Loop is designed for you. More tech-savvy users can access its Github repository to modify the app. General users can still enjoy its simple interface. But since Loop lets you assign units to your habit, it may take some getting used to understanding how to calculate your different habits.

Loop lets you see your progress over time and gives you the option to skip days without losing your streak. Unfortunately, if you’re an Apple fan, Loop isn’t available. 

✅ Pros	❌ Cons
• Free to use and open source • Fully customizable	• Not available to iOS or macOS users • Learning curve to begin

Pricing, plans, and platforms

Loop is completely free and open source. It’s available on Android and Chromebooks.

Google Play Store: 4.7 (56,900+)

Toggl Track

📌 Toggl Track is a productivity app that lets you set time tracking goals to form positive habits.

Toggl Track’s time tracking goals feature revolutionizes habit tracking by letting users set daily or weekly targets linked to specific projects, tasks, or tags. You can set goals to dedicate specific hours to certain habits each day or week or limit time on bad habits like checking social media by setting a ‘less than’ target. 

Your progress is visually tracked with color-coded icons — green indicates goals met, yellow signals progress needed, and red alerts you to being behind schedule. Every time you achieve your goal, you build on your streak, encouraging you to continue your habit every day.

✅ Pros	❌ Cons
• Track unlimited time on free plan  • Has tons of integrations • Can use solo or with a team	• Not available on all platforms

Pricing, plans, and platforms

• Free: For up to five users. Comes with unlimited time tracking, integrations with 100+ tools, and exportable reports.
• Starter: From $9 per user/mo. Adds pre-populated project templates, ‌time estimates, and alerts.
• Premium: From $18 per user/mo. Includes timesheet approvals, team time tracking reminders, and scheduled report emails.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing. Comes with multiple workspaces under one organization and priority support.

Toggl Track is available on iOS and Windows.​​

G2: 4.6 (1,571), Capterra: 4.7 (2,399)

Habitica

📌 Habitica is a gamified productivity and task management app that rewards habit-building and encourages social responsibility.

Think of Habitica as the love child of task management, social media, and video games. It’s like any other habit tracker in that you can create habits, set goals, and monitor your progress. But it incorporates social responsibility and gamification to make it stand out, turning your to-do list into a role-playing game (RPG).

You can join challenges and organizations and go on quests to collaborate with other users. Since it feels like a game, it’s much more engaging and entertaining than other apps. However, individuals who aren’t prone to spending their free time gaming might find this setup complicated and unnatural.

✅ Pros	❌ Cons
• Entertaining and engaging with rewards and levels • Encourages social responsibility	• The interface may be confusing if you don’t play games • Requires an Internet connection

Pricing, plans, and platforms

• Free: Free to download the iOS or Android mobile app. 
• Subscription: From $5 per month. It allows you to “buy gems for gold” but doesn’t unlock any additional habit-tracking features. 
• Group plan: From $9 per month and $3 per month/user. Includes a shared task board and flexible accountability.

Habitica is available on iOS and Android.

Apple App Store: 4.0 (2,000+), Google Play Store: 4.7 (55,300+)

Way of Life

📌 Way of Life is a habit tracking tool full of data and trends to monitor your progress.

Sometimes, it’s a little more complicated than “Yes, I did my habit today” or “No, I didn’t.” And missing a day can feel like a setback that discourages you from sticking with the habit at all. Way of Life keeps your motivation up because you can “skip” habits and even add journal entries about each one. 

You can also create your own custom “chains” rather than streaks to break habits down into more manageable chunks. This might look like setting a goal to complete a productive hobby for three days in a row and then taking a break. This way, you don’t feel like you failed when you skip a day. Way of Life gives you plenty of ways to analyze your data, but the Premium plan may be too pricey for users looking for a simple habit tracker.

✅ Pros	❌ Cons
• “Chains” instead of streaks make habits more approachable • Great selection of data, charts, and trends	• Pricier than other options • App appears to work better on iOS than Android

Pricing, plans, and platforms

• Free: Free to download the mobile apps. 
• Premium: from $4.99 per user/mo. Adds the ability to archive habits and track more habits.

Way of Life is available on iOS and Android.

Apple App Store: 4.8 (4,500+), Google Play Store: 3.5 (1,100+)

stickK

📌 stickK keeps you accountable by using your own money as a high-stakes motivation for habit-building.

If you’re having trouble sticking to your routine, maybe the stakes aren’t high enough. When you sign up for stickK, you sign a Commitment Contract. If you don’t stick to your habits, you lose money (but stickK donates this to charity).

stickK is another community-driven habit tracker. You can see other users who share your habits and get inspired by their success or learn from their struggles. Keep in mind that stickK can be extremely pricey, and both iOS and Android users often report sluggish performance and login issues.

✅ Pros	❌ Cons
• Community features • High stakes encourage users to keep up their habit	• App is extremely buggy • Very pricey

Pricing, plans, and platforms

• Basic: Free for 25 users per Commitment (can unlock unlimited users for $10 per month). Supports one campaign and two Commitments. 
• All-Access: From $19 per month. Supports 100 users per Commitment. Adds three campaigns and four Commitments per campaign.
• Pro: From $99 per month. Supports 250 users per Commitment. Includes unlimited campaigns and unlimited Commitments per campaign.

StickK is available on iOS and Android.

Apple App Store: 2.7 (22), Google Play Store: 2.8 (345)

Habitify

📌 Habitify is a cross-platform habit tracker app that offers social challenges, integrations, and extensive organizational features.

If you’re up for a little friendly competition, you can challenge your friends (or play along with strangers) to social challenges. This is a great feature for those who need some extra motivation. Habitify also comes with some of the best organizational capabilities, letting you sort your habits into different categories and group them together by relevance.

Habitify is a subscription model that some individuals might be put off by. But it might be worth it thanks to its advanced features and integrations. You can connect Habitify to your Apple Health or Google Fit to automatically mark off health-related habits.   

✅ Pros	❌ Cons
• Integrates with Apple Health/Google Fit • Functions great on all devices	• Subscription model pricing • Free version features are limited and run out quickly

Pricing, plans, and platforms

• Free: Free forever. Comes with three habits and cross-platform sync. 
• Premium: From $2.49 per month. Adds unlimited habits, calendar integrations, and advanced reminders.

Habitify is available on iOS, Android, and macOS. ​​

Apple App Store: 4.5 (670+), Google Play Store: 4.2 (4,800+)

Streaks

📌 Streaks is an Apple-friendly to-do list app that motivates users with ongoing streaks.

If you’re an iPhone or Mac user driven by the thrill of maintaining a lengthy daily streak, then Streaks was practically made for you. It’s great for users tracking physical habits because it’s compatible with your Apple Watch and even integrates with your device’s health app.

To focus on consistency, Streaks gives you a lot of stats associated with your habits and the option for home screen widgets. You can check out your weekly and monthly success rate percentages. But if you’re planning on tracking a lot of habits, note there’s a limit of 24 habits, even on the paid plan.

✅ Pros	❌ Cons
• One-time purchase • Lots of data associated with your streak	• Not available on Android • No option for unlimited habits

Pricing, plans, and platforms

It costs $5.99 one-time to download the app on iOS or macOS.

Apple App Store: 4.8 (1,400+)

Everyday

📌 Everyday is a straightforward, visual habit tracker that encourages discipline through daily habits.

Simplicity is at the heart of Everyday. You’ll see your habits on the left and the date across the top. The longer your streak, the darker the color. Any interruptions will look like white boxes. 

As the name suggests, Everyday encourages daily habit tracking. Its engaging visuals help users track their progress. As a beginner-friendly, cross-platform app, it’s a standout choice, though the free version limits you to tracking just three habits.

✅ Pros	❌ Cons
• Beginner-friendly interface • Appealing visuals	• Max of three free habits • Yearly subscription or costly one-time purchase

Pricing, plans, and platforms

• Free: Includes up to three habits and unlimited data storage. 
• Premium: From $2.50 per month. Comes with unlimited habits and habits insights.
• Lifetime: One-time $99 purchase. Includes all Premium features, forever, and priority support.

Everyday is available on iOS, Android, and macOS.​​

Apple App Store: 4.7 (1,100+), Google Play Store: 4.6 (3,700+)

Momentum

📌 Momentum is an iOS habit tracker that keeps you on track with your monthly habits. 

Momentum has a simple interface, offering you two view options. You can see a calendar view or a view of all your habits. When you complete a habit, the calendar day turns green. 

If you struggle with time management, you’ll enjoy Momentum’s integration with Google Calendar. This way, you can make time for your habits right within your productivity tools. It’s not available for Android and offers in-app purchases.

✅ Pros	❌ Cons
• Simple interface	• Only available on iOS • Subscription-based model

Pricing, plans, and platforms

• App download: Free to download the app. 
• Subscription: from $1.99 per month. Unlocks in-app features.

Momentum is currently available on iOS and Mac. ​​

Notion

📌 Notion is a productivity app with a free habit tracking template so you can customize your daily tasks.

While not strictly a habit tracking app, Notion is a powerful tool that offers a habit tracker template. This way, you can customize your view to your liking, promoting healthy habits to keep up your current streaks. 

Notion offers a free, fully customizable habit tracking experience. Add unlimited habits and tailor your view to suit your preferences perfectly. If you’ve never used Notion before, you might find it confusing and opt for a dedicated free habit tracker.

✅ Pros	❌ Cons
• Weekly view and card view of habits • Fully customizable	• More complex to set up

Pricing, plans, and platforms

• Free: Includes invitations to up to 10 guests, collaborative workspace, and integrations. 
• Plus: From $12 per user/mo. Adds up to 100 guests, unlimited blocks, and unlimited file uploads.
• Business: From $18 per user/mo. Comes with up to 250 guests and private team spaces.
• Enterprise: Contact sales for pricing. Adds audit log and workspace analytics.

Notion is available on iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows. ​​

G2: 4.7 (5,872), Capterra: 4.7 (2,405)

What to look for in any great habit tracker app

Not all habit trackers are created equal, which is great news because everyone has their own personal preferences. But any worthwhile habit tracker app should have the following:

• 💆 User-friendly: You should be able to open up a great habit tracker app and instantly figure out where to go, what to do, and how to track your progress. A well-designed app swiftly adds, tracks, and reviews habits with ease, so you can focus on building habits rather than figuring out how to use the app.
• ⚙️ Customization: When you can tailor habit tracking to your personal preferences, you’re more likely to keep using the app and continue your habit streak. Find an app that lets you pick and choose the habits you want to focus on, set reminders that sync with your daily rhythm, and express your style with color themes.
• 🔌 Integrations: A great habit tracker app plays well with others, syncing seamlessly with your calendar, fitness apps, and even timeboxing apps. These integrations are a must so you can save time and have a holistic view of your habits and how they fit into your life.
• 🏆 Motivational features: Who doesn’t want their own personal cheerleader making every small win feel like a genuine, rewarding achievement? Apps that come with streaks celebrate your consistency, earning rewards helps you achieve milestones, and social sharing lets you inspire and be inspired by others.
• 📊 Data insights and analytics: Actionable insights based on data help you truly understand your habits and their impact. By identifying patterns (good or bad), you can tweak your routines and continue on the path toward continuous improvement.
• 🎯 Goal setting and progress tracking: When you define specific, overarching goals, it’s important to monitor your advancement and keep your spirits high. Breaking down larger objectives into manageable tasks helps you maintain clarity and focus, making even the most ambitious goals feel achievable.
• 🔔 Reminders and alerts: Even the most determined individuals can struggle with accountability, so investing in an app that sends timely reminders and notifications is helpful. Whether it’s a gentle reminder to drink water, a prompt to exercise, or an alert to wind down before bed, these features help you stay consistent with even your most simple habits.

Tips for habit building

If you want to form positive habits or get rid of bad habits, you need strategies in place. Here are our top tips, designed to help beginners and experts alike build better habits.

Start small and be consistent

Great achievements take time, and so do lasting habits! Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither are habits. They take patience and persistence. Start with small, manageable habits to gain momentum and avoid feeling overwhelmed. And stay consistent with these small habits (trust us; it’s the key to habit formation). It’s better to do a little each day than attempt too much and give up. 

Small habits might look like easy-to-do daily actions, like spending 15 minutes each day reading a book. As you build this habit, you can start to increase its duration. Take things slowly, and even give the Getting Things Done framework a whirl to stay disciplined.

Identify and overcome obstacles

Habit building isn’t as easy as it sounds (otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many great apps dedicated to helping you on this journey). Time constraints, lack of motivation, and inconsistency all hinder the process, so start by anticipating these challenges early on. For example, if time is a concern, consider time blocking and dedicate a specific chunk of time each day to your habit.

Or, if you find yourself lacking motivation, try setting reminders or pairing new habits with activities you already enjoy. For example, if reading after a long day feels daunting, brew a cup of your favorite tea or grab your favorite beverage to sip alongside your book.

Celebrate progress and stay motivated

Celebrate all your victories — big and small. By acknowledging and rewarding small victories, you reinforce positive behavior, boost your morale, and make the journey enjoyable!

Consider treating yourself to a favorite meal or activity, reflecting on your achievements, sharing your wins with others, or creating a visual reminder of your progress. Each celebration propels you forward, turning habit-building into a rewarding process.

Build good habits with Toggl Track

Remember, when choosing a habit tracker, it’s important to take your time and make sure it ticks all your boxes. Whether you value features, integrations, or cross-platform functionality, carefully consider which app aligns best with your needs.

Toggl Track shines with its sleek, intuitive interface and standout features like Toggl Track Goals. This makes habit-building easy, so you can boost your productivity and establish the perfect, consistent routine. Try Toggl Track for free to start tracking and building good habits!

Timely is a popular time-tracking tool that leverages AI to automatically log and track time without you lifting a finger. With 100% automated tracking, detailed reporting, visual timelines, and several integrations, it’s a solid choice for many companies looking to improve productivity.

But is Timely the right fit for you? Some users find its AI-driven automation challenging to adjust to, while others feel it doesn’t actually end up saving them that much time in the end. If you’re curious about what other options, you’re in the right place. Are you and Timely a match made in heaven, or was it just not meant to be? Read on to find out.

Best Timely alternatives at-a-glance

Tool	G2 Rating	Description
Toggl Track	4.6	A powerful and flexible time tracking tool, best for boosting employee productivity and profitability.
Clockify	4.5	A free time tracking software providing billable and non-billable hour tracking and reporting, best for teams needing a basic solution.
TimeCamp	4.7	Automatic time and billable hour tracking, best for small to medium businesses and freelancers needing seamless integrations with project management tools.
Time Doctor	4.4	A comprehensive real-time time tracking and productivity tool, best for remote teams looking to monitor employee performance and ensure accountability.
Everhour	4.7	Seamless integration with project management tools like Asana and Trello. Best for less tab switching and more deep work.
Hubstaff	4.5	Time tracking with GPS and geofencing, ideal for remote and field teams needing accountability. Best for distributed workforces requiring detailed productivity insights.
RescueTime	4.1	A beast for personal productivity improvement, this automatic time management app tracks time spent on digital activities. It’s best for those wanting to improve focus and build better work habits.
DeskTime	4.5	URL tracking and employee productivity tool, best for a detailed look into where your team’s time goes.
BigTime	4.5	An all-in-one offering project management, time tracking, and billing tools, best for bigger consulting or accounting firms that need streamlined operations.
Paymo	4.6	End-to-end project management with time tracking, invoicing, and task management. Best for small agencies and freelancers requiring a 2-in-1 time and project tracking solution.

1. Toggl Track

Toggl Track is an easy-to-use time tracking software tool and a top alternative to Timely. Your team can track time using a simple timer, browser extensions, mobile and desktop apps, native integrations, or even add time entries manually.

Its desktop apps also offer automated time tracking. Running in the background, the app tracks your work activities privately (i.e., they’re not shared with your colleagues or manager). Once you’re ready, you can upload selected activities as time entries.

While Toggl Track simplifies time tracking, it also offers powerful and customizable profitability insights and time reports. Using the new Analytics feature, you can slice and dice your team’s time data any way you like using custom charts, tables, and dashboards.

G2: 4.6 (1,571), Capterra: 4.7 (2,404)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
Toggl Track is not only an intuitive time tracker. It’s also a time analytics tool that provides detailed insights into your tracked time.	Toggl Track does not offer any surveillance features—that’s by design. We believe employee monitoring and micromanagement feel invasive and create trust issues without offering any real productivity benefits.

Toggl Track is best for any type of professional team that wants an easy-to-use time-tracking and reporting tool. 

Top features

• One-click timer: Start and stop tracking your work with a single click.
• Automated time tracking: Track time spent on all work activities privately. When you’re ready, upload selected activities as time entries to Toggl Track.
• Calendar view: Visualize your tasks, appointments, and milestones on a calendar and get a clear overview of your day or month at a glance.
• 100+ integrations: Seamlessly connect with over a hundred popular tools and platforms to avoid switching between multiple web, Windows, or Mac apps.
• Project dashboard: Get a centralized hub to monitor all your projects’ progress, estimated vs. actual budget, and labor cost details.
• Insights: Dive deep into analytics and data to understand real-time profitability trends, areas of improvement, and overall performance.

Toggl Track vs. Timely

Feature	Toggl Track	Timely
Automation	Provides an Autotracker on the desktop app that runs in the background to record your activity on a timeline. This information is private to each user.	Has a stack of AI tools for tracking logged and idle time. Plus, an AI Assistant for categorizing activities and scheduling work.
Time tracker	Automatic, manual, or Pomodoro	Automatic in the background
Integrations	Over 100 integrations with the most popular SaaS tools plus an API	15 native integrations with project management tools
Reporting	Reports on business metrics like ROI, projects, profitability, etc. Offers Time Audits to spot tracking inconsistencies, an Insight hub to spot data trends and time sinks, and Analytics to visualize data with custom dashboards.	Reports on user work patterns, logged time, and unbilled hours. Supports custom dashboard

Why customers love it

One user shared, “I like that I can easily access it on the computer and/or my phone on the app. It is user-friendly. It also helps me stay on track, and I can run reports and categorize what I’ve been working on. I use it every day.”

“I use Toggl Track every working day, and I find it quick and easy to log time to each client throughout the day,” says programmer Mike M.

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0	Personal use
Starter	$9 per user/month	Teams with basic time tracking need
Premium	$20 per user/month	Teams needing online and offline functionality for tracking time and profitability
Enterprise	Custom pricing	Enterprise teams needing custom solutions (we can build it for you!)

2. Clockify

Clockify is a simple, easy-to-use time tracking solution. It lets you track projects and tasks across web, desktop, and mobile devices with one simple interface. Clockify is a great choice for those with basic and budget-friendly time tracking needs. Create time sheets or track attendance in just a few clicks.

G2 : 4.5 (173), Capterra: 4.8 (9,115)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
Clockify’s auto tracker tracks websites and apps you use for more than ten seconds and creates personalized records. You can then easily create timesheets based on these activities.	With Clockify’s free plan, you can’t track time off or schedule projects and don’t have access to project templates. Also, Clockify offers surveillance features, including screenshots and GPS tracking. This may feel invasive to some team members.

Clockify is best for teams who want an affordable but comprehensive tool for tracking time and monitoring employee productivity. 

Top features

• Productivity and attendance tracking: Monitor your team’s efficiency and ensure they’re present at work.
• Weekly timesheets: Easily record and access work hours to streamline payroll and accountability.
• Calendar timeline: Get a visual overview of how your team spends time so you can manage resources efficiently. 
• Employee monitoring: Timely tracks your team’s location and takes random screenshots when the clock is on.

Clockify vs. Timely

Feature	Clockify	Timely
Time tracking	Manual start-stop timer you have to remember to turn on and off yourself	100% automatic time tracking
AI features	No	Yes
Free version	Yes	No
Employee monitoring	Allows optional screenshots	No spying, but does track activity automatically

Why customers love it

Bailey E., a small business accountant, said, “It helps me keep track of time and ensure that I am very efficient and do my best work while on the job.”

As another user from the financial services industry put it, “Clockify makes it simple to synchronize our projects and activities across platforms by leveraging integrations with other development tools. Technical support is one area that needs improvement.”

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Basic	$4.99 per user/month	Solo users with basic time tracking needs
Standard	$6.99 per user/month	Small teams with more complex time-tracking needs
Pro	$9.99 per user/month	Teams needing very robust project and time tracking
Enterprise	$14.99 per user/month	Complex client projects that require advanced time-tracking features

3. TimeCamp

TimeCamp is designed to eliminate manual work. It does so much more than just tracking time — like managing invoicing, budget management, and profitability analysis. With features like billable hours tracking and one-click invoicing, it simplifies workflows and optimizes project efficiency. TimeCamp stands out with its “time entry approval” feature, ensuring billing accuracy for agencies and freelancers.

G2: 4.7 (335), Capterra: 4.7 (598)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
TimeCamp offers 20+ built-in reports, including attendance, time off, overtime, project budgets, and expense reports.	TimeCamp surveillance features like screenshots and website tracking can feel intrusive to employees and negatively impact their productivity.

TimeCamp is best for teams seeking an automatic time tracker with profitability and productivity insights.

Top features

• Keyword-based time tracking: Assign specific keywords to automate time tracking. When you use them, TimeCamp matches your time entry to the right task.
• Task management and project tracking: Generate detailed time records to schedule work and resources efficiently. 
• Profitability analysis: Get a clear overview of how profitable your team and projects are. 
• Invoicing: Easily create invoices, track billable time, and access historical billing rates. 

TimeCamp vs. Timely

Feature	TimeCamp	Timely
Customer support	Email, Knowledge base, 24/7 chat	Email, Knowledge base, phone access and FAQ Forum from other users
Training	Documentation, live online, or in-person options	Email, Knowledge base, phone access, and FAQ Forum from other users
Free plan	Yes	No, just a 14-day free trial

Why customers love it

“There isn’t time wasted figuring out how to log my time even when the application or site is updated with new features or a new look—you can get to where you want to go very quickly again,” says Ivan W., an IT Consultant for a small business.

Small business owner Lazar P. echoed the feeling, “Timecamp is easy to use. I use it daily in my work, including various features like reporting. Implementation and integration into the business was fairly seamless.”

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0 per user	Freelancers
Starter	$3.99 per user	Small teams and start-ups
Premium	$6.99 per user	Growing teams
Ultimate	$10.99 per user	Mid-sized teams
Enterprise	Custom pricing	Large enterprises

4. Time Doctor

Time Doctor is a robust productivity tool decked out with activity monitoring and distraction alerts. Employers can use the screen monitoring feature and detailed productivity reports to understand where inefficiencies arise in their team’s workday. Time Doctor’s focus on real-time insights and accountability makes it ideal for organizations trying to maximize efficiency.

G2: 4.4 (385), Capterra: 4.5 (532)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
Time Doctor lets you track time per client, task, or project. Choose how you want to log time for more accurate records.	Time Doctor’s approach to employee time tracking comes with a heap of monitoring features like recording random screenshots of the user’s screen and silent tracking. These features can feel invasive and lower team morale.

Time Doctor is best for teams that need a tool to track time accurately and improve employee productivity. But only if the surveillance features aren’t an issue.

Top features

• Productivity analysis: Get in-depth productivity insights to improve your employee’s work habits.
• Offline tracking: Ensure every activity gets logged, even when not online.
• Automated time logging: Minimize the need for manual data entry so your team can focus on their work. 
• Employee monitoring: Time Doctor takes random screenshots and tracks time silently whenever your computer is on.

Time Doctor vs. Timely

Feature	Time Doctor	Timely
Time tracking	Manual, less efficient, and accurate	Automatic, more efficient, 100% accurate
Billing and invoicing	Yes	No
Offline time tracking	Yes	No

What customers love it

“100% your best buddy if you have a WFH work setup. Will detect any malicious activity like if an employee is trying to game the system,” —Roxanne Marie V., Brand Operations Manager.

John P., Regional Platforms Lead, says, “It gives us an overview of the whole Customer Service operation in terms of agent performance: productivity, attendance, idle time, and productive hours.”

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Basic	$6.70 per user/month	Small teams and start-ups
Standard	$11.70 per user/month	Mid-sized teams with complex tasks
Premium	$16.70 per user/month	Large hybrid teams
Enterprise	Custom pricing	Large multinationals

5. Everhour

Everhour is a project management tool first and a time tracker second. It basically works like an extension that embeds itself into tools like Asana or Trello to measure how much time you spend on different tasks. Everhour also offers comprehensive budget tracking and detailed reporting, making it perfect for teams focused on collaborative project management.

G2: 4.7 (174), Capterra: 4.7 (426)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
Everhour’s free plan includes unlimited time tracking, projects, and reports. In addition, the paid plans offer team management features for resource planning, time off, and expense management.	It’s not built with different time zones in mind, which makes it challenging for distributed teams.

Teams using Asana needing seamless time tracking built into the project management and collaboration tool.

Top features

• Budgeting and forecasting: Helps manage budgets and predict future costs.

• Invoicing and payroll: Automatically creates invoices and calculates payroll.
• Task and project management: Organizes tasks within projects for easy tracking.
• Team availability tracking: Monitors who’s available and who’s not.

Everhour vs. Timely

Feature	Everhour	Timely
Platforms supported	Only available as a web page	Available as a desktop and mobile time tracking app on iOS and Android
Billing and invoicing	Yes	No
Native task and project management	Yes	No

Why customers love it

“Everhour is a well-designed, easy-to-use, powerful time-tracking tool that has one of the most unique integrations with several key SaaS productivity tools. It seamlessly flows into the UI of apps like Asana and Notion in ways that enhance the experience for both apps,” says DJ C., a small business founder.

Fellow founder Joel S. agrees, “If you are an Asana user, just get this tool. It will vastly simplify your life!”

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0 per user	Freelancers and small teams
Team	$10 per user	Mid to large teams with complex time-tracking requirements.

6. Hubstaff

Hubstaff Time is part of a larger suite of SaaS tools, including a hiring and project management tool. It is the ultimate employee monitoring software, offering both URL and screenshot tracking, as well as automated time entries. It’s an easy-to-use time tracking solution that gives employers lots of visibility — perhaps too much in our opinion (as we mentioned, we’re very anti-surveillance).

G2: 4.5 (1,275), Capterra: 4.6 (1,504)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
Automatic timesheet approval, lots of integrations, and built-in payroll for seamless billing	Real-time tracking feels intrusive, and there is no free plan, just a 14-day free trial.

Hubstaff is a decent option for smaller teams looking for a low-admin employee monitoring tool.

Top features

• Real-time tracking: Measures time and productivity metrics with screenshots, app usage, and activity rates.
• GPS and geofencing: Ideal for mobile teams who work between the field and the office.
• Payroll and invoicing: Built-in payroll integrations for simplified payments and invoicing.
• Project management: Task management and budgeting tools to streamline projects.

Hubstaff vs. Timely

Feature	Hubstaff	Timely
Overtime calculation	No	Yes, it’s one of the key features!
Employee monitoring	Yes, via both URL and screenshot tracking	No, no spyware here
Offline time tracking	Yes	No

Why customers love it

Marketing strategist Diana P. is a big fan, “It’s the most reliable tool to maintain transparency between remote workers and employers. I love it!!! I wish I had it in my older jobs, it’s so easy to use!”

Agatha C., who works in customer success, finds it helps her stay productive, “I like Hubstaff because it makes tracking time and productivity so efficient, helping me keep projects organized and ensuring accountability.”

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0	Freelancers
Starter	$7 per user/month	Start-ups
Grow	$9 per user/month	Fast-growing small teams
Team	$12 per user/month	Mid to large teams with complex needs
Enterprise	Contact Hubstaff for prices, starting at $25 per user/month	Enterprise organizations

7. RescueTime

RescueTime focuses on personal productivity. It tracks how you spend your time on devices, identifying inefficiencies and giving you actionable insights. It stands out with its real-time focus alerts and goal-setting options that help you stay on track. RescueTime is quite unique — it prioritizes personal growth, making it great for those who want to improve focus and work habits.

G2: 4.1 (90), Capterra: 4.6 (139)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
There’s no need to fuss with starting or stopping, as RescueTime does the tracking independently. Unlike other tools that offer time tracking features, RescueTime focuses on improving productivity.	RescueTime is only available via the web page at the moment. No desktop or mobile app can make the experience feel more limiting than with other tools.

RescueTime is best for individuals looking to improve their work habits and productivity.

Top features

• Automated and manual time tracking: Get flexibility in both automatic tracking and manual input and log work hours accurately. 
• Daily summaries: Each workday, you get a recap that shows your team’s main tasks and time spent to keep you in the loop.
• Third-party integrations: RescueTime works with many other tools to help your workflows run smoothly. Third-party apps include project management and communication apps. 
• Focus time: Set Focus Time sessions for as long as you need to block distracting websites and improve productivity. 

RescueTime vs. Timely

Feature	RescueTime	Timely
Customer training	None	Documentation, webinars, live online, in person
Project cost management	No	Yes
Employee monitoring	Yes	No

Why customers love it

“Rescue time has evolved a lot over the years. Along the way, their support and focus on making my workday more efficient have been consistent and outstanding.” —Geoffrey T., Senior CS Manager

“I can track my time in every app and also category what type of software I am using and set a target for a week. Every weekend, I get a proper mail regarding how I utilized my time in the previous week and tips for the next week.” —Jamruddin S., IT Trainer

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Lite	$0 per user	First-time time tracking tool users
Premium	$12 per user	Teams with tight deadlines

8. DeskTime

DeskTime is a time-tracking and productivity tool designed to enhance efficiency and work-life balance. It offers automatic time tracking and features like productivity analysis and employee scheduling. DeskTime’s Pomodoro timer comes with break reminders to protect well-being and prevent burnout. It’s ideal for any team that wants to cultivate a healthy work environment.

G2: 4.5 (321), Capterra: 4.6 (526)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
It makes time tracking a breeze, improves efficiency, and is helpful and easy to use while promoting wellbeing at work.	Software bugs have been reported, along with inaccurate tracking after a certain period of time. App performance has also been criticized, requiring refreshes after being left idle.

DeskTime is best for teams that want an all-in-one employee monitoring tool with many time management features and affordable forms.

Top features

• Automatic time tracking: No manual input is required for tracking work hours.
• Productivity analysis: Generates reports showing productive versus unproductive time.
• Project tracking: Teams can assign tasks and monitor time spent efficiently.
• URL tracking: Automatically tracks all computer activity. With higher-tier plans, employers can also get access to screenshot features that allow them to see their employees’ screens.

DeskTime vs. Timely

Feature	DeskTime	Timely
Free plan	Yes	No
Attendance tracking	Yes	No
Billing and invoicing	Yes	No
Offline time tracking	Yes	No

Why customers love it

Vikesh A. says, “Writing this after using two years of continuous services, this feature helps you stay organized and easily track time spent. They should have more dashboards or analytics related to monitor the absence or presence of team members.”

Laura G., accountant and project manager, says, “Desktime organizes your work schedule and evaluate which are your most productive hours, so in the future you can control your time better.”

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	$0	Freelancers
Starter	$7 per user/month	Start-ups
Grow	$9 per user/month	Fast-growing small teams
Team	$12 per user/month	Mid to large teams with complex needs
Enterprise	Contact Hubstaff for prices, starting at $25 per user/month	Enterprise organizations

9. BigTime

BigTime is the Swiss army knife of time trackers. It covers time tracking, billing, project management, and resource management and is best suited to larger professional service companies like accounting, consulting, or IT firms. Its real strength lies in its ability to provide granular insights into project profitability and resource allocation. The cherry on top? Its integrations with QuickBooks make end-to-end financial management seamless.

G2: 4.5 (1,405) , Capterra: 4.6 (647)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
BigTime is really good at eliminating a lot of the manual work associated with project and expense tracking.	Unfortunately, it is not available on Linux and comes with a steep learning curve.

As the name (sort of) suggests, BigTime is better-suited for big firms with complex and comprehensive workflow needs encompassing time tracking, project management, and finances.

Top features

• Time tracking: Measure both billable and non-billable hours or customize your timesheet.
• Expense tracking: Keep tabs on mileage and other expenses thanks to handy alerts and notifications.
• Full-cycle project management: resource allocation, payment processing, and reporting all in one!
• Integrations: With several common SaaS tools like Salesforce, Jira, Slack, and more.

BigTime vs. Timely

Feature	BigTime	Timely
Public API	Yes	No
24/7 live support	Yes	No
Available on Chromebook	Yes	No

Why customers love it

“I’ve been using BigTime software to streamline my billing, invoicing, and time tracking, and it has truly been a game changer. What was once a major headache is now handled effortlessly.” —Baris R., Project manager for civil engineers.

“It strikes an excellent balance of being clean, simple, and intuitive—while being highly customizable, thorough, and detailed. The implementation team was incredible. The whole process was incredibly professional—we were very impressed.” —Anon employee at a small architecture business

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Essential	$20 per user/month	Simple, smaller teams
Avanced	$35 per user/month	Anyone managing international currencies
Premiere	$45 per user/month	Larger teams with multi-level approvals
Foresight	Custom pricing	Complex enterprise clients

10. Paymo

Paymo is an intuitive 3-in-1 combo of task management, time tracking, and invoicing, making it ideal for teams managing multiple projects. Paymo boasts a Gantt chart feature, which offers a clear visual of project timelines and dependencies. It also supports resource scheduling and client collaboration, making it perfect for creative agencies and freelancers.

G2: 4.6 (588), Capterra: 4.7 (690)

✅ What we like	❓What’s missing
It offers a user-friendly interface while maintaining comprehensive project management tools and invoicing & budgeting features. Plus, you get big discounts if you pay annually!	Paymo has fewer integrations than other tools. There’s also no offline mobile access, and users complain about limited features. It can get quite expensive for larger teams.

Paymo is a great alternative to Timely (and other time tracking tools) if you’re a freelancer or small team looking for essential financial and invoicing features.

Top features

• Invoicing: Customizable invoices with expense tracking for billing clients.
• Project management: Comprehensive tools for planning, scheduling, and managing tasks.
• Task tracking and management: Organize tasks with deadlines, priorities, and assignments.
• Mobile apps: Track time and manage projects on the go with mobile access.

Paymo vs. Timely

Feature	Paymo	Timely
Public API	Yes	No
Project management functionality	Offers Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and project management, planning, and tracking features	No
Overtime calculation	No	Yes

Why customers love it

“I like the way Paymo has been designed. With its straightforward menu sidebar, it’s easy to access everything your business needs quickly and easily,”—Jamie Lee J., Sales Manager

Charlie H. echoes the sentiment, “Paymo is very easy to use and easy to set up, it’s a time savior spent on my different clients, perfect price/quality ratio, and its customer support is great and very helpful.”

Pricing

Plan	Cost	Best for
Free	Free	Small teams starting out with time tracking
Starter	$3.90 per user/month	Small teams needing collaboration tools and basic time management
Small Office	$6.90 per user/month	Small companies with project management needs
Business	$10.90 per user/month	Medium-sized businesses needing full Gantt chart functionality

How we chose this list of Timely alternatives

This list didn’t manifest out of thin air. We hand-picked the best Timely alternatives based on several different time tracking criteria. We then compared each tool against some of the best employee time tracking software available today to ensure a balanced review. How?

• We combed through hundreds of software user reviews and feedback to see what real people had to say.
• We double-checked each tool to see how the time-tracking features stack up against each other. For example, ease of use, native integrations, scalability, manual vs. automated tracking, pricing, etc.
• We even tested them ourselves to experience them firsthand in different use cases and check if they really align with the best practices in time tracking.

Why do users switch from Timely?

Timely itself is a solid time tracking tool. It is AI-powered, and automatically tracks and logs your work activities. This is great since it eliminates the need for manual entries, increasing accuracy and giving you one less thing to think about during a busy workday.

Standout features include its ease-of-use and Memories (an AI that runs in the background, logging all your tasks, apps, websites, and documents to build a detailed record of your day with zero manual input).

Timely offers three pricing plans without a free version:

• Starter: From $10 per user/mo
• Premium: From $20 per user/mo
• Unlimited: From $28 per user/mo

Pros: Easy to use, automatic tracking, detailed reporting
Cons: Higher cost for bigger teams, limited manual time entry, can take time to adjust to its automation

G2: 4.8 (419), Capterra: 4.7 (702)

With such great community scores, what makes people want to break up with their Timely subscriptions? According to our research, there are a few reasons that keep coming up:

• Firstly, it is simply too expensive for many solo freelancers with simpler timekeeping needs, especially with other more affordable options on the market.
• Tracking time against tasks in Timely costs extra. Users must purchase a $5 per user per month add-on to access a task timer. 
• It has fewer integrations than tools with similar pricing, such as Toggl Track or Clockify. Also, some integrations are only available on higher price tiers.
• You can’t create custom charts and dashboards to analyze tracked time data in Timely. 
• To generate invoices with Timely, you must pay $20 per user per month for the QuickBooks Online integration. 
• Automatic tracking is great, but limited flexibility isn’t. It would be nice to have the option to include a manual track with a stop/start timer (time spent on client phone calls, for example) or to override something if it goes wrong.
• Some users have claimed they saw their timesheet reporting become less accurate with Timely, with one person saying, “We saw, in a systematic (larger) way, that our timesheets became, in fact, less accurate. Some people in our organization started slacking on writing the timesheets because they felt they had all the historical data in Timely and could do it whenever, even months later. What we observed is that when using Timely, you end up leaving it up to an AI model that doesn’t really know what you did to create your timesheets. At some level, it becomes random.” —Simen A. W. O., CEO.
• A few users have also commented their Memories are not getting logged when they should be, which causes issues if they forget to manually check their logs at the end of the day (defeating the purpose of an automatic timer…). As one user put it, “Some team members experience glitches with the memory feature that tracks what we’re doing. We’ve realized that depending on the amount of tabs you have open, it may not track accurately becasue of it’s overload. We do wish there was a feature for limits of individual team members’ hours for projects.”

What to look for in a Timely alternative

This will depend on your specific needs. You may need to track task time, generate invoices, or access lots of integrations. Here are some general things to look out for:

• Cost: Look for alternatives that fit your budget. Whether you want a free version, a one-time purchase, or a low monthly fee, make sure it offers good value for the price.
• Features and integrations: The alternative should offer all the features you need. Check for integrations with other apps or software you regularly use.
• User experience: Look for software with good reviews about its ease of use and minimal technical glitches.
• Time-saving: You want to make sure your time tracker is actually, you know, saving you time!

Get started with a free time tracking tool

Toggl Track is the best Timely alternative, offering more functionality at a better price, with the same simplicity.

Firstly, track time as you please, with automatic time tracking, start/stop timer, and manual time entry options. This flexibility empowers employees to manage their time however suits them best. Timely, on the other hand, forces automatic time tracking, which is only possible on desktop apps.

With 100+ integrations and a browser extension, Toggl Track lets employees track time in any app on any device. Entries sync in real-time, enabling you to keep track on the go.

Time tracking goals make it easy to improve accountability and cultivate a time tracking habit, which helps newbies get into the swing of things. Employees can set the goals themselves, or their team lead can set them for them.

Comprehensive and customizable reports and analytics give managers deep insights into employee productivity, engagement, and accountability without any surveillance monitoring.

Go on… cheat on your regular, and sign up for a free account with Toggl Track. What’s the harm in taking a peek?

It’s another workday. You sign in to your computer…and so does your boss, silently observing your typing speed and blink rate via the webcam.

This may sound downright creepy, but it’s the unfortunate reality for many remote and hybrid workers. 80% feel monitored by their employers, and about the same number of employers have some type of activity tracking in place.

At Toggl, we strongly oppose employee surveillance. It’s ethically unacceptable, legally concerning, and, worst of all — severely damaging to companies and their people.

Yet, employee monitoring software is a booming billion-dollar market, and Toggl’s 2025 Productivity Index revealed that 70% of leaders are comfortable using surveillance software in a remote work setting.

So, how did we get to a state where companies distrust their employees and cultivate productivity paranoia? Let’s unpack this.

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• Over 550 employee monitoring products now offer employee surveillance technologies, such as keystroke logging, screen recordings, webcam monitoring, and GPS tracking. 

• These technologies erode trust and invade privacy and often have the opposite effect — they actually reduce productivity, increase disengagement, and lead to higher turnover. One in six workers consider monitoring technology usage a good reason to quit a job. 

• Excessive monitoring often breaches data privacy laws like GDPR, ECPA, and CCPA, with regulators taking action against companies that overstep boundaries. 

• There are better ways to manage employee performance, such as collaborative goal-setting, data-driven capacity planning, promoting deep work, and providing regular feedback. These approaches focus on building trust and intrinsic motivation rather than instilling fear via surveillance. 

• Toggl Track believes transparency and trust are the crux to higher workforce productivity and better operational performance. 

• To increase workforce productivity, employers should channel more effort into improving their visibility into teams’ workloads and available capacities. Try new work schedule strategies and continuously course-correct via internal employee feedback. 

The rise in employee monitoring

As more teams moved from cubicles to home offices, a new term emerged — bossware.

Also known as electronic employee monitoring software, bossware refers to the expanding means companies have to monitor employees’ laptops, phones, and physical activity under the guise of ‘productivity tracking.’

Browser history, app usage, mouse movements, keystrokes, break clock-outs, Slack messages — there are very few things employers can’t track.

Such intrusive surveillance raises many questions. Is it warranted? Yes, if you ask (micro)managers who doubt their people are working. But otherwise? No, because most employee monitoring software has zero positive effect on performance.

Is it morally questionable? Absolutely. 83% of employers realize the ethical issues with employee surveillance, but 78% nonetheless use monitoring tools due to fear their people aren’t doing enough.

85% of leaders say the shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to trust employee productivity. This has led to productivity paranoia, where leaders fear lost productivity is due to employees not working despite increased hours worked, meetings, and activity metrics.

Microsoft

No one likes being watched — and people get tense. High stress levels and poor mental health naturally lead to lower performance, absenteeism, and disengagement, all of which increase the intention to quit. 63% of workers consider monitoring technology usage a good reason to leave an employer.

When quitting isn’t an option, people often resort to a “productivity theater” strategy — finding workarounds to dupe the apps and inflate the tracked metrics. A quick online search provides plenty of options.

But this only creates more antagonism. Some employers, like Wells Fargo, have responded by firing people who used desktop activity simulation tools. Others are forcing people back to the offices. 

But neither addresses the real problem: Is employee monitoring software the solution to more productive work?

Many employers appear to think so. Starbucks, Delta, Nestlé, and AstraZeneca are using an AI-powered tool to monitor employees’ messages (yes, private ones on social media, too) from company-owned devices.

Barclays installed workplace surveillance software that emailed staff daily to warn them about not being “active enough” or “having too many unaccounted activities” like bathroom breaks. Other options are available to snoop on office and remote workers.

The most common types of employee surveillance

Employee monitoring software has become a $587.8 million market in less than five years, growing at 12% year-on-year.

Still, we feel it’s important to clarify that not all time tracking or attendance management apps are inherently bad. However, some of the following new technologies take employee monitoring too far. 

​​Keystroke logging 

Employee monitoring tools with keylogging features capture keyboard usage frequency and timing as a proxy of engagement. Many also collect specific user inputs like recent search queries, form submissions, file usage, browser activity, and system commands.

Some employers argue it can detect insider threats and breaches of workplace policies. Forcepoint software scans for specific keywords in employee activity to predict whether an employee shows “signs of willingness to leak company information,” “engage in insider trading,” or “show other signs of illicit workplace behavior.”

This degree of monitoring borders on predictive policing, a morally questionable and ineffective practice. 

Screen recordings

Occasional screenshot capture or desktop activity video recording is another feature in some employee monitoring software. Some managers see it as ‘proof’ of employees’ engagement or a justification for tracked billable hours. 

Can employee outputs be measured in screenshots? If your sales manager spends most of their day chatting with clients on Zoom, should you penalize them for that? Or if they spent the day perfecting a few presentation slides that led to a multi-million dollar deal closure?

Screen recordings often contain sensitive corporate and personal data, including logins, passwords, and financial records. If a monitoring app gets breached (which does happen), all of this information will end up in the wrong hands. 

Webcam monitoring 

Requiring employees to always keep their webcams and microphones on is another problematic post-pandemic practice. 37% of employers expect workers to be on camera all day. Among them, 93% monitor real-time video feeds for four or more hours daily — not the best use of supervisors’ time.

Video surveillance is often justified by the following: In the office, employees are monitored with security cameras or by the manager’s keen eye. So equivalent measures must be in place for home-based workers. But regulators don’t agree.

A Dutch court recently fined a US company for unlawfully terminating an employee who refused to keep the webcam on during a 9-hour online training session. His behavior was deemed “insubordination” and “refusal to work,” leading to dismissal. The court ruled that such surveillance invaded privacy under Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and ordered compensation.

GPS tracking 

Location tracking is common in attendance and shift scheduling apps. It’s not bad as long as the feature is activated with employer consent for legitimate purposes, like optimizing delivery routes or coordinating field service work.

But location tracking can also promote unhealthy management habits, such as immediately questioning employees’ whereabouts when they take a different route or a “suspiciously long” break. It can also invade employee privacy. Walmart was found to collect phone cameras and location data from employees’ personal devices after they forgot to turn off the workplace app after work.

GPS data and attendance monitoring technologies like badges or biometrics are used to build ‘point-based’ systems for tracking absences and lateness. One too many strikes (five in the case of Walmart and eight with Amazon), and you’re out of a job.

These automated systems, however, are error-prone and do not distinguish between absences protected by national labor laws and those violating company policies. Over 18 million workers across 66 US employers were wrongfully impacted by such systems.

Psycholinguistic analysis

Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) advances, software has improved in evaluating natural language. Beyond detecting specific keywords in emails or phone calls, advanced algorithms can evaluate sentiment, do personality profiling, or seek out signals of “malicious, inappropriate, or illegal behaviors in corporate communication,” as some vendors advertise.

Some businesses might track customer service communications to judge if workers handle complaints well. Others….to moderate internal communication channels for harassment, profanities, or bullying.

But language analysis algorithms aren’t perfect. They can show biases and poorly interpret phrases out of wider context, helping immature managers draw fast (and wrongful) conclusions. Such tools can also breach employees’ legally protected rights.

Collective organizing (unionization) and whistleblowing are protected by American federal, EU, and state laws. Yet, this doesn’t prevent employers from overstepping boundaries. Amazon HR managers, using an email monitoring program, surveyed minority and activism groups to detect employee organizing around controversial issues.

Is worker surveillance even necessary (or legal) in the first place?

Employee surveillance technologies have two major problems: Trust and privacy. Employers monitor workers due to distrust. But workers also distrust employers who obsessively watch their every step. The very nature of surveillance creates an environment of suspicion, fear, and deviance.

Arizona State University researchers found that excessive monitoring policies reduce employee productivity. Workers are more likely to take unapproved breaks, work slower, or engage in performative activities to inflate tracked metrics.

43% of employees spend 10+ hours a week on productivity theater tasks that make them look better in front of managers or colleagues but aren’t really warranted. 

Visier

Invasive employee monitoring also erodes personal accountability. Because people feel constantly micro-managed, they have a lower sense of personal responsibility, show less initiative, and don’t perform to the best of their abilities. 

In many cases, employee surveillance often backfires. Instead of higher performance and productivity, workers become disengaged and miserable. 3 in 4 workers say workplace monitoring lowers job satisfaction. Employees channel more energy into being visibly busy or thwarting monitoring systems instead of applying the same zeal to meaningful work.

By focusing just on the actions people take, these tools completely ignore the environment in which people are working. Managers are often attempting to juice productivity within fundamentally broken environments—full of fragmented or non-standardized processes and tasks, user-unfriendly IT applications, poor UX design, bottlenecks, and other factors that make work harder and slower. No single employee controls these variables and is instead subjected to them. Therefore, not only do these productivity tools fail to fix what is broken, they don’t even surface the real issues.

Rohan Narayana Murty,  junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and CTO at Soroco

Apart from being morally questionable and mildly effective, workplace monitoring can be illegal.

A number of privacy laws restrict employee data collection: 

• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 
• European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR)
• Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) 
• California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) 
• UK Data Protection Act 2018
• Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000

These laws don’t ban employee monitoring per se, but each limits its applicability. Employers must obtain workers’ consent, disclose monitoring use cases, restrict these to specific circumstances, and ensure the measures aren’t excessively intrusive.

Some national laws push for stricter workplace privacy. French CNIL says screen captures “are likely to be neither relevant nor proportionate since it is a frozen image of an isolated action by the employee, which does not faithfully reflect his or her work.”

The authority discourages such employee monitoring with a few exceptions, such as training or combating fraud. Employees cannot be subject to both video and phone call recordings at the same time.

Violators of data privacy rules risk fines. CNIL fined Amazon’s French division €32 million in 2024 for creating an intrusive employee monitoring system and running video surveillance without consent.

Employers can also face consequences for using collected data. An ExpressVPN survey found that 73% of employers used logged employee activity data and electrical communication for performance reviews, 43% to monitor potential workers’ union formations, and 37% as evidence for firing. When companies are then sued for privacy violations, courts often side with workers. 

In the US, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a warning against adopting monitoring tools using algorithmic scoring, third-party background checks, or any technology lacking transparency or breaching legal privacy protection.

Denmark has amended its video surveillance laws to bar companies from using remote or automatic workplace cameras for anything but security and crime prevention.

Greece and Cyprus have prohibited remote employee monitoring via webcams, while Portugal says employers must inform workers about any devices and apps used to monitor their activity remotely.

We are urging all organizations to consider both their legal obligations and their workers’ rights before any monitoring is implemented. While data protection law does not prevent monitoring, our guidance is clear that it must be necessary, proportionate, and respect the rights of workers. We will take action if we believe people’s privacy is being threatened.

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office 

There are (several) better ways to monitor and manage employee performance

Employee surveillance rarely achieves the desired effect because it optimizes the wrong measures.

Many companies still peg productivity to vague metrics like “visibility,” “total productive hours,” or even absurd ones like “logged keystrokes” or “messages sent” (although to be fair, 39% of C-suite execs polled did say there is too much focus on hours worked rather than output achieved).

The point is that these measures only increase productivity paranoia, where companies try to coerce employees into productive mode via nagging, micro-management, threats, and punishments.

Happiness, not fear, is the strongest productivity driver.

Our brain triggers a fight-or-flight response whenever our stress level rises. There’s a 50% chance we’ll either act and power through the unreasonable demand or freeze and fall further behind on a stressful task. Ongoing stress leads to loss of motivation, emotional exhaustion, and reduced effectiveness.

Happy workers, on the contrary, are 13% more productive. They use their time more effectively to complete tasks faster and at a higher quality. Happiness and high performance directly correlate with intrinsic motivation — our internal drive to engage in interesting, novel, or inherently satisfying activities.

Many employee performance management strategies only leverage extrinsic motivation — financial rewards, praise, or aversion to negative consequences. Employee surveillance tools only aggravate the latter.

A better (but slightly harder) approach is maximizing workers’ intrinsic motivation. This includes giving people greater autonomy and control over their actions (instead of micromanaging), helping them gain necessary competence levels, and giving them appropriately challenging tasks.

Timely feedback, supporting workplace dynamics, and a stronger connection to the company’s purpose improve employee performance more than blanket monitoring and threats.

Not sure where to start? Try these softer approaches to employee performance management.

Collaborative goal-setting

Humans are wonderfully unique, and everyone has their own timelines for getting good work done. The timing correlates with the nature of the job, their skill set, and cognitive capabilities.

As managers, we can help people understand and meet expectations by setting SMART team goals. Explain their importance and each person’s contribution to them, then break down each goal into individual KPIs — metrics that reflect real progress rather than sham activity.  

At the end of the day, you want your people to deliver better business results, not type more messages or stare into the webcam for 8 hours straight.

Data-driven capacity planning 

Good managers optimize employee outputs, not contributions. Just because someone is “active” for 8 hours doesn’t mean they contribute more value than someone doing 4 or 6 deep work hours. They may be less productive in “real terms” — waste time in unnecessary meetings, on redundant tasks, or by troubleshooting broken workflows. 

In such cases, time tracking, not activity tracking, can identify what’s holding your people back and where inefficiencies cost money. Analyzing time spent on tasks can reveal ways to remove, optimize, or automate low-value work. 

Focus on deep work 

Longer hours don’t translate to more outputs. Our brain has performance limits — it can muster five hours max of hard cognitive workload. 

Carving out that space is hard due to constant interruptions from messages, meetings, and other seemingly urgent but non-essential requests. For example, software engineers spend only 32% of their time writing code and about 70% on testing, operational, and management tasks.

An anonymous survey among FAANG employees also found 45% of workers don’t do more than four hours of focused work daily. Yet, these companies are hardly unprofitable. In fact, many companies and even entire countries are switching to six-hour workdays or four-day workweeks, and their productivity and economic outputs increase.

To improve your people’s productivity, you need to maximize the opportunities for deep work in a blissful state of distraction-free concentration. To promote deep work, companies adopt asynchronous communication, remove daily, recurrent meetings, and encourage employees to time block entries on their calendars for deep work. 

1:1 feedback sessions 

Immature managers often use employee monitoring software data to issue warnings to underperforming employees without investigating root causes. In 99% of cases, there’s a good reason for a performance dip.

Anika might have had a hard week due to a family issue but didn’t take PTO because it would look bad in the attendance tracker. Or Latricia might have been given a new task with unclear instructions, spending hours on call and in Slack clarifying the requirements. A manager must understand where and why their team is struggling — that’s what 1:1 sessions are for.

Toggl’s anti-surveillance stance

At Toggl, we’re big proponents of time tracking for personal productivity, not behavior policing. 

Our products will never have features that could breach employee privacy. No keystroke logging, screen captures, or location tracking — because we believe in empowering people, not oppressing them with totalitarian-like surveillance.  

Toggl Track’s mission is to provide the big picture of productivity data through the pane of time management. Studying your habits, processes, and task completion rates can help you understand when your performance is peak and what holds your company down. 

Time tracking gives real project visibility: Progress across sub-tasks, budget usage, resource availability, and time blockers. Activity monitoring only gives you “noise” — no context into group progress or individual contributions beyond the number of sites visited. In the end, it is the outcomes that matter, not the inputs. 

As long as everybody has a clear understanding what needs to be done, you can be quite liberal on how exactly the work is done.

Alari Aho, Toggl Founder

By giving our people the opportunity to be flexible with their time — all Togglers are free to choose when and how much they work — we’ve built a strong, loyal, distributed workforce of 150 people. When many choose to double down on surveillance, we put our bets on trust.  

How to fight “productivity paranoia”

The definition of paranoia is “unjustified suspicion and mistrust of others,” and that’s exactly what we’ve seen for the last couple of years.

Managers doubt their people are working enough and obsess over marginal metrics. Greedy software vendors fuel that frenzy with Black Mirror-esque technologies, such as work pods with heart-rate sensors to detect employee stress levels or AI-powered facial recognition apps to detect emotional cues and predict workers’ behaviors.

Such systems further erode workplace trust, leading to higher turnover, low morale, strained leader-staff dynamics, reduced innovation potential, and poor company performance, according to research. 

What we chose to do at Toggl (and now encourage others to do) is focus on restoring trust and increasing individual accountability. Here’s how.

Aim for workload visibility  

Suspicions often grow in the shadows. Without visibility into the teams’ workloads, capacity, and processes, it’s easy to doubt your people’s productivity and business profitability.

Workers, in turn, lack clarity in their priorities, don’t understand task dependencies, and focus on perfunctory work like attending meetings or quickly responding to emails.

Get your project management in order. Are your task estimates accurate? Do the deadlines make sense for the proposed chunk of work? Do you have to break down and parallelize tasks across two people instead of piling everything on one person?

A project management app with time-tracking features can determine each person’s scope of work, plan tasks, and track progress.

Greater workload transparency helps employers set clear expectations, and workers maintain clarity in their priorities. It also shifts the dynamics from proving, “Look, I’m working,” in favor of demonstrating your progress towards established goals and results. This creates greater personal accountability and removes expectation ambiguities.

Build a feedback-focused culture 

Workplace tensions arise when people can’t find common ground. Employees don’t understand what’s expected of them, and managers struggle to frame their demands or explain how to do better. This aggravates the disconnect between workers and leaders and undermines trust.

The solution is implementing more frequent and objective feedback cycles. Netflix encourages the open (sometimes uncomfortable, yet necessary) practice of sharing constructive feedback with everyone, including subordinates, peers, managers, or senior executives. All feedback follows the 4A Principle: 

When giving feedback:

• Aim to assist
• Actionable

When receiving feedback:

• Appreciate
• Accept or discard

Work in targeted sprints 

Endless grind isn’t the answer to better productivity. With constant stress to deliver faster and better, most people will burn out and quit, leaving you with fewer hands on deck and slimmer chances to deliver on the big objective.

A better option is keeping your team “toned” with a mix of high and low-intensity cycles as 37signals (Basecamp) does. Every team operates on a 6-week cycle, followed by a 2-week cooldown. This model creates a sense of urgency to keep the progress happening but also gives enough room for reflection, quick fixes, and rest. Work hours are strictly limited to 40h/week (32 hours in the summer) — forcing teams to ruthlessly prioritize what matters and enjoy life outside of work for better personal well-being. 

The company has no official growth or revenue targets, yet it’s been profitable for 24 years with over 100,000 customers.

The future of remote work productivity

For some companies, remote work was one of the greater workplace experiments — an opportunity to re-evaluate and reinvent operating processes and even their business models. For others, it’s become an ongoing source of tension, leading to the rise in employee monitoring software adoption and forced return-to-office (RTO) mandates. 

However, one in seven leaders at Fortune 500 companies that require in-person work say this rule had no impact on staff productivity.

The truth is many remote-first companies like 37signals, Buffer, Toggl, and Automattic, have always been efficient and productive. Not because we allow people to work from home and take more breaks, or use some form of monitoring. But because we choose to build a strong culture of strong personal accountability, high trust, and open communication. 

To succeed, leaders need to change how teams work, not where. This requires greater clarity into workload distribution, process efficiency, and time for deep work — something we aim to provide with our technology. 

Toggl Track brings time data into all major workflows, providing clarity into capacities, workloads, performance, and goals. Simple interface, powerful insights, and huge no to any form of surveillance get a 100% team buy-in for adoption.

Hiring teams are frazzled. They’re the frontline of your company’s employer brand — the face candidates will remember whether their application is accepted or rejected. And they’re busy.

Delivering timely candidate feedback, liaising with internal managers, and making objective, data-based hiring decisions are all part and parcel of your hiring team’s activities.

These tasks are made much easier with the right applicant tracking system — a tool that promises to streamline your hiring workflows while saving time and money as you hire the right candidate for the right role.

But ATS solutions aren’t created equal.

Not only do their features and functionalities vary wildly, but their pricing structures are different, too. This guide describes the different models you might see during your research and helps you pick a cost-effective ATS for your business.

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• Pricing models for applicant tracking systems differ based on the number of job openings, users, candidates, or even the total number of employees.
• Many ATS vendors also charge extra for things like implementation, integration, or customer support.
• Understanding ATS pricing can help you project your return on investment (ROI) to build a strong business case for internal approval. It’s also important to ensure you’re getting value out of the software based on what you will actually use it for.
• Small businesses should set a budget that accurately reflects the organization’s hiring needs, preferred features, and projected ROI. ATS vendor’s free plans or trials may also support your decision-making.

How much does an applicant tracking system cost on average?

How much you end up paying for your applicant tracking system depends on:

• The features you need
• The size of your hiring team
• How many people you’re hiring

We’ve broken down how much you should expect to pay based on the size of your organization.

Small businesses (under ten employees)

For small businesses, an ATS might be the first investment you make into your recruitment tech stack. You likely have limited hiring needs and budget, which means you won’t need an extensive list of features and functionality. It might make the most sense to go for an ATS with a pay-per-user or pay-per-vacancy model.

💰 Expect to pay: $240 to $1,500 per year

Medium-sized businesses (10-50 employees)

As your company grows, so do your hiring needs. With a greater hiring volume, you’ll need a solution capable of handling more candidates. You may also want to lean on analytics to refine your recruitment processes.

💰 Expect to pay: $1,500 to $3,000 per year

Large businesses (over 50 employees)

At this size, opting for a plan with unlimited candidates and vacancies is your best bet. You don’t want to blow your budget and need the flexibility to adjust your recruitment cadence without worrying about unexpected charges.

💰 Expect to pay: $3,000 to $10,000 per year

Enterprise pricing

Once your business reaches a certain level, your ATS price is largely influenced by the custom features and implementations you need to support your well-oiled hiring processes. For example, you may need an ATS with extra security or compliance functionality. Or, you might need to connect to a certain API.

💰 Expect to pay: $15,000 to $50,000

ATS pricing models

Most ATS vendors stick to an assortment of tried-and-tested pricing models. To select the best fit, ensure you understand each model’s nuances and how it could support your hiring needs.

Pay-per-job

Pay-per-job ATS systems could be a good option if you’re only hiring a handful of people at once. This model charges a flat fee per job opening, so you only pay for the positions you’re actively hiring for.

Once you make your hire, the position is archived, and you’re no longer charged for it. This model doesn’t make sense for high-volume hiring, as costs will quickly add up.

💰 Expect to pay: Between $100 to $500 per open position

Pay-per-recruiter

Pay-per-recruiter, also known as pay-per-user, is one of the most common pricing models you’ll see with ATS solutions. Put simply, your price is based on how many recruiters use the ATS.

A pay-per-recruiter ATS also allows you to control each team member’s access rights. For example, a Head of Recruitment might have more user privileges than a hiring manager for a given department. Some ATS solutions price user seats differently based on the access granted.

This model is best for teams with dedicated hiring teams, as costs will stay predictable regardless of the number of job openings they’re dealing with at once.

💰 Expect to pay: $60 to $100 per month per user

Pay-per-employee

Some ATS systems charge based on an organization’s total number of employees. For example, companies with 100 employees will pay the same, even if Company A receives twice as many candidates as Company B.

It’s a slightly unconventional approach, but worth considering for very small companies. It’s also favorable to enterprises with large hiring teams, where paying per recruiter would be expensive.

As your company grows, the incremental cost per employee actually goes down. That’s economies of scale for you!

💰 Expect to pay: $4 to $7 per employee, dropping to $0.20 per person for enterprise organizations

Flat fee

Finally, we encounter the most conventional pricing model: a flat price for a given service. This can be a one-time license purchase or a monthly or annual subscription model.

If your recruitment team values a consistent and predictable budget, this is the simplest solution. Even if it isn’t the cheapest option, you might decide it’s worth paying a slight premium to eliminate the mental drain of calculating and projecting costs every quarter.

💰 Expect to pay: From $350 per month to much higher amounts depending on the licensing agreement involved

Additional costs (that add up quickly)

You should know that the base price of the ATS solution is rarely the price you end up paying. Here are some common additional costs to watch out for and factor into your ATS software budget.

• Add-on features: Some ATS systems offer a menu of customizable features to bolt onto your plan for an extra cost. This makes sense because not every company will need the same combination of features, allowing the ATS vendor to cater to a wider range of customers. Take the time to consider whether any of the essential features you need (or might need in the near future) fall outside the base plan of the ATS you’re evaluating and how much they could cost you.
• Training and support: Depending on the ATS and tier you choose, you might need to pay extra costs associated with onboarding, setup, or general customer support access. Many ATS platforms include some degree of support in the price, but you might be forking out between $100-$500 for online training, so be sure to read the fine print.
• Integrations: Some products will charge you for ATS integrations with other recruiting software or Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) platforms in your tech stack. For example, while a Google Calendar integration might come with the base plan, vendors could charge you between $30-$100 for extra integrations. They may also charge for access to their application programming interface (API.)
• Implementation: Depending on the complexity of your implementation, there might be a hidden cost based on the level of customization required during setup. This could be a one-time activation cost or may include fees for custom implementations.

Overview of some of the best ATS software pricing

As you start to look for the best applicant tracking system for your budget, you’ll likely encounter a few common tools. Here’s a brief overview of pricing plans from top ATS software solutions on the market.

Toggl Hire

Toggl Hire follows a pay-per-candidate model with transparent pricing from $20 to $469 per month, billed annually for premium plans.

Our free plan accommodates five candidates, making it ideal for small businesses with occasional hiring needs. It includes bias-free candidate screening, video interviewing, bulk invitations, and instant candidate feedback.

The Basic plan is for 20 candidates and includes full access to Reports & Analytics and a customizable candidate database. Premium pricing is available for up to 45 candidates and includes anti-cheating, AI features, candidate email login, and more.

The Business plan is available for unlimited candidates and includes customizable email templates, bulk actions for candidate management, URL redirects, and more for an enhanced customer experience.

Workable

Workable follows a pay-per-employee model, starting at $149 monthly for the Starter plan, which includes two active job openings.

Features include resume parsing, job postings, custom analytics, and more. The Standard plan allows you to post unlimited active jobs — ustomized pricing is based on your number of full-time employees.

Greenhouse

Greenhouse supports you in talent acquisition and management, interview scheduling and evaluation, and reporting and analytics.

The company’s Essential, Advanced, and Expert plans all run on bespoke pricing, which is not directly visible on their site. To get an accurate quote, you’ll need to book a product demo.

Zoho Recruit

Zoho Recruit follows a pay-per-user model, billed annually for its Standard, Professional, and Enterprise plans, ranging from $30 to $90 per user per month. A free forever version is also available.

Start with 100 active jobs on the Standard plan, rising to 750 on the Enterprise plan. Expect AI candidate matching, screening & assessments, talent sourcing, client and staffing portals, advanced analytics, and more.

Breezy HR

Breezy HR operates a flat fee model, starting at $157 per month, up to $273 per month, and then $439 per month. A free “bootstrapped version” is also available if you’re hiring for a single position.

All premium plans allow unlimited job listings for job boards, users, and candidates. The difference is in the access to features and the level of customer support.

Other great ATS options

• Pinpoint hides its pricing behind a demo call, clarifying that accurate pricing is based on headcount, existing processes, and customer pain points.
• JazzHR runs its pricing model like an a la carte menu. You get three active job openings at $75 per month but can add more for $9 per job per month. If you’d rather get unlimited job openings, you can go up a tier for $269 per month, unlocking access to further features charged at $29 and $59 per month per feature. The highest tier, at $420 monthly, includes free Zoom integration and all-access support.
• Recruitee is priced at $199 per month for five job openings or $249 for unlimited job openings. Both tiers include features such as talent pipeline templates, talent pools, email automation, quick evaluations, and more. They also offer optional add-ons such as SSO and candidate texting for an extra fee.

How to calculate the ROI of an applicant tracking software

You’ve been on a few demo calls and have a gut feeling about which ATS software best suits your hiring team’s needs. Now, it’s time to convince the decision-maker to approve the budget. They’re going to expect numbers — in particular, ROI.

To illustrate return on investment, prepare some statements of what the tool can do for the organization. Remember: ATS vendors can often provide case studies and results they drove for similar businesses to yours to support projections and estimates.

How to set a budget for an applicant tracking system

Now you know all the different factors that contribute to the price of an ATS, and the different pricing models out there, you can create a budget based on your needs and company size.

Start by creating a business case to understand the software’s scope and estimated impact. Then, based on your hiring needs, company size, and projected ROI, set a sensible budget.

For example, if you’re a small business of 25 people expecting to manage five job openings per year, using an ATS might save you $10,000 per year in time and resources.

In this scenario, a flat fee budget of $1,500 per year, plus $500 for any extra support and implementation costs, would give you an ROI of 500%.

Try Toggl Hire for free

Getting your toes wet through a free trial or free account allows you to compare different ATS tools before committing to one. Doing so will help you familiarize yourself with the features and UI and get a sense of the value for money you’re getting with the product.

Toggl Hire is one of the most affordable options on the market and a great choice for various budgets.

We offer transparent pricing that aligns perfectly with the financial constraints of businesses looking for efficient recruitment tools. With a user-friendly platform, we aim to let it speak for itself and will never force you to contact a sales team just to take a peek at our software.

Toggl’s pricing options start with a free plan, so why not try it out for yourself right now? Create your free ATS account today to learn why Toggl Hire is the right ATS for you.

Hard skills are among the most challenging to assess accurately during the hiring process. But why? On the surface, it sounds counterintuitive, but hard skills can be more objectively measured than their soft skills counterparts.

The reality is that while a resume can offer some critical insight into a candidate’s past, it doesn’t necessarily say anything about how well they performed in a role. To understand that, hiring managers need to test for hard skills to assess potential candidates more accurately and fairly.

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• Hard skills are measurable competencies that people need to perform their job.

• Examples of hard skills vary across fields, but they include technical skills like Python, Java, cloud computing, data analysis, or any other skill required for a specific role.

• Soft skills are subjective attributes, which makes them harder to quantify and assess than hard skills. They include things like communication, empathy, and problem-solving.

• Testing hard and soft skills requires different methods. Soft skills are typically assessed through interviews, and behavioral assessments, while methods for evaluating hard skills typically involve skills assessment tests specific to the competency, like coding or cognitive ability tests.

• With our professionally crafted test library, Toggl Hire can help hiring managers evaluate both hard and soft skills in job candidates. Select from a library of role-specific skills assessment tests crafted by experts, or create your own to screen candidates faster and better.

What are hard skills?

Hard skills are the tangible, measurable attributes people need to do their jobs. They are competencies that can be quantified or measured against a particular benchmark or standard and, therefore, be used to compare against other people. 

Typically learned through education, training, or on-the-job experience, you can also think of them as the functional pieces of knowledge potential candidates need to work in a particular field.

We’ll look at some examples in more detail below. However, common practical skills include proficiency in a foreign language, the ability to use software tools (such as Microsoft Word), professional qualifications (such as a degree) in a certain field, or technical skills (advanced computation).

Examples of hard skills

Here’s a list of 30 common hard skills you may come across for popular job roles. Note that these are just the tip of the iceberg; you’ll encounter many different requirements depending on the roles you’re recruiting for.

Department	Examples of hard skills
Finance	Accounting, administration, P&L management, auditing, book-keeping, budgeting, Microsoft Excel & Google Drive
Marketing	SEO, Facebook ads, email marketing, copywriting, proofreading, social media management, ad optimization, A/B testing, growth loops
Software development	Database management, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, C#, C++, PHP, Flutter, debugging, GitHub
Customer support	Word processing, Microsoft Outlook, IT proficiency, foreign languages, reporting, CRM management, typing speed
Graphic designer	UI design, UX design, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Final Cut, illustration, Canva
Product management	Technical writing, prototyping, A/B testing, data extraction and analysis, agile methodology knowledge, product roadmap development
Human resources	Employee retention, recruitment, regulations, employee benefits, payroll, HR tool management
Project management	Waterfall, agile, scrum, Jira, cost management, task management

Hard skills vs. soft skills

Soft skills refer to an individual’s interpersonal characteristics, such as how they think, communicate, and work in a team. Often referred to as ‘people skills,’ they are the qualities that individuals need to work, lead, and interact with others. 

By their nature, soft skills are far more subjective and, as such, are harder to quantify and assess. But, one thing that everyone agrees on is that candidates need a great blend of hard and soft skills to be their most effective.  

Department	Examples of soft skills
Finance	Communication, negotiation, critical thinking, flexibility, resilience, teamwork, problem-solving, attention to detail, planning & organizational abilities
Marketing	Analytical thinking, multitasking, lifelong learning, creativity, communication, goal setting, adaptability
Software development	Communication, patience, open-mindedness, problem-solving, critical thinking, rime management, teamwork, empathy, self-awareness
Customer support	Empathy, relationship management, training, persuasion, problem-solving, critical thinking, decision-making, time management
Graphic designer	Creativity, communication, problem-solving, time management, empathy, active listening, presentation, giving and receiving feedback, flexibility, teamwork
Product management	Communication, leadership, motivation, conflict management, adaptability, resourcefulness, teamwork, persuasion, analytical thinking, prioritization
Human resources	Communication, problem-solving, time management, leadership, empathy, work ethic, teamwork, collaboration
Project management	Leadership, motivation, communication, conflict management, decision-making, organization, time management, prioritization

How to assess hard skills in job candidates

Often, the centerpiece of your hiring process evolves around the interview or a series of interviews. However, while interviews are the best method for evaluating your candidates’ soft skills, they won’t go as far as you need when assessing hard skills.

For example, a conversation with the candidate can reveal valuable insight into their communication and verbal reasoning skills, negotiation capabilities, and the candidate’s personality. But it isn’t ideal for figuring out how well they can code or manage an SQL database.

To assess a candidate’s hard skills, you need tests. Assessments are the best way to identify candidates’ hard skills and reveal a lot about their soft skills (bonus!).

Types of assessments for testing hard skills:

• Cognitive ability tests — This is one of your most powerful tools for understanding a candidate’s job performance. Cognitive ability tests assess how the candidate will perform in unexpected scenarios while mimicking the duties related to their position.

• Technical coding tests — Coding tests are an effective way to measure a candidate’s coding proficiency. These programming tests can assess their familiarity with programming languages and their ability to utilize them in practical projects.

• Computer skills assessment tests — Computer literacy tests evaluate a candidate’s technical abilities. These tests are often computer-based and keep up with advancing technology. Software simulations can evaluate a candidate’s familiarity with programs like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

• Basic math or writing assessments — Assess the candidate’s knowledge of basic math and writing concepts, style, fluency, and grammar. This will help you evaluate their ability to handle these tasks.

• Situational judgment tests measure a candidate’s critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making skills by simulating work-related scenarios. They are also useful for assessing a candidate’s capacity to work under pressure.

Top three ways to assess candidates for hard skills

Here are three key ways to assess your candidates for the competencies they need during the hiring process. 

1. Look out for qualifications

During the early stages of your hiring process, look out for candidates who have achieved recognized qualifications, licenses, or certifications for a particular skill or knowledge area. 

External qualifications are a great way to prove that a candidate has reached a certain level of competency in a particular hard skill. Most qualifications require the individual to pass an exam to demonstrate their knowledge in a pressure situation. 

Whether it’s a degree, professional qualification, or a record of CPD, remember that in most circumstances, you can also contact the awarding body to verify the individual’s competence. 

Of course, qualifications usually need to be balanced off with practical experience, but they are a great way to quickly identify a certified hard skill level.

2. Run an assessment center

A great way to test for hard skills is to run an assessment center for particular roles. While many people only associate these with graduates, assessment centers can be used for candidates at all levels, including senior executives. 

Assessment centers are great places to test all sorts of abilities, as you can utilize various tasks, including aptitude tests. Try including some of these tasks within your assessment center:

• Create a custom assessment for your candidates, assessing their knowledge of a particular topic.

• Challenge candidates to complete a job simulation such as an in-tray exercise or staged customer calls.

• Finish by running a case study and presentation task for your candidates. This will have the supplementary benefit of assessing time management and communication skills alongside any other attributes you want the candidate to showcase. 

3. Skills testing

You can also use testing to assess candidates’ competencies and knowledge. 

Skills tests are a great way to test a candidate’s abilities beyond simply listing them on a resume. Not only are they great for you as hiring managers, but they also offer candidates the chance to stand out from the crowd and showcase how good they are in a fun and interactive way!

They also help remove any bias in your recruiting, ensuring that you’re progressing with the best candidates based on their knowledge alone.

Assess hard skills with Toggl Hire

Like the sound of that? Here’s how Toggl Hire can help you with hard skills testing. 

Step 1: Create skills tests in a few clicks

Setting up a skills test in Toggl Hire is super easy. In fact, it requires just a few clicks! Our role-specific templates cover hiring across every department of your business, including technical, marketing, sales & support, leadership, and more!

Our library of over 15,000 questions ensures every test is unique, eliminating the chance of cheating. Best of all, those questions are quality-checked by our team of community experts to ensure they accurately evaluate the exact hard skills needed to perform the job role!

Step 2: Customize your skills assessments

While we do most of the legwork for you, we appreciate every role (and every organization) is unique. That’s why you can add as many bespoke questions to your skills tests as you need to cover every one of your must-have hard skills.

Simply jump in and add customized questions in the right format for you. That could be free text, single-choice, multiple-choice, picture-choice, numeric, or code input.

Step 3: Get the results

As your candidates complete their tests, evaluations of their hard skills start rolling into your dashboard!

Here, you can easily see your candidates ranked on their performance, with the ability to quickly search or filter on particular score percentages or customizable tags. This is a great way to identify which candidates have the hard skills to perform well in the role. 

Start testing hard skills with Toggl Hire 

Hard skills are the measurable competencies people learn through education or in the workplace. And with the right tests, it’s easy to assess how skilled they really are.

Whether through an assessment center, external qualification, or testing, there are many ways to certify a candidate’s hard skills against the standard you need!

And, when it comes to testing, whether it’s a foreign language, accounting, or proficiency in Microsoft Word, it’s just two easy clicks to get started with a free Toggl Hire account.

Finding the right leader for your company is crucial. Whether it’s for the entire organization or a specific department, you need someone who can bring vision and drive results.

But how do you ensure you find the next Steve Jobs instead of Elizabeth Holmes? 🙈

To assess leadership candidates more effectively, identify their strengths, and choose the best person to take your organization to new heights, let’s explore 10 key leadership competencies to evaluate during your hiring process.

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• Leadership competencies encompass a combination of skills, knowledge, and behaviors that define effective leadership.
• Unlike standalone skills, competencies blend interpersonal and technical elements applied to real-life challenges.
• Evaluating candidates effectively requires a mix of interviews, behavioral questions, skills tests, and scenario-based assessments.

What are leadership competencies?

Leadership competencies refer to the skills, knowledge, and behavior needed to be an effective leader of an organization and its people. The right set of leadership competencies is essential for guiding and motivating teams and driving them forward to achieve organizational success.

Think of leadership competencies as ingredients in a recipe. Not every organization will be making the same meal. Some companies, or even industries, will need a specific mix of competencies based on their goals and priorities.

For example, an organization needing to build out a robust succession planning strategy may focus on leadership development from its junior ranks upward. On the other hand, companies focused on improving employee retention rates may require leaders with advanced mentoring competencies to progress individual careers within the organization.

For this reason, effective leadership strategies often use a competency model framework to select the core competencies they need.

Are leadership competencies different from leadership skills?

Confused about the competing terms you’ve heard? Leadership competencies are different from leadership skills, but they’re both super important.

While leadership skills point to specific abilities like public speaking or financial modeling, leadership competencies are broader. They blend skills with knowledge and behavior and then apply them to real-world challenges.

What does it mean to be a “great leader?”

A great leader in one organization might not be as effective in another company. That’s because the right leader depends on your goals, team dynamics, and industry influences. Even so, certain traits are universal in separating a great leader from the rest of the pack.

Great leaders retain their employees

Retention is an ongoing issue for companies as modern employees prefer to seek new opportunities rather than being “stuck” with a work situation they can’t stand. While a team member may choose to jump ship for many reasons, bad managers will significantly impact the employee experience. In fact, 27% of employees would happily replace their manager.

Great leaders engage their team members

Keeping seats filled isn’t the only positive outcome of effective leadership. A good leader will also know how to motivate and inspire each individual under their wing. Gallup’s research finds that 70% of a team’s engagement relates directly to the quality of their management. That can be the difference between an employee who’s constantly clock-watching and one who’s excited to show up and produce their best work.

Great leaders produce results

When employee turnover is low, and your team members are motivated and have a strong relationship with their leaders, it makes sense that they achieve results for your company. The proof? Korn Ferry Institute’s research on organizational transformation revealed that over a five-year period, a 25% difference in financial performance was attributed to trust in leadership. How’s that for a competitive advantage?

Do you need a specific type of leader for your organization?

We wish we could answer that for you! However, the best leadership style for a particular team or organization will depend on many factors, including the size and structure of the organization, the nature of the work, and the personality and preferences of the employees.

Some common leadership styles include:

Leadership Style	Description
Autocratic	Make decisions independently without much input from others
Bureaucratic	Listens to the employees’ input but may reject it if it doesn’t align with company policy or past practices
Coaching	Focuses on identifying the individual strengths of each team member and emphasizes individual employees’ success
Democratic/Participative	Involves team in decisions and seeks input and feedback, effectively building trust and engagement
Laissez-faire/Delegative	Gives team autonomy and minimal guidance (this works with skilled and motivated teams)
Authoritative/Transformational	Inspires and motivates the team with vision and goals to develop members and drive change
Transactional	Rewards or punishes based on performance (particularly effective in motivating employees to meet goals)
Servant	Prioritizes team needs and supports and develops team members
Charismatic	Inspires and motivates with personality and charm to build strong emotional connections with the team
Situational	Adapts style to situation and team needs; they effectively respond to changing circumstances
Strategic	Uses vision, competitive awareness, and adaptability to manage teams and achieve business goals
Pacesetting	Pacesetting leaders set high standards and expect employees to meet them; they may step in to ensure things are done correctly and on time

Great leaders understand the strengths and limitations of each style and can adapt their approach based on the needs of their team and organization.

An effective leader falls into one of three leadership competency categories

Let’s imagine you have a mediocre or even subpar leader in your organization. What competencies do they need to elevate themselves into the effective leadership role category? The list of possible competencies falls into three main categories.

Competencies for leading the organization

Competent leaders are the figureheads for the entire business, capable of driving innovation and steering the ship through organizational change when necessary. The right set of leadership-level competencies will include the ability to craft strategies and align teams with business goals.

Competencies for leading others

Besides flexing their business acumen, effective leaders must also have exceptional people-facing skills. Similar to HR professionals, leaders should be equipped with interpersonal skills that enable them to motivate their teams.

Competencies for leading the self

Exceptional leaders know their work is never complete, and they never stop trying to up their game. They regularly reflect and take self-assessments to ensure they’re continuously improving and building strong partnerships with their people.

10 key leadership competencies to hire for in 2025

While we encourage you to select competencies that match your organizational goals and current gaps, here are ten of the most important leadership competencies you might focus on this year.

1. Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EI) is a vital trait for effective leaders as it involves understanding and managing one’s own emotions, as well as the emotions of others. Leaders with high emotional intelligence can build strong relationships and relate to their employees.

2. Social intelligence

Social intelligence, also known as social quotient or SQ, is the art of reading the room. This competency involves reading social cues to behave appropriately in any given situation. While useful as a standalone competency, it’s even more powerful in combination with emotional quotient (EQ) and intelligence quotient (IQ), equipping leaders with a broader set of competencies than their counterparts.

3. AI literacy

Instead of delegating remotely anything technical to IT teams, modern leaders need to understand how to integrate AI effectively. According to Kornferry, 65.5% of global leaders are excited about AI’s impact on their work. In particular, 73% of CEOs and 80% of senior executives believe AI will elevate their value in the next three years.

4. Agility

Agile leaders thrive in fast-paced, unpredictable environments. They adapt to change quickly (did someone say pandemic?) and encourage their teams to embrace new challenges and opportunities.

Learning agility forms a key part of this competency, which the Center for Creative Leadership defines as “Knowing how to learn—knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do. It’s about learning from experience and applying it in new ways, adapting to new circumstances and opportunities.”

5. Communicative intelligence

This is more than just “being a good communicator.” It’s about adapting your message to suit different audiences and ensuring clarity in every interaction. In an HBR article about “How Great Leaders Communicate,” Carmine Gallo points to the leadership of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos as someone who uses short words to discuss complex topics, ensuring his message is never lost in translation.

6. Analytical thinking

Analytical leaders excel at breaking down complex problems, spotting trends, and developing data-driven strategies. They combine logic and creativity to navigate challenges effectively. Analytical thinking is a competency that spans multiple skill sets. For example, Springboard reports that data analysis is the most in-demand hard or technical skill.

7. Change management

Whether it’s implementing a new strategy or navigating organizational restructuring, change management skills are essential. Leaders with this competency minimize disruption while keeping teams aligned and motivated.

8. Conflict management

Conflict is inevitable in any workplace, but skilled leaders approach it as an opportunity for growth. It’s not always easy, but strong leaders mediate disputes, find common ground, and maintain harmony while addressing the root causes of conflict.

9. Innovation

Innovative leaders think outside the box and encourage their teams to do the same. They foster a culture where experimentation is encouraged, and failure is seen as a step toward success. After all, “the fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate,” said IBM’s CEO Thomas Watson.

10. Coaching ability

A great leader’s success isn’t measured solely by their own achievements but by how well they elevate others. Leaders with strong coaching skills empower their teams and deliver feedback that helps their employees grow professionally.

10 tips on what to look for when evaluating leadership competencies in candidates

Let’s be real: finding the next Rosalind Brewer or Ray Kroc is next to impossible. These people – titans who changed the business landscape – are always self-starters and incredibly rare. However, you can find future employees who have founder-like qualities.

You’ll get an inkling of who is right because they will display strong leadership skills. Let’s run through the top tips and skills to look out for and how to best evaluate them when hiring.

1. Decide if you need a visionary or a pragmatic

When hiring for leadership positions, it’s crucial to determine whether a candidate possesses a visionary or pragmatic leadership style. Each style has its own strengths and approaches.

Visionary leaders

Visionary leaders are able to see the big picture and create a compelling vision for the future. They are often known for their creativity, innovation, and willingness to take risks. A notable example of a visionary leader is Steve Jobs, who recognized the potential of personal computers and iPhones.

Pragmatic leaders

On the other hand, pragmatic leaders are more focused on the business’s day-to-day operations. They excel at problem-solving and making sound decisions, ensuring the effective execution of plans. Warren Buffett serves as a famous example of a pragmatic leader who has successfully built an investment firm over many years.

2. Dissect their communication style

Influential leaders can communicate their vision and ideas clearly and concisely. They are also skilled at active listening and understanding the needs of others.

To assess a candidate’s communication skills beyond the interview, consider skills testing and homework assignments:

• Skills tests can help identify the candidate’s abilities in active listening, communication, observation, and feedback.
• Homework assignments, like asking the candidate to give a presentation on a topic of their choice, offer the chance to observe how they interact with others in a group setting.

Oprah Winfrey is a prime example of a gifted communicator who can tell stories and connect with people from all walks of life.

3. Understand how they make decisions

Effective leaders possess the skill to make well-informed decisions – quickly. They carefully consider and weigh the advantages and disadvantages of various options before selecting the optimal course of action for the organization.

Jeff Bezos is widely recognized as a successful leader for his capability to make decisive decisions swiftly.

As a senior executive, you get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. If I make, like, three good decisions a day, that’s enough. And they should be as high quality as I can make them.

Jeff Bezos | Source

Try using behavioral-based interview questions to gain insights into potential candidates’ thinking processes, problem-solving capabilities, and work ethic.

4. Look for high emotional intelligence

When evaluating emotional intelligence, consider the following factors:

• Self-awareness: Entails understanding one’s own emotions, recognizing strengths and weaknesses, and comprehending personal motivations and drives.
• Self-management: The ability to think before acting, keeping negative emotions in check, and ensuring that immediate reactions do not control the situation.
• Social awareness: Being aware of the feelings and actions of others, empathizing with their perspectives, and establishing trust in various situations.
• Relationship management: Going beyond social awareness, this involves taking responsibility for oneself and creating a positive work environment.

Political leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill are common examples of individuals with high emotional intelligence who are sensitive to the emotions of their countries and dedicate their lives to their cause.

During interviews, you can ask candidates questions like “Who inspires you and why?” or present hypothetical scenarios to assess how they would handle negative feedback on their job performance.

5. Test how they collaborate and work in a team

Effective leaders possess the ability to bring people together and foster a sense of collaboration toward a common goal. They are skilled at building trust and rapport with their team members.

Walt Disney was known for his ability to create a sense of community and belonging among his employees. He also very successfully fostered a culture of innovation and creativity within his organization.

To this day, Disney is one of the best examples of a brand that has achieved creative collaboration.

When assessing candidates’ collaboration and team-building skills, consider the following factors:

• Teamwork skills: Can the candidate work effectively with others and contribute to a harmonious team environment?
• Communication skills: Can the candidate communicate their ideas and instructions clearly to ensure effective collaboration?
• Leadership skills: Can the candidate motivate and inspire others to work together toward a common goal?

6. Ask them about their past projects and people management skills

One key aspect of being a good people manager is the ability to motivate team members. This involves understanding their individual needs and finding ways to inspire and drive their performance. Effective communication is also crucial, as leaders must clearly convey goals and expectations, provide feedback, and actively listen to their team’s concerns and ideas.

Accountability, the practice of taking responsibility, is another fundamental quality of a strong people manager. Leaders should lead by example, demonstrating integrity and accountability in their actions.

A notable example of a leader exemplifying exceptional people management skills is Jason Fried, Basecamp co-founder and CEO of 37signal. Through his approach to leadership, he showcases effective communication, responsibility, and the ability to motivate and inspire his team.

7. Dig into their mentorship experience and style

Leaders who adopt the coaching and development style focus on nurturing and guiding their team members to reach their full potential. They provide support, feedback, and resources to help individuals develop their skills and grow professionally.

Leaders who invest in their team’s growth and development create a positive, empowering work environment that fosters continuous improvement. Great leaders start developing leadership skills early in younger members of staff.

Anthony Jay Robbins, or Tony Robbins, has created a successful career by coaching people to become their best. The best way to assess their coaching and development abilities is to test their emotional intelligence and soft skills and have one-on-one interviews.

8. How well do they persuade and influence?

A successful leader possesses the ability to effectively persuade others and influence them toward a desired outcome. They are skilled at building consensus and rallying individuals around a shared vision or goal.

A good example of this is Ray Kroc, who turned McDonald’s into the most successful fast-food franchise in the world. Kroc was impressed by the original owners of McDonald’s, brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald, and how they had vastly improved other restaurants’ efficiency. He convinced the two to allow him to franchise the concept, consequently building it into a multi-billion dollar company.

To assess a candidate’s persuasion and influence capabilities, examine their:

• Communication skills: Can the candidate articulate their ideas clearly and convincingly to diverse audiences?
• Negotiation skills: Can the candidate find common ground, resolve conflicts, and reach mutually beneficial agreements?
• Ability to build relationships: Can the candidate establish rapport and trust with others, facilitating their influence over decision-making processes?

9. Assess their adaptability and flexibility

In today’s dynamic and ever-changing business landscape, leaders must be adaptable and flexible to navigate uncertainty and drive success. They need to embrace new ideas, adjust to shifting circumstances, and proactively seek growth opportunities.

Steve Jobs was renowned for his adaptability as a business leader. He navigated changing market conditions, introduced transformative products and strategies, and made bold decisions that revitalized Apple and established the company as a leader in innovation.

During interviews, ask candidates about situations where they had to adapt to change or navigate unforeseen challenges. Inquire about how they have demonstrated flexibility in their previous roles and how they stay up to date with industry trends.

Leaders who are adaptable and flexible are better equipped to guide their teams through uncertainty and drive innovation within their organizations.

10. What degree of toughness and resilience is required for the role?

Leaders who possess toughness and resilience are composed under pressure, maintain a positive attitude, and motivate their team to overcome obstacles. These leaders are adept at bouncing back from adversity, learning from failures, and using setbacks as opportunities for growth.

Nelson Mandela was the first black president of South Africa. He spent 27 years in prison for his political activism but never gave up hope for a better future for his country. After his release from prison, Mandela led the negotiations that ended apartheid and brought about democracy in South Africa.

By embodying toughness and resilience, leaders inspire confidence and foster a culture of perseverance within their teams. They lead by example, demonstrating that setbacks are temporary and can be overcome through determination, adaptability, and a growth mindset.

Toughness and resilience can be delved into by asking the candidate about their past experiences.

How to develop leadership skills

We’ve all heard the phrase “born leaders,” but the truth is that most people are born with the potential to lead. Those who succeed have had the opportunity to develop their leadership skills and competencies. Human Resource teams can provide opportunities for leadership growth by doing the following.

Skills tests

Give leaders access to skills assessments so they can obtain benchmark metrics in where they excel versus where they need to develop. These are a great way to identify gaps in leadership skills and build personalized development plans.

Leadership development programs

Leadership certification programs and degree programs such as MBAs provide structured, evidence-based learning. The training can be broad or delivered in specialized workshops, such as negotiation techniques or conflict resolution.

Programs are typically instructor-led and take place in classrooms or virtual spaces. Wondering how effective these formal growth methods are? LinkedIn reports that 70% of “mature development companies” offer this type of program, making it the most popular career progression strategy.

On-the-job experience

Succession candidates can gain a wealth of experience by shadowing current leaders in their roles. They might even sample a variety of leadership positions throughout the company, allowing them to pick up skills and experience before moving into a C-suite role.

Mentorship

There are countless examples of successful leaders who have been first been mentored by someone notable. For example, Mark Zuckerberg was mentored by Steve Jobs, Yves Saint Laurent was mentored by Christian Dior, and Barack Obama was mentored by Michelle Robinson (who would become his wife!).

Mentorship looks different in every partnership, but a commonality is the mentor passing on their experiences, guidance, and insights to the mentee.

Peer learning

Leadership roundtables or mastermind sessions provide a setting for sharing information and brainstorming challenges. This is an excellent professional development strategy where leaders learn from others’ diverse perspectives and discover the latest industry trends.

Self-directed learning

Reading books or listening to podcasts about leadership allows learners to focus on the areas where they need the most improvement. It’s also convenient and accessible — leaders might listen to their favorite podcast in the car or read a leadership book during their lunch break without detracting from their regular work.

Screen for key leadership competencies in hiring with skills testing

Your future leader needs the right skill set to match their position, which is where skill tests come in. With Toggl Hire’s test library, you can pick from hundreds of pre-made assessments from experts and add your own questions.

In addition to skills testing, you can ask candidates to provide a video intro. This is a short video where the candidate introduces themselves and discusses their leadership skills and experience. Video intros can be a great way to get to know a candidate and assess their communication skills.

Find and hire highly capable leaders with Toggl Hire!

The success of your company depends on its people, but how do you attract the very best talent? It starts with understanding the powerhouse behind your hiring strategy — your recruiter.

Should you opt for the inside expertise of an in-house recruiter or tap into the expansive networks of an external recruitment agency? Each brings its own unique edge to the table. The right type of recruiter for your team is one who can come in and improve your process, attract high-caliber candidates, and position your business as a top contender for talent.

By understanding the strengths each recruiter brings to the table, you gain the tools to refine your strategy and elevate your hiring outcomes. This guide will unravel the nuances of different recruiter types to help you supercharge your talent acquisition efforts.

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• You can take two main paths when hiring recruiters: external or internal recruiters.
• In-house recruiters have a better understanding of your company culture, recruitment process, values, and goals, and you can manage them more easily. However, they have a limited network and increased workload, so they might be the wrong choice for recruiting for specialist roles.
• External recruiters can access a wider talent pool and often come with specialized knowledge. However, they don’t have as much information about your company, and they are usually pretty expensive.
• There are eight main recruiter types: executive search firms, headhunters, staffing agency recruiters, contingency recruiters, technical recruiters, freelance recruiters, retained recruiters, and specialized recruiters.

In-house recruiters vs. external recruiters: Key differences

Before we look into the diverse types of recruiters, let’s first understand the fundamental distinction between in-house and external recruiters.

An in-house recruiter, also known as a corporate recruiter, is a full-time, salaried member of your team, typically nestled within your HR department. They’re the home team, deeply embedded in your company’s culture and operations.

An external recruiter, on the other hand, is a hired gun. They could be a recruitment agency or a freelance professional you engage on a case-by-case basis. They are typically compensated upon the successful placement of a candidate.

In-house recruiters

As part of your internal HR team, corporate recruiters intimately understand your company’s culture, management style, and operational nuances. They’re in the trenches with you, making them well-positioned to identify candidates who will fit and enhance your company culture.

Corporate recruiters work hand-in-hand with hiring managers, identifying departmental needs and sourcing the best talent to meet those needs.

However, their reach may be limited to your company’s existing network of contacts and candidates, which can sometimes make finding the perfect fit feel like running on a treadmill. Moreover, internal recruiters often juggle multiple responsibilities, from recruitment to employee engagement and HR administration.

This can stretch them thin, potentially impacting the effectiveness of your recruitment efforts. And while they’re generally well-versed in HR practices, they may lack the specialized knowledge required to fill specific roles, such as a product manager or machine learning engineer.

External recruiters (e.g., recruitment agency)

External recruiters, like a well-connected staffing agency, have access to a vast pool of candidates. Their experience spans multiple clients and industries, giving them a broad perspective on recruitment strategies and a deep reservoir of talent to tap into. They will likely have specialized knowledge for roles outside your usual hiring needs.

However, hiring an external recruiter can be costly if you seek top-notch, swift results. While they’re adept at finding qualified candidates, they may not fully grasp your company culture as intimately as an in-house recruiter would. This could lead to a mismatch between the candidate’s values and your company’s culture.

Additionally, external recruiters primarily focus on filling vacancies and earning their commission. This could sometimes result in a less thorough understanding of the role and the candidate’s fit. Also, their services typically don’t extend to providing interviewing assistance or giving you complete control over the hiring process.

Here’s a quick summary of key differences between internal recruiters and agency recruiters

In-house Recruiter	External Recruiter
Participate in full-cycle recruitment from sourcing to onboarding	Typically heavily focused on candidate sourcing and initial screening
Care about the candidate experience and employer branding	Have a more aggressive, go-getter attitude, focused on sourcing the right skills match
Administrative-driven mindset, like to follow and improve procedures	Possess a combination of marketing and sales skills, able to ‘sell’ the role to passive candidates
Work closely with the hiring manager to find the perfect candidate	Typically work alongside in-house recruiters to fill the vacancies as quickly as possible
Employed full-time and aligned with the company’s talent strategy	Juggle multiple clients and types of positions
Hire with the focus to retain	Prioritize speed and efficiency over ‘perfect fit’
Hire permanent staff	Often hire short-term staff for specific projects
Typically focused on improving vs innovating	On top of the latest trends, candidate sources and market shifts

When to hire a recruiter in-house vs. external talent acquisition specialists

Now that you know the main differences between the two types of recruiters, let’s find out which one you should hire and when.

When to hire in-house recruiters

It’s a lot more cost-effective to have an internal recruiter when you need to hire for many roles consistently. Also, when you want complete control and ownership of your hiring process, from writing job descriptions to negotiating the final offer.

Last but not least, in addition to sourcing candidates, full-time corporate recruiters handle more strategic projects, such as developing the employer brand or building talent pools of qualified candidates.

When hiring internal recruiters, equip them with the right tools for the job. Your internal HR team will need more than an ATS to find candidates that elevate your organization to the next level, tackle skills gaps, and build high-performing teams.

Part of having a skills-first strategy is going beyond just hiring to ensure you’re looking at the larger picture. First, you need to understand the skills that your business needs. Then understand what skills your employees have, or that they can develop, and what skills you need to hire for so that you build your talent strategies accordingly.

Jennifer Shappley, VP, Global Talent Acquisition at LinkedIn

When to hire external recruiters

When you want to fill positions very quickly or when your hiring needs are inconsistent, for instance, when you only need to hire someone a few times per year. Also, when looking for candidates with very specialized knowledge that an in-house team may not have.

8 Types of recruiters your business may need in 2025

Depending on your situation and the type of role you want to fill, you may need executive recruiters, recruitment agencies, a retained agency recruiter, or something entirely different.

Here are the eight main types of recruiters you can hire for your team.

Executive search firms

An executive search firm specializes in hiring senior executive roles in companies such as president, vice-president, CEO, or any other C-suite role.

When is it a good idea to employ an executive search firm?

Executive search firms are particularly valuable when an organization seeks to fill a senior role that requires a unique blend of skills, experience, and leadership qualities.

They are also beneficial when a company needs to conduct a confidential search without alerting internal staff or the public. The specialized knowledge and extensive networks of potential candidates these firms possess make them well-equipped to identify and attract top executive talent, even those not actively seeking new opportunities.

Common characteristics of executive search recruiters

• Deep industry knowledge: Executive search recruiters possess a profound understanding of the industries they serve, which allows them to identify the specific skills and experiences required for high-level roles.
• Extensive networks: They have wide-ranging networks of potential candidates, including those who may not actively seek new opportunities but could be the perfect fit for a specific role.
• Discretion and confidentiality: Executive search recruiters are committed to maintaining a high level of discretion and confidentiality, which is particularly important when conducting a search for a senior role or a confidential replacement.
• Long-term relationship building: They excel at building and maintaining long-term relationships with the companies they serve and the candidates they place. This allows them to understand the strategic needs of an organization and match them with candidates who can drive growth and success.

Typical work arrangement

Executive search firms typically operate on a retained basis, meaning they are paid a retainer fee upfront to conduct the talent search. This arrangement underscores the consultative and dedicated nature of their service.

Unlike contingency recruiters, who are paid only upon the successful placement of a candidate, retained firms are compensated for the process, time, and expertise they invest in the search, regardless of the outcome. This makes the due diligence process of choosing the right executive recruiters that much more important!

How much do they cost?

The cost of engaging an executive search firm is typically a percentage of the successful candidate’s first-year total compensation, including base salary, bonuses, and other financial benefits.

This fee usually ranges from 20% to 35%, with the percentage potentially increasing for more senior or complex roles.

Headhunters

A headhunter in the corporate world is akin to a skilled bounty hunter. This is a recruitment professional you engage, typically as a contractor, to hunt down the perfect candidate for a specific role, doing so with speed, precision, and a keen eye for talent.

When is it a good idea to employ headhunters?

Consider engaging a headhunter when your recruitment efforts feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.

If you’re struggling to find highly qualified candidates or need someone with a deep pool of specialized, highly motivated talent – say, a headhunter focusing on technical recruitment — they can be your secret weapon.

Headhunters also excel at unearthing passive candidates, those high-performers who aren’t actively job hunting but could be persuaded by the right opportunity.

Common characteristics of headhunters

• Master communicators: Headhunters are gifted communicators, able to sell the opportunity to candidates and represent your company in the best light.
• Industry insiders: They possess deep industry knowledge, understanding the nuances of their roles and the landscape of potential talent.
• Bold poachers: Unafraid to venture into the lion’s den, headhunters will contact competitor companies to poach top performers.
• Network navigators: They maintain an extensive network of candidates, keeping in touch and knowing who might be ripe for a new opportunity.
• Prepared professionals: Headhunters do their homework. They understand the role and the candidate and enter each conversation fully prepared.

Typical work arrangements

Headhunters are typically engaged as contractors and paid upon the successful placement of a candidate. They are your “on-call” talent scouts, ready to act when an urgent vacancy arises.

How much do they cost?

The cost of a headhunter’s services usually falls between 20% and 30% of the annual salary for the role they’re filling.

Staffing agency recruiters

Think of a staffing agency as your company’s external HR SWAT team. These agencies serve as a bridge between job seekers and employers, ready to deploy reinforcements when you need to fill positions swiftly.

When is it a good idea to employ staffing agency recruiters?

Consider engaging a staffing agency when hiring for entry to mid-level positions or when you need part-time or temporary employees. They’re also your go-to resource when you need to scale up quickly for a project or seasonal demand.

Common characteristics of staffing agencies and agency recruiters

• Talent reservoir: Staffing agencies maintain a dynamic, ever-expanding pool of candidates actively seeking new opportunities.
• Skills sleuths: Staffing agency recruiters frequently use skills tests to quickly match the right person with the right job, ensuring a good fit based on abilities.
• Speedy strategists: Agency recruiters prioritize filling open positions quickly, often focusing on finding a good enough fit who can hit the ground running.

Typical work arrangements

They work on either a flat fee, retainer, or one-off basis, helping to fill urgent openings.

How much do they cost?

The cost of a staffing agency’s services typically ranges from 25% to 100% of the hired employee’s annual salary. This wide range in staffing company’s costs reflects the variability in services offered, from temporary placements to permanent hires.

Contingency recruiters

These recruiters are contingent on whether they successfully find a new hire for your team. In other words, they only see a payday when they make a successful hire.

When is it a good idea to employ contingency recruiters?

Consider the contingency recruitment model when you prefer a “pay for performance” approach. It’s an attractive option when you’re budget-conscious and prefer to pay for tangible results from the recruitment process rather than committing to ongoing retainer fees for an untested recruitment agency.

Common characteristics of contingency recruiters

• Talent trappers: Contingency recruiters maintain a broad network of candidates, casting a wide net to catch the right talent for your role.
• Efficiency experts: With their compensation on the line, contingency recruiters operate with high efficiency. They’re motivated to fill your vacancy swiftly and effectively.

Typical work arrangements

This type of recruiter operates on a “no win, no fee” basis. They only get paid when they successfully fill a position, making them a risk-free option for your recruitment needs.

How much do they cost?

The cost typically ranges from 10% to 30% of the hired candidate’s first-year salary. This fee structure aligns the recruiter’s interests with the client company, ensuring they’re motivated to find the right candidate for the role as fast as possible.

Technical recruiters

Technical recruiters are the seasoned guides you need when venturing into the complex terrain of tech talent acquisition. They specialize in hiring for technical roles, such as software development, data science, or hardware engineering, and possess a depth of knowledge that sets them apart from generalist recruiters.

When is it a good idea to employ technical recruiters?

Consider bringing a technical recruiter on board when your in-house hiring managers are grappling with the challenge of filling specialized technical roles. They’re also your go-to resource when you don’t have an in-house recruitment team but need to fill a technical role swiftly and accurately.

Common characteristics of technical recruiters

• Tech talent whisperers: Technical recruiters have specialist knowledge in recruiting within technical areas, typically within the IT sector.
• Hands-on tech experience: Many technical recruiters have hands-on experience in some area of tech, such as software development. This means they speak the language and understand the nuances of the roles they’re filling.

Typical work arrangements

Technical recruiters can operate on a retainer basis, providing ongoing recruitment services for a set fee. Alternatively, they can work on a one-off basis, getting paid a percentage for filling a specific role.

How much do they cost?

Technical recruiters typically charge 15% to 25% of the hired candidate’s first-year salary for one-off engagements.

Freelance recruiters

Freelance recruiters are the agile, adaptable generalists of the recruitment world. Unlike recruiters tied to an agency or company, they operate as independent contractors, offering their expertise on a temporary basis to companies in need.

When is it a good idea to employ freelance recruiters

Consider hiring a freelance recruiter when you have an existing HR team but want to amplify your recruitment results. A freelance recruiter can serve as a consultant, identifying areas for improvement and strategizing ways to fill positions more efficiently and effectively.

Common characteristics of freelance recruiters

• Industry veterans: Freelance recruiters often have extensive experience in staffing agencies, recruitment firms, or HR teams across various industries.
• Communication maestros: They possess superb communication skills, essential for liaising between candidates and companies.
• Talent networkers: They maintain a network of candidates they’ve engaged with in the past, ready to tap into when the right role arises.
• Multitask masters: As independent operators, freelance recruiters are adept at wearing many hats, handling all aspects of the recruitment process.

Typical work arrangements

Freelance recruiters are typically engaged as consultants, either on a one-off basis or on a retainer. They can augment an existing HR team or manage the entire recruitment process for businesses without an in-house HR function.

How much do they cost?

Typically, anywhere between 15% and 25% of the annual salary for the roles they are trying to fill.

Retained recruiters

Retained recruiters can act as your company’s external HR department. They operate on a retainer basis, receiving a monthly fixed fee for their comprehensive recruitment services.

When is it a good idea to employ retained recruiters?

Consider partnering with a retained recruiter when your company has consistent hiring needs and frequently open positions but not enough to justify a full-time, in-house recruitment team.

Common characteristics of retained recruiters

• Recruitment generalists: Retained recruiters often have broad experience in the recruitment field, enabling them to handle various roles and industries.
• HR taskmasters: They can cover a wide array of HR tasks for a client company, from crafting compelling job descriptions to orchestrating the interview process.
• Team players: Retained recruiters often operate in teams, providing you with a dedicated hiring manager along with other team members to support your recruitment needs.

Typical work arrangements

Retained recruiters are engaged for ongoing recruitment tasks, keeping them consistently involved in your hiring process. Their responsibilities span the full recruitment cycle, from identifying new openings to scheduling interviews and extending job offers.

How much do they cost?

The client company pays them 15 to 35% of the role they are trying to fill. If you’re looking to fill multiple roles simultaneously, it’s worth doing the math first – hiring an in-house corporate recruiter may be more cost-effective in the long run.

Specialized recruiter

A specialized recruiter is an expert in their chosen field. Whether freelance or retained, these recruiters concentrate their efforts on a specific area, be it an industry (like healthcare), a role or function (like data science), or a geographical region. Their focused approach allows them to navigate the complexities of their niche with precision, delivering highly qualified candidates that meet the unique needs of their clients.

When is it a good idea to employ specialized recruiters?

Consider calling in a specialized recruiter when faced with a hiring challenge that’s left other recruiters scratching their heads. They’re your go-to resource when you need to fill a niche role in a specific market, and generalist recruitment agencies just aren’t cutting it.

Common characteristics of specialized recruiters

• Niche knowledge: Specialized recruiters possess a deep, nuanced understanding of their focus areas, whether that’s a certain industry, role, or geographical region.
• Specialist networks: They maintain contact with a network of specialists in their focus area, ready to tap into when the right role arises.
• Proven track record: Specialized recruiters have a history of successful placements within their area of expertise, demonstrating their ability to navigate the niche talent landscape.

Typical work arrangements

Specialized recruiters typically work on a one-off basis with a client company, focusing their efforts on filling a specific role that requires their unique expertise.

How much do they cost?

Similar to an executive recruiter, anywhere from 15 to 35% of the annual salary for the role they are hiring for in a client company.

Wrapping up

With so many types of recruiters to choose from, getting help with your recruitment process should be easy. While it may seem like having an internal recruiter is the best way for companies to fill vacant positions, the reality is that the choice is much broader than that.

And if your recruiters and hiring managers need help with finding those ideal candidates, a skills test is the best way to kick off your sourcing process. Sign up for Toggl Hire today and quickly go from thousands of candidates to a handful of the very best talent.

If you’re like most of us, you’re likely tired of hearing about how ChatGPT and generative AI are going to take all our jobs (spoiler alert: they’re not…at least not anytime soon), but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all be learning how to make technology work for us.

For employees to survive and thrive in a fast-paced, change-fuelled future, they need meta-skills: the ability to learn, understand, and adapt (fast). 73% of employees globally report they don’t currently feel equipped to learn the digital skills businesses need now, and that’s a scary reality.

So, let’s explore what meta-skills encompass and which ones result in productive, creative people ready for whatever tomorrow brings (hopefully more human empathy and fewer robot overlords, but hey, we’re open to just a sunny day and some good vibes).

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• Organizations must prioritize meta-skills for current and future employees to stay ahead of changes and ensure synergy between human and technological resources.
  
• Meta skills are higher-order skills that boost a person’s ability to learn and apply new knowledge quickly.
  
• A few examples of meta-skills include capabilities like learning a new language, plug-and-play skill transfer between industries, and the ability to solve complex problems.
  
• Studies have shown that the three main meta-skills are self-awareness, creativity, and resilience, which have the biggest impact in the modern workplace.
  
• Additional meta-skills all candidates and employees should strive to build and improve include learning and applying info quickly, having high emotional intelligence, and problem-solving.
  
• You can assess meta-skills to understand what level a candidate is at with Toggl Hire’s skills assessment platform. Create a customized test around specific skills in just a few clicks.

The changing world of work

Even though the world of work is changing fast, we know two things for sure.

☝️ The first is that AI and automation are here to stay. 55% of Americans regularly interact with AI, and the global AI market is expected to grow by 19% through 2032. The simple reality is that, as a society, we’ve grown to rely on technology to make our lives easier or to solve problems.

✌️ Second, these technological advances are permanently changing the role of humans in the workplace. Technology is challenging the standard notion of what makes a great employee. And while technology is the lever that enables agile change, organizations need employees with the right soft skills to work those levers.

A company’s capacity to learn determines its capacity to adapt and, ultimately, its chances of surviving far into the future. If your company isn’t learning, it isn’t growing — and it’s probably on a losing path.

Boston Consulting Group | Source

Looking at the current upward trend in upskilling and lifelong learning, what skills should organizations prioritize that will have the biggest impact on success? To stay one step ahead of the fourth industrial revolution, forward-thinking businesses are looking for candidates with meta skills.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Alvin Toffler, Futurist | Source

What is a meta-skill? Definition and examples

A meta-skill is the ability to learn and apply new knowledge quickly. Also known as meta ability, it’s an overarching range of capabilities people need to learn new skills faster or drive functional expertise in other skills.

If you’re wondering why soft skills, like these meta-skills, are so crucial all of a sudden for the workforce, the World Economic Forum spells it out pretty clearly:

By the end of 2025, 85 million jobs may be displaced by machines, according to the Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2020, but 97 million new roles may emerge that are more adapted to the new division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms.

World Economic Forum

Meta skills are core skills that we adopt through deep learning. For example, they tend to be more lasting than learning to use a new HR software tool and are in short supply for many organizations.

According to McKinsey, “Research indicates that 50% of leaders are facing business problems due to an unforeseen skills gap; the majority believe that upskilling and reskilling are the crux of the solution.”

A few common examples of meta-skills

Meta skills will only grow in importance, but the good news is that you should have already encountered a few or mastered them yourself. Like these:

• Ability to transfer core skills between different industries
• Ability to learn a new language
• Core coding knowledge
• Complex problem solving
• Ability to identify business pain points

While those are all good examples of meta-skills, there are three specific ones that would future-proof any applicant or employee.

What are the three meta-skills that every employee should develop?

Soft skills, like effective communication and interpersonal skills, and hard skills, like data analytics, all contribute to the makeup and success of a good employee in our digital age.

Yet, these three meta-skills are ones that every employee should and can develop for a lasting career advantage: self-awareness, creativity, and resilience.

1. Self-awareness

Self-awareness is about more than knowing yourself. It’s a quality or trait that includes knowing your strengths and weaknesses, triggers, how you typically respond to particular situations, awareness of your effect on others, empathy, and understanding other peoples’ realities.

We’ve found that even though most people believe they are self-aware, self-awareness is a truly rare quality: We estimate that only 10%–15% of the people we studied actually fit the criteria.

Dr. Tasha Eurich, organizational psychologist | Source

2. Creativity

Creativity isn’t typically learned in school, and children are often branded as “naturally” more creative than others. Yet, as Albert Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”

We need to be able to change gears or think creatively to solve new problems more quickly at work or in our personal lives. This means letting go of binary thinking (the idea that there are only two sides to every situation) and embracing our imagination.

And since AI is now encroaching on creative job functions, like digital design and copywriting, it presents us with another opportunity to use meta-skills.

In 2025, and throughout the next decade, we’ll need to find ways to work creatively with generative AI to enhance our work, like using it to get new content ideas or to create the first draft of a computer program.

3. Resilience

Resilience is all about being able to challenge yourself, being willing to fail, and immediately adapting and trying a new approach. Your adaptability hinges on your willingness to fail.

Resilience is the ability to not only recover quickly from a crisis but to bounce back better—and even thrive.

McKinsey | Source

Those able to adapt quickly and not give up when things get tough will have what it takes to ride the wave of any new or unexpected change we’ll experience in 2025 and beyond. They’ll be the ones who innovate, succeed, and create competitive advantages for organizations.

The Meta Skills Progression Framework by SDS

Meta Skills Progression Framework was invented by Skills Development Scotland as a way to empower learners to thrive in any context. They look at meta skills from the perspective of teaching and ensuring that students can recognize, understand and explore their meta skills development.

The framework organizes meta-skills into three core categories:

1. Self-management: The ability to regulate one’s behavior and emotions, fostering focus, integrity, adaptability, and initiative.
2. Social intelligence: The capacity to interact effectively with others through communication, empathy, collaboration, and leadership.
3. Innovation: Creative and critical thinking that drives curiosity, sense-making, and problem-solving.

The framework lays out how meta-skills develop across different educational stages, from early years to the senior phase. Each skill is illustrated through examples:

• Early level: Learners demonstrate curiosity by asking questions and exploring new tasks.
• First level: Skills grow as learners reflect, collaborate, and begin problem-solving.
• Second level: Critical thinking and initiative deepen, with learners adapting to feedback and complex tasks.
• Third/fourth level: Focus shifts to independent problem-solving, leadership, and self-regulation.
• Senior phase: Learners show sophisticated skills such as confidently evaluating situations, leading others, and independently navigating challenges.

How to use this framework

The Meta Skills Progression Framework is not prescriptive but offers guidance to educators seeking to integrate meta-skills development into their teaching. Key points include:

• It is non-mandatory: Educators can adapt it to fit their unique classroom contexts.
• The framework focuses on practitioner support: It provides insights for teaching but is not designed as a direct tool for learners.
• Examples serve as a starting point: Educators are encouraged to contextualize these examples based on their students’ experiences.

The top 6 meta-skills to look for in candidates

Hiring candidates with meta-skills means creating a stable, adaptable, and quick-acting workforce. Is that the kind of workforce you’re looking to build in 2025? We thought so, so let’s explore the six core attributes they’ll bring to the party.

1. Learning capacity

The overarching and possibly most essential meta-skill, the one skill to rule them all, is a person’s ability to learn. If a person can’t learn and apply new skills quickly, they’ll be severely disadvantaged in an automated world.

Moreover, constant learning has become part of how we operate in modern business.

Tips to improve your learning ability:

• Figure out which learning style you prefer—visual, tactile, or audio, and find resources that support that style, such as YouTube videos for visual learners.
  
• Ensure you understand all the core terms of a new subject or industry you plan to enter. You could even create a glossary for yourself.
  
• Use visual aids, such as flashcards or drawing sketches and mind-maps of the concepts you learn about.
  
• Take notes. Good old-fashioned notes can help you out of a bind if you’re learning a new skill or tool and need to quickly refer back to a particular step in a process, for instance.
  
• Get some exercise. It’s good for the mind and body!

2. Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is the ability to manage your feelings and responses effectively and be aware of how others are feeling.

People with high emotional intelligence use empathy, self-awareness, and social awareness to manage how different people in a group interact, resolve conflicts quickly, and ultimately create a positive, productive work environment.

This is a valued and important skill used by leaders as it can help to build confidence and trust in teams.

A leader needs to have all of those skills, including de-escalating and empathizing with people, especially in these times. Emotional intelligence is one of the key things of working with people and helping people grow.

Forbes | Source

3. Perspective

Perspective is about being able to see and understand different points of view. In other words, it means putting yourself in the shoes of your boss, colleague, client, or competitor and holistically understanding their priorities and why.

Studies show that perspective-taking can:

• Help you be more present rather than focusing on why your way is the best
• Support a better integration of knowledge and experience
• Help teams work more synergistically
• Help us learn better from each other

4. Storytelling

Storytelling is a way of communicating ideas through stories. Since research reveals that approximately 65% of us are visual learners, using this medium for persuasive business communication with clients makes sense.

Organizations use storytelling to simplify complex problems or concepts and lead their audience to a particular conclusion, such as why the business’ product best solves their pain points.

Storytelling is used across various departments and industries:

• Marketing communication, such as blogs or infographics
• Data analytics to show insights visually through charts and graphs to support data-driven decisions
• Selling your business ideas to investors
• Creating persuasive presentations
• Creating explainer videos that demonstrate your product’s value

Research indicates that stories can be far more effective at selling a job than impressive facts and figures. With only 5% of the latter being remembered after just 10 minutes, against the 65% of stories.

DeepStash | Source

5. Creative problem-solving

The ability to solve complex problems quickly means being able to spot the actual problem. It also means focusing, being objective, and looking at potential problems from a distance.

When this goes together with a lot of experience across the business, leaders can:

• Come up with practical solutions quickly
• Ensure teams keep producing quality work in good time
• Override complacency and help teams work smarter
• Help the business quickly adapt to change

Design thinking is a great approach to solving problems efficiently. It helps teams move from problem to solution in an iterative way that ensures practical solutions.

6. Leadership

A natural career path often leads employees from being juniors to taking on more responsibility and eventually managing other team members.

This is an important meta-skill to develop, as it has a positive impact not only on the individual but also creates growth for teams and the organization.

Effective leadership can inspire confidence and create a supportive environment that nurtures other employees’ meta-skills, boosting self-esteem, self-confidence, and overall abilities within teams.

Evaluate your candidates’ meta-skills (and any other skills) with skills assessments

Recruiters and hiring teams may need to reconsider traditional role-based hiring. Creating skills-based opportunities might be a more suitable approach for today’s globally connected workforce (and keep us a step ahead of the robot takeover 😉).

If you’re looking for a way to hire future-ready candidates or modernize your talent mobility strategy, stop looking. Toggl Hire is the only full-cycle recruiting software that allows you to create skills tests based on specific skills that match your requirements.

Faster and more objective hires are a click away! Browse our assessment library to future-proof your business and hire smarter.

Clockify is an easy-to-use time tracking app popular with freelancers and businesses with simple time tracking needs. Its bare-bones UI and basic reporting make it a top choice for those who don’t demand much from a time tracker.

However, these same qualities make Clockify a poor choice for larger businesses that need to gain insights from their tracked time and increase productivity. This is just one of the many reasons why businesses look for Clockify alternatives.

For example, some companies may be put off by its employee surveillance features. Simply reading a few online discussions will reveal that employees aren’t keen on installing surveillance software on their equipment.

So, if you’re thinking about Clockify alternatives, you’re in the right place. We’ve been in the time tracking space since 2006, and know what freelancers, small businesses, large businesses, and enterprises are looking for — because we serve all of them.

That’s why we made this list to help you find the best alternative. All apps in this article offer free plans and trials so you can test them thoroughly before deciding. We’ve also tested each by ourselves and presented our findings below for your convenience. 

Quick overview of the best free Clockify alternatives

What is Clockify, and why should you consider an alternative?

Nenad Milanovic and Lazar Vujanic founded Clockify in 2017 when they realized the industry needed a simple and affordable time tracking app and that more people should have access to useful yet free apps.

Clockify is a timekeeping, reporting, and project management platform for straightforward projects. Its manual time tracking features are designed for factory workers and officegoers. The Reports feature helps track billable hours, automatically calculate wages, and auto-generate client invoices.

Some may find it controversial because it’s developed for companies that expect industrial efficiency from their workforce. That’s why they offer surveillance features such as GPS Tracking, Automated Screenshots, and Force Timers that can’t be stopped or manually edited.

This fosters employee distrust, negatively impacts company cultures, and (ironically) tends to decrease productivity.

Companies also look for Clockify alternatives because it lacks custom reporting, advanced analytics, and time tracking tools for dynamic office environments like agencies, software development, marketing, and other fully remote or hybrid teams.

What to look for in a Clockify alternative (and how we curated our list)

If you’re looking for an alternative to Clockify, you probably need a tool with the same functionality without the drawbacks. The following is the framework we used when picking the tools for the list.

Our testing methodology

We started by finding tools on review sites like G2 and Capterra and looked for the ones listed as the best match feature-wise. We then went through their website and documentation to confirm which tools best match Clockify’s features, which allowed us to shorten the list.

Next, it was time to test the apps.

We tested ten platforms side-by-side with Clockify to see which ones performed better. That’s how we narrowed our list down to 7 platforms that were good alternatives to Clockify and didn’t completely overlap with each other feature-wise.

Rating categories

Online reviews and discussions around Clockify and its alternatives commonly revolve around four categories:

• Ease of use: Managers often mention their teams don’t want to adopt a platform that isn’t intuitive for employees (because time tracking becomes a chore).
• Analytics: Many Clockify users (and time tracking software users in general) discussed the lack of good analytics features to gather insights into improving their team’s workload and productivity.
• Employee Privacy: One of the main talking points around Clockify and similar software is how much employees hate being monitored — people often talk about leaving companies that try to impose surveillance in their workflow.
• Price: We often find people looking for free options, so all the apps on our list offer free plans. However, we also compare pricing plans and their affordability.

We rated each platform’s features in all four categories to give you a quick overview of what you can expect from them.

We split the list into two categories

We noticed the tools on our list all offer similar features, but they fall into two broad categories with different time tracking philosophies:

• Trust-based tools: These focus on employee privacy and autonomy and are designed to track time and productivity without monitoring. They try to capture productivity data without intruding on the natural workflow to help everyone in the organization improve their work-life balance and productivity.
• Tools with employee surveillance features: These include monitoring features like screenshots, activity monitoring through clicks and keyboard strokes, URL tracking, location tracking, and such. They try to force employee productivity and fundamentally function around distrust.

❗ DISCLAIMER:

Now, let’s go through an in-depth review of each Clockify alternative.

1. Toggl Track: Best overall Clockify alternative to maximize team productivity and build trust

Alari Aho and Krister Haav created Toggl in 2006 because they had difficulty accurately tracking their working hours to bill their clients. The time tracking software was renamed Toggl Track after launching Toggl Plan and Toggl Hire.

Toggl Track’s strength is intuitive time tracking with the Timeline feature, allowing quick adoption within any organization.

However, its main distinction is the most advanced Reports, Analytics, and Insights you can get. These allow you to clearly reveal your whole organization’s work habits without monitoring employees. And, when combined with cross-platform support, integrations, extensions, and the Toggl API, Toggl Track guarantees accurate time tracking is not a chore but a seamless part of your workplace culture.

Analytics, Insights, & Reporting: Toggl Track provides insights that impact your business growth better than Clockify

Similar to Clockify, Toggl Track also offers Reports.

The difference is that Toggl Track has deeper Insights to spot inefficiencies and boost productivity. Their Analytics features allow you to build fully customized reports and dashboards (unique to Toggl Track).

The Insights tool allows you to use the tracked time to get actionable insights into ROI by tracking work hours against clients, projects, and tasks.

But don’t take our word for it. Here’s how Candybox Marketing uses Toggl Track to sustain up to 40% growth YOY:

User experience

Clockify has straightforward manual timers, while Toggl Track takes time tracking off your mind with automatic tracking, time entry duplication, and a built-in Pomodoro timer.

Toggl Track is designed to take time tracking off your mind with five ways to track time:

1. Manual time entry,
2. Time recording via the browser extension,
3. Import Google Calendar or Outlook events,
4. The timer on the web, mobile, and desktop app,
5. Local and private automatic time recording on the desktop app (lets you choose what time to submit).

It also offers an interchangeable List, Calendar View, and Reminders to start or stop timers.

All these additional features are there so Toggl Track is the one adapting to your employees’ and company’s workflow, not the other way around.

Employee privacy

Clockify has employee surveillance features, while Toggl Track doesn’t because it’s made for teams with trust-based cultures.

Toggl originated as an in-house time tracker, where micromanagement has never been a part of the work culture. It doesn’t record location, keystrokes, screen, app, URL usage, or employee webcams.

It provides insights to improve productivity, work-life balance, and profitability.

While monitoring generates a lot of data, it encourages employees to cheat the system, so the data is skewed at best and doesn’t offer any value at worst. Instead, Toggl Track’s approach relies on trust and a sense of ownership over work and tracks team performance based on output, not input.

Toggl Track pricing

Toggl Track is free for freelancers and teams of up to 5, while its paid plans are flexible with your needs.

Toggl Track’s pricing starts with a free plan, which includes everything a freelancer, solo professional, or micro-team might need. In contrast, its paid plans target businesses and larger teams where advanced analytics and insights can significantly impact profitability and productivity.

Use Toggl Track if:

• You need an intuitive time tracker that works with your employees for maximum adoption
• You need powerful analytics to help you improve team productivity
• You value privacy and a trust-based work culture

2. Harvest: Best Clockify alternative for freelancers that need invoicing

Harvest was started in 2006 when Danny Wen and Shawn Liu “made the tool they couldn’t find: a well-designed, innovative application to track time and invoice.” Thousands of freelancers and remote teams globally now use it to track and understand their time.

Harvest vs. Clockify

Harvest is a compelling Clockify alternative, especially for those prioritizing invoicing and time tracking. It offers an intuitive user experience without surveillance features, making it a good choice for managing teams and projects.

It’s particularly well-suited for small businesses juggling multiple clients and various projects and freelancers needing a robust solution for time tracking, invoicing, and billing.

While its basic reporting features might not satisfy those looking for deep business insights (where a tool like Toggl Track might be more appropriate), it excels in simplicity and user-friendliness.

It offers customizable expense reports that can filter and sort data for more detailed oversight. But its focus is on basic functionalities like:

• Logging time
• Tracking expenses per project (as shown in the image below)
• Distinguishing between billable and non-billable work hours

However, what it lacks in analytics, it makes up for with its invoicing features.

Harvest is efficient for freelancers and those working with contractors, allowing them to convert timesheets into invoices and process payments directly within the app via PayPal or Stripe.

Despite its lack of automatic time tracking, it remains user-friendly.

Harvest is available as a web, desktop, mobile app, and Chrome extension. Additionally, it seamlessly fits into various workflows with 68 integrations ranging from project management tools like Asana, Trello, and Notion to payment processors.

Harvest pricing

Harvest’s pricing starts with a free plan, which supports one user and two projects.

The Pro plan, priced at $12 per user per month, unlocks all features, including unlimited projects and access to all integrations. It is accompanied by a generous 30-day trial.

There is also a Premium plan at $17.50 per user per month. This unlocks features such as profitability reporting, timesheet approvals, activity logs, custom reports and exports, SAML-based SSO, and custom reporting.

Use Harvest if:

• You’re a freelancer looking for a paid all-in-one online time tracking, invoicing, & billing solution
• You don’t need advanced time analytics features
• You’re a lean business with multiple contractors

3. MyHours: Best Clockify alternative for teams on a tight budget

Launched in 2002, MyHours founders believe that employee time tracking is communication, that no one likes being monitored, that the future belongs to autonomous teams, that the project budgets breed creativity, and that software should be fun to use while getting the job done.

MyHours vs. Clockify

MyHours caters to freelancers and small to mid-sized teams.

While Clockify offers essential time tracking features, MyHours focuses on simplicity and efficiency in managing timesheets and invoicing. MyHours’ best features include:

• Task-based or member-based rates
• Diverse billing options, such as flat project fees
• Ability track attendance with hourly rates

These key features ensure that businesses clearly understand the time spent on projects and tasks, making it easier to manage workloads and bill clients accurately.

MyHours lacks a calendar view, which might be a deal-breaker for those who prefer a more visual scheduling tool. 

However, it compensates by strongly emphasizing timesheets (its default view) and simplicity of use. In some cases, though, we found that certain tasks in MyHours require unnecessary steps. For example, you need to update your project (1), task (2), and expense (3) information every time you start the timer. 

This approach aligns well with its target audience of professionals and teams prioritizing straightforward time tracking over complex scheduling features.

MyHours offers reporting capabilities similar to Harvest, including a cost-profit breakdown, although it doesn’t support expense tracking. This limitation makes it a more specialized tool for those who want to monitor project profitability and use third-party tools for comprehensive financial management.

It also includes invoicing capabilities, providing a seamless transition from time tracking to billing clients but with simpler features than more all-encompassing solutions.

MyHours pricing

MyHours’s pricing consists of two plans. The Free plan is meant for up to 5 users and includes unlimited projects and clients with the ability to track time on projects and tasks, set billable rates, and generate detailed reports without any cost.

Meanwhile, the Pro plan costs $8 per user per month. It includes everything from the Free plan plus priority support, generating client invoices, and adding or editing time logs on behalf of team members. It also introduces an approval workflow.

Use MyHours if:

• You don’t need advanced analytics for productivity management
• Your business has a larger team and is on a tight budget
• You’re looking for a trust-based tool

4. TimeCamp: Clockify alternative with employee monitoring and an emphasis on expense tracking

TimeCamp, founded in 2008, evolved from its CEO’s class assignment, a note-taking app. It has since advanced into a smart and intuitive time management app, with the idea of not controlling employees but allowing them to focus on their assignments instead of glancing on the clock or wasting time manually filling out timesheets.

TimeCamp vs. Clockify

TimeCamp is a compelling alternative to Clockify, especially for those drawn to Clockify’s feature set but seeking a tool with a more intuitive interface and slightly more refined analytics.

At its core, TimeCamp mirrors Clockify’s strengths:

• Expense tracking
• Calendar view for scheduling
• Screenshotting for work progress monitoring

However, TimeCamp’s interface is simpler and more intuitive than Clockify’s, with a stronger contrast that makes navigation and task management smoother. This design philosophy also extends to its analytics capabilities, offering better analysis options than Clockify, making it easier for users to assess the profitability of their projects, tasks, and client engagements.

One notable caveat of TimeCamp is that timesheet approvals (a crucial feature for many businesses) are only available on the paid plan at $8.

The free plan also doesn’t include invoicing, which may limit its appeal to freelancers who often rely on integrated invoicing features to streamline their billing processes. 

TimeCamp pricing

TimeCamp offers four paid plans:

• The Starter plan: $3.99/user/month
• The Premium plan: $6.99/user/month
• The Ultimate plan: $10.99/user/month
• The Enterprise plan: custom pricing

Use TimeCamp if:

• You want slightly more analytics options than what Clockify offers
• You want employee performance monitoring features
• Your main concern with Clockify is the UI

5. Tmetric: Clockify alternative with surveillance features focused on task management

TMetric launched in 2016 as an internal productivity tool with over 40,000 users by the end of 2017. They aspire to be an app that smooths the work process for higher profits and more cohesive teams.

TMetric vs. Clockify

TMetric is an affordable alternative to Clockify for users and teams whose priorities are collaboration and project progress management.

While it mirrors Clockify with core features like reports, time off management, client management, and invoicing, TMetric is more streamlined. An example is its lack of a calendar view, a feature Clockify users might miss because of its convenience in visualizing schedules and allocating time.

However, TMetric compensates for this with a task list view — designed to enhance project management. 

This feature allows users to assign and manage tasks collaboratively within TMetric, allowing a more organized and streamlined workflow.

Regarding monitoring features, TMetric allows screenshots and includes app activity tracking to provide managers with work pattern insights, not just remote team accountability.

From a pricing standpoint, TMetric is an affordable option for startups and small businesses looking to optimize their budget without sacrificing much functionality compared to Clockify.

However, it’s important to note the lack of kiosk support for teams that prefer physical or kiosk-based time tracking solutions.

In essence, TMetric can be considered a “Clockify clone” that leans towards collaboration and project management.

TMetric pricing

TMetric has three pricing plans:

• Free
• Professional: $5/month/user
• Business: $7/month/user

Use TMetric if:

• You’re a startup or small business and need a streamlined time tracking system
• You want better task management features than what most time tracking apps offer
• You want employee surveillance features

6. Everhour: Clockify alternative with employee surveillance and a focus on project management

Everhour started as an idea in a small IT outsourcing company based on its own time-keeping needs. The company couldn’t find a time-tracking solution that fit its needs, so it made its own. Everhour is known for its best-in-class integrations with the most popular project management tools.

Everhour vs. Clockify

Everhour is an alternative to Clockify for users who want to integrate time tracking with other popular tools for project management.

Unlike Clockify, it has a native project timeline and integrated resource planning features. It includes key Clockify features like expense tracking, time off tracking, and invoicing capabilities. It also has monitoring capabilities with screenshot capture, a feature that aligns it more closely with Clockify’s functionality.

However, unlike Clockify, Everhour takes reporting further by offering customizable report options.

While advanced features might not revolutionize the reporting landscape, the ability to tailor reports to specific needs adds a layer of flexibility that can be invaluable for teams with unique reporting requirements.

Everhour pricing

In terms of pricing, Everhour stands neck and neck with Clockify. It offers two pricing plans:

• Free: Free up to 5 users
• Team: $10/user/month (min. five users required)

Use Everhour if:

• You’re using third-party project management software and want to integrate a time tracker
• You need a native project timeline and integrated resource planning features
• You want customizable reporting options

7. DeskTime: Clockify alternative with employee surveillance for identifying time sinks

DeskTime was born in 2011 out of the need to manage Draugiem Group’s many employees. The founders soon realized they had made a tool that could be useful to many other companies, and so the development began.

DeskTime vs. Clockify

DeskTime carves out its niche with robust shift scheduling and team management features, making it particularly appealing for teams needing to manage shifts and tracking productivity.

With options for away time and an “absence calendar,” DeskTime is not just about monitoring hours but ensuring that those hours align with the planned shifts and workforce availability.

This feature makes it an excellent tool for businesses that operate on a shift basis.

Like Clockify, DeskTime tracks app usage, offering insights into which applications and websites employees use during work hours.

However, DeskTime elevates this with an automatic time tracking feature that detects app, website, or page usage without manual input, streamlining the process and providing accurate data on how work time is distributed across different tasks and tools. It also offers fixed report dashboards that cover the usual metrics expected from a time tracking solution.

The necessity to use the desktop app for all interactions with DeskTime might limit its appeal to those who prefer more flexibility in accessing their time tracking tools.

DeskTime pricing

DeskTime has four pricing plans to choose from:

• Lite: Free
• Pro: $7/user/month
• Premium: $10/user/month
• Enterprise: $20/user/month

Use DeskTime if:

• You want to track exactly how your employees are spending their time
• You don’t need flexibility and are fine with only the desktop app
• You want to plan and schedule work shifts

So, what’s the best Clockify alternative for you?

Based on our tests and research, we listed the seven best alternatives for Clockify you can choose from.

They all offer free plans that are great for freelancers, solo professionals, and even small teams. Based on what most users seek in a Clockify alternative, you should consider four things when choosing your ideal time tracking tool:

1. Ease of use
2. Analytics
3. Employee privacy
4. Price

All Clockify alternatives take one of two approaches: trust-based time tracking or forced productivity with employee monitoring features. Choose from the ones that align with your company culture.

While options like Harvest and MyHours are great if you’re a lean business looking for a simple Clockify alternative with affordable pricing, choose Toggl Track if you’re a team or enterprise with a trust-based culture looking to empower employees and managers with in-depth insights while respecting privacy (or if you’re a freelancer looking for a great free time tracker).

Ready to turn time into money? Get started with Toggl Track’s 30-day free trial.

Online timers provide motivation, accountability, documentation, balance, and vital management data. Whether you manage yourself, work with a team, or lead a group, you can get the most from your efforts by keeping track of your most precious resource: productive time.

Better yet, managers and employees can find that elusive sweet spot — the perfect balance between underwork and overwork.

By studying your time tracking data, you can:

• Identify your most productive times-of-day for different task types
• Determine which team members work best solo, in small groups, and in large groups
• Reward hard work by noticing the “unsung” heroes in your ranks.
• Find a healthy work/life balance as a freelancer/solo employee

Now, without further ado, here are our top five free work timers.

5 best online timers to track time spent on work

1. Toggl Track

Choose Toggl Track if:

• You need a full range of time-tracking options.
• You manage a team and want an easy solution for tracking billable hours.
• You want to save your time-tracking data for later reference.
• You want to analyze your overall efficiency (or that of an entire organization) over the long term.

Toggl Track stands above the competition by saving all your tracked time in your cloud-based account. With Toggl Track, you can view your charts and timesheets — anytime, anywhere.

With Toggl Track’s robust, easy-to-use reporting suite, you can quickly analyze your data. Toggl Track makes tracking your team’s billable hours, mileage, and break times more straightforward. This clear and comprehensive interface allows you to organize your data by client, team member, project, workspace, and more.

With the easy-to-use Toggl Track dashboard, you can effortlessly switch between “Me” and “Team” views. You can check out your workflow over time at a glance and compare this data to previous periods. You’ll be astounded at how easily you can analyze data on Toggl Track and save your reports for instant reference.

2. Timer Tab Multifunctionality

Pick Timer Tab if you:

• Juggle various types of tasks
• Use timers, alarms, and stopwatches regularly
• Want multifunctionality without a lot of visual noise
• Perform both fixed and open-ended tasks

This online countdown timer lets you set a timer for routine tasks and track open-ended projects with a stopwatch. With this easy click-and-type interface, you can quickly set timers and alarms — even down to the second!

3. Online-Stopwatch Simple Countdown Timer

Pick this big, colorful online stopwatch if you want only countdown functionality. With this mouse-click (no keyboard) interface, online time-tracking is just a few clicks away.

By using countdown timers, you avoid wasting mental energy on non-essential tasks. For example, while answering emails, you don’t need to plan your next board meeting in the back of your mind. Countdown timers (and appropriate scheduling) help you stay on-task and avoid costly multi-tasking.

Giving yourself only a set amount of time to complete a project isn’t about pressuring yourself to work at an unhealthy pace and make many mistakes.

You’re setting yourself free by setting proper amounts of time for each task.

If you know you have 25 minutes to answer emails, you’ll naturally prioritize the most important ones. You’ll give yourself the time you need to interact with each person meaningfully — and provide a quality experience.

If you’ve given yourself the right amount of time for this task, you’ll float happily and easily through this task with a smile on your face. The value of scheduling and time-tracking lies in segmentation.

When working on a task, do your best by mentally setting aside all other concerns. You’ll be amazed by the results!

4. Tomato Timer – Breaks Down Your Workday

Tomato Timer is best for you if:

• Your work involves many routine tasks
• You want to eliminate procrastinate
• You want to increase your productivity

Tomato Timer was designed to work in concert with the  Pomodoro technique. This popular time-management method involves breaking up your workday into 25-minute chunks of productive time.

After completing each 25-minute chunk, take a short break and restart the cycle. That requires you to break up the workday into 25-minute productive time blocks. After 25 minutes, you get a short break, and the cycle starts again. This online timer will alert you when 25 minutes or the break time is up.

You’ll love this simple and elegant online Pomodoro timer. In reality, 25 minutes doesn’t feel like a long time – before you know it, this page will be telling you it’s time for a break.

Tomato Timer allows you to select short 5-minute or 10-minute Pomodoro technique break times (which countdown, just like your work sessions). This interface even features keyboard shortcuts, so you’ll spend more time working and less time playing with the app.

5. Toggl Track’s Free Full-Screen Work Timer

Nothing beats this no-nonsense online timer for simplicity and visual appeal. Bookmark this page in your browser to create a one-click timer tab. Solo workers and freelancers use stopwatch timers to stay honest with themselves about their different types of work.

For example, if you stop working on a graphic design project to answer an email from another client, is this really on-task work?

Let’s be real here – you probably switch from task to task without noticing. I’ll own this one: as a freelance writer, I flit between client relations, social interactions, research, and actual writing work many times throughout my work time in the café.

You probably do the same — don’t you?

Carve out more productive work time by acknowledging the amount of time you spend on non-essential tasks (and social interludes).

People who manage themselves (whether in the office, the café, or the home office) can use simple stopwatch apps to track their time on various tasks.

This technique also works well for students balancing their study time between more- and less-enjoyable classes/subjects.

This simple and free online timer is only the tip of the Toggl Track iceberg. For example, click the links at the bottom of the page to integrate Toggl Track’s timer with Trello. Toggl Track offers 100+ integrations with popular platforms like Drupal, Google Calendar, GitHub, Beeminder, and many more!

Everhour and Toggl Track are time management tools with features that boost team performance and improve productivity. However, after comparing them side-by-side, we realized each approaches things differently.

Everhour is a time tracking app that integrates with third-party project management platforms. It comes with a native project timeline and resource planning tools, customizable reports, and employee monitoring features like screenshots.

Everhour is an excellent option for strict employers because it gives an over-the-shoulder perspective of every employee’s activity. However, some employers believe surveillance erodes trust and may negatively impact team culture.

On the other hand, Toggl Track is known for its anti-surveillance policy. Privacy is deep-rooted in its philosophy, so it doesn’t support screenshots or other employee monitoring features.  

Toggl Track’s strengths lay in its intuitive time tracking with the Timeline feature, timer mode, and manual time entry, which help everyone track time effortlessly. The goal is to reveal work habits, assess performance, and boost productivity, rather than micromanage.

This, combined with advanced Reports, Analytics, and Insights, makes Toggl a powerful tool for managers and decision-makers who want to improve work-life balance, productivity, and profitability in a trust-based environment. 

To better understand the differences between Everhour vs Toggl Track, we will take a closer look at how they stack up in the following areas: 

• Time tracking 
• Project and team management 
• Analytics, reporting, and insights
• Employee monitoring
• Pricing 

The comparison summary below also touches on billing hours, invoices, integrations, and user experience. Our goal is to give you a solid picture of each tool’s strengths and weaknesses so you can choose the right one. 

Before we go in-depth, here’s a quick summary of our findings:

Comparison Summary: Everhour vs Toggl Track

What is Everhour?

“Time tracking software with hassle-free integrations”👩‍💻

Everhour is a team-oriented time tracking software launched in 2015 by Weavora Consulting LLC, a web development company from Belarus. It was founded on the idea that people need an easy and intuitive time tracking app, and too many features disrupt that balance. 

That might be why the software is so heavy on integrating and fitting smoothly into the workflows of the most popular project management tools in a way that users feel like Everhour is a built-in function.

Everhour is equipped with a Resource Planner for assigning tasks, Reports for creating custom dashboards, and a Team page to monitor team members’ work day. However, its best feature remains its ability to natively integrate with Trello, Asana, Basecamp, Pivotal, GitHub, ClickUp, and Jira. 

Overall, Everhour is an excellent time tracking tool for small and large teams needing a streamlined solution that works seamlessly with their existing project management toolkit. 

What is Toggl Track?

“An all-in-one time expert” 🕙👨‍💻

Toggl was created in 2006 by Alari Aho and Krister Haav as a time tracking tool. They later expanded their selection to two more tools: Toggl Plan and Toggl Hire, and the time tracking software was renamed Toggl Track.

Toggl Track embodies a philosophy of time tracking for self-reflection and career growth. Therefore, it prioritizes ease of use, giving users the flexibility to design their time tracking workflows however they want.

Toggl’s key features include an Insights hub to spot data trends and time sinks, an Autotracker to automate the time tracking process, an Analytics hub to visualize data with custom dashboards, and an Organization hub for tracking projects and managing teams. 

Overall, Toggl Track works best for freelancers who want a free time tracking solution or teams of any size that need a seamless time tracking tool for team-wide adoption. Its ideal use case is in large teams because of the powerful analytics features that help boost productivity and profitability.

Everhour vs Toggl: Time Tracking

In a nutshell, Toggl’s time tracking toolset is more robust than Everhour’s. It offers more ways to track time and prioritizes ease of use.

Everhour works best with its clock-in and clock-out timer, while Toggl’s Timeline feature makes time tracking effortless. 

Everhour’s Time Clock App is built around a clock-in and clock-out feature that employees can use to record their work hours without logging time on specific tasks.

It works with a simple start/stop button and a task hub that admins can use to assign time to tasks. 

The Time Clock App also supports screenshots and provides a Timecard page managers can use to edit and adjust reported time entries. 

On the other hand, Toggl Track’s Timer Mode also offers a clock-in and clock-out functionality with a start/stop timer that employees can use to keep track of their day. 

However, Toggl really shines with its Timeline feature, which lets you automatically record your computer activity—every website and program you view for over 10 seconds—without taking intrusive screenshots. 

Instead of screenshots, Toggl’s Activity Timeline shows you a graph of your recorded work with vertical lines that represent a recorded Timeline for a period, and bars underneath showing the time entries you logged. 

All recorded activities are saved locally on your computer and are not shared with anyone unless you decide to use them as time entries on Toggl Track.

Moving to views, Everhour complements the time tracking process with its List, Timesheets, and Screenshot views. Plus, a Timeline hub for project management offering Kanban boards and multiple widgets. 

Toggl, on the other hand, supports extra visualizations like Activity Timelines, Calendar View, weekly and daily project breakdowns, and a List View that supports bulk editing. There’s also a Focus Mode option on Toggl’s web app for time tracking without clutter.  

Both tools allow users to manually add and edit time entries, offer browser extensions, and support Google Calendar integration. However, they differ in how they track time with a few features.

Along with the previously mentioned, there are many other ways to track time on Toggl Track, which include:

• an Outlook and Google calendar import option for creating or starting time entries based on calendar events,
• a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox to track time in your favorite web tools wherever you are on the web,
• an in-app Pomodoro Timer (more on this in the next section),
• and Manual Mode for manual time entry. 

And similar to Toggl, additional ways to track time on Everhour include: 

• an integration with Outlook, iCloud, and Google Calendar to sync events as time entries,
• a browser extension to natively embed time tracking controls inside other tools,
• a web-based Pomodoro timer,
• and manual time entries. 

There are a handful of subtle differences between these time tracking apps. 

Everhour, for one, allows you to add a note to its Timer, which helps project managers and team members share relevant info about the time entry. 

Meanwhile, Toggl’s unique Timer additions include the “Split time entries” and “Add to favorite” features, which help organize the time entries. 

Toggl provides an Autotracker with customizable auto-tracking rules. Everhour isn’t as big on automation. 

Toggl takes time management a step further by offering an auto tracker to automate the time tracking process. 

The Autotracker allows users to set auto-tracking rules with specific triggers, eliminating the need to use the start/stop button each time they want to track activities. 

Everhour, on the other hand, doesn’t offer a flexible automation sequence and doesn’t support auto-tracking rules. 

Automation that is available on Everhour happens on each user’s profile page. 

Users can set automation preferences to automate clock-ins and clock-outs based on the following criteria:

• “Active”: when the computer is on,
• “Idle”: when the computer is turned on, but there has been no activity for some time,
• and “Locked”: when your computer is locked, turned off, or goes into sleep mode. 

Everhour vs Toggl: Team and Project Management 

In a nutshell, Everhour is a great choice for managers who want to plan and monitor how team members spend time, while Toggl Track is a better choice for tracking employee work hours and project profitability and it leaves project planning to Toggl Plan.

Everhour’s Team page helps managers monitor employees’ processes, while Toggl’s Organization hub helps admins manage how team members spend time. 

Everhour’s Team page comprises features that can help busy managers eliminate the chore of team management. It shows admins their team’s process so they can adjust the composition of each member as needed. 

Some core features include: 

• a Timers page that highlights what your team is working on,
• a Timesheet page that provides a structured picture of a member’s tracked time for a week, 
• a Timecard page displaying when a user started their workday, had breaks, and finished their work, 
• and a Time Off page showing vacations, sick leaves, and other PTO types.

On the other hand, team management in Toggl Track revolves around its Organization hub. 

This hub provides data on all the Groups and Workspaces within your organization, allowing you to effectively oversee your teams. 

From each user’s worked hours and billable rate to time entries and subscriptions, it helps busy admins stay on top of team members’ activities. 

Toggl’s Organization Hub also serves as a one-stop for admins who want to grant team members seamless access to the data they need to do their best work. 

Everhour offers a Timeline and Resource Planner that admins can use to build project roadmaps and track each employee’s capacity.

Everhour’s Timeline feature allows admins to build project roadmaps and manage team members’ workloads by providing a detailed calendar of all past and future team assignments. 

Within Everhour’s Timeline hub, you can: 

• create assignments,
• group time entries by Member and Project,
• navigate between days, weeks, and months, 
• and apply different filters to enable planned time.

There’s also a Resource Planner page that highlights who is busy, overworked, or free to take on new projects, so you can speedily create new assignments for team members. 

The Resource Planner also gives admins a vivid picture of how much time was originally planned for a particular project or client budget compared to the actual time spent.

Toggl’s Project Dashboard offers insights admins can use to predict timelines and budgets, track progress, and spot potential bottlenecks.

Unlike Everhour’s Timeline and Resource Planner features, which focus on helping busy managers plan work, Toggl’s Project Dashboard helps data-savvy admins track project performance and assess profitability.

It has multiple filters that busy admins can use to get a bird’s-eye view of where their team is spending time, so they can reshuffle work as needed. 

And for all the decision-makers in need of detailed performance data, clicking on any project on your Project Dashboard will lead you to the Forecasting chart. 

This chart provides trendline graphs and historical insights on billable and non-billable tasks and projects so admins can make better cost projections, efficiently allocate resources, and set realistic budgets. 

Everhour supports automatic data synchronization for selected task management tools, while Toggl Track aids with a dedicated task management product. 

Everhour and Toggl Track natively integrate with task management tools like Trello, Asana, Basecamp, Pivotal, GitHub, ClickUp, and JIRA. 

The key difference is that Everhour goes a bit further with integration by providing more advanced options for certain task management tools. 

For example, Everhour integrates with project management tools like Asana, Jira, and Basecamp, like it’s a built-in function, allowing admins to log or edit time entries manually within these third-party tools.

Toggl Track, on the other hand, integrates with these tools but not as a built-in function that might fully support manual edits across tools. 

That’s because Toggl has its dedicated product for task management: Toggl Plan. 

It’s a simple, visual way for admins and managers to balance team capacity and manage tasks — priced at $9/user/mo. Toggl Plan automatically integrates with your Toggl Track workspace and offers every project and resource planning functionality you’ll find in Everhour and more.

Everhour vs Toggl: Reports, Insights, and Analytics

In a nutshell, Toggl and Everhour both allow custom reports but Toggl Track offers better productivity and profitability insights.

Toggl Track offers Reports and Insights features that give admins a deeper view of what is driving team and project profitability.

Toggl’s Reports house summaries, detailed analyses, and weekly overviews of workspace activities. 

• The Summary Report comprises colorful charts and multiple filters admins can use to create one-click reports to visualize employee productivity and timesheets. 
• The Detailed Report shows each team member’s detailed time log, allowing admins to bulk edit, export, and print.  
• The Weekly Report gives admins an overview of the time tracked during one specific week.

In addition to the Reports feature, Toggl offers an Insights feature, designed to inform admins about data trends and the profitability of each project.

The Insights allow admins to filter for data such as project profitability, including income vs expense reports, and estimated vs actual comparisons.

Everhour offers a Report hub with multiple layouts and columns you can customize to track metrics and insights tailored to your needs.  

Unlike Toggl, Everhour’s Report hub doesn’t support one-click summaries. And there’s no such feature as Insights that would help admins get a comprehensive view of the team’s profitability. 

However, Everhour does offer a Home page with summary dashboards that aggregate and allow admins to see key team metrics quickly. The page consists of 6 widgets. 

Then there’s also the Report hub, built around layouts, filters, groups, conditions, and drag-and-drop columns. You can tweak the data layout to create editable report dashboards displaying quantitative metrics with insights tailored to your needs.

Some of the key metrics you can track and generate custom reports on include: 

• budget remains,
• estimated profits,
• expense tracking, 
• labor cost, 
• complexity,
• and invoiced time.

Everhour’s Report hub also supports automatic synchronization with all integrated projects and tasks, guaranteeing real-time updates. The generated reports are downloadable as PDF, CSV, or Excel files.  

Toggl also has an Analytics feature similar to Everhour’s Report hub, but it takes timesheet reporting a step further with its Timesheet Approval feature. 

Custom reports can also be created on Toggl. You just need to visit the Analytics hub. 

Toggl’s Analytics feature comprises a combination of customizable charts and detailed dashboards you can create using those charts. Like Everhour’s custom reports, Toggl’s Analytics feature allows admins to build custom dashboards showing real-time insights into team progress, projects, and resources.

Then there’s Toggl’s Timesheet Approval feature, which helps admins set up an approval workflow for team members. The feature makes it effortless for admins to check team members’ tracked time for approval or rejection, guaranteeing the validity of billed invoices. 

Everhour vs Toggl: Employee Monitoring

In a nutshell, Everhour takes screenshots of employees’ work activities, meanwhile, Toggl has a strict no-surveillance policy.

Everhour records employees’ screen activities and takes screenshots. 

Everhour has a Screenshots feature that lets admins monitor page visits and other team members’ activities to prove they are working on a task for which they report hours.

To authorize access to the Screenshot feature, you’d have to download Everhour’s desktop app and use the API on your profile page.

Each screenshot Everhour takes shows the exact time it was taken according to the users’ time format, allowing admins to track employees who are stalling on tasks. 

However, some employees may view this approach as a privacy issue. It can lead to micromanagement and a lack of trust among team members.

Toggl is anti-surveillance and doesn’t support screenshots. 

Toggl doesn’t support employee surveillance because it originated as an in-house time tracker in a work culture built to foster trust. So, any feature that can eventually lead to micromanagement is a no-go. 

It doesn’t monitor location, keystrokes, screen, or employee webcams on the premise that while employee surveillance might provide a lot of information on an employee’s work ethic, it also generates a lot of noise, which dilutes the usefulness of the data. 

Instead, Toggl provides useful insights for improving workspace productivity and profitability. 

It also provides a Timeline feature that allows users to record their computer activity without taking intrusive screenshots. The data is entirely private to them until they want to upload it as time entries to their Toggl Track workspace. 

Everhour vs Toggl: Pricing

In a nutshell, Both tools’ paid plans start at $10/user/mo, but Toggl provides a better bargain because it offers more plans with more features.

Both tools offer free plans that accommodate up to five users, but Toggl Track takes the lead with its 30-day trial period. 

Everhour’s free plan can help keep track of unlimited projects and give you an at-a-glance overview of team members’ performance with its custom reports. It also allows integration with multiple websites and supports a 14-day trial period on its paid plans. 

Toggl’s free plan, on the other hand, is just as robust as Everhour but has more features. Free users can enjoy an in-app Pomodoro Timer and inactive data storage for up to six months. Also, new users can opt for a 30-day trial period to try out all the premium features. 

But like Everhour, Toggl Track’s free plan is limited to a maximum of five users. 

Everhour’s one-size-fits-all paid plan is suitable for freelancers and mid-size businesses.

Everhour’s single plan for Teams is priced at $10/user/mo. The Teams plan’s core features include: 

• automatic and manual time tracking, 
• project and task management features,
• native integrations, 
• summary emails, 
• custom access level management,
• time audits, 
• expenses and invoices, 
• detailed custom reports,
• Zapier and Jira sync, and more.

Everhour doesn’t have a custom or enterprise plan for large businesses. However, opting for the yearly plan grants you a 15% discount. 

Toggl has a more flexible paid plan structure that is suitable for diverse creative needs. 

Unlike Everhour, Toggl offers three paid plans. 

Its Starter plan is the most affordable, priced at $9/user/mo. This plan serves freelancers and small teams that want to track billable rates, need pre-populated project templates, or require Outlook calendar integration. 

Next up is the Premium plan, priced at $18/user/mo. It’s a powerful option for agencies, medium-sized businesses, and large companies that want to create fixed-fee projects, audit time logs, schedule reports via email, or track team labor costs. 

And lastly, the Enterprise plan is a suitable choice for larger companies that need to manage multiple workspaces under one organization. Get in touch with Toggl’s team for pricing. 

Toggl’s paid plans come with a 10% discount on yearly subscriptions. 

Everhour vs Toggl: Pros and Cons

Final Verdict: Everhour vs Toggl Track

In a nutshell, Everhour has an advantage as a built-in time tracker for your favorite project management tool, meanwhile, Toggl works best as a standalone time tracking solution for improving productivity.

Overall, both tools can help you track project progress and budget, separate billable and non-billable hours to create accurate invoices and manage remote teams. However, at their core, they differ in their use cases and the audience they serve. 

Toggl is an ideal choice for freelancers looking for an all-in-one time management solution, as well as large and small teams that value employee privacy and want to maximize profits. Everhour, on the other hand, works best for mid-sized and small businesses that want to plan work and monitor employee performance closely. 

Use Everhour if:

• You are managing a small or mid-size team. 
• You use project management tools like Asana, Jira, and Basecamp and want a time tracker that integrates like a built-in functionality. 
• You prioritize screen monitoring and want a tool that can help record employees’ screen activities. 

Use Toggl Track if:

• You are a freelancer or an admin managing a large team or multiple departments.
• You want a tool that can help automate the time tracking process and allow you to do more in less time.
• You want an all-in-one time tracking solution offering detailed insight into what’s driving profitability and what isn’t.

Click here to get started with Toggl Track!

Note: Still looking for the best time tracker for individual or organization-wide needs? We also compared Clockify vs Toggl Track, Harvest vs Toggl, Timely vs Toggl, and several other employee time tracking software. 

Hiring with your heart or gut feeling isn’t viable anymore. It’s incredibly inefficient and a surefire way to lead to a bad hire. And when you hire badly, often, that person will end up leaving (or being let go) quickly, and then you’ll be right back where you started.

One way to improve the accuracy of your hiring hit rate is by designing and using a candidate scorecard for interviews, so your team can support their hiring decisions with real, quantitative data. This guide explores how these interview scorecards save you time and effort in the long run, all the while delivering smarter insights to support your hiring decisions.

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• An interview scorecard is a rating system for objectively assessing candidates’ skills. It increases the fairness of interviews and provides data-driven insight that supports better hiring decisions.
  
• But there are even more benefits — reducing unconscious bias, spotting top talent faster, and ultimately moving the right candidates through your recruiting funnel.
  
• We also unpack the best way to create and use interview scorecards to keep the hiring team focused and gain the most from an initial screening interview with a candidate.
  
• Combining practical HR tools, like an interview scorecard template, with other resources like job task analyses and skills assessments will help your team save valuable time and effort.
  
• If you’re looking for simple, drag-and-drop skills assessments to add to your toolkit, Toggl Hire has just what you need for fast, enjoyable candidate screening, assessment, and hiring.

What is a candidate scorecard for interviews?

A candidate scorecard is a rating scale interviewers use to score a candidate on how well they match the job requirements for a particular role. Each person conducting the interview completes the same hiring scorecard by rating the candidate’s hard skills and soft skills listed as categories on the card.

With the entire panel rating each candidate on the same points and collaborating after each interview on their findings, it supports a more objective and fair hiring process.

People are biased, emotional, and inconsistent when interviewing and, as a result, decades of industrial psychology research has found, the validity or predictive power of a typical unstructured job interview is around 20%, meaning that only one in five interviews increases the baseline odds that a hired candidate will be successful.

Ben Dattner | HBR

These interview score sheets (as they’re also called) are often used in structured interviews, along with other tools, such as a set of fixed interview questions. Why? Because they also produce quantitative data on candidates, which is the basis of structured interviewing.

A candidate scorecard can help hiring teams shortlist candidate profiles faster and more objectively.

When to use a candidate scorecard in interviews

Interview scorecards can be very helpful if you’re dealing with broad, competitive roles. For instance, a major accounting firm with a large graduate program will have thousands of applicants to screen and assess. Using a scorecard can help the selection team filter out the best candidates faster.

Another instance where interview scorecards are helpful is as a pre-screening tool for a large pool of potential talent. For example, if you were reviewing the massive flood of tech talent out there from the recent mass layoffs.

Interview scorecards can help evaluate candidates who seem like a good match for your company. They employ a quantitative approach to selection that reduces unfair hiring practices.

Since “95% of employers reported making a bad hire in the last year,” tools like scorecards are essential for reducing bias.

Benefits of using an interview scorecard in the hiring process

Today’s hiring teams need to use data to continually improve the hiring process and relevant metrics, such as time to hire. And that’s why it’s so important to work with quantitative data wherever possible (rather than going on gut feelings). A hiring scorecard is a valuable source of quantitative data on potential candidates.

For instance, hiring managers can use the scorecard info to predict whether candidates will be a good fit and compare that data with the number of candidates that are actually successful in a role. We love what executive coach Ben Dattner shares about this in the Harvard Business Review:

By using a quantitative interview scorecard to evaluate the qualifications and suitability of job candidates, and by comparing interview-based predictions with subsequent performance on the job, it’s possible to boost your interview hit rate and your organization’s return on human capital investment over time.

Ben Dattner | HBR

Interview scorecards help an organization make better hiring decisions. But the benefits don’t stop there.

• Interview scorecards can help a company achieve better success in hiring with smarter hiring decisions.
• More data to compare prospective candidates, especially when combined with other data on candidates, such as insights from pre-employment skills tests
• Easier to identify top talent as all applicants are compared by the same criteria
• Avoid unconscious bias by collaborating with other interviewers and sticking to an agreed-upon scoring method
• Together with job task analyses, interview scorecards can reduce any unrealistic job expectations that cause open positions to remain unfilled for a long time
• Deliver standardized, fair interviews across all candidates by sticking to scorecard details
• Remember candidates more clearly with specific notes on their skills and abilities

Potential disadvantages or minefields to avoid

Interviewers must remember to compare candidates to the skills required for the role rather than compare them against each other. Darren Bush, Global Talent Acquisition Lead at Ericsson, explains,

“You have two candidates in the final round. How do you evaluate the candidates and make the final decision? The right thing to do is compare the candidates against the role. But being human, instinctively, you can’t help but compare the candidates. Our brains are naturally wired to make comparative judgments. However, there are arguments against doing that:

• It can amplify unconscious biases
• It can lead to overlooking critical role-specific requirements
• It may introduce irrelevant factors into the decision-making process.”

To get around this, Bush recommends the importance of understanding what the specific role requirements are before the interview process begins, to avoid managers introducing new criteria that specifically favor one candidate over another.

Another thing to ensure is that your candidates are at ease while using your scorecards. HR practitioners have learned from conducting video meetings and interviews that eye contact is always important. So, don’t just read the scorecard and take notes without making eye contact with the candidate.

Another myth is that scorecards make the interview rigid. They don’t have to. Because it’s ok to stray beyond the scorecard questions. So long as you’re gathering important information on a candidate and not wasting everybody’s time, keep doing what you’re doing!

Word of caution! Relying solely on interviews to screen and shortlist candidates can lead to bad hires. What’s more, it may get boring sticking to the same questions for a bunch of candidate interviews in a row.

But remember, you’re gathering helpful intel, so don’t let the applicant think you’re bored. Since you’re gathering the same type of info for each candidate, you can analyze that data and make smarter, data-driven hiring decisions — and that’s cool!

How to design and use a candidate scorecard in the interview process

If you design a scorecard that’s easy to use and replicate for other roles, you’ll be helping your team deliver fast, fair interviews. Let’s explore how to get started.

#1. Create a new scorecard in a spreadsheet or table

It’s a good idea to create a new interview scorecard for each job your team needs to fill so it’s easier to manage, refer to quickly, and collaborate with your colleagues.

Here’s how to create a basic scorecard template.

• Create four columns in your spreadsheet or table.
• Label the first column ‘Category of information’, the second column label will be ‘Candidate’s response’, the third column ‘Numerical rating’, and the fourth ‘Comments’
• Of course, you’ll also need to include basic data on the form, such as the candidate’s name, the date, and the job title
• And that’s it for your basic template…(or just use our free template)!

Note on the numerical rating: You’ll be scoring each item, such as level of experience, on a scale of 1-5 (or 1-10 if you need a more detailed breakdown to differentiate candidates). Plus, you’ll also need to get everyone to agree on what each score represents. For instance, a score of 1 out of 5 is a candidate answer that missed the mark altogether. These ratings show the interviewer how well a candidate’s personality, qualifications, and experience suit the role specs.

Who’s involved at this stage? The hiring manager can create the framework for the interview scorecard template.

#2. Decide what categories and rankings to include

Now you have the basic template, it’s time to add some juicy filling into that pie crust — and populate your template with relevant categories.

The Harvard Business Review suggests these broad criteria:

• Technical ability
• Leadership skills
• Interpersonal/collaboration skills
• Organizational skills

Who’s involved at this stage? The hiring manager and a person who oversees the specific role to input on the broader criteria.

#3. Create interview questions that address all the hard and soft skills

With your categories chosen, you can now decide what specific questions you need to ask to get a clear picture of the soft and hard skills of the potential new hire.

• Identify the skills: You could use the data you gathered through performing job task analyses to help you identify or verify the essential skills for the position. Then, determine what hard, soft, and other role-specific skills are necessary.
• Design the questions: Craft questions that will get candidates to share relevant information about their skills and experience using the data from your job task analysis and job descriptions.

For example, “Tell us about your greatest achievement as a social media manager.”

Who’s involved at this stage? The hiring manager and the person overseeing the role break down the essential skills for success in the role.

#4. Calculate the score

Once you’ve conducted the interview and each team member has filled out the scorecard, you’ll calculate each applicant’s total score.

Make sure you’re all in agreement about what each rating number means. For instance, 4 out 5 means they answered the question well and in a way that clearly demonstrated their experience or expertise.

Who’s involved at this stage? All interviewers. You’ll be collaborating to reach an agreement on who the top candidate is — based on the data and insight from your scorecards.

#5. Shortlist candidates with Toggl Hire

The final step, and our favorite (of course) to ensure you’re making the right choice—is to perform skills tests to gain more quantitative data on their relevant skills and experience. That way, you boost the chances of selecting a quality candidate that’s a good cultural fit for your company, and likely to succeed in the long run.

Hire fairly using interview scorecards

Interview scorecards are a super helpful tool to include in your screening process.

They give you solid data to use when selecting candidates, helping your team work smarter (and hopefully argue less 😉!). Scorecards also help you transform subjective impressions into objective data, making it easier to compare candidates on a level playing field and select the best fit for your team.

Toggl Hire enhances this process even further by integrating skills tests and a seamless candidate pipeline directly within our hiring software, simplifying the note-taking and evaluation process. With Toggl Hire’s all-in-one applicant tracking system, you can effortlessly track candidate performance, marrying quantitative data with qualitative insights to enhance your decision-making.

Ready to revolutionize your hiring process with an exceptional candidate experience? Sign up for a free account with Toggl Hire today and experience the power of efficient, data-driven candidate evaluations.