Toggl Track

What it is

Toggl Track records where time goes. You start a timer or fill in a timesheet, tag the entry to a project and a client, and the reports tell you afterwards what a week actually consisted of. It runs on web, desktop and mobile, and its browser extension adds a timer inside more than 100 other tools, which is what makes tracking survive contact with a real working day.

Paid tiers turn tracking into commercial information: billable rates, project estimates with alerts when you approach them, and on Premium profitability analysis, fixed-fee projects, timesheet approvals and scheduled reports.

Who it's for (and who it isn't)

It fits anyone who sells time or estimates work: agencies, consultants, freelancers, studios. The specific value is not the timer, it is discovering that the project you priced at twenty hours takes thirty-five, which is a pricing problem you cannot see without data.

It is a weaker fit for teams doing fixed internal work with no client billing, where tracking adds admin and produces numbers nobody acts on. It is also not a project management tool: it records time against work defined elsewhere, such as in Asana or Trello.

Pricing

Toggl Track is freemium. The free plan is free forever for a limited number of users and covers time tracking on all platforms, more than 100 integrations through the browser extension, calendar integrations and basic productivity reports. Starter is $9 per license per month and adds billable rates, project estimates with alerts, and team collaboration. Premium is $14 per license per month for the first year on annual billing and renews at $18 per month, adding profitability analysis, fixed-fee projects, scheduled reports, timesheet approvals, customizable reports, Jira and Salesforce integrations and SSO. Enterprise is custom.

Note the Premium renewal price. A first-year rate that rises by $4 per user per month afterwards is worth putting in the calendar rather than discovering on the invoice.

Set it up

Official guide: Track End-User Guide

1. Create a Toggl Track account on the free plan, which is free forever for a limited number of users. Go to toggl.com, click "Sign Up" and sign up with email, Google or Apple. Choose the free plan. Toggl now sends you a verification email.
2. Click the link in the verification email. Your account is now verified and ready for tracking.
3. Create a project for each client you bill. Click the "Projects" tab in the left menu, then "+ New Project", type a name and click "Create Project". You can skip "Advanced Options". Your project now shows on the Projects page.
4. Open the Timer page and click the pink play button in the top right. Click the project drop-down menu, select your project and add a description of the work. When you finish, click the red "Stop" button. You now see your first time entry.
5. Track all your work for two weeks first, so your report shows what really happened. Then click "Reports" in the sidebar and open the "Summary" tab. Click the Date Selector in the upper left and choose the last two weeks. You now see charts and a table of hours per project.
6. In a notes app or on paper, write down what you charged for each project next to its hours from the table. The project with the most hours for the least money is the one to reprice or change the scope of. You now have the hours and the money for each project side by side.

When this works, you can see how many hours each project really took, so you know which clients and project types make money.

On Starter ($9 per license/mo): billable rates, which let you set the hourly price you charge per project so reports show money as well as hours.

Strengths and limitations

The strength is low friction. Toggl is easy enough that people keep using it, which is the only property that matters in time tracking, and the free tier is genuinely usable for a small team.

The limitations are behavioural and structural. Tracking depends on humans remembering, and retroactively reconstructed timesheets are fiction with decimal places. Profitability reporting sits on Premium at $14 rising to $18 per user per month. And time tracking on employees is regulated as personal data processing in the EU, so tell people what is tracked and why rather than switching it on quietly.